Europe political map

Europe political map.

Europe is considered politically as a continent or geographically as part of the supercontinents of Eurasia and Afro-Eurasia. It is sometimes called the "Old Continent" as opposed to the "New World" (America). On the cultural level, Europe has received many influences over the ages, and includes many countries that have both a common heritage, linguistic, religious and historical differences, and recent contributions from globalization. As such, Europe is a space of civilization forged by a millennial history. A community of peoples, of different states, tends to be politically constituted with the European Union. Map 2008.
Source: Central Intelligence Agency: CIA

The European continent is limited by the Arctic Ocean in the North to the Mediterranean Sea in the South, in the East, it borders Asia, from which the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus Mountains, separate it. the Black Sea and the straits of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles and the west, reaches the Atlantic Ocean.

History and use have made Europe a continent but it is, if one considers the Eurasian plate, the western part (a peninsula) of a super-continent. This means that Europe's terrestrial boundaries have always been inaccurate in the east because there is no landform or sea clearly separating Eurasia. The geographical borders of Europe are therefore more political than physical.

The eastern borders of Europe are above all political: the Ural boundary is due to the cartographers of the Tsar Peter the Great in the eighteenth century. Similarly, the border was moved from the high ridges of the Caucasus to the Caspian Sea in the early nineteenth century to justify the annexation of Georgia and Armenia into the Russian Empire. From a geological point of view, if we refer to the tectonics plates, Europe and the mainland of Asia are one and the same continent, called Eurasia. Also, some eminent geographers, such as Alexander von Humboldt, regarded Europe as a mere peninsula of Asia.

Europe has an area of just over 10 million square kilometers (10,392,855 km²). That's one-third of Africa, a quarter of Asia or the Americas.

Europe is divided politically into 50 sovereign states, 8 states with limited recognition, 6 dependent territories and 3 autonomous regions integrated into the European Union.