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. Particularly 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 in the poem 'Spain 1937'; 'nipped off from hot Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe.'

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, forty years before Columbus' discoveries, a succession of metropolitan leaders 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'. 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.

After the explorations, however, the Mediterranean was no longer the core of Europe: it gradually became its periphery, its unity was eroded, and the Euro-Mediterranean 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. 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 EC membership in the context of a new, bureaucratic, narrative. As it seems, however, the expansion of the EC 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.

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. 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. 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 Europe's eastern boundary rather fuzzy: Cartographer Bloch expressly excluded the regions that are today Eastern Europe from his social definition of the continent, and many followed his point of view.

Or like we mentioned elsewhere on this website the Mercator world map still found everywhere today - from world atlases to school walls to airline booking agencies and boardrooms today. If one looks at it in detail one will quickly notice that for example where Scandinavia in reality about a third the size of India, they are accorded the same amount of space on the map. And Greenland appears almost twice the size of China, even though the latter is almost four times the size of the former, and so on. In fact the actual landmass of the southern hemisphere is exactly twice that of the northern hemisphere. And yet on the Mercator, the landmass of the North occupies two-thirds of the map while the landmass of the South represents only a third. For other examples of this kind of bias see:

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Sully strongly argued to exclude Russia from the European order, on grounds of inferiority. Russians reciprocated by distancing themselves from Europe, which they considered as ‘a speech act; it is talked and written into existence’. 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. Russians themselves were ambivalent and divided between Westernizers and Slavophiles well into the nineteenth century. After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, (Paid by the German Kaiser) Lenin identified with Europe and especially with the French revolution, but then Stalin distanced the USSR from Europe. Religion was unifying in a Europe fragmented and tom 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.

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'.

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 Euro-Mediterranean imaginary was dropped from mappings. The sea which used to bridge civilization, became a border. The core of Europe was consolidated toward the one we know today and new spatiality’s 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 prince's territory and gradually nation-states rose and became the regions bounded by hard borderlines.

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'  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  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-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 regions and cities, especially Berlin, with its wall built in August 1961 as a material symbol of the Iron Curtain. Similarly, a fence split Goriziaf 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'.

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. 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, 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.

Thus an ambivalent cognitive geography of Europe 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 harmonization 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 crystallization of a European post national 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 spatiality’s 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 ED. It creates a European post national political culture by regulating hierarchies of borders and negotiating Europe's spatial limits and multilayered bordering. This ranges from a diverse set of national boundaries whose significance has been changing to external borders under negotiation, especially since the Schengen treaty. The tiers and hierarchies of borders of 'Europe' shift during the 'new world order'  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 organization.

The debordering of cold-war Europe, the porosity of East-West boundaries, and the penneability of the Mediterranean were effectively renegotiated in the I 990s, with Berlin as a place of effective symbolism. The Berlin wall was demolished in 1989, at the pivotal day of9 November, or 9. I I as Europeans write it. Reading 9. II the American way, we encounter 'September Eleven'-an event named with a date, a metonymy, according to Derrida.' , There is an irony here in the antithetical symmetry of two similarly written dates-9.11-because they stand for two contrasting global events, both dramatized 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. 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 modem 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.

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 border discourse involved considerable ambivalence; spatiality and definitions were never resolved and rapid change undermined the strictness of meanings of borders boundaries, and frontiers conveyed , but there is no excuse for geographers who use the terms 'frontier' and 'boundary' as synonymous. They are certainly not synonymous, but neither Cal 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. Thus there are  those who focus on borders and their change while another contemporary tradition is particularly negative about their future claiming that boundaries are melting.

See an explanation of similar issues from a worldwide perspective in one of the articles with which we originally started this website, see: The Burden of Boundaries.

This narrative became louder after the demise 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. However, history or geography did not end; local identities have belied found to be reinforced during post modernity, exactly because of fears of detentorialization.

