What Is Europe?

Three claims hidden in a single word

Socrates began his conversations with questions of the type “What is X?”: what is courage, what is justice. The people he talked to thought they knew the answer, until they tried to say it. His lesson is simple: we cannot discuss whether something is good or bad until we know what we are talking about.

Take a sentence we hear often: “Moldova must join Europe.” It seems clear. But Moldova is already in Europe, at least on the map: Chișinău is closer to Vienna than Lisbon is to Berlin. Whoever says the sentence probably means something else: that Moldova must join the European Union, or that it must adopt European values and practices.

Verbal dispute: an argument in which two people use the same word in different senses. They seem to disagree, but they are really talking about different things. Example: one says “Moldova is already in Europe” (the geographical sense), the other “Moldova is not in Europe yet” (the political sense). Both can be right.

The first step of critical thinking: when you hear “Europe”, ask “in which sense?”. Many debates calm down as soon as this is cleared up.

Not all definitions are alike

We know from the critical thinking course that there are several kinds of definition. They serve different purposes, and some of them are not really definitions at all.

Three of them try to clarify: a lexical definition says how a word is used, a stipulative one fixes a meaning for a discussion, and a precising one cuts down the vagueness of a term for a particular purpose, for example in a law.

The fourth is different. A persuasive definition loads a word with emotion in order to convince. It looks like a definition, but it is a hidden argument.

“True Europe means…” When you hear a definition that starts with “true”, “authentic” or “real”, check whether you are being sold a conclusion.

The rules of a good definition

Classical logic gives us a few simple rules. A good definition says which wider category the defined thing belongs to and how it differs from the other things in that category.

Genus and specific difference: the nearest category and the feature that sets the thing apart. Example: “A square is a rectangle (the genus) with all sides equal (the specific difference).”

Next, a definition must be neither too broad (taking in things that do not belong to the concept) nor too narrow (leaving out things that do). It must not be circular, like “Europe is the place where Europeans live”, nor figurative, like “Europe is the soul of the world”.

Test: three definitions of Europe

Let us apply the rules. Each of the definitions shown here looks reasonable at first sight. What is wrong with each one?

“Europe is the Christian continent” has two problems at once. Armenia, Georgia and Ethiopia are old Christian countries, yet not all of them are considered European. And millions of Muslims (in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Albania), Jews and people with no religion live in Europe.

“Europe is the European Union” would remove Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Ukraine and Moldova from Europe. “Europe is the continent between the Atlantic and the Urals” is the best of the three. We will see, however, that the Ural border too is a convention, not a fact of nature.

A princess from Asia

The name of the continent comes from a Greek myth. Europa was a Phoenician princess, the daughter of King Agenor of Tyre, in today’s Lebanon. Zeus fell in love with her, turned himself into a gentle white bull, persuaded her to climb onto his back and carried her across the sea to the island of Crete. There Europa became the mother of Minos, the legendary king of Crete.

The story was told by the Greek poet Moschus (2nd century BC) and by the Roman poet Ovid, in the Metamorphoses.

The myth contains a paradox: the name of Europe comes from a woman from Asia. Europe “begins” with an arrival from outside.

The image has survived to this day: the Greek 2-euro coin shows Europa on the bull, and her face appears on the euro banknotes of the “Europa” series.

Where the word comes from

The etymology of the word “Europe” is uncertain. There are two main hypotheses.

The first links it to the Greek words eurys (“wide”) and ops (“eye, face”): Europe would be “the one with the wide gaze”.

The second links it to a Semitic word meaning “sunset, evening”. Europe would be “the land where the sun sets”, as opposed to Asia, “the land of sunrise”.

Neither has been proven. It is a good example of intellectual honesty: when we are not sure, we say that we are not sure.

Herodotus: one earth, three names

As early as the first great historian of Antiquity, the borders of Europe were seen as a convention. Herodotus (5th century BC) admitted that he did not know who had named the continents or where the name of Europe came from.

“I cannot guess why the earth, which is one, has three names, all of them names of women.”Herodotus, Histories, IV, 45 (paraphrased)

The Greeks divided the known world into Europe, Asia and Libya (Africa), with rivers as boundaries: the Nile and the Phasis, in Colchis (today’s Georgia).

Herodotus’ remark is still relevant: nature does not tell us where Europe ends. People decide that.

