Boundaries of Europe

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

593

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power114Taylor & FrancisTaylor and Francis 325 Chestnut StreetPhiladelphiaPA191061070-289X1547-3384GIDETaylor & Francis, Inc.3858510.1080/107028904908838762004142L. LeontidouThe Boundaries of Europe The Boundaries of Europe: Deconstructing Three Regional Narratives

Lila LeontidouDepartment of European Culture, Hellenic Open University, Athens, Greece

The shifting boundaries of Europe as lines of enclosure and mobility restriction in thelongue dureeare analysed here at the European/supranational level through thedeconstruction of three regional narratives on Europe and its reborderings indifferent millennia. These narratives have had a lasting significance in identity con-struction and spatialities around the Mediterranean and are evidence of the histori-cally specific and constructed nature of the boundaries of Europe, as well as thepower relations involved in changing spatialities. Europe is a cultural construct thatemerged around the Mediterranean in a captivating Greek myth, much earlier thanthe period of written history. The notion of Europe then shifted to the northwest as acolonial culturalreligious construct of Christendom during the Middle Ages, beforenation-states emerged. Much later, European integrationin the context of globali-zation after the end of bipolaritynot only did not melt borders, but in fact createdsome new and often bizarre hierarchies supported by a bureaucratic narrative and aninstitutional discourse for unification after two devastating world wars. Unpackingthese narratives is important in understanding sociopolitical constructions ofEurope and its boundaries, their hardening or relaxation, and criticizing essentialism,as well as commenting upon the ambivalent placing in the European Union of certaincandidate and neighboring nations.

Key Words: borders, Mediterranean, European Union, spatialities, European iden-tity, cultural geography, geopolitics, globalization, essentialism, ontology

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

594 L. Leontidou

are discussed in this article, which presents evidence about the elasticity and flex-ibility of the notion of Europe over time and argues that Europe has been a cul-tural construct through the ages, rather than a continent or a fixed bordered entity.

The notion of continent, predating Herodotus (484424 BC), refers toa mass of land like Africa or Australia, but is not appropriate for Europe.Unlike Africa, Australia, and the Americas, Europe has never been a continentwith definite boundaries. It has been analysed recently as the changing prod-uct of imperial and papal ideologues, of predators, crusaders, conquerors fromCharlemagne to Napoleon, and federalist visionaries from (say) Voltaire toDelors.1 Europe has been sometimes a cape, the extreme portion of Eurasiaand the point of departure of discoveries and colonisation,2 sometimes a chang-ing cultural representation made material by geopolitics.3 During each one ofthe epochs discussed here, shared cultural mappings and geopolitical con-structed realities have dominated collective imaginaries of Europe and itsborders. The three epochal narratives of Antiquity, Christendom, and EuropeanIntegration presented in this article, have affected spatialities and haveinvolved significant reborderings in their time, by becoming dominant or evenhegemonic. These narratives correspond to mappings, and relocations of Europeanboundaries in the longue duree.

This article attempts a systematic diachronic analysis of Europes reborderingsin order to criticize evolutionism and the conception that past attempts at Euro-pean unity have pointed toward the European Union (EU) (Wintle 1996: 56). Themain objective of our analysis of narratives and related reborderings is a critiqueof essentialist, Fortress, conceptions of Europe and Europeanness vis--viscountries in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. The awareness of thehistorically specific and even elusive and constructed nature of the boundaries ofEurope is an objective crucial to current debates about European identity andEuropean culture, for that matter. The focus here is on shifting spatialities,involving changes in Europes internal and external borders, and the interplay ofsoft and hard boundaries around spatial units of various scales, from nations to thewhole region of Europe and beyond.

Spatiality is here used in Gregorys (1994) sense, as a constellation ofknowledge inscribed in space, through which particular identities are fabricatedand social inclusionsexclusions are perceived. This belongs to Pickles (1985)understanding of ontology, where spatialities are constellations of relations andmeaning. Europe will be analysed here as a concept, an ontological fact and sin-gular entity (Lewis and Wigen 1997: 4), actively constructed by geographicalimaginations (Gregory 1994) or by imagined geographies (Hagen 2003). As itsboundaries have been changing, a sequence of spatialities will be followed here,drawn not only from every millenniumas shown on Maps 14but also fromevery century. We have here chosen to stop at three major epochs and unpacktheir mappings and narratives, in order to show their contemporary relevance inidentity construction.

The Boundaries of Europe 595

Rather than placing the emphasis on national borders as lines of enclosure andmobility restriction, this article investigates territoriality and the boundaries of abroader spatial unit, Europe. It focuses on the metamorphosis of Europe over sev-eral millennia by tracing the shifting spatialities of Europeans across three snapshotpoints in history. The research material consists of certain narratives that havebecome dominant over lengthy periods of border change as collective representa-tions and are still sometimes inscribed in the collective memory in various cornersof Europe. We will deconstruct three narratives in their respective historical con-texts, in order to understand their emergence and the relevant spatialities as reflectedin 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 nation-states. These boundaries were sometimes soft, or porous, and sometimes hard, so asto restrict movement, communication, and exchange. The hardest of boundaries thatEurope felt ran through its centre and split East from West Europeans during thecold war. Contrary to expectations, boundaries did not melt when this was lifted andthe globalization narrative spread: it will be also shown here that they became tieredand in fact sometimes hardened, as they were institutionalized within EU bureau-cratic discourses, regulations, and legislation, as enclosures of Fortress Europe.

The historical background of the boundaries of Europe has been quite exten-sively researched, but mainly in relation to nation-state formation (Anderson andBort 1998; Anderson et al. 2003). However, the nation-state is a rather recent phe-nomenon. Todays spatialities have been forged by hegemonic narratives in his-tory schoolbooks, where Europe is often divided by war and is certainly worldsapart from Africa and Asia. In everyday fears, it is composed of states ridden orencircled by aliens. Such essentialism can be only contested if we draw attentionto earlier epochs, other types of boundaries, different spatialities and grass-rootslocal discourses. Though dominant, and sometimes even hegemonic, these havenot really been grand narratives, because they have been constructed in parts ofEurope, by segments of the population; they may be contested by othersforexample, eurosceptics, autonomist movements, and so on. The three followingsections analyse what are actually three regional narratives, corresponding towhat Pickles (1985), after Husserl, would call regional ontologies (Leontidou1997). Exposing regional narratives and deconstructing them in a loose fashion isimportant for understanding the process of identity construction through the delin-eation of boundaries, of mappings and spatialities, and of oral traditions inspired bylocal, regional, and national myths, history, memory, and cultures.

