Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 11: 593617, 2004

Copyright Taylor & Francis, Inc.

ISSN: 1070-289X print / 1547-3384 online
DOI: 10.1080/10702890490883876

The Boundaries of Europe: Deconstructing Three

Regional Narratives

Identities:
114Taylor
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& Francis,
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Chestnut StreetPhiladelphiaPA191061070-289X1547-3384

Lila Leontidou
Department of European Culture, Hellenic Open University,
Athens, Greece

The shifting boundaries of Europe as lines of enclosure and mobility restriction in the
longue dureeare analysed here at the European/supranational level through the
deconstruction of three regional narratives on Europe and its reborderings in
different millennia. These narratives have had a lasting significance in identity construction and spatialities around the Mediterranean and are evidence of the historically specific and constructed nature of the boundaries of Europe, as well as the
power relations involved in changing spatialities. Europe is a cultural construct that
emerged around the Mediterranean in a captivating Greek myth, much earlier than
the period of written history. The notion of Europe then shifted to the northwest as a
colonial culturalreligious construct of Christendom during the Middle Ages, before
nation-states emerged. Much later, European integrationin the context of globalization after the end of bipolaritynot only did not melt borders, but in fact created
some new and often bizarre hierarchies supported by a bureaucratic narrative and an
institutional discourse for unification after two devastating world wars. Unpacking
these narratives is important in understanding sociopolitical constructions of
Europe and its boundaries, their hardening or relaxation, and criticizing essentialism,
as well as commenting upon the ambivalent placing in the European Union of certain
candidate and neighboring nations.

Key Words: borders, Mediterranean, European Union, spatialities, European identity, cultural geography, geopolitics, globalization, essentialism, ontology

The nature of Europe as a spatial entity has stirred debate throughout the process
of European integration, but never has the discussion been as lively as during the
last decade. According to some analysts, the question of what Europe is, only
became the subject of wide-ranging political debate in the wake of the Single
European Act (SEA) in 1992 (Hoskyns 1996: 19), which followed the end of the
cold war, when the East/West divide crumbled and geopolitics had to be redefined in the wake of the new world order. Spatial reshuffling since the 1990s has
been equalled only in few periods in Europes history. Three of these periods

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L. Leontidou

are discussed in this article, which presents evidence about the elasticity and flexibility of the notion of Europe over time and argues that Europe has been a cultural construct through the ages, rather than a continent or a fixed bordered entity.
The notion of continent, predating Herodotus (484424 BC), refers to
a mass of land like Africa or Australia, but is not appropriate for Europe.
Unlike Africa, Australia, and the Americas, Europe has never been a continent
with definite boundaries. It has been analysed recently as the changing product of imperial and papal ideologues, of predators, crusaders, conquerors from
Charlemagne to Napoleon, and federalist visionaries from (say) Voltaire to
Delors.1 Europe has been sometimes a cape, the extreme portion of Eurasia
and the point of departure of discoveries and colonisation,2 sometimes a changing cultural representation made material by geopolitics.3 During each one of
the epochs discussed here, shared cultural mappings and geopolitical constructed realities have dominated collective imaginaries of Europe and its
borders. The three epochal narratives of Antiquity, Christendom, and European
Integration presented in this article, have affected spatialities and have
involved significant reborderings in their time, by becoming dominant or even
hegemonic. These narratives correspond to mappings, and relocations of European
boundaries in the longue duree.
This article attempts a systematic diachronic analysis of Europes reborderings
in order to criticize evolutionism and the conception that past attempts at European unity have pointed toward the European Union (EU) (Wintle 1996: 56). The
main objective of our analysis of narratives and related reborderings is a critique
of essentialist, Fortress, conceptions of Europe and Europeanness vis--vis
countries in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. The awareness of the
historically specific and even elusive and constructed nature of the boundaries of
Europe is an objective crucial to current debates about European identity and
European culture, for that matter. The focus here is on shifting spatialities,
involving changes in Europes internal and external borders, and the interplay of
soft and hard boundaries around spatial units of various scales, from nations to the
whole region of Europe and beyond.
Spatiality is here used in Gregorys (1994) sense, as a constellation of
knowledge inscribed in space, through which particular identities are fabricated
and social inclusionsexclusions are perceived. This belongs to Pickles (1985)
understanding of ontology, where spatialities are constellations of relations and
meaning. Europe will be analysed here as a concept, an ontological fact and singular entity (Lewis and Wigen 1997: 4), actively constructed by geographical
imaginations (Gregory 1994) or by imagined geographies (Hagen 2003). As its
boundaries have been changing, a sequence of spatialities will be followed here,
drawn not only from every millenniumas shown on Maps 14but also from
every century. We have here chosen to stop at three major epochs and unpack
their mappings and narratives, in order to show their contemporary relevance in
identity construction.

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595

Rather than placing the emphasis on national borders as lines of enclosure and
mobility restriction, this article investigates territoriality and the boundaries of a
broader spatial unit, Europe. It focuses on the metamorphosis of Europe over several millennia by tracing the shifting spatialities of Europeans across three snapshot
points in history. The research material consists of certain narratives that have
become dominant over lengthy periods of border change as collective representations and are still sometimes inscribed in the collective memory in various corners
of Europe. We will deconstruct three narratives in their respective historical contexts, in order to understand their emergence and the relevant spatialities as reflected
in their mappings. It will be argued that, though Europe is not a proper continent,
boundaries have been drawn around it as a region and later as a group of nationstates. These boundaries were sometimes soft, or porous, and sometimes hard, so as
to restrict movement, communication, and exchange. The hardest of boundaries that
Europe felt ran through its centre and split East from West Europeans during the
cold war. Contrary to expectations, boundaries did not melt when this was lifted and
the globalization narrative spread: it will be also shown here that they became tiered
and in fact sometimes hardened, as they were institutionalized within EU bureaucratic discourses, regulations, and legislation, as enclosures of Fortress Europe.
The historical background of the boundaries of Europe has been quite extensively researched, but mainly in relation to nation-state formation (Anderson and
Bort 1998; Anderson et al. 2003). However, the nation-state is a rather recent phenomenon. Todays spatialities have been forged by hegemonic narratives in history schoolbooks, where Europe is often divided by war and is certainly worlds
apart from Africa and Asia. In everyday fears, it is composed of states ridden or
encircled by aliens. Such essentialism can be only contested if we draw attention
to earlier epochs, other types of boundaries, different spatialities and grass-roots
local discourses. Though dominant, and sometimes even hegemonic, these have
not really been grand narratives, because they have been constructed in parts of
Europe, by segments of the population; they may be contested by othersfor
example, eurosceptics, autonomist movements, and so on. The three following
sections analyse what are actually three regional narratives, corresponding to
what Pickles (1985), after Husserl, would call regional ontologies (Leontidou
1997). Exposing regional narratives and deconstructing them in a loose fashion is
important for understanding the process of identity construction through the delineation of boundaries, of mappings and spatialities, and of oral traditions inspired by
local, regional, and national myths, history, memory, and cultures.