Geographical Europe: a border that has moved

On the map, Europe is not a separate continent like Australia or South America. It is a large peninsula of Eurasia: there is no ocean between Europe and Asia.

For the ancient Greeks, the eastern border was the river Don (Tanais). Today’s border, along the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus, was proposed only in the 18th century, by geographers such as the Swede Philip Johan von Strahlenberg (1730) and the Russian Vasily Tatishchev. So the eastern border of Europe has moved by more than a thousand kilometres.

There are many borderline cases. Most of Turkey’s territory is in Asia. Georgia and Armenia lie right on the conventional border. Cyprus is geographically in Asia, yet it is an EU member state.

Several places in Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus and Slovakia compete for the title of “geographical centre of Europe”. The result depends on the method of calculation and on which islands are counted.

Historical Europe: a shared history, and its conflicts

The second meaning is that of a shared history. The Roman Empire united a large part of the continent, but it also included North Africa and the Near East. So “European” history does not coincide with the geography of Europe.

In the Middle Ages, people did not call themselves “Europeans” but Christians. Their common space was Christendom.

Christianitas (Lat.): Christendom, the community of Christian peoples in the Middle Ages. It was a religious identity, not a geographical one.

The word “Europe” came back to the fore after the fall of Constantinople. But the shared history also includes the wars between Europeans: the history of Europe is largely the history of its conflicts.

Cultural Europe: ideas that also came from outside

The third meaning concerns a set of ideas and practices: Greek philosophy, Roman law, Christianity, the medieval university (Bologna, 1088, by tradition), modern science, the Enlightenment, human rights. This is the meaning closest to the subject of our course.

Here too we must be careful: many of these elements also have non-European sources. The numerals we use are of Indian origin and reached Europe through the Arab world. Aristotle’s works reached the medieval West largely through Arabic translations and commentaries, such as those of Averroes.

The conclusion: European culture was formed through exchange, not in isolation.

Political Europe: who is a “European state”?

The fourth meaning concerns the organisations created by European states. The most important are the Council of Europe, founded in 1949, with 46 member states, and the European Union, with 27 member states.

Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union says that any European state which respects the Union’s values and is committed to promoting them may apply to become a member. But the Treaty does not define what a “European state” is.

When Morocco applied to join in 1987, its application was rejected on the grounds that it is not a European state. Turkey, by contrast, has been a candidate country since 1999.

In practice, who is “European” in the political sense is decided by political judgement, not by a geographical rule.

Valéry: “civilisations are mortal”

If geography, history and politics do not give us a satisfying definition, perhaps philosophy can help. In the 20th century, several thinkers tried to say what Europe is, usually at moments of crisis.

In 1919, just after the First World War, the French poet and essayist Paul Valéry wrote “The Crisis of the Mind”. Europe, which believed itself the centre of civilisation, had just destroyed itself in a war with millions of dead.

“We civilisations now know that we are mortal.”Paul Valéry, “The Crisis of the Mind” (1919)

Valéry asked whether Europe would become what it is in reality, “a little promontory of the Asian continent”, or remain what it seems: the most precious part of the world, “the brain of a vast body”. His question already contains the idea of this lecture: geographically, Europe is not much. What makes it important is something else.

Husserl: Europe as a “spiritual shape”

In May 1935, the philosopher Edmund Husserl gave the lecture “The Crisis of European Humanity and Philosophy” in Vienna. The context matters: Husserl, born into a Jewish family, had been excluded from university life by the Nazi regime, and aggressive nationalism and racism were spreading across Europe. At precisely that moment, Husserl declares that Europe is not defined by blood, race or territory.

Spiritual shape (Ger. geistige Gestalt): for Husserl, Europe is a way of thinking and living, not a place. It was born in ancient Greece, in the 7th–6th centuries BC, together with philosophy.

What was new about the first philosophers? A theoretical attitude: interest in truth for its own sake, not only for immediate use. A truth found in this way is valid for anyone, regardless of tribe or city, and can always be checked, corrected and deepened. That is why Husserl speaks of an “infinite task”.

The consequence is remarkable: a community built around this attitude is bound not by blood or soil but by ideas that any human being can share. The crisis of Europe, Husserl says, does not come from too much reason, but from a misunderstood reason that reduces everything to measurable facts and forgets the human being, meaning and values.