Myths and metaphors of EuropaThe name Europe was coined on the South of the Aegean archipelago. Greekmythology named Europa between the third and the second millennium BC, per-sonified her, and located her on an island, Crete, overlooking almost all EasternMediterranean shores. The captivating mythical narrative about the abduction of

596 L. Leontidou

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

FIGURE 1 The boundaries of Europe: the first of four snapshots in the course of threemillennia presents Europe in 1000 BC. 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 (Graves1992: 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, theMediterranean coasts at a large radius centred on Crete were named Europe(Map 1). This is a metaphor or maybe a metonymy, a solely linguistic associationused widely in ancient Greece. Hippocrates (460370 BC) included Egypt inEurope in his treatise on the effect of climate, environment, and landscapeespecially air and wateron European races: In respect of the seasons and figureof 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 ambiv-alence of Herodotus regarding the names of Europe and Asia:

The Libyans. . . say that Asia has the name of the son of Kotyos and grandson ofManis, 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

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

598 L. Leontidou

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

Whatever the relationship of the semi-goddess to the region, their names wereused widely in ancient Greece with reference to each other and to geography. Themetaphor associates the figures and events portrayed in the mythical narrative ofEuropa, with the actual succession in the rise and fall of ancient civilizations in theEastern Mediterranean and its broader region, before written history began: in thethird millennium BC, the Sumerians and the Egyptians did not have any notion ofEurope. When the Phoenician civilization receded as the Minoan one rose, Creteflowered, around 2000 BC. It was founded reputedly by King Minos, son ofEuropa 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 citiesneeded no fortification. He was later neutralized by the Argonauts. Jason, with thehelp of Medea, treated Talos with wine and pulled the nail sealing his veins, spill-ing his blood to the sea. Talos turned into a copper statue, the one at the entranceto the port of Crete. The Minoan civilization thus became vulnerable and its unde-fended palacecities were conquered by the Mycenians.

By 1450 BC, the Mycenians controlled the Aegean archipelago up to Troy. By1200, however, these civilizations vanished, possibly from natural disasters suchas volcanic eruptions or from wars. The period between the thirteenth and theninth century BC is discontinuous, lost in the dark ages between the decline ofcivilizations around the Aegean archipelago and the beginnings of the ClassicalPeriod (Map 1). Europe was then also trapped in darkness between earthquakesand wars and its continuity was interrupted. As script systems fell out of use, theMinoan script remained undeciphered, and the Greek citystates later adoptedthe Phoenician alphabet. After this prolonged interruption, the antique origins ofEurope have been obscured.

However, the myth of Europa kept re-emerging in Hellenistic and Romantimes. It was retold centuries later until the Renaissance. It was narrated withseveral variations in Mediterranean oral traditions. Urban citizens and artistswere inspired by its iconography before, during, and after the Classical Period, tocreate images on Greek amphoras, murals, and relieves; poems, with the mostcelebrated ones by Ovid who lived between 43 BC and AD 17 in the centre oflands shaded in Map 2; and frescoes of the abduction of Europa in Pompeii.7 Forseveral millennia, representations of Europa seated on the bull stirred popularimaginations in Greece and the Roman Empire. The myths calibre can be con-cluded from the multitude of authors referring to it, who had lived all around theEastern Mediterranean.8 Artistic representations have been discovered as far asBabylon, where a clay statuette of the Seleukides Dynasty (300150 BC) wasfound and is now kept in the British Museum.


During those times, the boundaries of Europe enclosed the coastal strips alongthe 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 softboundaries, while the hard ones encircled cities. Ancient civilizations were associatedwith urbanism and the colossal importance of the sea (Anderson 1974: 2021).The Mediterranean was punctuated by cities that were walled and ports that wereprotected. Several European concepts, ideas, and life patterns were constructedwithin those walls, especially in Athens. In just 100 years (510404 BC), the Athe-nian civilization flowered and, among other contributions, laid the foundations oftodays European institutional discourse. Besides launching the name of Europe,ancient civilizations named democracy, after Demos, a local society. Athens was aweak democracy, of course, where male civic pride or citizenship was definedagainst the otherness of the barbarians and the slaves, but also the exclusion ofwomen. Cities, but also Demoi, islands, and colonies (paroikies), formed the fullpolis,9 from which politis (citizen), politismos (civilization), polity, and politicswere named. The classical civilization also offered the concept of patris (homestate) and patriotism, recasting loyalty and attachment in a more positive lightthan 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 firstpan-Mediterranean Empire preceding that of Rome, offered the first conceptionof the multicultural society, which was later also extended in the Roman Empire.Alexander the Great expanded Europe into Asia, reshuffling spatialities fromthose centred on city states and their colonies, toward Empires and their capitalcities (Toynbee 1967). The notion of barbarians, those noncitizens outside thecity-state, was weakened during the Macedonian and Roman periods, as Emper-ors sought interaction with the arts and customs of the peoples conquered. TheEmperor Hadrian of Rome, for example, tenderly rebuilt and decorated Athens instyles of Greek art. In his multicultural Empire, Alexander attacked but alsoadmired Oriental civilizations. He married Roxanne and put to action a helleni-zation expedition involving communication with the East. His own Europe hadan Oriental thrust, mappings from the Nile to the Indus, and the opposite spatial-ity of Rome, which soon would face the West. The impressive MacedonianEmpire was fragmented after Alexanders death in 322 BC, and its eastern prov-inces never entered the realm of Europe.

The third cycle of imperial expansion was the Roman Empire, which shiftedthe boundaries of Europe from East to West, but it never abandoned the Mediter-ranean shores (Map 2). On the west, the borderline hardened in comparison withclassical or Macedonian times. City walls softened and harder walled borderswere erected in the countryside, like Roman limes and the Hadrian wall in Britainor that between the rivers Rhein and Danube. Besides city walls, territories on thenorthwest had to be defended during the Roman period. On the frontiers, the

600 L. Leontidou

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

Medieval discourses of Christendom and colonial arroganceIn the high Middle Ages at the turn of the second millennium AD, Bartlett (1993)discovers the Europeanisation of Europea rising awareness of Europeanidentity and topdown nation-building mechanisms, coins and chartersset tomotion by monarchs and popes. Boundaries were drawn against Arabs in theSouth, 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 wasto Europeans the eastern limit of the known world. . . After the Arab conquests ofthe seventh and eighth centuries. . . the Orient took on new meaning as the aliencultural realm against which Europeanness was defined. . . But as the Orientbecame synonymous with Islam, its referent began to expand out of the easternMediterranean. Only thus could Morocco, most of which lies to the west ofEngland, be subsumed under the rubric of Oriental civilization (Lewis and Wigen1997: 5354).