Myths and metaphors of Europa

The name Europe was coined on the South of the Aegean archipelago. Greek
mythology named Europa between the third and the second millennium BC, personified her, and located her on an island, Crete, overlooking almost all Eastern
Mediterranean shores. The captivating mythical narrative about the abduction of

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FIGURE 1 The boundaries of Europe: the first of four snapshots in the course of three
millennia presents Europe in 1000 BC. Source: Adapted from Pounds 1990; Davies 1997;
Horden and Purcell 2000; Jordan-Bychkov et al. 2002.

the princess and semi-goddess Europa appears, fades out and re-emerges during
several historical cycles: in prehistoric Minoan, Greek, Hellenic, Macedonian,
and Roman times, people were fascinated by several versions of this myth, which
underlies the origins of Europe in ancient sociocultural constructs. The myth of
Europa is widely known from Ovids Metamorphoses,4 as well as hundreds of
paintings, sculptures, and literary works where it reappears from early antiquity
until the Renaissance. Putting together fragments of the myth from various sources,
we find that earlier than the second millennium BC, Europa was represented as
a Phoenician princess, granddaughter of Poseidon, the Greek God of the sea, and
daughter of King Agenor of Sidon. Zeus, the major Greek God renamed Jupiter or
Jove by the Romans, fascinated by Europas beauty, metamorphosed into a handsome white bull that attracted her attention and managed to kidnap her; or,
according to the matriarchal version of the same narrative, she escaped Oriental
confinement on the back of this beautiful beast. Speculation over the etymology
of her name abounds and if we accept that Europa means broad face, like the
full moon,5 the myth can be related to the adoration of the Moon Goddess, the
Hellenic Goddesses Hera and Io, but also to other regions legends of the moon-cow

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597

FIGURE 2 The boundaries of Europe at the birth of Christ. Source: Adapted from
Pounds 1990; Davies 1997; Horden and Purcell 2000; Jordan-Bychkov et al. 2002.

of Hathor, Kaliwho rode Shivaor the moon priestess (Walker 1983: 287).
That Europa adorned and rode the white bull echoes ancient fertility rites (Graves
1992: 197).
The bull carrying Europa swam, with the help of her grandfather, God of the sea,
westward from the Orient along the Mediterranean shores. He carried her to Crete,
which became the epicentre of the Europa region: as the Greek narrative goes, the
Mediterranean coasts at a large radius centred on Crete were named Europe
(Map 1). This is a metaphor or maybe a metonymy, a solely linguistic association
used widely in ancient Greece. Hippocrates (460370 BC) included Egypt in
Europe in his treatise on the effect of climate, environment, and landscape
especially air and wateron European races: In respect of the seasons and figure
of the body, the Scythian race, like the Egyptian, have a uniformity of resemblance,
different from all other nations. 6 The following interesting lines reflect the ambivalence of Herodotus regarding the names of Europe and Asia:
The Libyans. . . say that Asia has the name of the son of Kotyos and grandson of
Manis, who tranferred the name to the tribe called Asiada in Sardes. As for Europe,
nobody knows whether it is encircled by sea, after all, nor where its name originates

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L. Leontidou

nor who gave it to her, except if we accept that it started from Europa, the woman
from Tyros. . . This is unlikely, because Europa. . . travelled only from Phoenicia to
Crete and from there to Lycea (Herodotus 1992: 67; authors translation).

Whatever the relationship of the semi-goddess to the region, their names were
used widely in ancient Greece with reference to each other and to geography. The
metaphor associates the figures and events portrayed in the mythical narrative of
Europa, with the actual succession in the rise and fall of ancient civilizations in the
Eastern Mediterranean and its broader region, before written history began: in the
third millennium BC, the Sumerians and the Egyptians did not have any notion of
Europe. When the Phoenician civilization receded as the Minoan one rose, Crete
flowered, around 2000 BC. It was founded reputedly by King Minos, son of
Europa and Zeus, born in the Diktaio cave. Cretes safe ports were without walls,
because they were naturally fortified according to a subplot in the myth of Europa:
the giant Talos was sent by Zeus to guard the ports of Crete, ensuring that its cities
needed no fortification. He was later neutralized by the Argonauts. Jason, with the
help of Medea, treated Talos with wine and pulled the nail sealing his veins, spilling his blood to the sea. Talos turned into a copper statue, the one at the entrance
to the port of Crete. The Minoan civilization thus became vulnerable and its undefended palacecities were conquered by the Mycenians.
By 1450 BC, the Mycenians controlled the Aegean archipelago up to Troy. By
1200, however, these civilizations vanished, possibly from natural disasters such
as volcanic eruptions or from wars. The period between the thirteenth and the
ninth century BC is discontinuous, lost in the dark ages between the decline of
civilizations around the Aegean archipelago and the beginnings of the Classical
Period (Map 1). Europe was then also trapped in darkness between earthquakes
and wars and its continuity was interrupted. As script systems fell out of use, the
Minoan script remained undeciphered, and the Greek citystates later adopted
the Phoenician alphabet. After this prolonged interruption, the antique origins of
Europe have been obscured.
However, the myth of Europa kept re-emerging in Hellenistic and Roman
times. It was retold centuries later until the Renaissance. It was narrated with
several variations in Mediterranean oral traditions. Urban citizens and artists
were inspired by its iconography before, during, and after the Classical Period, to
create images on Greek amphoras, murals, and relieves; poems, with the most
celebrated ones by Ovid who lived between 43 BC and AD 17 in the centre of
lands shaded in Map 2; and frescoes of the abduction of Europa in Pompeii.7 For
several millennia, representations of Europa seated on the bull stirred popular
imaginations in Greece and the Roman Empire. The myths calibre can be concluded from the multitude of authors referring to it, who had lived all around the
Eastern Mediterranean.8 Artistic representations have been discovered as far as
Babylon, where a clay statuette of the Seleukides Dynasty (300150 BC) was
found and is now kept in the British Museum.

