Hi all!
UPD: thank you all for insightful answers. I am even more confused, but I find fascinating how fluctuating and alive the concept of Europe seems to be, reflecting the relationships between countries, geography, cultural context and even languages. Seems to be a valid PhD topic! Cheers!
I have an ultimately silly question for the thread, but I think it might be the best place to ask about it. I come from Russia and lived in Europe for around 6-7 years. And last weekend I realized I don’t know what do Europeans normally mean when mentioning Europe. Is it EEA? EU?
I’ve mentioned in a random convo that sometime in 2000s Moscow was one of the most expensive cities in Europe, and I was told off that I should not ever say it like that.
I was taught at school back in Russia that Europe is a continent, and the division lies between tectonic plates or something. That means, that there’s a European and Asian parts of Russia, like there are 2 sides of Istanbul sitting on two continents.
I understand, in Europe the most common understanding in Europe is not geographical, but, perhaps, political?
Is Belarus Europe? (I would say yes?) Then what about transcontinental countries? Like, Georgia is Europe and Azerbaijan is not? What about Armenia? (I’ve heard both interpretations).
Right now, my gut feeling is that all transcontinental countries kinda chose their sides? (Like, Georgia chooses European integration and Azerbaijan doesn’t). Could it be most common religion? (Doesn’t quite work tho?)
I’m only asking to clear my confusion, not to bait. I’m not suggesting anything. There’s a difference in education, and knowing how biased post-soviet education, I think I need to understand the conversation better.
Upd: typo on the subject linem
I don’t think it’s a firm enough concept that you’ll get one answer everyone agrees on. For me, personally, it’s a fuzzy-edged geographical concept that has a cultural basis. So it’s “that bit of Eurasia west of the Urals and Bosporus”, and we think of that as a meaningful category because a lot of the people here have a lot of shared identity and history
Russia is, in my mind, a part of that. Most of Russia’s landmass is east of the Urals, yes, but the origin of the country is within Europe and it was a major part of that shared history. Britain didn’t become less European when most of Britain’s landmass was in Africa, India, Australia etc. Belarus is just unambiguously European to me. It’s hardly the first time in history that European countries have been hostile with each other
The other ambiguously-European countries - Turkiye, the Caucasian countries, Greenland, I suppose arguably Kazakhstan as well since it does reach into the western side of the Urals a bit - are where the “fuzzy edges” come into play for me. These countries can be thought of as European in some contexts, not in others. Often it is going to be a matter of identity for those countries - as you say, they pick their sides. I can imagine futures in which Russia, Turkiye, Armenia, and so on pull away from Europe altogether and are thought of as entirely Asian. I can equally imagine futures in which they move the other way and become more solidly European. There’s little sense to me in trying to draw a strict and exact geographic line of where “Europe” starts and ends because the concept is too entrenched and useful to just abandon, but the lines that it became entrenched upon were never neat ones in the first place
Thank you very much! Only now I realize how contextualised and nuanced those concepts are.
Interesting notion of the fuzzy edges. Europe seems to be a changing, living idea based on how the world changes and the context.