The consolidation of imperial power and the corresponding European bound-aries gives the impression that Europe is a creation of the Middle Ages (Bloch1963: 123124). But this is due to the deliberate obliteration of the antique pagannarrative, the pantheistic discourse. Throughout the Middle Ages, there wasconstant tension between the paganism of early antiquity and Christian morality.Christendom undermined the myth of Europa and so the origin of the name ofEurope was deliberately shrouded in oblivion, in line with the alterity of pagancultures, especially during the prolonged ruralization period (Cipolla 1980)before the revival of city-states. As Christianity spread, the ancient urban civili-zations that had created Europe were forgotten, often excluded, and the namewas rarely used. In fact, the myth of the abduction of Europa was embarrassing.Sex, violence, seascape, landscape, beauty and the beast, gestures of alarm andaffection (Hale 1993: 48) had no place in Christendom. The Latin/Orthodoxschism is mentioned in the shaping of a new Christian view of Europe and theReformation seemed to tear the unity of both (Latin) Christendom and Europe topieces (Wintle 1996: 14). It was during the Reformation that biblical texts were


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, Noahssons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, inhabited zones of the world after the delugeAsia, Africa, and Europe, respectively. In 1561, the very year when Titian hadjust presented his painting of Europa in Venice, a Frenchman, G. Postel, sug-gested renaming Europe after Noahs son: Japetie! (Hale 1993: 4849). Thisattempt failed, of course. The standard outcome of the new morality was that theword Europe fell out of use during the Middle Ages and was replaced by theidea of Christianitas or Latin Christendom (Wintle 1996: 14).

Non-Christians became the other again, barbarians outside the faith andoutside the borders. The first multi-ethnic army in history, the ChristianEuropeanCrusaders, was set up in order to acculturate these infidels. This was the periodof essentialist eurocentrism par excellence that, ironically, excluded from Christen-doms boundaries all Middle Eastern lands, even the West Bank where Christianityhad been actually born. However, Eastern Europe, centred in Constantinopleuntil the mid-fifteenth century, cherished the emblem of Eurasia on its flags andstamps: the biheaded eagle of Byzantium symbolized a civilization looking bothto 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 pactaround Luebeck, a remarkable urban network, the Hanseatic League, emerged(Benevolo 1993: 6264; Pounds 1990). Still, however, the core of developmentwas Italy, where city-states flowered with cultural innovation, science and art.They were enclosed in walls, hard borders analogous to todays national bound-aries. Even unwalled cities, such as Venice, were well protected: canals herewere natural fortifications in the tradition of the Minoan cities, millennia before.Allegiance to the King or rulers, not boundaries, divided populations and madethe difference in cultural identities, citizenship, migration, and social exclusion.In this vibrant cultural milieu, in Italy, several myths were resurrected, amongwhich the myth of Europa re-emerged. It lingered in those radiant cities, espe-cially in Venice, in Titians and Veroneses paintings, and in Medican Florence,arguably the first modern state of the world during the fifteenth century, whereGreek culture was rediscovered and ancient Greek intellectual traditions wererevived (Benevolo 1993; Toynbee 1967: 68). Classical antiquity fascinated Ital-ians and consolidated the spatio-temporal unity of European traditions aroundthe Mediterranean. The painters of Venice are especially important for culturalcontinuity at a time of resistance against the myth of Europa by Christian morality.

Uneven development in European space was soon to reverse the dichotomybetween the lands of Charlemagne in the west with the prosperity of Byzantiumand the culture of Constantinople, its capital. The West/East divide was to beoverturned 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

602 L. Leontidou

Empireadvanced East and backward Westbegan for the first time to bereversed. This change of signs (Anderson 1974: 16) deepened after the fall ofConstantinople in 1453, forty years before Columbus discoveries. A successionof metropolitan leaders (Jones 1990) brought the European centre of gravity fromAmalfi 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 theMediterranean (Map 3). The discovery of the New World, economic dynamismnorth of the Mediterranean, the reconquista in the West, and Ottoman occupationof the Levant shifted the core of Europe from Italian cities to Iberian and Northernports and raised an imaginary about superior cultures.

Perhaps the essentialisation of Europe was never more conspicuous than inthe period of colonialism. In the sixteenth century, during the age of exploration,expansion, and Protestant Reformation, Europe was redefined in a context ofeurocentric power relations and unequal geopolitics and was mapped as thecentre of the world in colonial domination. It was even personified as QueenEurope reigning over the New World in a posture of superiority. In the 1572Atlas of A. Ortelius in Antwerp, Europe was represented as a queen with the restof the continents at its feet (Hale 1993: 49; Wintle 1996: 8186). This eurocentricrepresentation was combined with the clash between Christendom on the onehand and Islam, as well as pagan cultures, on the other, along with their mythsand legends (including the myth of Europa). Europe was a land of Christian faith,but also of colonial superiority and arrogance. Its southern boundary was definedagainst Islam, even if this meant geographical distortions, such as the one in theIberian peninsula until 1492, when the Moors were finally defeated (Map 3). Inthe sixteenth century, Europe excluded Egypt, the whole of MediterraneanAfrica and the Middle East, basically on the divide of a Christian versus anArab world.

Sixteenth-century maps of Christendom drew a border with the South of theMediterranean, but were also ambiguous on the eastern side of Europe. Theexclusion of Slavs, despite their Christian persuasion, first on cultural and lateron economic grounds, rendered Europes eastern boundary rather fuzzy: Blochexpressly excluded the regions that are today Eastern Europe from his social def-inition 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 stronglyargued to exclude Russia from the European order, on grounds of inferiority.10

Russians reciprocated by distancing themselves from Europe, which they consid-ered as a speech act; it is talked and written into existence (Newmann 1996: 2).This meant the rupture of geographical continuity, especially after Turkish conquestsand extensive reborderings creating basic problems in defining Europe for quite along period (Barraclough 1955). Russians themselves were ambivalent and dividedbetween Westernizers and Slavophiles well into the nineteenth century. After theBolshevik revolution in 1917, Lenin identified with Europe and especially with


the French revolution, but then Stalin distanced the USSR from Europe (Davies1997: 1112). Religion was unifying in a Europe fragmented and torn by war,but Orthodox Christian regions were considered different. At the same time, theNorth/South divide was partly set by the division within Christianity betweenProtestantism and Catholicism (Lewis and Wigen 2001: 12).

