ABSTRACT
There are two answers to the question ‘What is Europe?’ The short answer is that Europe is a space and a place. It is a space, defined by geography. It is a continent, indeed the second smallest one. It is a place in the sense that it is a territory that is imbued with meaning – it has specific social, cultural, and economic connotations – albeit most scholars writing on Europe and politicians involved in national or European politics disagree on what these defining elements of Europe as a space actually are. The long answer is that Europe is first and foremost a concept which takes different shapes and meanings depending on the realm of life on which it is applied and on the historical period that we are looking at. At a given point in time, depending on the perspective we adopt and the situation in which we find ourselves, Europe may represent very different things. Thus, we should better talk about Europes in the plural. This chapter brings together the different perspectives through which we have discussed our answer to the ‘What is Europe?’ question and offers some reflections to this perpetual exploration.