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During those times, the boundaries of Europe enclosed the coastal strips along
the Mediterranean shores and included North Africa (Maps 1 and 2). On the East,
the river Don (Tanais) was navigable to the Greeks and considered by Hippocrates
(1881) as the border between Europe and Asia. However, these were external soft
boundaries, while the hard ones encircled cities. Ancient civilizations were associated
with urbanism and the colossal importance of the sea (Anderson 1974: 2021).
The Mediterranean was punctuated by cities that were walled and ports that were
protected. Several European concepts, ideas, and life patterns were constructed
within those walls, especially in Athens. In just 100 years (510404 BC), the Athenian civilization flowered and, among other contributions, laid the foundations of
todays European institutional discourse. Besides launching the name of Europe,
ancient civilizations named democracy, after Demos, a local society. Athens was a
weak democracy, of course, where male civic pride or citizenship was defined
against the otherness of the barbarians and the slaves, but also the exclusion of
women. Cities, but also Demoi, islands, and colonies (paroikies), formed the full
polis,9 from which politis (citizen), politismos (civilization), polity, and politics
were named. The classical civilization also offered the concept of patris (home
state) and patriotism, recasting loyalty and attachment in a more positive light
than nationalism (Berezin 2003: 29) and kratos, the state (citystate at the time),
essentialized by Aristotle as a creation of nature (Aristotle 1988: 14).
Between the period of Athens and Rome, the Macedonian Empire, the first
pan-Mediterranean Empire preceding that of Rome, offered the first conception
of the multicultural society, which was later also extended in the Roman Empire.
Alexander the Great expanded Europe into Asia, reshuffling spatialities from
those centred on city states and their colonies, toward Empires and their capital
cities (Toynbee 1967). The notion of barbarians, those noncitizens outside the
city-state, was weakened during the Macedonian and Roman periods, as Emperors sought interaction with the arts and customs of the peoples conquered. The
Emperor Hadrian of Rome, for example, tenderly rebuilt and decorated Athens in
styles of Greek art. In his multicultural Empire, Alexander attacked but also
admired Oriental civilizations. He married Roxanne and put to action a hellenization expedition involving communication with the East. His own Europe had
an Oriental thrust, mappings from the Nile to the Indus, and the opposite spatiality of Rome, which soon would face the West. The impressive Macedonian
Empire was fragmented after Alexanders death in 322 BC, and its eastern provinces never entered the realm of Europe.
The third cycle of imperial expansion was the Roman Empire, which shifted
the boundaries of Europe from East to West, but it never abandoned the Mediterranean shores (Map 2). On the west, the borderline hardened in comparison with
classical or Macedonian times. City walls softened and harder walled borders
were erected in the countryside, like Roman limes and the Hadrian wall in Britain
or that between the rivers Rhein and Danube. Besides city walls, territories on the
northwest had to be defended during the Roman period. On the frontiers, the

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successful conquest and integration of the critical corridors between East and
West . . . achieved the final geo-strategic unification of the Empire. Illyria, in
particular, was henceforward the central military link of the imperial system in
the Mediterranean (Syme 1960). Roman frontiers engulfed the colonies and
Europe was huge (Map 2). A wise decentralized administrative system integrated
local societies in governance and defense, thus ensuring the strength of the
Roman Empire for centuries. This contrasts with the exclusion of noncitizens
from the Athenian army, which to a great extent caused the vulnerability and the
short-lived glory of Athens.

Medieval discourses of Christendom and colonial arrogance

In the high Middle Ages at the turn of the second millennium AD, Bartlett (1993)
discovers the Europeanisation of Europea rising awareness of European
identity and topdown nation-building mechanisms, coins and chartersset to
motion by monarchs and popes. Boundaries were drawn against Arabs in the
South, but also Slavs in the East (Map 3). The Orient was Europes first other:
The Orient began its career in the Eastern Mediterranean, at a time when India was
to Europeans the eastern limit of the known world. . . After the Arab conquests of
the seventh and eighth centuries. . . the Orient took on new meaning as the alien
cultural realm against which Europeanness was defined. . . But as the Orient
became synonymous with Islam, its referent began to expand out of the eastern
Mediterranean. Only thus could Morocco, most of which lies to the west of
England, be subsumed under the rubric of Oriental civilization (Lewis and Wigen
1997: 5354).

The consolidation of imperial power and the corresponding European boundaries gives the impression that Europe is a creation of the Middle Ages (Bloch
1963: 123124). But this is due to the deliberate obliteration of the antique pagan
narrative, the pantheistic discourse. Throughout the Middle Ages, there was
constant tension between the paganism of early antiquity and Christian morality.
Christendom undermined the myth of Europa and so the origin of the name of
Europe was deliberately shrouded in oblivion, in line with the alterity of pagan
cultures, especially during the prolonged ruralization period (Cipolla 1980)
before the revival of city-states. As Christianity spread, the ancient urban civilizations that had created Europe were forgotten, often excluded, and the name
was rarely used. In fact, the myth of the abduction of Europa was embarrassing.
Sex, violence, seascape, landscape, beauty and the beast, gestures of alarm and
affection (Hale 1993: 48) had no place in Christendom. The Latin/Orthodox
schism is mentioned in the shaping of a new Christian view of Europe and the
Reformation seemed to tear the unity of both (Latin) Christendom and Europe to
pieces (Wintle 1996: 14). It was during the Reformation that biblical texts were

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re-narrated as an alternative respectable source for a new name for Europe.

According to a medieval legend, which does not appear in the Bible, Noahs
sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, inhabited zones of the world after the deluge
Asia, Africa, and Europe, respectively. In 1561, the very year when Titian had
just presented his painting of Europa in Venice, a Frenchman, G. Postel, suggested renaming Europe after Noahs son: Japetie! (Hale 1993: 4849). This
attempt failed, of course. The standard outcome of the new morality was that the
word Europe fell out of use during the Middle Ages and was replaced by the
idea of Christianitas or Latin Christendom (Wintle 1996: 14).
Non-Christians became the other again, barbarians outside the faith and
outside the borders. The first multi-ethnic army in history, the ChristianEuropean
Crusaders, was set up in order to acculturate these infidels. This was the period
of essentialist eurocentrism par excellence that, ironically, excluded from Christendoms boundaries all Middle Eastern lands, even the West Bank where Christianity
had been actually born. However, Eastern Europe, centred in Constantinople
until the mid-fifteenth century, cherished the emblem of Eurasia on its flags and
stamps: the biheaded eagle of Byzantium symbolized a civilization looking both
to the East and the West.
The Renaissance came along, full of surprises: the city-state was resurrected,
along with the myth of Europa. Renaissance Europe was an unbounded territory,
extending to the North up to the Baltic Sea where, already after the 1241 pact
around Luebeck, a remarkable urban network, the Hanseatic League, emerged
(Benevolo 1993: 6264; Pounds 1990). Still, however, the core of development
was Italy, where city-states flowered with cultural innovation, science and art.
They were enclosed in walls, hard borders analogous to todays national boundaries. Even unwalled cities, such as Venice, were well protected: canals here
were natural fortifications in the tradition of the Minoan cities, millennia before.
Allegiance to the King or rulers, not boundaries, divided populations and made
the difference in cultural identities, citizenship, migration, and social exclusion.
In this vibrant cultural milieu, in Italy, several myths were resurrected, among
which the myth of Europa re-emerged. It lingered in those radiant cities, especially in Venice, in Titians and Veroneses paintings, and in Medican Florence,
arguably the first modern state of the world during the fifteenth century, where
Greek culture was rediscovered and ancient Greek intellectual traditions were
revived (Benevolo 1993; Toynbee 1967: 68). Classical antiquity fascinated Italians and consolidated the spatio-temporal unity of European traditions around
the Mediterranean. The painters of Venice are especially important for cultural
continuity at a time of resistance against the myth of Europa by Christian morality.
Uneven development in European space was soon to reverse the dichotomy
between the lands of Charlemagne in the west with the prosperity of Byzantium
and the culture of Constantinople, its capital. The West/East divide was to be
overturned in favor of the former. This starts with the emergence of feudalism,
in that historical era when the classical relationship of regions within the Roman

