The myth of the European culture

In my writings, as usual, I always grab a good-sounding demagogic slogan, that is, a manipulative, almost cliché-like keyword that has become a meme, and logically explode it to its atoms. Now my target phrase is after my previous post the ‘Europeanism’, or the ‘old Europe’, or ‘European culture’, or ‘European identity’, name it whatever you want. Well, what is the famous “European culture” when I only know about European cultures, and I don’t see Europe as more than a geographical concept, which is not even an independent continent, but a large western peninsula of the Eurasian supercontinent. How could we interpret Europe, if not as a geographical, but as a cultural category? What is meant by European culture? Let’s find out!

According to some, it is the Christian religion, which they believe is the cradle of Europe, or indeed the Judeo-Christian cultural circle. With this interpretation, however, we are again on the quagmire, because it is a fact that Europe is largely in the Judeo-Christian cultural circle and this is its root, the Jewish-Christian cultural circle and Christianity as a religion are not a European characteristic, but a world phenomenon. Moreover, Europe is not even the cradle of Christianity, the Middle East is. Both the Middle East and North Africa became Christian a millennium earlier than Europe, especially its northern and eastern areas of Europe.

The Holy Land does not geographically belong to Europe, but Córdoba, which has an Islamic tradition, does, and I haven’t even touched on the sharp cultural border between Western Christianity (Catholic, Protestant) and Eastern Christianity (Orthodox). According to some scholars Western Civilization mostly includes Western Christianity, but the eastern part of the continent is Orthodox. In other words, in terms of religion, Zagreb is closer to Rio than to Belgrade, just as Belgrade is closer to Vladivostok than to Zagreb. Therefore, European culture cannot be interpreted on the basis of religion. Then how to proceed?

Perhaps the European continent could be interpreted on the basis of culturally unifying empires, European culture? However, there was no such empire that would have integrated all of Europe and only Europe into one culture. Even the European Union is good if it only covers half of the continent. Perhaps the Greco-Roman civilization? The Greek empires, thus the Hellenic culture, never reached the mainland of the continent beyond Dalmatia, on the contrary, it also reached India in the east. Similarly, Rome did not create an empire of a European nature, it was more of a Middle Eastern and North African empire than a European one, but it was more typically a Mediterranean empire.

Greco-Roman culture therefore barely reached north of the Alps, than south of the Sahara, so it was as much European as it was African. Thus, under the yoke of Rome, Egypt and Syria were culturally closer than Scotland, especially Scandinavia, to this “European culture”. The successor of the Roman Empire, the Frankish Empire, was a European empire in terms of its nature, but it was Western European. Even then, the East was a different world. So, Europe has never had such a culture-creating unified political entity that would have united all of Europe and not hung beyond it by at least one piece of land. It does not hurt to forget that the XII. A century ago, the inhabitants of the continent did not know the word “Europe”, just as they were not aware that it was a separate continent.

In other words, “European Culture” is logically incomprehensible, and Europe cannot be considered anything other than a geographical category. And it is also just a wishful thinking that Europe would be some separate entity, nevertheless it’s a modern approach to imagine identity to, where is not in reality. Pre-modern man never experimented with such things, not even on a thought level.

It makes more sense to talk about Western civilization instead of European culture or civilization. But what is western civilization?

I would say the Greco-Roman civilization and Judeo-Christianity are that. But it is important to emphasize that, although religion alone has a prominent role, it is not the sole determinant of a culture, and thus of the definition of civilization. The Philippines, for example, is Roman Catholic but does not belong to the West in any way.

I looked at many maps in this regard, the most famous of them is Samuel Phillips Huntington’s representation. But for me they are too categorical and arbitrary. Civilization borders do not coincide with country borders, and this is a fundamental flaw of these maps. In addition there are no exact borders of the West. There are a lot of grey zones, especially where there is a mixed population. Here it is mainly about the mixing of settlers and indigenous cultures. So I made my own, which I tried to make more accurately:

However, I would like to mention one more factor that defines the West, the linguistic factor. The western branch of the Indo-European language family has three main groups and several subgroups:

The only exceptions to this are three languages in the west, which are Uralic Altai: Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian. In other words, the West cannot be defined solely on the basis of linguistics either, but the languages play no small role in culture, and civilization. What you can clearly see on the map, however, is that Western civilization does not coincide with the geographical boundaries of Europe. So Europe is no more than a geographical category. But anyways, human greatness is neither cultural nor geographical nor geo-political phenomenon.