Europe as a construct is more than its geographical representation. In order to shed light on the concept of Europe, it is crucial to consider its geographical, historical, political, economic, and social aspects. 

According to Merriam-Webster, Europe can be defined as “continent of the eastern and northern hemispheres that has the Atlantic Ocean to its west, the Arctic Ocean to its north, Asia to its east, and Africa and the Mediterranean and Black seas to its south…area 3,997,929 square miles.” This geographical definition is often paired with an overlapping understating of Europe as the European Union, a supranational institution of twenty-seven member states. However, we can better define the concept of Europe through five main areas—geography, history, politics, economics, and society—informed by Michael Hard and Antonio Negri, and Michel Foucault among others. Ultimately, this expanded definition of Europe is rather blurry, and it overlaps with the terms like empire and capital.

Geography:

While the geographical connotation is often the most commonly known, it is important to connect Europe with the notion of nation-state. According to Negri and Hardt in Empire (2000), the modern system of nation-states developed out of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which defined the territorial boundaries that became fundamental to European colonialism and economic expansion: “Modern sovereignty is a European concept in the sense that it developed primarily in Europe in coordination with the evolution of modernity itself. The concept functioned as the cornerstone of the construction of Eurocentrism”  and thus, the modern idea of Europe (70).

History:

Hardt and Negri refer to the Roman Empire as a precursor to the modern, global Empire that they theorize, and Rome played a central role in the creation of Europe. Taking over the role of the Greeks, the Romans came to represent the Occident, as the natural opposite of the Orient. This distinction was mainly drawn upon religious and cultural lines, but it fueled an early imagination of what is in Europe and what is outside it, what is East and what is West, and what is European and what is the “other”. According to Stuart Hall (2018), the first time that the term Europe was recorded seems to be in the eight century in reference to Charles Martel’s victory over the Spanish Moors at Tours, France. Since then, the blocking presence of Islam to the south and east became the defining feature of Europeanness; “Its continental identity was primarily Christian, for its name was Christendom more often than it was Europe” (Hall, 197).

Politics:

Connecting with the core feature of the nation-state and popular understanding, Europe can also be understood as the EU, a supranational confederation of sovereign nation states that agree to transfer part of their powers to a central power in exchange for real or perceived positive outcomes. The European Union is a unique economic and political union between 27 EU countries in the European continent. Its first iteration, the European Economic Community (EEC) was created after WW2, to foster economic cooperation, with the goal of avoiding conflict by making the member countries become economically interdependent (Europa). From a juridical standpoint, even though Hardt and Negri (2000) talk about it referring to the United Nations, the EU can be seen as “a new inscription of authority and a new design of the production of norms and legal instruments of coercion that guarantee contracts and resolve conflicts” (9).

Economy:

The economic sphere is central in defining Europe as capitalism is intertwined with the development of Europeanness. Exploration, colonialism and imperialism evolved the idea of Europe by increasing contact with the “other”, and by exploiting the technological divide between civilizations. Exploration began as a capitalist endeavor and culminated with the colonial exploitation of much of the world. Negri and Hardt present Empire as the modern manifestation of covert capitalist interest, corroborating the idea that the development of the West has been indeed a story of economic gain. “Capital has indeed always been organized with a view toward the entire global sphere, but only in the second half of the twentieth century did multinational and transnational industrial and financial corporations really begin to structure global territories biopolitically” (Foucault in Hardt and Negri, 31). Nowadays, private corporations have supplanted the national colonialist and imperialist systems in earlier phases of capitalist development. Like them, corporations directly structure and influence territories and populations across the globe.

Society:

While numerous and complex, the sociological implications of the concept of Europe can be linked to biopolitical production: “the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another” (Hardt & Negri, 2000, xiii). Foucault’s concept of biopolitics traces the historical development of a European society relying on disciplinary institutions to one of control, a society of control (Empire) that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it. Examples of this are visible in some policies actualized by the EU that aim at creating and fostering an Europeanness that is not really there. Programs like Erasmus (student exchange) and visa-less travel within EU countries are affecting the identities of people and normalize certain constructs. In a hegemonic manner, the state/society/corporation/ruling class can achieve an effective command over the entire life of the population only when it becomes an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and enacts (in)voluntarily (Foucault, 2008). Supranational corporations in particular, act beyond Europe and its “borders” producing needs, social relations, bodies, and minds—in other words, producing producers (Hardt & Negri, 2000, 32). From a Marxist perspective, the Empire brings to the world the annihilation of space by time, where the individual is no longer confronted with the local mediations of the universal but with a concrete universal itself (Hardt & Negri,19). In Doreen Massey’s words, the global reach of capital/Empire/Europe enact economic, political and cultural social relations each “full of power and with internal structures of domination and subordination, stretched out over the planet at every different level, from the household to the local area to the international (Hardt & Negri, 2000, 7).

(See Empire, Enclave, Enclosure/Border, De/Reterritorialization, Sovereignty)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Aims and Values.” European Union, 2019. https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/principles-and-values/aims-and-values_en. 

“Europe Definition & Meaning.” Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, n.d. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Europe. 

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978- 1979, New York: Palgrave, 2008.

Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest:Discourse and Power [1992].” Essay. In Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora, edited by David Morley. Duke University Press, 2018. 

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Massey, Doreen. “A Global Sense of Place.” aughty, [1991].
http://www.aughty.org/pdf/global_sense_place.pdf.