The Enlightenment offered a new perception of Europe as a system ofsovereign states rather than a community of believers. In place of a semi-goddess or a queen, we now find Europe as a secularized region where techno-logical development unfolded, capitalism was rising, and imperialism remainedpowerful. Its epicentre shifted further to the northwest and away from the Levant,and Mediterranean cities were surpassed by Northern ports, which now becamedynamic metropolitan leaders (Jones 1990: 5157). Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam,then London, and finally the towns of the industrial revolution. The Mediterraneanfell from core to peripheral status in the global economy and the EuroMediterra-nean imaginary was dropped from mappings (Leontidou 1990). The sea whichused to bridge civilization, became a border (Leontidou 2003). The core ofEurope was consolidated toward the one we know today and new spatialitiesevolved with the emergence of nation-states. Historiography considers the Peaceof Westphalia in 1648 as the beginning of this process. It established the principleof sovereignty for each princes territory and gradually nation-states rose andbecame the regions bounded by hard borderlines.

Institutional/bureaucratic narratives and the globalization discourseFractured from within, with rivalries and wars, Europe emerged in the mid-1940swith hopes for peace, reconciliation, and unification. A new narrative has beenunder construction since the first postwar years, with the basic drive of discur-sively transforming the dark continent (Mazower 1999) into a unified Europe.The emergent narrative has been contested by multiple voices since Churchilland Schuman and has involved several different spatialities since the EuropeanCoal and Steel Community (ECSC, 1951) united the West versus its eastern othersduring the cold war. Ambiguities of the past, especially the ones concerning thefragmentation of the Mediterranean and the boundaries of Europe on the East,have followed us into the mid-twentieth century, when De Gaulle referred to aEurope from the Atlantic to the Urals, hinting at the partition of Russia intotwo parts. Another ambiguity was expressed by Churchill in Zurich on 19September 1946, in his proposal for a United States of Europe (Bainbridge andTeasdale 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 impenetrableenclosure and a checkpoint of extreme restriction of movement in the heart ofEurope. The visibility of the cold war has dominated the landscapes of many

604 L. Leontidou

regions and cities, especially Berlin, with its wall built in August 1961 as a mate-rial symbol of the Iron Curtain (Derrida in Borradori 2003: 146). Similarly, afence split Gorizia/Nova Gorica (a single town in Italy/Slovenia) and severalbarbed wire borders encircled free Europe. However, boundaries remainedundefined and in fact confusing in cases such as Prague, which despite itslocation 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 SecondWorld and became the other for the First World of Western Europe and theUnited States (Agnew 2002; Dalby 1999; Newmann 1999). The West has alwaysneeded a common enemy, an other. The ancient Persians, Arabs, and Turkswere 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 bound-aries and those of the USSR itself. For many centuries, the River Don was theboundary between European and Asian sections of Russia. This was rejected inthe eighteenth century and the Ural Mountains came to mark the eastern frontierof Europe with the erection of boundary posts, where prisoners to Siberia used topause (Davies 1997: 47). In European discourse, all this was the East, a notion

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.


more difficult to deconstruct than the Orient (Afouxenidis 2003; Newmann1999; 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 Christen-dom: the Orthodox leadership of the Byzantine and Russian churches. . . . To com-plicate matters further, Cold War discourse appropriated the lexicon of East andWest, to demarcate zones of communist and noncommunist regimes (Lewis andWigen 1997: 55,7).

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

FIGURE 4 Hierarchies of boundaries in Europe 2000 AD: map of 15 EU members, 2non-members, 10 candidate members (2004 accession) and a borderline including statesnegotiating membership until today. Source: Adapted from Pounds 1990; Davies 1997;Horden and Purcell 2000; Jordan-Bychkov et al. 2002.

606 L. Leontidou

ambivalent cognitive geography of Europe (Paasi 2001). It has been crystallizedespecially since 1992, when the Maastricht Treaty was signed after the end of thecold war. The narrative includes anniversaries, days of celebration of Europe,and landmarks in its development (e.g., 9 May 1950), as well as heroes andvisionaries 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 thetwelve-starred European flag, sounds the euro-anthem, promotes educational har-monisation with ERASMUS and SOCRATES networks, and of course circulatesthe Euro. Common currency has been the most effective among nation-buildingprocesses and strategies in history and will certainly contribute in the crystallisa-tion of a European postnational political culture, along with the European Consti-tution that is now being negotiated.

By implicitly equating Europe with the European Union after successiveterritorial formalizations, the new narrative influences the construction of newspatialities in cultural and social life. It attempts to place Europe as a con-structed spatiality in parallel with the nation-state, by passing legislation, regula-tions, and treaties in the EU. It creates a European postnational political cultureby regulating hierarchies of borders and negotiating Europes spatial limits andmultilayered bordering. This ranges from a diverse set of national boundarieswhose significance has been changing (ODowd 2003) to external borders undernegotiation, especially since the Schengen treaty. The tiers and hierarchies ofborders of Europe shift during the new world order (Map 4) and the fluidity ofits territory causes significant shifts in the domains of culture and identity,besides the important global restructuring in the economy, politics, and socialorganisation (Berezin 2003; Castells 1997).

The debordering of cold-war Europe, the porosity of EastWest boundaries, andthe permeability of the Mediterranean were effectively renegotiated in the 1990s,with Berlin as a place of effective symbolism. The Berlin wall was demolished in1989, at the pivotal day of 9 November, or 9.11 as Europeans write it. Reading 9.11the American way, we encounter September Elevenan event named with adate, a metonymy, according to Derrida.11 There is an irony here in the antitheticalsymmetry of two similarly written dates9.11because they stand for two con-trasting global events, both dramatised by demolitions: first in Europe in 9 November1989 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 andclosing borders, is tragically underlined by yet another 11 September of 1973,when yet another demolition started an era of exclusions and missing persons, atthe 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