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Empireadvanced East and backward Westbegan for the first time to be

reversed. This change of signs (Anderson 1974: 16) deepened after the fall of
Constantinople in 1453, forty years before Columbus discoveries. A succession
of metropolitan leaders (Jones 1990) brought the European centre of gravity from
Amalfi to Venice, then Genoa in Northwest Italy, but later on to Iberian cities.
Ottoman occupation would create a secluded East, while the West was taking off.
The Spanish reconquista pushed Arabs to Africa and tore Europe from the
Mediterranean (Map 3). The discovery of the New World, economic dynamism
north of the Mediterranean, the reconquista in the West, and Ottoman occupation
of the Levant shifted the core of Europe from Italian cities to Iberian and Northern
ports and raised an imaginary about superior cultures.
Perhaps the essentialisation of Europe was never more conspicuous than in
the period of colonialism. In the sixteenth century, during the age of exploration,
expansion, and Protestant Reformation, Europe was redefined in a context of
eurocentric power relations and unequal geopolitics and was mapped as the
centre of the world in colonial domination. It was even personified as Queen
Europe reigning over the New World in a posture of superiority. In the 1572
Atlas of A. Ortelius in Antwerp, Europe was represented as a queen with the rest
of the continents at its feet (Hale 1993: 49; Wintle 1996: 8186). This eurocentric
representation was combined with the clash between Christendom on the one
hand and Islam, as well as pagan cultures, on the other, along with their myths
and legends (including the myth of Europa). Europe was a land of Christian faith,
but also of colonial superiority and arrogance. Its southern boundary was defined
against Islam, even if this meant geographical distortions, such as the one in the
Iberian peninsula until 1492, when the Moors were finally defeated (Map 3). In
the sixteenth century, Europe excluded Egypt, the whole of Mediterranean
Africa and the Middle East, basically on the divide of a Christian versus an
Arab world.
Sixteenth-century maps of Christendom drew a border with the South of the
Mediterranean, but were also ambiguous on the eastern side of Europe. The
exclusion of Slavs, despite their Christian persuasion, first on cultural and later
on economic grounds, rendered Europes eastern boundary rather fuzzy: Bloch
expressly excluded the regions that are today Eastern Europe from his social definition of the continent, and many followed his point of view (Anderson 1974: 17;
see also Hale 1993: 50). At the turn of the seventeenth century, Sully strongly
argued to exclude Russia from the European order, on grounds of inferiority.10
Russians reciprocated by distancing themselves from Europe, which they considered as a speech act; it is talked and written into existence (Newmann 1996: 2).
This meant the rupture of geographical continuity, especially after Turkish conquests
and extensive reborderings creating basic problems in defining Europe for quite a
long period (Barraclough 1955). Russians themselves were ambivalent and divided
between Westernizers and Slavophiles well into the nineteenth century. After the
Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Lenin identified with Europe and especially with

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the French revolution, but then Stalin distanced the USSR from Europe (Davies
1997: 1112). Religion was unifying in a Europe fragmented and torn by war,
but Orthodox Christian regions were considered different. At the same time, the
North/South divide was partly set by the division within Christianity between
Protestantism and Catholicism (Lewis and Wigen 2001: 12).
The Enlightenment offered a new perception of Europe as a system of
sovereign states rather than a community of believers. In place of a semigoddess or a queen, we now find Europe as a secularized region where technological development unfolded, capitalism was rising, and imperialism remained
powerful. Its epicentre shifted further to the northwest and away from the Levant,
and Mediterranean cities were surpassed by Northern ports, which now became
dynamic metropolitan leaders (Jones 1990: 5157). Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam,
then London, and finally the towns of the industrial revolution. The Mediterranean
fell from core to peripheral status in the global economy and the EuroMediterranean imaginary was dropped from mappings (Leontidou 1990). The sea which
used to bridge civilization, became a border (Leontidou 2003). The core of
Europe was consolidated toward the one we know today and new spatialities
evolved with the emergence of nation-states. Historiography considers the Peace
of Westphalia in 1648 as the beginning of this process. It established the principle
of sovereignty for each princes territory and gradually nation-states rose and
became the regions bounded by hard borderlines.

Institutional/bureaucratic narratives and the globalization

discourse
Fractured from within, with rivalries and wars, Europe emerged in the mid-1940s
with hopes for peace, reconciliation, and unification. A new narrative has been
under construction since the first postwar years, with the basic drive of discursively transforming the dark continent (Mazower 1999) into a unified Europe.
The emergent narrative has been contested by multiple voices since Churchill
and Schuman and has involved several different spatialities since the European
Coal and Steel Community (ECSC, 1951) united the West versus its eastern others
during the cold war. Ambiguities of the past, especially the ones concerning the
fragmentation of the Mediterranean and the boundaries of Europe on the East,
have followed us into the mid-twentieth century, when De Gaulle referred to a
Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, hinting at the partition of Russia into
two parts. Another ambiguity was expressed by Churchill in Zurich on 19
September 1946, in his proposal for a United States of Europe (Bainbridge and
Teasdale 1995: 465)without the UK.
The hardest boundary that Europe has ever known was the Iron Curtain,
which was also named by Churchill. Iron sends us to a notion of impenetrable
enclosure and a checkpoint of extreme restriction of movement in the heart of
Europe. The visibility of the cold war has dominated the landscapes of many

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FIGURE 3 The boundaries of Europe in 1000 AD. Source: Adapted from Pounds 1990;
Davies 1997; Horden and Purcell 2000; Jordan-Bychkov et al. 2002.

