What Makes Europe a Region?
Physically, Europe is a peninsula extending off the western end of the huge Eurasian continent. On this giant peninsula of Europe are many peninsular appendages, large and small. Norway and Sweden share one of the larger appendages. Other large peninsulas are the Iberian Peninsula (occupied by Portugal and Spain), as well as those of Italy and Greece. All extend into either the Atlantic Ocean or into the various seas that are adjacent to the Atlantic (see the Figure 4.1 map). The perimeter of the region of Europe to the north, west, and south is primarily oceanic coastline; this unique access to the world ocean facilitated European exploration and colonization of distant territories. The eastern physical and cultural border of Europe has long been harder to define. Just where Europe ends and Asia begins has been a source of contention for millennia. In this book, at this time, the eastern limit of the European region is taken to be the border of the European Union. Other potential parts of Europe—Ukraine, Belarus, western Russia, Moldova, and the Caucasus—are covered in Chapter 5, Turkey in Chapter 6.
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Terms in This Chapter
This book divides Europe into four subregions (Figure 4.3)—North, West, South, and Central Europe. Central Europe refers to all those countries formerly in the Soviet sphere that are now in the European Union, as well as the countries that were formerly in Yugoslavia, plus Albania.
For convenience, we occasionally use the term western Europe to refer to all the countries that were not part of the experiment with communism in the Soviet sphere and in Yugoslavia. That is, western Europe comprises the combined subregions of North Europe (except Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), West Europe (except the former East Germany), and South Europe. When we refer to the countries that were part of the Soviet sphere up to 1989, we use the pre-1989 label eastern Europe. EU-28 is the term for just the 28 member countries of the European Union. When we refer to the group of countries collectively known to some as the Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia), we use the term southeastern Europe.