Europe

Europe sits entirely north of the equator and mostly east of the prime meridian. Its northern border is the Arctic Ocean, its western border the Atlantic Ocean, and its southern border the Mediterranean Sea; to the east, it meets Asia. Together with Asia, Europe forms the Eurasian landmass, and with both Africa and Asia it forms Afro-Eurasia. The conventional boundary with Asia runs along the watershed of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Greater Caucasus, the Black Sea, and the Turkish straits. Covering about 10,186,000 square kilometers—2 percent of Earth’s surface and 6.8 percent of its land area—Europe is the second-smallest continent under the seven-continent model. Politically, it contains roughly fifty sovereign states. Russia is the largest and most populous among them, occupying 39 percent of the continent and holding 15 percent of its people. Europe’s climate is shaped by warm Atlantic currents like the Gulf Stream, which give much of the continent a temperate climate with mild winters and summers; farther inland, seasonal contrasts grow sharper, producing more continental conditions.

Europe’s culture is a mosaic of national and regional traditions that together form the core of Western civilisation. These traditions commonly trace shared roots to ancient Greece and Rome, especially through their Christian successors. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, Christian consolidation during the Migration Period defined the post-classical Middle Ages. The Italian Renaissance then spread across many Western European countries, adapting locally and producing distinct national expressions. Its renewed humanist focus on art and science helped drive the broader shift to the modern era. From the Age of Discovery onward, led by Spain and Portugal, Europe became a dominant force in global affairs through extensive exploration and conquest. Between the 16th and 20th centuries, European powers colonised the Americas, nearly all of Africa and Oceania, and most of Asia at various times.

The Age of Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars reshaped Europe culturally, politically, and economically from the late 17th century through the early 19th. The Industrial Revolution, starting in Great Britain in the late 18th century, sparked radical economic, cultural, and social change across Western Europe and eventually the wider world. Both world wars began largely in Europe and were fought there extensively, leading to a decline in Western European global dominance by the mid-20th century as the Soviet Union and the United States rose to prominence and competed for geopolitical control in Europe and beyond. The Cold War split Europe along the Iron Curtain, with NATO in the West and the Warsaw Pact in the East. That division ended with the Revolutions of 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which then allowed European integration to advance significantly.

Institutional European integration began in 1948 with the Council of Europe and deepened through the European Union (EU), which now represents most of Europe. The EU is a supranational entity—somewhere between a confederation and a federation—built on a system of treaties. It started in Western Europe and has expanded eastward since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Most EU members use a common currency, the euro, and take part in a single market and customs union. A large group of countries, the Schengen Area, have removed internal border and immigration controls. EU-wide elections are held every five years and are considered the second-largest democratic elections in the world, after India’s. The EU economy ranks second globally by nominal GDP and third by PPP-adjusted GDP.

The name Europe likely comes from classical Greek mythology, where Europa was a Phoenician princess. One theory holds that her name derives from the Ancient Greek words for “wide” and “eye” or “face,” meaning “wide-gazing” or “broad of aspect”—“broad” being an epithet of Earth in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion and poetry. Another view, from linguist Robert Beekes, argues for a pre-Indo-European origin, noting that a Greek derivation would produce a different toponym. Beekes points to place names related to Europa in ancient Greece, such as Europos in ancient Macedonia. Some have tried to link the name to a Semitic term for “west,” like Akkadian for “to go down” (said of the sun) or Phoenician for “evening, west,” which gave rise to Arabic and Hebrew words for west. But scholar Martin Litchfield West found the phonetic match between Europa and any Semitic word very poor, and Beekes considers a Semitic connection unlikely. Most major world languages use words derived from Europa to refer to the continent. Chinese, for instance, uses a term that abbreviates a transliterated name meaning “continent”; a similar Chinese-derived term appears occasionally in Japanese.