modern history. What appear as inclusions may turn out to be exclusions and viceversa. In Europe, the recent collapse of the Iron Curtain did not mean the meltingof borders; far from it. Boundaries around the EU were soon to become morerigid in the new world order. As soon as the curtain was lifted between West andEast, the borderline was hardened elsewhere: Europe was rebordered as FortressEurope. It also started to discuss borders and to strengthen outside enclosures asit opened up some of its inner spaces toward the East. At the turn of the new mil-lennium, as Gorizia was considering the demolition of its fence between Italy andSlovenia 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 compara-tive EU project on Border Cities and Towns realized in 19972001 (Leontidouet al. 2002), revealed several such contrasts between the porosity and hardeningof EU borders at the turn of the new millennium. Though findings on local con-tested imaginaries and border discourses unfortunately cannot be discussed atthis point, for lack of space, it is worth mentioning that most of our intervieweesrecognized the elusiveness of borders. In the process of forging their spatialityand temporality, they tried to make sense of rapid border changes by sticking tolong-established boundaries in the collective memory. Border discoursesinvolved considerable ambivalence; spatiality and definitions were neverresolved 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 andboundary as synonymous. They are certainly not synonymous, but neither canthey be solidly defined. They (especially frontier) carry diverse and elusivemeanings among local societies and especially between countries, betweenEurope and the United States, in the course of history and also among severalauthors (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 phenomenonknown as globalization. This narrative became louder after the demise ofsocialist regimes, combined with the sensational cyberspace of communica-tions. Current economic developments are considered as deterritorializationssignaling an end of history and of geography, as was discursively overstatedduring the early 1990s, after the end of bipolarity (Fukuyama 1993; O Brien1992). However, history or geography did not end; local identities have beenfound to be reinforced during postmodernity, exactly because of fears of deterri-torialization; the cyberspace narrative has been arguably dealing with an elite andthe broad and often contradictory use of the term globalization has been criti-cised in favor of more rigorous and discrete use (Dicken 2003; Hirst and Thompson1999; Kourliouros 2001). Borders may become more porous or even melt at the

608 L. Leontidou

economic sphere, with liberalization and the unification of financial markets.Otherwise, however, the current globalization narrative overemphasises externalforces shaking the principle of national sovereignty and challenging the system ofnation states or even superseding it. It also underestimates hardened borders aroundthe 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 (Leontidouet al. 2002). The spatial recalibration (Berezin 2003) of Europe has notundermined the importance of the nation-state as an imagined community(Anderson 1983). The principle of subsidiarity was partly devised as the poleopposite to Europeanization within one and the same institutional discourse, inorder to calm rising euroscepticism in the face of centralistic decision-makingprocesses. This contradiction is mirrored in the tendency of a postnational politi-cal culture to essentialise the nation-state in the context of the EU dominantbureaucratic narrative. Official agents, such as the Eurobarometer (2001), forexample, stereotype nationsmeasure, plot, and correlate national attitudes inreports based in tiny samples. They essentially naturalise national identities assomehow fixed and label each nations citizens as racists or otherwise,according to the survey question. This in itself can lead to the social constructionof otherness and even racism (Leontidou et al. 2002). The bureaucratic nar-rative also adopts a constructed regionalisation, reflected in the formal frag-mentation of Europe into administrative unitsNUTS 1, 2, and 3 regions.12 Thisformalisation reduces the understanding of spatiality as a network of givengrids (Paasi 2001: 14) and does not seem really essential for the promotion of aEurope of the regions. Is it just another bureaucratic formalisation, a normativeconstruction, or a Federalist stereotype?

The social construction of boundaries contributes in the formation of a senseof place (Massey and Jess 1995: 162), often in line with the dominant narrative.The Schengen Agreement has created several types of borders and often bizarrehierarchies (Leontidou and Afouxenidis 2001). The Treaty, signed in Luxembourgin December 1998, was initially expected to loosen up, relax, or demolishinternal EU borders, while tightening external ones (Acherman 1995). It origi-nally included Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Portugal, Greece,Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Seven countries decided to moveahead and implement it. Since then, the five Nordic countries have acceded to theAgreement. The unusual element here is that Norway and Iceland are not EUmember states! Though Schengen was for EU members only, it was initiallyrejected by some member states while it was accepted by non-members (includingSwitzerland, recently) raising absurd issues of migration, transactions, and borderhierarchies more generally (ODowd 2003). Soon afterward, a new border waserected in 2002 with the EMU, the Euro currency zone, which facilitates the freeflow 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 (Map 4): thosespecified by Schengen around member states and those around non-members;those with candidate members and long-term candidate members for whom dis-cussions for inclusion will start in the future; there are EMU borders; and borderswith memories of bipolarity and of the Iron Curtain. There also is the questionof Europe beyond the mainland and here, besides Melilla and the Canaries thereare French lands further afield, in the Caribbean and in the Indian Ocean (Lewisand Wigen 2001: 4). Such examples of the several tiers of borders, internal andexternal, augment the tensions between nationalism, regionalism, and federalism.The multiple hierarchy of borders also undermines the ideal of a borderlessEurope as promoted by the Schengen Agreement, surrounded by hard EU bound-aries. Deconstructing the bureaucratic narratives we find differing political philo-sophies in space and time that create its diversity and contradictions.

But the most important tiering and the greatest shift in borders has followeddevelopments in Eastern Europe. These culminated in 1989 and then again in2004 when eight among the ten new member states accepted into the EU areEast European countries: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia,the Czech Republic, and Slovenia. Most Eastern European countries are stillexcluded, 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 evenapplied for EU membership. Bulgaria and Romania were not accepted during thepresent round of EU expansion, on economic grounds. With the accession ofTurkey before the Balkans or at least before Albania, Serbia, and FYROM, wemay soon see a deformed EU map with a big hole down its southeast, incompara-bly larger than the Swiss hole (Map 4). Though the Balkans are predominantlyChristian, their population, along with Ukranians and Georgians, are not treatedas Europeans but as others when they migrate to the EU, just like Afghans,Iraquis, Africans, and other peoples further afield. The Balkan people are oneboundary shift away from European citizenship, but this shift is surrounded byambiguity, though their geography is much more European than that of Algeriansand Moroccans, whom France failed to integrate into Europe. But that is yetanother story.

