January 9, 2012, *10:03 pm* Where Is Europe? By FRANK
JACOBS
Where is Europe? You might as well ask: What is Europe? For it is a
concept as well as a continent, and the borders of both oscillate wildly.
For the ancient Persians, it was that small stepping stone separating them
from Greece. In the Middle Ages, it became virtually synonymous with
Christendom. A relatively recent and generally unaccepted theory sees
Europe spanning half the globe, from Iceland to the Bering Strait, nearly
touching Alaska.
Take the most common present-day usage of the term `Europe,’ shorthand
for (and synonymous with) the European Union. The external borders of this
supranational project are well-defined, and in some cases well-defended.
But they remain movable, having consistently shifted outward over the last
half century. From a core of six founding members in the continent’s west
[1] ,
this `Europe’ has expanded to comprise 27 states, as far east as Cyprus.
That still leaves quite some wriggle room between concept and continent,
which by some estimates
[2]includes
as many as 51 countries. For those in between, the difference is
clear and uncontested. Even non-European Union members like Switzerland
and Croatia, close to the continent’s geographic core, will readily admit
that they’re outside `Europe’ (but only if you include the quotation
marks). The interesting difference is that the Swiss overall are happy to
remain outside, while the Croats generally can’t wait for July 2013, when
they’re slated to join the Union.
This gap in Euro-euphoria is a symptom of a curious kaleidoscopic quality
of this supranational `Europe’: Everybody is looking at the same thing, but
everybody sees something different. For the Swiss, who have a long history
of non-alignment (and a shorter one of being confidently rich), joining
`Europe’ would entail few benefits. By contrast, for the non-`European’
remainder on the Balkans
[3],
similarly encircled by member states, joining would be almost more of a
moral vindication than an economic relief. Like the countries of the former
Eastern Bloc before them, membership would confirm their Europeanness.
As a frequent visitor to the Balkans recently put it to me: `In the Croats’
own eyes, they are the last bastion of Europe against the barbarians, the
first of which are the Serbs. The Serbs too view themselves as Europe’s
ultimate bulwark, against the Albanians.’ And so on.
What’s interesting is that such kaleidoscopic assessments of what is and
isn’t Europe exist within the Union, too. But instead of positive images,
the E.U. kaleidoscope refracts nothing but horrors. Here, `Europe’ has
become the convenient scapegoat for anything too unpopular, expensive or
painful to be defended by the individual member states. `We don’t like
it
either,’ they can tell their electorates, `but Europe is making us do it.’
Europe, long the defining inclusive quality uniting people from Spain to
Finland, is now, ironically, the oppressive other.
This `Europe’ is a misassembled, headless monster, owing less to
Charlemagne than to Frankenstein. It stalks the bureaucratic labyrinth of
Brussels, beying for tribute from the peoples of Europe. But this modern
minotaur is also a petty, powerless bureaucrat, issuing directives on the
correct curvature of cucumbers
[4],
but unable to save the euro from collapsing.
To the British, `Europe’ and `the Continent’ are increasingly one and the
same, and they find increasing consolation in their splendid isolation from
it. Strictly geographically speaking, they’re not wrong. A continent may
be
defined as a large, contiguous land mass, sans the islands off its coast.
Of course, the choice of terminology is suggested more by the rise of
anti-E.U. sentiment in Britain rather than by concerns for geographic
rectitude. An equally acceptable definition of a continent does include
so-called continental islands
[5]-
situated on the continental shelf, as Britain and Ireland are. An even
broader definition includes islands off the shelf (so to speak), if they
are geographically and culturally proximate. Cyprus, Malta and Iceland are
all considered European because of historical, political and cultural
links, even though none of them is entirely located on Europe’s continental
shelf.
Yet if we leave the islands out of the equation for a moment, most of
Europe’s borders are self-evident. They are the waters that border it on
three sides: the Arctic Sea to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west
and the Mediterranean and Black Seas to the south. Ah, but then the
ultimate problem becomes painfully clear: Where to draw Europe’s eastern
border? And does it even have one?
