The New Old World by Perry Anderson

discuss the question, remarked that ‘the boundaries of Europe are quite unknown, and no man can say where they end . . . but it is certain that Europa [he is referring to the beauty borne away by Zeus] was an Asiatic, and never even set foot on the land the Greeks now call Europe, only sailing [on her bull] from Phoenicia to Crete’. The irony of Herodotus perhaps still retains a lesson for us. If Slovakia is a candidate for entry into today’s Union, why not Romania? If Romania, why not Moldova? If Moldova, why not the Ukraine? If the Ukraine, why not Turkey?In a couple of years, Istanbul will overtake Paris to become the largest city in what—however you define it—no one will contest is Europe. As for Moscow, it is over two centuries since Catherine the Great declared in a famous
ukaz
that ‘Russia is a European nation’, and the history of European culture and politics from the time of Pushkin and Suvorov onwards has enforced her claim ever since. De Gaulle’s vision of a Europe ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’ will not lightly go away. All the stopping-places of current discussion about widening the EU are mere conveniences of the ring of states closest to it, or of the limits of bureaucratic imagination in Brussels. They will not resist the logic of expansion.
    In 1991 J.G.A. Pocock remarked that
‘Europe’ . . . is once again an empire in the sense of a civilised and stabilised zone which must decide whether to extend or refuse its political power over violent cultures along its borders but not yet within its system: Serbs and Croats if one chances to be Austrian, Kurds and Iraqis if Turkey is admitted to be part of ‘Europe’. These are not decisions to be taken by the market, but decisions of the state. 44
    But as Europe is not an empire in the more familiar sense of the term—a centralized imperial authority—but merely (as he put it) ‘a composite of states’, with no common view of their borderlands, it is not surprising that its
limes
has yet to be drawn by the various chancelleries. Since he wrote, however, there has been no shortage of expert opinion to fill the gap.
    For example Timothy Garton Ash, one of the first and keenest advocates of a PCH fast track, has recently adjusted his sights. ‘Having spent much of the past fifteen years trying to explain to Western readers that Prague, Budapest and Warsaw belong to Central and not to Eastern Europe, I am the last person to need reminding of the immense differences between Poland and Albania’, he writes in the
Times Literary Supplement.
‘But to suggest that there is some absolutely clear historical dividing line between the Central European democracies in the so-called Visegrád group and, say, the Baltic states or Slovenia would be to service a new myth’. 45 Instead, the dividing-line must be drawn between a Second Europe numbering some twenty states which hedescribes as ‘set on a course’ towards the EU; and a Third Europe that does not share this prospect, comprising Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and—a cartographical nicety—Serbia.
    A dichotomy so visibly instrumental is unlikely to be more durable than the mythical distinction it has replaced. At the end of his
Orchestrating Europe
, a capacious and strangely zestful guide through the institutional maze and informal complications of the Union, Keith Middlemas looks out on a somewhat broader scene. Europe, he suggests, is surrounded by an arc of potential threat curving from Murmansk to Casablanca. To hold it at a distance, the Union needs a belt of insulation, comprising a ‘second circle’ of lands capable of integration into the Community, shielding it from the dangers of the ‘third circle’ beyond—that is, Russia, the Middle East and Black Africa. In this conception the respective buffer zones logically become Eastern Europe, Cyprus and Turkey in the Eastern Mediterranean, and