ABSTRACT
At the first glance Europe's contemporary economic and political structure seems to be extremely difficult to consider from a common viewpoint. The different European countries all have their own cultural heritages, which their national governments cherish and use as support for their respective importance. Europe is a peninsula of the Eurasian mass of land. This leads immediately to the question of its eastern and south-eastern border. The traditional geographic definitions, going back to the work of cartographer Philip Johan von Strahlenberg's in 1707, define the Ural Mountains in the east and the Kuma-Manych Valley in south-east as Europe's borders. For economic structure of Europe, the split into the involved nation states is more important. It is rather obvious which states belong to Europe, problematic is mainly the case of Russia, with its main mass of land in Asia, and to a lesser extent Turkey, with the heavy weight of its European part around Istanbul and its proximity to central Europe.
