CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
"Defining Europe" and History itself
In a post titled "Defining Europe" over on H-World, Alexander Engel of Goettingen University raises some oh-so-interesting questions about the current debates on the past and future of Europe. In a nutshell, he points up that the historical construction of Europe is increasingly at odds with the move to include Turkey and other more "eastern" (dare I say Oriental?) states. He includes several interesting excerpts from the Draft Constitution of the European Union -- among which is the geographically erroneous notion that Europe is a "continent."
This brings up a wider point that I've been mulling over for some time -- regarding our tendency to use modern constructions (such as "Europe") and impose them upon our analyses of the past. Goodness knows the neither the Ancient Greeks nor the Romans ever thought of themselves as "Europeans" as we understand the word's meaning today. Indeed, if either group had been forced to identify a "world" to which they belonged, it would have almost certainly been built around the Mediterranean... and thus included many "non-European" regions. Thus, because we (or certain groups of us) tend to invest identity and meaning in these more modern constructions -- be they "Europe" or even "Africa" -- we then impose that identity upon the past. Such a situation suggests that our current meta-organization of knowledge in the form of "Area Studies" and "Ethnic Studies" programs does much to obscure the reality of history by imposing modern boundaries on the pre-modern world.
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