regions and cities, especially Berlin, with its wall built in August 1961 as a material symbol of the Iron Curtain (Derrida in Borradori 2003: 146). Similarly, a
fence split Gorizia/Nova Gorica (a single town in Italy/Slovenia) and several
barbed wire borders encircled free Europe. However, boundaries remained
undefined and in fact confusing in cases such as Prague, which despite its
location to the northwest of Vienna was considered as a city of the east
(Hagen 2003: 490).
Eastern Europe, especially the Balkans and the USSR, were the Second
World and became the other for the First World of Western Europe and the
United States (Agnew 2002; Dalby 1999; Newmann 1999). The West has always
needed a common enemy, an other. The ancient Persians, Arabs, and Turks
were replaced by communism as the other during the cold war (Said 1995),
but the communists were within Europe and this tended to blur its eastern boundaries and those of the USSR itself. For many centuries, the River Don was the
boundary between European and Asian sections of Russia. This was rejected in
the eighteenth century and the Ural Mountains came to mark the eastern frontier
of Europe with the erection of boundary posts, where prisoners to Siberia used to
pause (Davies 1997: 47). In European discourse, all this was the East, a notion

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605

FIGURE 4 Hierarchies of boundaries in Europe 2000 AD: map of 15 EU members, 2

non-members, 10 candidate members (2004 accession) and a borderline including states
negotiating membership until today. Source: Adapted from Pounds 1990; Davies 1997;
Horden and Purcell 2000; Jordan-Bychkov et al. 2002.

more difficult to deconstruct than the Orient (Afouxenidis 2003; Newmann

1999; Said 1995), with which at times it has been synonymous:
On the one hand, it has sometimes been used to refer to an area within Christendom: the Orthodox leadership of the Byzantine and Russian churches. . . . To complicate matters further, Cold War discourse appropriated the lexicon of East and
West, to demarcate zones of communist and noncommunist regimes (Lewis and
Wigen 1997: 55,7).

Fortress Europe was thus not the creation of European integration or the
Schengen Treaty, but of the cold war before it. However, only in the 1990s did it
enter the dominant discourse of the EU (Massey and Jess 1995: 162). Fortress
Europe was labelled in the context of deborderings and relevant declarations, the
collapse of the Iron Curtain, the partition of former Yugoslavia, questions of
European federalism, and the expansions of the EU. These processes gave shape
to a new bureaucratic/institutional narrative, which has recently seized the

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L. Leontidou

ambivalent cognitive geography of Europe (Paasi 2001). It has been crystallized

especially since 1992, when the Maastricht Treaty was signed after the end of the
cold war. The narrative includes anniversaries, days of celebration of Europe,
and landmarks in its development (e.g., 9 May 1950), as well as heroes and
visionaries of European integration, such as Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet,
giving their names to metro stations, streets, and University Chairs in Brussels,
Paris, London, Florence, and throughout Europe. The Commission flies the
twelve-starred European flag, sounds the euro-anthem, promotes educational harmonisation with ERASMUS and SOCRATES networks, and of course circulates
the Euro. Common currency has been the most effective among nation-building
processes and strategies in history and will certainly contribute in the crystallisation of a European postnational political culture, along with the European Constitution that is now being negotiated.
By implicitly equating Europe with the European Union after successive
territorial formalizations, the new narrative influences the construction of new
spatialities in cultural and social life. It attempts to place Europe as a constructed spatiality in parallel with the nation-state, by passing legislation, regulations, and treaties in the EU. It creates a European postnational political culture
by regulating hierarchies of borders and negotiating Europes spatial limits and
multilayered bordering. This ranges from a diverse set of national boundaries
whose significance has been changing (ODowd 2003) to external borders under
negotiation, especially since the Schengen treaty. The tiers and hierarchies of
borders of Europe shift during the new world order (Map 4) and the fluidity of
its territory causes significant shifts in the domains of culture and identity,
besides the important global restructuring in the economy, politics, and social
organisation (Berezin 2003; Castells 1997).
The debordering of cold-war Europe, the porosity of EastWest boundaries, and
the permeability of the Mediterranean were effectively renegotiated in the 1990s,
with Berlin as a place of effective symbolism. The Berlin wall was demolished in
1989, at the pivotal day of 9 November, or 9.11 as Europeans write it. Reading 9.11
the American way, we encounter September Elevenan event named with a
date, a metonymy, according to Derrida.11 There is an irony here in the antithetical
symmetry of two similarly written dates9.11because they stand for two contrasting global events, both dramatised by demolitions: first in Europe in 9 November
1989 a wall symbolizing the Iron Curtain was demolished and borders opened;
then, in America in 11 September 2001, as the New York twin towers collapsed,
new cultural borders were erected and borders closed around the United States
(Leontidou 2001). The antithesis between Berlin and New York, or opening and
closing borders, is tragically underlined by yet another 11 September of 1973,
when yet another demolition started an era of exclusions and missing persons, at
the centre of Santiago, Chile, where Salvador Allende was killed.
These layers of metonymies, coincidences, and reversals, represented in a date,
underline the ambiguities of the most dramatic deborderings and reborderings in

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607

modern history. What appear as inclusions may turn out to be exclusions and vice
versa. In Europe, the recent collapse of the Iron Curtain did not mean the melting
of borders; far from it. Boundaries around the EU were soon to become more
rigid in the new world order. As soon as the curtain was lifted between West and
East, the borderline was hardened elsewhere: Europe was rebordered as Fortress
Europe. It also started to discuss borders and to strengthen outside enclosures as
it opened up some of its inner spaces toward the East. At the turn of the new millennium, as Gorizia was considering the demolition of its fence between Italy and
Slovenia when the latter was becoming a candidate EU member state in the 1990s,
a barbed wire enclosure was built around Melilla, the Spanish town in Morocco.
Our field work in these, as well as other, border cities, on occasion of a comparative EU project on Border Cities and Towns realized in 19972001 (Leontidou
et al. 2002), revealed several such contrasts between the porosity and hardening
of EU borders at the turn of the new millennium. Though findings on local contested imaginaries and border discourses unfortunately cannot be discussed at
this point, for lack of space, it is worth mentioning that most of our interviewees
recognized the elusiveness of borders. In the process of forging their spatiality
and temporality, they tried to make sense of rapid border changes by sticking to
long-established boundaries in the collective memory. Border discourses
involved considerable ambivalence; spatiality and definitions were never
resolved and rapid change undermined the strictness of meanings of borders,
boundaries, and frontiers conveyed by the much-quoted paragraph by Prescott
(1987: 36): there is no excuse for geographers who use the terms frontier and
boundary as synonymous. They are certainly not synonymous, but neither can
they be solidly defined. They (especially frontier) carry diverse and elusive
meanings among local societies and especially between countries, between
Europe and the United States, in the course of history and also among several
authors (e.g., Agnew 2002; Anderson 1996: 910; Anderson and Bort 1998;
Anderson et al. 2003; Donnan and Wilson 1999: 48).
The above authors are among those who focus on borders and their change,
while another contemporary tradition is particularly negative about their future,
claiming that boundaries are melting in the course of the complex phenomenon
known as globalization. This narrative became louder after the demise of
socialist regimes, combined with the sensational cyberspace of communications. Current economic developments are considered as deterritorializations
signaling an end of history and of geography, as was discursively overstated
during the early 1990s, after the end of bipolarity (Fukuyama 1993; O Brien
1992). However, history or geography did not end; local identities have been
found to be reinforced during postmodernity, exactly because of fears of deterritorialization; the cyberspace narrative has been arguably dealing with an elite and
the broad and often contradictory use of the term globalization has been criticised in favor of more rigorous and discrete use (Dicken 2003; Hirst and Thompson
1999; Kourliouros 2001). Borders may become more porous or even melt at the

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L. Leontidou

economic sphere, with liberalization and the unification of financial markets.

