What Is Europe

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 Europe's 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 Europe's 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