Besides borders, Europe also has a contested core with the legacy of Mitteleu-ropa (Hagen 2003) or, on a lighter level, a central development corridor, the pro-verbial blue banana, which every major cityfrom Madrid to Milan, fromWarsaw to Viennatries to pull towards itself (Jensen-Butler et al. 1996). Thebureaucratic discourse is mapped over it and over levels of ambivalence in spati-alities, which can confuse or even overwhelm and turn certain citizens towardtraditional narratives, mappings, and regions (Leontidou et al. 2002). Tensions ofregionalism are often acute; autonomist movements are strong in the Basqueregion, in Corsica, and on the Irish border; and the resurgence of fundamentalismis noticed in Europe and the Middle East. The bureaucratic/institutional narrativeis shaken by such tensions and by euroscepticism. Its discourse is dominant in

610 L. Leontidou

some regions, hegemonic around Brussels, but there is a multitude of alternativenarratives springing up in several corners of Europe. Borders, treaties, and con-cepts found in official documents conceptualising Europeanness13 are contestedin civil society of the various member states. Even if Derrida and Habermas areby no means representative of French and German civil societies, respectively,their discourses on Europe in the new millennium (Borradori 2003) can onlyhighlight the flimsiness of the dominant bureaucratic narrative, especially nowthat ruptures between Anglo-Saxon and continental countries are lurking. Europeanintegration, even as incomplete as it started, was once a major event, but noweurophilia gives way to euroscepticism in several regions and member states, asoften shown in plebiscites. What is especially contested, from Ireland to theBasque region to Corsica and the frequent antiglobalization rallies, is the demo-cratic deficit and the topdown nature of institution buildingconsequently, thevery bureaucratic narrative itself. Questions of European identity, citizenship,and welfare may be broadly discussed by civil societies and the media, butforeign policy, important agreements, and the European Constitution are con-structed in a topdown manner.

Attempts to moderate euroscepticism, discord, and relevant mobilisations canbe discerned in narrations replete with those elegant familiar Euro-words, such asthe principle of subsidiarity, social cohesion, synergy, social insertion policy,empowerment, partnerships, and support frameworks. Even so, however, thecurrent bureaucratic essentialisation of Europe found in EU discourse, narratives,and documentsor institutional definitions of Europeis haunted by its inabilityto resolve the issue of local and national identities, and contested borders inher-ited by past narratives. Complexity of mappings, ambiguity of identities andshifting hierarchies of borders currently characterise spatialities in Europe as itchanges its geographies and its geographical imaginations. On a more optimisticnote, let us hope, with Derrida (1992) that Europes memory of the past willprotect and redirect it to another heading, a new destination.

ConclusionIn all current endeavors for understanding temporalities and spatialities in the EUand of the EU, there is the underlying ambiguity that Europe never came toconstitute a clearly, solidly, and unambiguously bounded continent. We have triedto understand three dominant narratives surrounding the shifting boundaries ofEurope, their porosity, and their hardening. Since its inception within myth, whichlocated it around the Mediterranean shores, Europe has always been seeking itsmappings, its boundaries, and its relationship with the sea. Braudel (1975) hasstudied and portrayed the Mediterranean as a unifying sea, literally a sea in themidst of land, punctuated by great cities, to the point where Southern Europemight indeed be seen as an enlargement of Audens Spain (as in the poem Spain1937), nipped off from hot Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe.


(Compare the popular Torinese saying that Garibaldi did not unite Italy, hedivided Africa) (Horden and Purcell 2000: 21). After the explorations, however,the Mediterranean was no longer the core of Europe: it gradually became itsperiphery, its unity was eroded, and the EuroMediterranean narrative was aban-doned. The sea ceased to be a bridge of civilizations between Europe and Africa onthe South: it became a border, specifying the Southern edge of Europe (Leontidou2003). As African countries and the Middle East were pushed out of the bound-aries of Europe, the Christendom narrative came to dominate the scene, in the con-text of power contests that we have more or less exposed as colonial arrogance.This was, in turn, abandoned, especially in the new millennium, allowing Muslimcountries to apply for EU membership in the context of a new, bureaucratic, nar-rative. As it seems, however, the expansion of the EU toward the East and pendingapplications from the South are met with concern, the external boundaries ofEurope are still under negotiation, and Fortress Europe as a concept is inscribedin narratives at all levels.

Our ambition in this article was to illuminate such metamorphoses of Europeand its rebordering over the longue duree, with the purpose of raising awarenessagainst essentialist views of Europeanness and exposing power relations embed-ded in certain crucial mappings. We have argued that the dominant narrative ofeach 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 sur-rounded 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 civ-ilizations 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 Chris-tendom during the rise of the latter, and has supported its specific geopoliticalclaims against the world of Arabs, but also of Slavs (Map 3); then the postwar nar-rative emerged from reconstruction efforts and the drive for reconciliation after twodevastating world wars followed by the cold war and EU integration (Map 4).

We would therefore not agree with Wintle (1996: 52) that Europe means whatyou 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 ofEurope, 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 narra-tive analysis as a valid method to unveil mappings, spatialities, reborderings, thechanging interplay of hard and soft boundaries, and the elasticity and flexibilityof their bounded region, Europe, over time. We have deconstructed three narra-tives in support of an anti-essentialist attitude to Europe, exposing the changingand flexible spatialities around it. A complex cognitive geography and geopoliticalreality emerged, which contradicts evolutionist schemes and essentialist views ofEurope.

612 L. Leontidou

We have loosely deconstructed, or placed in their sociopolitical context, threenarratives of Myth, Christendom, and Bureaucracy. At a deeper level, we have atriplet of ontologies here: pagan, Christian, and secular. The borders of Europehave been changing, matching up with the narrativesontologies in the lastinstance. In the course of the three millennia discussed in this article, we havefound that Europe has been rebounded several times especially on its Southuntil the Mediterranean Sea was relegated to a borderand on its East, whereboundaries are still being negotiated, shifting, and expanding after the end ofbipolarity. The frontier has been often undefined between East and West and alsoat the edge of Eastern Europe; often shifting, as new historical priorities haveemerged, technology has evolved and political power has shifted; and, mostimportant for us in this article, boundaries have been always drawn by a domi-nant narrative embedded in specific power relations.

