Of Europe

Abstract

The geographical extent of Europe has been an unstable and shifting concept since the age of Herodotus. Where should the boundaries of Europe be drawn? Which natural or artificial markers should determine its size? What claims have been made about the European land mass and its connection to neighbouring continents such as Asia? Along with geography, the identity of Europe also seems to have been flexible for centuries. Anthony Pagden writes, ‘Like all identities it is a construction, an elaborate palimpsest of stories, images, resonances, collective memories, invented and carefully nurtured traditions.’ Across the generations, thinkers have variously stressed Europe’s classical Graeco-Roman, Christian and Jewish currents. Critics and commentators speak also of Europe’s debt to the cultures of Asia, Africa and the Americas, to Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, and it seems that no coherent sense of Europe’s identity is easily stated or accepted. Another way of putting all this is to say that Europe’s geographical co-ordinates and its cultural identity have been contested for centuries, into our own time.