Otherwise, however, the current globalization narrative overemphasises external
forces shaking the principle of national sovereignty and challenging the system of
nation states or even superseding it. It also underestimates hardened borders around
the United States after 9/11 or in fact around Fortress Europe, for that matter.
Despite such key developments as globalization and the emergence of the EU,
states and their borders retain their relevance on at least three levels: security,
political, and administrative jurisdiction and individual status (Leontidou
et al. 2002). The spatial recalibration (Berezin 2003) of Europe has not
undermined the importance of the nation-state as an imagined community
(Anderson 1983). The principle of subsidiarity was partly devised as the pole
opposite to Europeanization within one and the same institutional discourse, in
order to calm rising euroscepticism in the face of centralistic decision-making
processes. This contradiction is mirrored in the tendency of a postnational political culture to essentialise the nation-state in the context of the EU dominant
bureaucratic narrative. Official agents, such as the Eurobarometer (2001), for
example, stereotype nationsmeasure, plot, and correlate national attitudes in
reports based in tiny samples. They essentially naturalise national identities as
somehow fixed and label each nations citizens as racists or otherwise,
according to the survey question. This in itself can lead to the social construction
of otherness and even racism (Leontidou et al. 2002). The bureaucratic narrative also adopts a constructed regionalisation, reflected in the formal fragmentation of Europe into administrative unitsNUTS 1, 2, and 3 regions.12 This
formalisation reduces the understanding of spatiality as a network of given
grids (Paasi 2001: 14) and does not seem really essential for the promotion of a
Europe of the regions. Is it just another bureaucratic formalisation, a normative
construction, or a Federalist stereotype?
The social construction of boundaries contributes in the formation of a sense
of place (Massey and Jess 1995: 162), often in line with the dominant narrative.
The Schengen Agreement has created several types of borders and often bizarre
hierarchies (Leontidou and Afouxenidis 2001). The Treaty, signed in Luxembourg
in December 1998, was initially expected to loosen up, relax, or demolish
internal EU borders, while tightening external ones (Acherman 1995). It originally included Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Portugal, Greece,
Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Seven countries decided to move
ahead and implement it. Since then, the five Nordic countries have acceded to the
Agreement. The unusual element here is that Norway and Iceland are not EU
member states! Though Schengen was for EU members only, it was initially
rejected by some member states while it was accepted by non-members (including
Switzerland, recently) raising absurd issues of migration, transactions, and border
hierarchies more generally (ODowd 2003). Soon afterward, a new border was
erected in 2002 with the EMU, the Euro currency zone, which facilitates the free
flow of capital and payments among twelve of the then fifteen EU member states.

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609

There are thus several types of borders in and around the EU today (Map 4): those
specified by Schengen around member states and those around non-members;
those with candidate members and long-term candidate members for whom discussions for inclusion will start in the future; there are EMU borders; and borders
with memories of bipolarity and of the Iron Curtain. There also is the question
of Europe beyond the mainland and here, besides Melilla and the Canaries there
are French lands further afield, in the Caribbean and in the Indian Ocean (Lewis
and Wigen 2001: 4). Such examples of the several tiers of borders, internal and
external, augment the tensions between nationalism, regionalism, and federalism.
The multiple hierarchy of borders also undermines the ideal of a borderless
Europe as promoted by the Schengen Agreement, surrounded by hard EU boundaries. Deconstructing the bureaucratic narratives we find differing political philosophies in space and time that create its diversity and contradictions.
But the most important tiering and the greatest shift in borders has followed
developments in Eastern Europe. These culminated in 1989 and then again in
2004 when eight among the ten new member states accepted into the EU are
East European countries: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia,
the Czech Republic, and Slovenia. Most Eastern European countries are still
excluded, of course, especially the Balkans. Two of the states of former Yugoslavia,
still derelict from civil wars and the Kosovo bombings of 1999, have not even
applied for EU membership. Bulgaria and Romania were not accepted during the
present round of EU expansion, on economic grounds. With the accession of
Turkey before the Balkans or at least before Albania, Serbia, and FYROM, we
may soon see a deformed EU map with a big hole down its southeast, incomparably larger than the Swiss hole (Map 4). Though the Balkans are predominantly
Christian, their population, along with Ukranians and Georgians, are not treated
as Europeans but as others when they migrate to the EU, just like Afghans,
Iraquis, Africans, and other peoples further afield. The Balkan people are one
boundary shift away from European citizenship, but this shift is surrounded by
ambiguity, though their geography is much more European than that of Algerians
and Moroccans, whom France failed to integrate into Europe. But that is yet
another story.
Besides borders, Europe also has a contested core with the legacy of Mitteleuropa (Hagen 2003) or, on a lighter level, a central development corridor, the proverbial blue banana, which every major cityfrom Madrid to Milan, from
Warsaw to Viennatries to pull towards itself (Jensen-Butler et al. 1996). The
bureaucratic discourse is mapped over it and over levels of ambivalence in spatialities, which can confuse or even overwhelm and turn certain citizens toward
traditional narratives, mappings, and regions (Leontidou et al. 2002). Tensions of
regionalism are often acute; autonomist movements are strong in the Basque
region, in Corsica, and on the Irish border; and the resurgence of fundamentalism
is noticed in Europe and the Middle East. The bureaucratic/institutional narrative
is shaken by such tensions and by euroscepticism. Its discourse is dominant in

