The Council of Europe says its 46-member organisation offers a practical way to understand “modern political Europe”, even as the continent’s geographical boundaries have been debated for centuries.
The organisation said in a release on Thursday that the term “Europe” was first used in Ancient Greece, where it referred to Europa, a mythological figure, and where early attempts to divide the world into Asia, Africa and Europe left unclear where Europe ended in the east. Around the River Don in what is now Ukraine was often cited.
The Romans adopted the same broad distinction and used it as far as the Atlantic, while drawing a key line between Rome’s Mediterranean world — including North Africa and western Asia — and areas north of the Empire.
It noted that a convention still used “more or less” today dates from the 1700s, when Swedish geographer Philip Johan von Strahlenberg proposed the Ural Mountains and the River Ural as Europe’s eastern boundary.
The Council of Europe said cultural and political ideas later reshaped how “Europe” was understood, including a medieval association with Christianity and, in the second half of the 20th century, Cold War divisions that popularised the terms “Eastern Europe” and “Western Europe”.
From the Arctic to Malta — and beyond
The organisation stated it was formed in 1949 and expanded after the return to democracy in parts of southern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the 1980s.
Today it has 46 member states, stretching from the Caucasus to “almost” Canada, and from the Arctic to Malta.
Its reach also extends beyond the European continent through the European Convention on Human Rights, which the Council of Europe said applies at least in part in some non-European territories linked to European countries, including Greenland, New Caledonia, Curaçao, Saint Helena and Réunion.
The Council of Europe also has five observer states — Canada, the United States, Mexico, Japan and Vatican City — which further widen its international footprint.
Some of the Council of Europe’s treaties are open to non-member states, and the organisation said this includes its constitutional advisory body, the Venice Commission, which counts members such as Peru and Kyrgyzstan, and the Bern Convention on wildlife protection, which has been signed by countries including Burkina Faso and Tunisia.