“The greatest danger to Europe is weariness.”Edmund Husserl, “The Crisis of European Humanity and Philosophy” (1935)

Patočka: Europe and “care for the soul”

The Czech philosopher Jan Patočka (1907–1977), a student of Husserl, took this reflection further under the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Excluded from the university, in 1973 he gave private seminars in people’s flats, later published as Plato and Europe.

Care for the soul: the idea, coming from Socrates and Plato, that a person should live by examining their life and seeking the truth, not just by surviving or piling up possessions. For Patočka, this is Europe’s central heritage.

Patočka did not stop at theory. In 1977 he was one of the spokesmen of Charter 77, the document in which Czech dissidents asked the regime to respect the human rights it had itself signed up to.

For Patočka, Europe as an idea demands personal courage: living in truth, even when it is costly.

A concept that stays open

So what do we do with the definition of Europe? In 1956 the British philosopher W. B. Gallie proposed a useful notion.

Essentially contested concept: a concept whose meaning is always disputed, like democracy, justice or art. The dispute is not a defect but part of the concept’s life: by arguing about what democracy is, we make it evolve.

“Europe” seems to be such a concept. An idea of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s also helps: the members of a family do not all share the same feature, but they resemble each other through features that partly overlap. One has the father’s eyes, another the mother’s walk.

Family resemblance: a network of partial similarities, with no feature common to all. In the same way, European countries and cultures have no single “essence”, but a network of similarities: history, ideas, institutions, values.

The practical conclusion: we do not need a perfect definition of Europe. We need to say clearly in which sense we are using the word.

Three different things

The first confusion to avoid in this course is the one between Europe and the European Union. The second, just as common, is the one between the European Union and the Council of Europe.

Council of Europe: an international organisation for human rights, democracy and the rule of law, founded in 1949, based in Strasbourg. The European Court of Human Rights is part of it.

European Union: a political and economic union of 27 states that exercise part of their powers jointly, through common institutions: the Commission, the Council, the European Parliament, the Court of Justice of the EU.

Memory trick: the Council of Europe deals mainly with rights; the European Union also builds a common market and common policies.

Common confusions in public debate

Once we tell the three apart, many claims we hear on television or on social media turn out to be false or ambiguous.

“The European Court of Human Rights is an EU institution” is false: it belongs to the Council of Europe. “Switzerland and Norway are not in Europe” is also false: they are not EU members, but they are European states and members of the Council of Europe.

“Moldova will become European when it joins the EU” is ambiguous. Geographically, Moldova is already European. What, then, would accession change? The answer to that question is, in fact, the subject of the whole course.

Where Moldova stands

The Republic of Moldova is part of geographical Europe, has been a member of the Council of Europe since 1995 and applied to join the European Union in 2022. It became a candidate country the same year, and accession negotiations began in 2024.

Following the constitutional referendum of 20 October 2024, the Constitution of the Republic of Moldova sets European integration as a strategic goal of the state.

If geographical membership is already a fact, then accession is about something else: taking on certain values and practices. What these values are and where they come from we will see in the next lectures.

Three positions

We return to the question of the lecture. We can distinguish three main positions.

The essentialist position: you are born European, through origin, language or religion. The problem: it contradicts the very values Europe proclaims, such as the equal dignity of all human beings, and its own history, which has always been one of exchange and mixing.

The civic position, that of values: you become European by taking on certain ideas and practices, such as critical reason, dignity, freedom and the rule of law. This is, in essence, the position of Husserl and Patočka. The problem: it risks becoming vague (who decides which values count?) and, as we saw with Husserl, it can be used to exclude others.

The pluralist position: European identity is one of several identities we hold at the same time. I can be Moldovan, European and a citizen of the world all at once. The problem: if European identity is just “one layer” among others, how strong can the solidarity it creates be?

Build your position

To the question “can someone become European?” there is no “correct” answer imposed by the teacher. What counts is being able to say clearly what you claim, why you claim it and what you would answer someone who disagrees.

Choose one of the three positions and set it out following the scheme shown here. The exercise prepares the argumentative essay at the end of the semester.

Example of a thesis: “One can become European, because what makes someone European is the values they take on, not their place of birth.” Now look for the best objection to it.