Introduction

In 1959, General de Gaulle gave a speech in which he stated that the fate of the world would be decided by a Europe stretching “from the Atlantic to the Urals”. With this theory, he sought to promote European autonomy, fundamentally that of France, to overcome the logic of the Cold War. He considered it necessary to move beyond or break with the subordination of European states to one block or another. Europe is a historically constructed cultural concept born from a myth, the limits of which have changed considerably over time. As a geographical term, the Greeks of the Archaic Period used this name for the continental European territory of Greece as opposed to the Peloponnese and the coast of Anatolia. The concept of Europe as a continent is historically quite recent. In the later Roman Empire only the province located in the territory that currently comprises the European part of Turkey received this name.