Except for the economic sphere, with liberalization' and the unification of financial markets, the current globalization narrative overemphasizes external forces shaking the principle of national sovereignty and' challenging the system of nation states or even superseding it, the spatial recalibration of Europe has not undermined the importance of the nation-state as an imagined community. The principle of 'subsidiary' 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 Euro barometer (2001), for example, stereotype nations-measure, plot, and correlate 'national attitudes' in reports based in tiny samples. They essentially naturalise national identities as somehow 'fixed' and label each nation's citizens as 'racists' or otherwise, according to the survey question. This in itself can lead to the social construction of 'otherness' and even racism. The bureaucratic narrative also adopts a constructed regionalization, reflected in the formal fragmentation of Europe into administrative units-NUTS 1, 2, and 3 regions. (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. )

This formalization reduces "the understanding of spatiality as a network of given grids" and does not seem really essential for the promotion of a 'Europe of the regions.' Is it just another bureaucratic formalization, a normative construction, or a Federalist stereotype?

The social construction of boundaries contributes in the formation of a 'sense of place' (Massey and less 1995: 162), often in line with the dominant narrative. The Schengen Agreement has created several types of borders and often bizarre hierarchies. The Treaty, signed in Luxembourg in December 1998, was initially expected to loosen up, ‘relax,’ or ‘demolish’ internal EU borders, while tightening external ones. 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) raising  issues of migration, transactions, and border hierarchies more general. 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.

There are thus several types of borders in and around the EU today: 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 started to take place; 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 Islands further a  field, in the Caribbean and in the Indian Ocean. Such examples of the several tiers of borders, internal and external augment the tensions between nationalism, regionalism, and federalism. This multiple hierarchy of borders however in a way, undermines the ideal of a borderless Europe, promoted by the Schengen Agreement, surrounded by hard EU boundaries: where one still finds differing political philosophies of space and time that create its diversity and contradictions.

Another example of this  took place 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, plus Slovenia. Other Eastern European countries are still excluded, especially the Balkans. Though the Balkans are predominantly Christian, their population, along with Ukrainians and Georgians, are not treated as Europeans but as 'others' when they migrate to the EU, just like Afghans, Iraqi’s, Africans, and other peoples further a field.

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 Moroccan’s, whom  failed to integrate into Europe. But that is yet another story.

Furthermore autonomist movements are strong in the Basque region, in Corsica, and on the Irish border; plus  attempts to moderate euroscepticism, discord, and relevant mobilizations can be discerned in narrations replete with those elegant familiar Euro-words, such as the principle of subsidiary, social cohesion, synergy, social insertion policy, empowerment, partnerships, and support frameworks. Even so, however, the current bureaucratic essentialisation of Europe found in EC discourse, narratives, and documents-or institutional definitions of Europe-is 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 characterize spatiality’s in Europe as it changes its geographies and its geographical imaginations. On a more optimistic note, let us hope, with Derrida (1992) that Europe's memory of the past will protect and redirect it to another heading, a new destination.

Thus in spite of Dante who besides the  Divine Comedy, wrote about subsidiarity - about a political unity in Europe which respected the autonomy and diversity of its regions. Or the 15th-Century King of Bohemia, George of Podiebrad, who tried to map Europe by advocating a continental confederation of independent states,it is because of the more recent  ambiguity’s listed above, that Europe today, did not yet, came to constitute an unambiguously bounded continent.

But despite ambiguities in mappings and redefinitions of 'Europe,' it can be analyzed as an inter subjective cultural and political construct, which has materialized according to political circumstance, power relations, geopolitics, and cultures in each period. The narrative of antiquity, on the other hand, has periodically re-emerged, with captivating representations of 'Europe' 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 Europe 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.

This 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 ontology’s and our collective memories of 'Europe.'

Not surprising the discussion of boundaries in relation with European identity is at the top of the agenda today. But seven centuries after Dante first started musing about subsidiarity, we have not nearly reached the end of the story.

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