Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
It is the delicious complexity of Europe's geography, with its multiplicity of seas, pen-
insulas, river valleys, and mountain masses that have assisted in the formation of separate
language groups and nation-states, which will continue to contribute to political and eco-
nomic disunity in the years to come, despite pan-European institutions. Europe, the map
suggests, has a significant future in the headlines.
Europe, in the words of the Oxford archaeologist Barry Cunliffe, is the “westerly excres-
cence” of the continent of Asia, a massive peninsula which came to dominate world polit-
ics in the course of the second millennium
A.D
. Geography ordained this, as we know from
McNeill, and Cunliffe elaborates on McNeill's thesis. Europe lay in a “congenial” ecozone
between the deserts of Africa and the ice sheets of the Arctic, with a climate moderated by
the Gulf Stream. Europe was rich in resources, with wood, stone, metals, and furs. Most
crucially, Europe has a deviating and shattered coastline, indented with many good natural
harbors, and cluttered with islands and halfislands. This coastline is 23,000 miles long—an
epic length equal to the circumference of the earth. In fact, Europe has a higher ratio of
er than four enclosed and semi-enclosed seas that squeeze the subcontinent, so to speak,
into a relatively narrow peninsula: the Mediterranean, the Black, the Baltic, and the North
seas; even as Europe has an advantageous riverine topography blessed with cross-peninsula
routes—the Rhine, the Elbe, and above all the Danube. The Danube, as the Italian devotee
of Central Europe, Claudio Magris, rhapsodizes, “draws German culture, with its dream of
an Odyssey of the spirit, towards the east, mingling it with other cultures in countless hy-
plain through France to the Rhône valley that act as corridors from one part of Europe to
another.
This very elaborate interface between land and water, and the fact that Europe is pro-
tected from—and yet accessible to—a vast ocean, has led to maritime dynamism and mo-
bility among Europe's peoples, as well as contributing to an intense range of landscapes
inside Europe itself. That, in turn, has led to strikingly different human communities, and
ultimately to the outbreak of power politics: from warring Athenians, Spartans, Romans,
Iberians, Phoenicians, and Scythians and other barbarian tribes in antiquity, to the conflicts
between French, Germans, and Russians—and between Prussians, Habsburgs, and Otto-
mans—in the modern era. Yet despite these divisions, a lowland corridor from the Atlantic
to the Black Sea, for example, has allowed travelers for centuries to cross the length of
Europe in relative comfort, contributing to Europe's cohesion and superior sense of itself,