Let’s return to our earlier definition: A continent is a large, contiguous
land mass. And not half of one. Many geographers see what we call the
European continent as a mere peninsula of a gigantic continent of Eurasia,
spanning halfway across the world, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the
Bering Strait. There is no good reason to divide that continent in two. No
good geographic reason.
For, etymologically, `Eurasia’ might well be a union of opposites. Some
linguists suggest that Europe and Asia derive from words in Phoenician and
Assyrian for `sunset’ and `sunrise’ respectively, similar to the Latin
concepts of `occidens’ and `oriens,’ or simply our `west’ and
`east.’
In fact, in its earliest incarnation, Europe was merely that bit of land on
the continent that the Persians had to cross to get from the
Hellespont [6]to
Greece proper. Ironically, 25 centuries later, the perception of that
region has totally reversed. Greece is now firmly part of Europe (both the
concept and the continent), while that former Persian stepping stone is now
known as Turkish Thrace
[7].
Its existence embarrasses those who would deny Turkey E.U. membership on
the basis that it is `not a European state.’ It is. And what’s more:
based
on ancient history, Turkey (or at least this part of it) can claim to be
the original Europe.
Joe Burgess/The New York Times
Turkey’s detractors have another Europe in mind. This one took shape in the
early Middle Ages, as `Europe’ became a constituent third of the world
in
simplified ecclesiastical geography, together with Africa and Asia
converging on Jerusalem – the center of the world. From the 13th century
onward, encroachment by the Tartars (in Russia) and the Turks (in Anatolia)
shifted the definition to a more spiritual one: Europe came to be
identified with Christendom – specifically, western Christendom.
In this definition, Europe ended where Turkey began, even when Turkey
extended deep into the continent proper. When the Turks controlled large
parts of the Balkans, those areas were considered to be beyond Europe
[8],
the eastern edge of which was the border between the Austrian and Ottoman
Empires.
To be fair, this viewpoint wasn’t absolute. As their power declined, the
Ottomans were pushed out of almost all of Europe. This allowed the
classical definition to prevail, placing the border at the narrow waterway
that connects the Mediterranean and Black Seas
[9].
It remains there to this day – with only Turkish Thrace remaining as a
reminder that `Europe’ may stop where continents divide, but also where
empires collide.
The northern border with Asia posed a different problem for geographers
because, as knowledge of and self-consciousness in that part of the world
increased, it turned out that `Europe’ was not connected to Asia via a
narrow isthmus, but rather via the widening expanse of Russia. The problem
being that any definition of Europe will divide Russia in two. The question
is thus: How much of Russia is European? Or, even: How European is Russia?
As seen from the west, the earliest answer always seemed to be, not much,
or not at all. The French minister Sully (1560-1641), when dreaming up his
`Grand Design’ [10]for
a `Very Christian Council of Europe,’ objected to Russia’s inclusion
in
his scheme: `[T]here scarce remains any conformity among us with them;
besides they belong to Asia as much as to Europe. We may indeed almost
consider them as a barbarous country, and place them in the same class with
Turkey.’ [11]
Sully’s opinion sounds awfully modern. For centuries, the urge was to
include Moscow and its lands within the European continent, even though
doing so made for some rather arbitrary-seeming distinctions. In the
Renaissance, geographers solved the problem of Europe’s eastern border by
being creative: Ortelius, in his `Theatrum Orbis Terrarum’ (1570), started
from the ancient border, the river Don (even though it was less impressive
than its semi-mythical pendant, the Tanais), then drawing a straight line
north towards the White Sea, near the city of Archangel.
By the end of the 17th century, the eastern border of Europe had shifted,
following the courses of the rivers Don, Volga and Kama, and then leaping
in a straight line across the northern Ural Mountains to join the river Ob
north into the Arctic Ocean.
This border, championed by the geographer Philipp Clüver, made the Gulf of
Ob, at 600 miles the world’s longest estuary, the border between Europe and
Asia. Had this extension of Europe east of the Urals persisted, the
northernmost part of Europe would now be the tip of the Yamal
Peninsula [12],
poking 400 miles into the Arctic and home to Russia’s largest remaining
reindeer herds (and largest remaining natural gas reserves).
