What Do We Mean By Europe?

By Charles Westin
Professor, Stockholm University
Sun., Sep. 10, 2006 / Sha`ban 17, 1427
IslamOnLine

Europe has different meanings depending on one's focus.

It is first of all a geographical entity, one of the world's six inhabited continents. Europe and Asia differ from the other continents in that they make up one contiguous landmass.

The division between Europe and Asia is not genuinely geographical but rather historical and cultural.

Europeans see Europe as a life-world that is distinctly different from the historical and cultural regions of Asia.

Europe may be seen as a community of values and ideas, the origins of which may be traced back to the forging of the Judeo-Christian religious traditions, Greek philosophy and democracy, and Roman jurisprudence and military organization.

But the European legacy also owes so much to the Moors of Spain and Portugal, and to the Ottomans in the Balkans.

The Renaissance from which modern European thought sprung was a product of Islamic culture and the links that Islamic culture provided back to the knowledge and philosophy of European antiquity.

To some people the European type represent a "racial" category of fair-skinned peoples, which stand out in contrast to the darker skinned peoples of Africa and Asia.

Europe is of course also a political space. Its territory is divided into 43 states and some semi-autonomous regions.

Internal Divisions:

What are the most significant internal divisions of Europe?

The answer pertains to historically rooted power structures and their impact on national self-conceptions and identities today.

A basic East-West divide coincides more or less with the ancient boundary between Orthodoxy and Catholicism dating back to the first council of Nicaea in AD 325.

A somewhat more indistinct North-South divide roughly coincides with the northern boundary of the Roman Empire, which more or less corresponds to the division between Greek and Russian Orthodoxy and the historically more recent one between Catholicism and Protestantism.

The four quadrants of Europe thus outlined are by no means fixed and unchangeable, but highly dependent on power structures and political alignments.

Moreover, these quadrants make sense in terms of historical and political experiences that are fundamental to an understanding of the deeper roots of conflict that have ravaged the continent for centuries.

Peripheral Regions:

We may, moreover, speak of frontier regions in the European peripheral regions.

Spain and Portugal have, for example, extended Europe into Africa and South America, but also brought Africa and South America back into Europe.

The United Kingdom above all, but to some extent also the Scandinavian countries, have extended the European concept to North America (the United States, Canada, and Greenland).

Russia is a frontier region linking Europe with Asia.

And finally, the Balkan states represent historical and cultural linkages between Europe and the Muslim Middle East.

A Long Pattern Of Violence:

Europe has a bad historical record as far as intergroup violence is concerned.

One should, of course, be careful to pass judgment on acts committed far back in time by applying the moral standards that are associated with our own times.

However, one does need to recognize that current expressions of racism, ethnic cleansing, discrimination, etc. are part of a long pattern.

Anti-Semitism manifested itself in the prohibition for Jews to own land. Nor were they entitled to engage in certain professions or to settle in various cities. In Eastern Europe they were forced into ghettos and were repeatedly the victims of brutal pogroms.

The expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain in 1492 was of great significance because racial criteria were employed (for the first time) to justify the mass-expulsion and cultural destruction.

The significant point was that even Jews and Moors who had converted to Christianity were expelled.

Some Jewish historians regard this expulsion as a catastrophe (almost) comparable with the Nazi genocide of the European Jewry.

Roma, Sinti, and other traveling people have histories of vicious processes of social exclusion.

In a number of countries, indigenous territorial minorities (Basques, Britons, Celts, Saami, etc.) have fought an uneven battle for recognition and language rights.

The Nazi Holocaust was the culmination, but not the end, of five centuries of radicalized treatment of minority groups in Europe and of non-European peoples in the colonial empires.

Charles Westin is a Professor of Migration and Ethnicity Studies at Stockholm University.

Related Links:

First Muslims in Europe Charter
Muslims in Greater Europe
Muslims In Europe: Germany, France And Great Britain
Immigration And Integration
Daring to Be Euro Muslims (1)
Daring to Be Euro Muslims (2)