What Is Europe
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What is Europe
The physical boundaries of Europe as conventionally understood are relatively easy to identify:
like millions of other schoolchildren, I learnt from my geography teacher that Europe is the
landmass lying to the north of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the mountains of the
Caucasus and the Caspian, and although the precise location of the disjunction between
Europe and Asia was a little uncertain, this could be resolved by drawing a line from the
Arctic ocean down through the Ural mountains to the Caspian. So that was that: we were now
in a position to draw lines on the map enabled us to mark out Europe quite unambiguously in
spatial terms.
Yet our conceptualisation of Europe involved much more than an ability to mark off and
label the northwestern corner of the much larger Afro-Asiatic landmass. In common, I suspect,
with millions of others, we also took it for granted that the indigenous inhabitants of this area
(a group to which I and my classfellows manifestly belonged) also shared certain common
characteristics, and on the basis of which Europeans could therefore be differentiated from
non-Europeans. But just what were those characteristics? As I recall, our teachers offered us a
much less specific account of Europes social as opposed to its spatial identity, but even so our
lessons, further supplemented by what we learned from films, comics, adventure stories and so
forth provided us with plentiful material from which to draw our own conclusions. Thus
despite the very obvious differences between Europes various national components, we took
it for granted that all Europeans shared, by definition, a number of common cultural characteristics — even if we would have been hard-pressed to specify just what these were.
We also took if for granted that although North America and Australia might be far removed
from Europe in spatial terms, those parts of their population which were of European descent
were “like us”. As such they stood in sharp contrast to the indigenous peoples of these
colonised territories, and indeed to the indigenous inhabitants of Asia and Africa, whom we
perceived as standing quite outside — and indeed as being alien to — the European
civilization to which we ourselves belonged. To be sure we might often have been most
unclear about the actual content of these differences, but our education and socialisation
nevertheless generated a mindset which indicated that the disjunction between Europeans and
non-Europeans was both profound and far reaching.
Nor was this perception restricted solely to the cultural sphere. European languages such
as French, German, Russian, Spanish, Italian were those which we might expect to learn as a
normal part of our education — even if our very English agenda led us to make little more
than a feeble effort to do so, on the grounds that it was more reasonable to expect for
“foreigners” to learn English than for us to learn another language. But there were foreigners
and foreigners. Beyond the immediate arena of at least potentially learnable European
languages lay a wide variety of much more exotic tongues, such as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and
Turkish, and to which only the most serious academic scholars could ever hope to gain access.
Over and above all this there is also the question of biological difference — or at least of
differences in physical appearance. Although I cannot recall being offered an explicitly
biological explanation of European distinctiveness during the course of my schooling, it is not
without significance that I and my contemporaries grew up in the post-holocaust era. If for no
other