The discussion of boundaries in relation with European identity is at the top ofthe agenda today (Berezin and Schain 2003), including questions of territoriality,space, debordering and rebordering Europe, as well as citizenship and the inter-play of inclusions/exclusions, both sociopolitical and geographical. A new narra-tive is being constructed, or rather negotiated, for a European post-nationalpolitical culture. In this, perhaps for the first time in history, earlier narrativescontinue to have resonance. The interplay of these narratives results in a complexhierarchy of European borders institutionalized during the period of Europeanintegration (Map 4). The inherent spatialities of past narratives are sometimesengraved in collective consciousness and they sometimes resurface and overlapwith narratives of modernity. No example can be better than the recent debate ofwhether to include references to religion in the European Constitution.14 Despitethe fact that European culture is indeed secular, we have come to a turning pointwhen 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 relationshipof certain countries such as Russia, Turkey, and some North African nation-states, with Europe, and especially with the frequently debated issue of theEuropeanness of new candidates. Is Turkey a European country? And indeed,unpacking the two possible replies, we encounter two opposite ontologies, corre-sponding to the two earliest narratives in Europes history. The coasts of todaysTurkey, as well as Algeria and Morocco, which France wished to integrate intoEurope in the 1950s, were European according to the mythical narrative of pagancultures (Maps 1 and 2), when they were flourishing with cities, colonies ofGreece, then Rome. It was the Romans who first named Asia Minor, pre-emptingthe narrative of Christendom that would definitely exclude all these lands fromEurope (Map 3). In the process, it also excluded the holy lands where Christian-ity was born. The Ottoman Empire was centred in Asia, Moors retreated toAfrica 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


alterity could have been stamped by the European Constitution if it did refer toreligionwhich it did notor might be reversed if Turkey were eventuallyaccepted into the EU. Whether Ancara should be included before Moscow andBelgrade, however, or how broadly Europe can expand, is another questiontouching upon relationships with Turkey, Algeria, Morocco, and the rest of theMiddle East. There will always be limits, borders, geographical constraints, andidentity 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 arestill 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 itsiconography still flickers, here and there: the parliament buildings for Europe, theone in Strasbourg in France and the other in Brussels in Belgium, contain muralsdepicting Europa seated on the bull (Zeus). The mythical scene is also encoun-tered in hotel lobbies as far as Warsaw and printed on secular objects of materialculture. Greece seems to reclaim its contribution to European identity by return-ing to its own myths: narratives mingle in the representation of the kidnappingof Europe carved on the Greek coin of 2. The carving celebrates ancient heri-tage surviving in oral tradition of the mythical narrative, at the same time that itrepresents modernity and the EMU as depicted in the bureaucratic narrative. Wehave 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 nar-ratives of European identity. The re-emergence of the mythical within thebureaucratic/institutional European narrative and the confluence of this coupletof narratives as iconography on a secular object of exchange, on a coin, onmoney, underline several levels of representation of contradictory yet overlap-ping discourses: modernity and memory, reality and metonymy, the contempo-rary and the mythical, the secular and the sacred, as well as the recurrence andcohabitation of multiple layers of history and their regional narratives within ourpresent ontologies and our collective memories of Europe.

NotesReceived 3 March 2003; accepted 18 March 2004.

Address correspondence to Lila Leontidou, Dean of the School of Humanities, Hellenic OpenUniversity, 1113 Ravine Street, 115 21 Athens, Greece. E-mail: [email protected]

I wish to thank Josiah Heyman and Tom Wilson for their critical reading and intellectual support, as wellas two anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions. Reflections presented here originate in fourdelightful years (19972000) of intensive research work and learning I enjoyed as a project leader of aTargeted Socio-Economic Research (TSER) project on towns on the EU border in a network ofcolleagues named in the references (Leontidou et al. 2000, 2002). I am also indebted to J. Fink, G. Lewis,

614 L. Leontidou

and J. Clarke for stimulating seminars at their O.U. and a nucleus scholars at the School of Humanitiesof 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 interdisciplinaryaudacity 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-Bychkovet 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 Westafter the Assyrian word Ereb. We would actually rather adopt the etymology of the former twoauthors, 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 andGoddesses, I am particularly indebted to Eftychia Leontidou and the pamphlets of the WomensGroup for the Study of Matriarchal Societies.

6. Hippocrates 1881 edn: 79; see also his p. 75 and our extended commentary on his treatise onEurope 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, andHyginus. Ovid followed, but also Horace with his Odes, besides the visual artists whose worksare now scattered in various museums.

9. See Anderson 1974: 29 and Demand 1990: 1415. The union or community (koinonia) of Demoiformed 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 fromregional (NUTS 1) to municipal (NUTS 4) level.

13. Several of those narratives are listed in Lewis et al. 2001: 79. They range from EEC documentsof the 1970s stressing principles of democracy and human rights to a Thatcher speech of the1980s stressing free markets and a Prodi speech of 2000 on Europeans as heirs of a civilizationrooted 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.

ReferencesAcherman, A. 1995. Schengen Agreement and Its Consequences: The Removal of Border Controls in

Europe. Bern, Germany: Stampfli.Afouxenidis, A. 2003 (in Greek) West and East: Where are the boundaries and why? In the electronic

journal Epomena Vimata, available at http://www.epomenavimata.gr/ 1, 1, May.Agnew, J. 2002. Making Political Geography. London, UK: Arnold.Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined communities. London, UK: Verso.Anderson, J., L. ODowd, and T. M. Wilson, eds. 2003. New Borders for a Changing Europe: Cross-

Border Cooperation and Governance. London, UK: Frank Cass.


Anderson, M. 1996. Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World. Cambridge, UK:Polity Press.

Anderson, M. and E. Bort, eds. 1998. The Frontiers of Europe. London, UK: Pinter.Anderson, P. 1974. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London, UK: Verso.Aristotle 1988. The Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Barraclough, G. 1955. History in a Changing World. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.Bainbridge, T. and A. Teasdale, 1995. The Penguin Companion to the European Union. London, UK:

Penguin.Bartlett, R. 1993. The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 9501350.

London, UK: Allen Lane.Benevolo, L. 1993. The European City. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.Berezin, M. 2003. Territory, Emotion and Identity: Spatial Recalibration in a New Europe. In Europe

Without Borders: Remapping Territory, Citizenship, and Identity in a Transnational Age.M. Berezin and M. Schain eds. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 130.

Bloch, M. L. B. 1963. Melanges Historiques. vol. I, Paris, France: S.E.V.P.E.N.Borradori, G., ed. 2003. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Juergen Habermas and

Jacques Derrida. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.Braudel, F. 1975. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols.

London, UK: Fontana/Collins.Castells, M. 1997. The Power of Identity. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.Chomsky, N. 2001. 911. New York: Seven Stories Press, Open Media.Cipolla, C. M. 1980. Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 10001700.

London, UK: W. W. Norton.Dalby, S. 1999. Globalization or Global Apartheid? Boundaries and Knowledge in Postmodern

Times. In Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity. D. Newman, ed. London, UK: Frank Cass.pp. 132150.

Davies, N. 1997.Europe: A History. London, UK: Pimlico.Demand, N. H. 1990. Urban Relocation in Archaic and Classical Greece: Flight and Consolidation.

