What is Europe anyway? Ask the Ukrainians....

Europe is not really a continent, geographically speaking.

Continents are meant to be defined by tectonic plates. But Europe is just a peninsula of the massive Eurasian Tectonic plate.

India, called a subcontinent, has its own plate. As does Arabia. Much of central America sits on the Caribbean plate, rather than the North American or South American.

So Europe is really not a geographical entity. What, then, is it?

It is sometimes assumed that the distinction is racial, that Europe is where the white people came from. There is little basis for that view in history. Europa was a figure of Greek legend. Pretty soon the term Europe came to have a geographical meaning, which by the middle ages was taken to be the area where the Roman Church held sway.

That is the boundaries of Europe were defined by the Mediterranean (with Islam the majority belief to the south) and the Orthodox Christians to the East, and the Ottoman empire (including modern Greece and much of the Balkans) to the South East.

The world 'Europe' was not much in use, however. Christendom was the term of choice.

Only after the reformation, when the power of the Roman church was broken in large parts of Western Europe did the word 'Europe' come to the fore.

So Europe is a cultural place.

And it is not fixed. Greece rejected Roman papal authority back in 1053. It has not returned to the fold. But from a modern secular perspective Greece is viewed as the cradle of all European civilisation. It was only in the 19th century, during the reign of Westward leaning Tsar Peter the Great that Europe extended far enough east to include the Russian heartland. Although as early as the sixth century BC some Greeks had located the boundary between Europe and Asia somewhere in the Caucasus.

Sometimes people who are not really European attempt to define themselves as such, in order to make a political statement about what they want to be.

Therefore secular Turks will often describe Turkey as a 'European nation', when almost all definitions of Europe would place the country something more than 95% in Asia. The aforementioned Peter the Great shifted his capital to the West as part of an attempt to Europeanise his nation.

It is in this light that I would view the current struggle in Ukraine. Poland, a Catholic country, has a long history of Europeanism. It was the first country in Europe (since ancient times) to elect its head of state. Many Ukrainians see Poland as their closest neighbour. Russia, a big, Orthodox country, with a lot of money and oil, is seen by many other Ukrainians as their natural partner.

This division is often reinforced by language. With Russian being the majority tongue in the industrial East, Ukrainian in the West. But bearing in mind the religious definition of the middle ages Europe the religious divide, where Western Ukrainians traditionally accepted the authority of the pope (although much of their traditions look somewhat eastern, allowing priests to marry for instance). Eastern Ukrainians remained Orthodox, under the authority of the Patriarch of Moscow. The East much earlier became part of the Russian empire, the West under the authority of the Habsburgs or Poland.

In the same way that an ancient European divide, across the Alps, between North and South seems to have reopened in the financial crisis, so too has another divide, between east and west. This latter divide being both ancient and modern.

In the unambiguous West; London, Paris, Washington, Frankfurt, Milan, Madrid, Europe seems pretty much broken and crisis ridden. Nationalism is at the fore to a greater extent than at any time since the second world war. The brief moment at the end of the cold war when Europe looked like it might become a world wide player dissolved in the forming of a post Kyoto G2 consensus.

Whatever it is that unites Europe, is, as ever, overwhelmed by the divisions. In 1914 the Emperors in Berlin and Moscow were both cousins of the Emperor in London. That did not prevent the beginning of an internal European conflict that would destroy European power, propelling the aptly named United States to the role of Global hegemon.

Yet on the streets of Kiev people are willing to die for whatever it is they think Europe is. I have met Israelis and Turks who think joining 'Europe' is their dream.

For these people, being the of 51st state of the USA is unpalatable as an alternative. Europe is their dream. But, as ever, it remains a dream. An ideal. It is 100 years since Europe tore itself apart in the first world war. All attempts at unity since have ended in failure.

It seems the people of Europe forget the cost of their division. In refusing to learn from the past, it is to be hoped Europe does not doom itself to a repeat. For if they cannot learn to live together as brothers, they may well die together as fools.