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L. Leontidou

some regions, hegemonic around Brussels, but there is a multitude of alternative

narratives springing up in several corners of Europe. Borders, treaties, and concepts found in official documents conceptualising Europeanness13 are contested
in civil society of the various member states. Even if Derrida and Habermas are
by no means representative of French and German civil societies, respectively,
their discourses on Europe in the new millennium (Borradori 2003) can only
highlight the flimsiness of the dominant bureaucratic narrative, especially now
that ruptures between Anglo-Saxon and continental countries are lurking. European
integration, even as incomplete as it started, was once a major event, but now
europhilia gives way to euroscepticism in several regions and member states, as
often shown in plebiscites. What is especially contested, from Ireland to the
Basque region to Corsica and the frequent antiglobalization rallies, is the democratic deficit and the topdown nature of institution buildingconsequently, the
very bureaucratic narrative itself. Questions of European identity, citizenship,
and welfare may be broadly discussed by civil societies and the media, but
foreign policy, important agreements, and the European Constitution are constructed in a topdown manner.
Attempts to moderate euroscepticism, discord, and relevant mobilisations can
be discerned in narrations replete with those elegant familiar Euro-words, such as
the principle of subsidiarity, social cohesion, synergy, social insertion policy,
empowerment, partnerships, and support frameworks. Even so, however, the
current bureaucratic essentialisation of Europe found in EU discourse, narratives,
and documentsor institutional definitions of Europeis haunted by its inability
to resolve the issue of local and national identities, and contested borders inherited by past narratives. Complexity of mappings, ambiguity of identities and
shifting hierarchies of borders currently characterise spatialities in Europe as it
changes its geographies and its geographical imaginations. On a more optimistic
note, let us hope, with Derrida (1992) that Europes memory of the past will
protect and redirect it to another heading, a new destination.

Conclusion
In all current endeavors for understanding temporalities and spatialities in the EU
and of the EU, there is the underlying ambiguity that Europe never came to
constitute a clearly, solidly, and unambiguously bounded continent. We have tried
to understand three dominant narratives surrounding the shifting boundaries of
Europe, their porosity, and their hardening. Since its inception within myth, which
located it around the Mediterranean shores, Europe has always been seeking its
mappings, its boundaries, and its relationship with the sea. Braudel (1975) has
studied and portrayed the Mediterranean as a unifying sea, literally a sea in the
midst of land, punctuated by great cities, to the point where Southern Europe
might indeed be seen as an enlargement of Audens Spain (as in the poem Spain
1937), nipped off from hot Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe.

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611

(Compare the popular Torinese saying that Garibaldi did not unite Italy, he
divided Africa) (Horden and Purcell 2000: 21). After the explorations, however,
the Mediterranean was no longer the core of Europe: it gradually became its
periphery, its unity was eroded, and the EuroMediterranean narrative was abandoned. The sea ceased to be a bridge of civilizations between Europe and Africa on
the South: it became a border, specifying the Southern edge of Europe (Leontidou
2003). As African countries and the Middle East were pushed out of the boundaries of Europe, the Christendom narrative came to dominate the scene, in the context of power contests that we have more or less exposed as colonial arrogance.
This was, in turn, abandoned, especially in the new millennium, allowing Muslim
countries to apply for EU membership in the context of a new, bureaucratic, narrative. As it seems, however, the expansion of the EU toward the East and pending
applications from the South are met with concern, the external boundaries of
Europe are still under negotiation, and Fortress Europe as a concept is inscribed
in narratives at all levels.
Our ambition in this article was to illuminate such metamorphoses of Europe
and its rebordering over the longue duree, with the purpose of raising awareness
against essentialist views of Europeanness and exposing power relations embedded in certain crucial mappings. We have argued that the dominant narrative of
each epoch has reflected specific power relations, changing geopolitics, wars,
power figures, cultural change, and global shifts (Hagen 2003; Newman 1999;
Tunander et al. eds 1997; Wilson and Donnan 1998). Power struggles have surrounded the ways in which the narratives have been adopted and also abandoned,
one by one. In sequence, the mythical narrative accounts for the rise and fall of civilizations conquering each other around the eastern Mediterranean (Maps 1 and 2);
the medieval one has defined Europe as a colonial queen, as the territory of Christendom during the rise of the latter, and has supported its specific geopolitical
claims against the world of Arabs, but also of Slavs (Map 3); then the postwar narrative emerged from reconstruction efforts and the drive for reconciliation after two
devastating world wars followed by the cold war and EU integration (Map 4).
We would therefore not agree with Wintle (1996: 52) that Europe means what
you choose it to mean, as Humpty Dumpty once said to Alice (Leontidou 1997).
We have tried to show that, despite ambiguities in mappings and redefinitions of
Europe, it can be analysed as an intersubjective cultural and political construct,
which has materialized according to political circumstance, power relations,
geopolitics, and cultures in each period. To this effect, we have relied on narrative analysis as a valid method to unveil mappings, spatialities, reborderings, the
changing interplay of hard and soft boundaries, and the elasticity and flexibility
of their bounded region, Europe, over time. We have deconstructed three narratives in support of an anti-essentialist attitude to Europe, exposing the changing
and flexible spatialities around it. A complex cognitive geography and geopolitical
reality emerged, which contradicts evolutionist schemes and essentialist views of
Europe.

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L. Leontidou

We have loosely deconstructed, or placed in their sociopolitical context, three

narratives of Myth, Christendom, and Bureaucracy. At a deeper level, we have a
triplet of ontologies here: pagan, Christian, and secular. The borders of Europe
have been changing, matching up with the narrativesontologies in the last
instance. In the course of the three millennia discussed in this article, we have
found that Europe has been rebounded several times especially on its South
until the Mediterranean Sea was relegated to a borderand on its East, where
boundaries are still being negotiated, shifting, and expanding after the end of
bipolarity. The frontier has been often undefined between East and West and also
at the edge of Eastern Europe; often shifting, as new historical priorities have
emerged, technology has evolved and political power has shifted; and, most
important for us in this article, boundaries have been always drawn by a dominant narrative embedded in specific power relations.
The discussion of boundaries in relation with European identity is at the top of
the agenda today (Berezin and Schain 2003), including questions of territoriality,
space, debordering and rebordering Europe, as well as citizenship and the interplay of inclusions/exclusions, both sociopolitical and geographical. A new narrative is being constructed, or rather negotiated, for a European post-national
political culture. In this, perhaps for the first time in history, earlier narratives
continue to have resonance. The interplay of these narratives results in a complex
hierarchy of European borders institutionalized during the period of European
integration (Map 4). The inherent spatialities of past narratives are sometimes
engraved in collective consciousness and they sometimes resurface and overlap
with narratives of modernity. No example can be better than the recent debate of
whether to include references to religion in the European Constitution.14 Despite
the fact that European culture is indeed secular, we have come to a turning point
when modernity can not be taken for granted as the essence of European identity.15
The overlapping of past and present narratives has a bearing on the relationship
of certain countries such as Russia, Turkey, and some North African nationstates, with Europe, and especially with the frequently debated issue of the
Europeanness of new candidates. Is Turkey a European country? And indeed,
unpacking the two possible replies, we encounter two opposite ontologies, corresponding to the two earliest narratives in Europes history. The coasts of todays
Turkey, as well as Algeria and Morocco, which France wished to integrate into
Europe in the 1950s, were European according to the mythical narrative of pagan
cultures (Maps 1 and 2), when they were flourishing with cities, colonies of
Greece, then Rome. It was the Romans who first named Asia Minor, pre-empting
the narrative of Christendom that would definitely exclude all these lands from
Europe (Map 3). In the process, it also excluded the holy lands where Christianity was born. The Ottoman Empire was centred in Asia, Moors retreated to
Africa after the fifteenth century, and both became Europes others, the Orient.
Turkey was part of the Orient from the seventh century until very recently
(Lewis and Wigen 1997: 54). Europe is now at a crossroads where narratives of