Joe Burgess/The New York Times
Those reindeer might have benefited from the media attention that being
threatened in `Europe’s northernmost wilderness’ might have brought.
But
alas for them: The Ob as Europe’s northeastern border became obsolete by
the late 18th century.
The reason for this was the expansive growth of the Russian state east- and
southward, so that geographers felt annoyed by the fact that Russia in its
entirety could no longer be treated under the header `Europe.’ One solution
was to discard `Muscovy’ entirely from Europe, another to extend the
borders of Europe to keep up, somewhat, with Russian expansion. To be fair,
the Russians themselves considered Europe to be elsewhere, hence the
mission of of St. Petersburg, founded in 1703, to be a `window on Europe.’
The ultimate compromise between `Russia in’ and `Russia out’ was found when
western geographers became aware of the mountain range the Russians
themselves called Kameny Poyas (`Stony Girdle’). The Swedish military
geographer Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, after years of captivity gave him
the benefit of close observation of the Russian geography, proposed these
Ural Mountains as the new European border in 1730. The Strahlenberg border
soon found acceptance throughout Europe – and Russia itself.
Strahlenberg’s southern bend back via the Volga to the Don (always the Don)
was more controversial. Many geographers chose, where the Ural Mountains
ended, to follow the Ural River south to the Caspian Sea.
By the early 19th century, Conrad Malte-Brun and other French geographers
had successfully promoted the Caucasus Mountains, connecting the Caspian to
the Black Sea, as the southern border of Europe.
This is still considered the most conventional border for the continent of
Europe. But the Urals-Ural-Caspian-Caucasus border was (and is) by no means
a generally accepted convention. Several geographers have, over the
centuries, tried to place Europe’s eastern boundary well beyond the Urals –
one notable example being the 18th-century German botanist Johann Georg
Gmelin, who proposed the Yenisey River, running from the Mongolian border
to the Arctic Ocean near the 70th meridian east, or about 2,000 miles east
of Moscow.
The most expansive vision of Europe was one of many expounded by the
founder of the Pan-European Union, the Austrian count Richard von
Coudenhove-Kalergi, in 1935. It solved the problem of finding an adequate
geographical boundary to Europe by substituting a political one – all of
the Soviet Union would be considered part of Europe. Asia would be to its
south. That would have made European cities out of Vladivostok and Irkutsk,
but also Samarkand and Dushanbe.
During the cold war, however, the opposite tendency triumphed more often:
All of the Soviet Union, including Vilnius, Riga and other cities that
today lie within the European Union, were excluded from Europe entirely. At
times even the Soviet satellite states in the Warsaw Pact were left out as
well, so much had `Europe’ come to be synonymous with `the West’ and its
associated political values.
Today, of course, the border of Europe is rebounding, thanks to the
expansive semi-state run out of Brussels. Indeed, if Turkey ever does join
the E.U. – and while its prospects look dim today, who knows what a decade
or two will bring – it will push the border of Europe further east than
anyone but a few daydreaming geographers had ever imagined: from the
volcanic shores of Iceland to the mountainous frontier that divides Turkey
from Iran.
*Frank Jacobs is a London-based author and blogger. He writes about
cartography, but only the interesting bits.*
——————————
[1] By signing the Treaty of Rome (1957), the three Benelux countries,
Italy and – most crucially – the former archenemies France and (West)
Germany constituted the European Economic Community, which would later
become the European Union.
[2] That’s a maximalist figure, including countries partly or wholly
outside the accepted geographic borders of Europe, and thus often excluded:
Russia, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and one country
well within most geographic definitions of Europe, but still not recognized
by many as a sovereign state: Kosovo.
[3] Of the former Yugoslav countries, only tiny Slovenia has joined (in
2004). Albania, never a part of Yugoslavia, is also still in the E.U.
antechamber.
[4] Only 10 mm per 10 cm. Otherwise an equal number of cucumbers wouldn’t
fit into standard packaging, which would require them to be counted
individually. More background
here