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Derrida, J. 1992. The Other Heading: Reflections on Todays Europe. Indianapolis: Indiana Univer-

sity Press.Dicken, P. 2003. Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic Map in the 21st Century. London,

UK: Sage.Donnan, H. and T. M. Wilson, 1999. Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State. Oxford, UK:

Berg.Eurobarometer/EUMC 2001. Attitudes Towards Minority Groups in the European Union: A Special

Analysis of the Eurobarometer 2000 Survey. Vienna, Austria: European Monitoring Centre onRacism and Xenophobia (EUMC).

Fukuyama, F. 1993. The End of History and the Last Man. London, UK: Hamish Hamilton.Graves, R. 1992. The Greek Myths: Complete Edition. London, UK: Penguin.Gregory, D. 1994. Geographical Imaginations. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.Hagen, J. 2003. Redrawing the imagined map of Europe: The rise and fall of the center. Political

Geography 22: 489517Hale, J. 1993. The Renaissance Idea of Europe. In European Identity and the Search for Legitimacy.

S. Garcia, ed. London, UK: Pinter. pp. 6480.Heffernan, M. 1998. The Meaning of Europe: Geography and Geopolitics. London, UK: Arnold.Herodotus 1992. (in Greek). History, 4: Melpomene. Athens, Greece: Cactus.Hippocrates 1881 edn. Hippocrates on Airs, Waters, and Places: The Received Greek Text of Littre,

with Latin, French and English Translations by Eminent Scholars. London, UK: Wyman & Sons.Hirst, P. and G. Thompson 1999. Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the

Possibilities for Governance. 2nd ed., Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

616 L. Leontidou

Horden, P. and N. Purcell 2000. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford, UK:Blackwell.

Hoskyns, C. 1996. Integrating Gender: Law and Politics in the European Union. London, UK:Verso.

Jensen-Butler, C., A. Shakhar, and J. van den Weesep, eds. 1996. European Cities in Competition.Aldershot, UK: Avebury.

Jones, Emrys 1990. Metropolis: The Worlds Great Cities. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Jordan-Bychkov, T. G. and B. B. Jordan 2002. The European Culture Area: A Systematic Geography.

Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.Kakridis, I.Th. 1986. (in Greek) Hellenic Mythology 3: The Heroes. Athens, Greece: Ekdotiki.Kourliouros, E. 2001. (in Greek) Itineraries in Spatial Theories: Economic Geographies of Produc-

tion and Development. Athens, Greece: Hellenica Grammata.Leontidou, L. 1990. The Mediterranean City in Transition: Social Change and Urban Development.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Leontidou, L. 1997. Humpty Dumptys ontological allegory. International Journal of Urban and

Regional Research 21 (4): 715718.Leontidou, L. 2001. Attack on the landscape of power: An anti-war elegy to New York inspired by

Whitmans verses. City 5 (3): 406410.Leontidou, L. 2003. The Mediterranean as a Border and as a Bridge. In Globalization and the Dia-

logue of Civilizations: Making of a New World. M. Ouda, ed. Cairo, Egypt: Ain Shams Univer-sity. pp.8495.

Leontidou, L. forthcoming. (in Greek) Geographically Illiterate Land: Hellenic Idols in the Episte-mological Pathways of European Geography. Athens, Greece: Hellenica Grammata.

Leontidou, L. and A. Afouxenidis 2001. Boundaries of Social Exclusion in Europe. In RethinkingEuropean Welfare: Transformations of Europe and Social Policy. J. Fink, G. Lewis, and J. Clarke,eds. London, UK: Sage. pp. 231248.

Leontidou, L., A. Afouxenidis, H. Donnan, V. Matias Ferreira, A. Garcia-Lizana, A. Gasparini,X. Peraldi, A. Gasparini, M. Zago, and J. Gow, 2002. Border Cities and Towns: Causes of SocialExclusion in Peripheral Europe, Final Scientific Report, Brussels, Belgium: TSER, EuropeanCommission Project Reports. Available at: http://improving-ser.sti.jrc.it/default/, accessed May2004

Lewis, G., J. Fink, and J. Clarke, 2001. Introduction: Transitions and trajectories in European welfare.In J. Fink, G. Lewis, and J. Clarke, eds. Rethinking European Welfare: Transformations ofEurope and Social Policy. London, UK: Sage and Open University. pp.129

Lewis, M.W. and K. E. Wigen, 1997. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Massey, D. and P. Jess, eds 1995. A Place in the World? Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Mazower, M. 1999. Dark Continent: Europes Twentieth Century. London, UK: Penguin.Newman, D., ed. 1999. Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity. London, UK: Frank Cass.Newmann, I. B. 1996. Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations.

New York: Routledge.Newmann, I. B. 1999. Uses of the Other: The East in European Identity Formation. Minneapolis:

University of Minnessota Press.O Brien, R. 1992. Global Financial Integration: The End of Geography. London, UK: Pinter.ODowd, L. 2003. The Changing Significance of European Borders. In J. Anderson, L. ODowd, and

T. M. Wilson, eds. New Borders for a changing Europe: Cross-Border Cooperation and Gover-nance. London, UK: Frank Cass. pp. 1336.

Ovid 1986. Metamorphoses. Translated by A.D. Melville. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Paasi, A. 2001. Europe as a social process and discourse: Considerations of place, boundaries and

identity. European Urban and Regional Studies 8 (1): 728.


Pickles, J. 1985. Phenomenology, Science and Geography: Spatiality and the Human Sciences.Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Pounds, N. J. 1990. A Historical Geography of Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Prescott, J. R.V. 1987. Political Frontiers and Boundaries. London, UK: Allen and Unwin.Said, E.W. 1995. Orientalism. London, UK: Penguin.Syme, Sir R. 1960. The Roman Revolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Toynbee, A., ed. 1967. Cities of Destiny. London, UK: Thames and Hudson.Tunander, O., P. Baev, and V. I. Einagel, eds. 1997. Geopolitics in Post-Wall Europe. London, UK:

Sage.Walker, B. G. 1983. The Womans Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. San Francisco, CA: Harper

and Row.Wilson, T. M. and H. Donnan, 1998. Nation, State and Identity at International Borders. In T. M. Wilson,

and H. Donnan, eds. Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers. Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 130.

Wintle, M., ed. 1996. Culture and Identity in Europe: Perceptions of Divergence and Unity in Pastand Present. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

Boundaries of Europe

Documents

Transcript of Boundaries of Europe