The Boundaries of Europe

613

alterity could have been stamped by the European Constitution if it did refer to
religionwhich it did notor might be reversed if Turkey were eventually
accepted into the EU. Whether Ancara should be included before Moscow and
Belgrade, however, or how broadly Europe can expand, is another question
touching upon relationships with Turkey, Algeria, Morocco, and the rest of the
Middle East. There will always be limits, borders, geographical constraints, and
identity barriers. Postcolonial Europe has superseded its medieval stereotypes,
since Turkey, along with Bulgaria and Romania, signed the EU Constitution,
alongside the 25 EU member states on 29 October 2004 in Rome; but there are
still dark corners and blurred boundaries.
The narrative of antiquity, on the other hand, has periodically re-emerged,
with captivating representations of Europa in art and architecture. Today its
iconography still flickers, here and there: the parliament buildings for Europe, the
one in Strasbourg in France and the other in Brussels in Belgium, contain murals
depicting Europa seated on the bull (Zeus). The mythical scene is also encountered in hotel lobbies as far as Warsaw and printed on secular objects of material
culture. Greece seems to reclaim its contribution to European identity by returning to its own myths: narratives mingle in the representation of the kidnapping
of Europe carved on the Greek coin of 2. The carving celebrates ancient heritage surviving in oral tradition of the mythical narrative, at the same time that it
represents modernity and the EMU as depicted in the bureaucratic narrative. We
have here an interesting cycle of metaphor and metonymyEuropa/Europe/
Eurowhich celebrates interactions, or rather overlapping, between pagan,
Christian, and secular ontologies and the corresponding facets of Europe and narratives of European identity. The re-emergence of the mythical within the
bureaucratic/institutional European narrative and the confluence of this couplet
of narratives as iconography on a secular object of exchange, on a coin, on
money, underline several levels of representation of contradictory yet overlapping discourses: modernity and memory, reality and metonymy, the contemporary and the mythical, the secular and the sacred, as well as the recurrence and
cohabitation of multiple layers of history and their regional narratives within our
present ontologies and our collective memories of Europe.

Notes
Received 3 March 2003; accepted 18 March 2004.
Address correspondence to Lila Leontidou, Dean of the School of Humanities, Hellenic Open
University, 1113 Ravine Street, 115 21 Athens, Greece. E-mail: leontidou@eap.gr
I wish to thank Josiah Heyman and Tom Wilson for their critical reading and intellectual support, as well
as two anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions. Reflections presented here originate in four
delightful years (19972000) of intensive research work and learning I enjoyed as a project leader of a
Targeted Socio-Economic Research (TSER) project on towns on the EU border in a network of
colleagues named in the references (Leontidou et al. 2000, 2002). I am also indebted to J. Fink, G. Lewis,

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L. Leontidou

and J. Clarke for stimulating seminars at their O.U. and a nucleus scholars at the School of Humanities
of the Hellenic O.U. during the spring semester of 2004, which unfortunately cannot be recaptured.
I therefore wish to thank colleagues in two Open Universities for enhancing the interdisciplinary
audacity of this articlewhile all responsibility for any errors or omissions remains my own.
1. Horden and Purcell 2000: 16; see also Wintle 1996; Lewis and Wigen 1997, Jordan-Bychkov
et al. 2002, and many others cited later.
2. Derrida 1992; see also Borradori 2003: 171.
3. Braudel 1975; Lewis and Wigen 1997; Jordan-Bychkov et al. 2002; Leontidou 2003, 2004; Hagen
2003.
4. Ovid 1986: 49, 50, 124; see also fragments found in other sources (cited in Graves 1992: 194196,
292, 311, 336; Kakridis 1986: 259270).
5. The etymology from both Graves (1992: 196) and Kakridis (1986: 261) does not agree with
Davies (1997: 1137) and Wintles (1996: 75). The latter share the view that Europa means West
after the Assyrian word Ereb. We would actually rather adopt the etymology of the former two
authors, associating Europe with the moon, which may also have something to do with the West,
as the Eastern civilizations viewed it. For this information and other insights about myths and
Goddesses, I am particularly indebted to Eftychia Leontidou and the pamphlets of the Womens
Group for the Study of Matriarchal Societies.
6. Hippocrates 1881 edn: 79; see also his p. 75 and our extended commentary on his treatise on
Europe and Asia in Leontidou forthcoming: ch. 2.
7. First century AD, Davies 1997: 428, 1205.
8. First Hesiod (eighth century BC) referred to Europe as a geographical entity, in his Hymn to
Apollo. Then there were Herodotus and Hippocrates (see above). Other authors cited by Graves
(1992: 196) and Kakridis (1986: 261) are Pausanias, Theofrastus, Diororus, Apollodorus, and
Hyginus. Ovid followed, but also Horace with his Odes, besides the visual artists whose works
are now scattered in various museums.
9. See Anderson 1974: 29 and Demand 1990: 1415. The union or community (koinonia) of Demoi
formed the city-state.
10. Sully (15591641) cited by Heffernan (1998: 23).
11. Derrida in Borradori 2003: 86, 147; see also Chomskys (2001) title. According to Derrida, the
date refers to an event that symbolizes terror and trauma beyond language.
12. Nomenclature des Unites Territoriales Statistiques (NUTS) are not only used by the EU to collect
and represent statistical information, but tend to become the official subnational units from
regional (NUTS 1) to municipal (NUTS 4) level.
13. Several of those narratives are listed in Lewis et al. 2001: 79. They range from EEC documents
of the 1970s stressing principles of democracy and human rights to a Thatcher speech of the
1980s stressing free markets and a Prodi speech of 2000 on Europeans as heirs of a civilization
rooted in religious and civic values.
14. See the debate in the Rome EU Summit, October 2003.
15. We would disagree with Wintle (1996), who considers modernism as the core of EU discourses,
and also with the many who consider religion as the core of European culture.

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