AHC: Destroy 'Europe'

Sycamore

Banned
The use of the term "Europe" has developed gradually throughout history. In antiquity, the Greek historian Herodotus mentioned that the world had been divided by unknown persons into three parts, Europe, Asia, and Libya (Africa), with the Nile and the River Phasis forming their boundaries—though he also states that some considered the River Don, rather than the Phasis, as the boundary between Europe and Asia. Europe's eastern frontier was defined in the 1st century by geographer Strabo at the River Don. The Book of Jubilees described the continents as the lands given by Noah to his three sons; Europe was defined as stretching from the Pillars of Hercules at the Strait of Gibraltar, separating it from North Africa, to the Don, separating it from Asia.

A cultural definition of Europe as the lands of Latin Christendom coalesced in the 8th century, signifying the new cultural condominium created through the confluence of Germanic traditions and Christian-Latin culture, defined partly in contrast with the lands of Islam (Byzantium), and limited to northern Iberia, the British Isles, France, Christianized western Germany, the Alpine regions and northern and central Italy. The concept is one of the lasting legacies of the Carolingian Renaissance: "Europa" often figures in the letters of Charlemagne's court scholar, Alcuin. This division—as much cultural as geographical—was used until the Late Middle Ages, when it was challenged by the Age of Discovery. The problem of redefining Europe was finally resolved in 1730 when, instead of waterways, the Swedish geographer and cartographer von Strahlenberg proposed the Ural Mountains as the most significant eastern boundary, a suggestion that found favor in Russia and throughout Europe.

Europe is now generally defined by geographers as the western peninsula of Eurasia, with its boundaries marked by large bodies of water to the north, west and south; Europe's limits to the far east are usually taken to be the Urals, the Ural River, and the Caspian Sea; to the southeast, including the Caucasus Mountains, the Black Sea and the waterways connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.

So, your alternate history challenge is to create a plausible ATL in which the concept of 'Europe' is effectively destroyed, and resigned to the dustbin of ancient history; one in which the European peninsula is universally acknowledged as being merely part of the larger continent of Eurasia (the name of which may well be completely different ITTL). The POD has to be after the year 0AD. How would you go about achieving this? What would be the latest POD which could conceivably bring about this outcome? And how profound might the repercussions be?
 
I wonder how much of a Late Bronze Age PoD couldn't help : it seems that Europe and Asia were at first navigational terms, with Europe being the West and Asia the East while navigating on Egean Sea (Europe named as well a part of Thrace up to quite late).

Maybe something making Phoenician "thallassocracy" less of a thing, and landmasses being (maybe) differenciated along different lines (maybe North/South of Mediterranean)?
It may lead for Greeks to see Anatolians people even more akin to them with this cultural continuity, and eventually include what was named Asia Minor within a same conceptual landmass?

Problem is that Europe, as a continental peninsula, is quite geographically delimited, except in its eastern borders : Caucasus is an obvious limit, and you'd have too much passage trough Alps, Carpatians, etc. to make them continental borders.

Maybe with regions North of Caucasus being considered as too distinct, making a "Scythian" (up to Istros/Danube - Carpathians) sub-continent out of it? While it may be considered part of the pseudo-European peninsula, maybe an "p-European sub-continent" may appear out of this distinction.

I'm really not sure it would be plausible : this is essentially wild tought at work.
 
So, your alternate history challenge is to create a plausible ATL in which the concept of 'Europe' is effectively destroyed, and resigned to the dustbin of ancient history; one in which the European peninsula is universally acknowledged as being merely part of the larger continent of Eurasia (the name of which may well be completely different ITTL). The POD has to be after the year 0AD. How would you go about achieving this? What would be the latest POD which could conceivably bring about this outcome? And how profound might the repercussions be?

I don't know. Should we start from Micene civilizaton? I do not know..
Maybe the Persian/Achaemenid attempt to conquer Greece might be a good PoD?
The key point seems to be the steppe though. The Huns establishing themselves permanently after Attila might help...

Or even later the Scythians more enegetoc in Europe coming handy?
 
Persia takes over Greece and Carthage and Persia become the main civilizations on the continent.

-or-

Islam takes Constantinople, France, etc. in the early phases of expansion.

-or-

Mongol invasion trashes Europe and it, like Russia becomes more eastern oriented politically and culturally.
 
Persia takes over Greece and Carthage and Persia become the main civilizations on the continent.

-or-

Islam takes Constantinople, France, etc. in the early phases of expansion.

-or-

Mongol invasion trashes Europe and it, like Russia becomes more eastern oriented politically and culturally.

Yes, anything that makes Europe less culturally distinct from the rest of Eurasia could make it less likely to be seen as a separate continent.
 
Could the name "Europe" still be used in a cultural sense like Arabia and India, not as a continent but as a part of one? Or would we have to change the name to something more generic like "The Far West" or "Western Eurasia"?
 
While not destroying the concept of Europe, wouldnt it be easier to just reduce its association with Christendom?

I mean, part of European identity for centuries was Europe = Christendom (this being Roman Catholics and then Protestants we are talking about here, not any other Christian population). So if, say, you knock out Islam before its born or prevent its conquests in the Byzantine Empire and Mediterranean, you could have less of a European identity emerging.

With the Mediterranean remaining a Christian lake, Christian civilization remains centered on it and you have less of a European identity forming. After all, a southern Italian or Spaniard might have more in common with the people across in North Africa then they might have with the people above the Alps/Pyrenees.

Europe would remain as a geographic term yes, but it might get reduced in its importance.
 
While not destroying the concept of Europe, wouldnt it be easier to just reduce its association with Christendom?

I mean, part of European identity for centuries was Europe = Christendom (this being Roman Catholics and then Protestants we are talking about here, not any other Christian population). So if, say, you knock out Islam before its born or prevent its conquests in the Byzantine Empire and Mediterranean, you could have less of a European identity emerging.

With the Mediterranean remaining a Christian lake, Christian civilization remains centered on it and you have less of a European identity forming. After all, a southern Italian or Spaniard might have more in common with the people across in North Africa then they might have with the people above the Alps/Pyrenees.

Europe would remain as a geographic term yes, but it might get reduced in its importance.

I like this idea. It's so hard to even imagine the development of Europe in a world where North Africa is still Christian - If Europe and North Africa are part of the same sphere, does that make North Africa more developed than OTL or Europe less developed than OTL by modern times?

What languages would prevail in North Africa? Presumably Egypt stays Coptic-speaking, maybe with large Greek and Nubian speaking minorities. Apparently Tunisia had its own variant of Latin that was the native language in Carthage - With Tunisia in communion with Rome, presumbly Punic becomes all but irrelevant there. Would the Berber languages be important or irrelevant?

What about migration back and forth? In OTL, Europeans didn't settle North Africa in large numbers until after the 18th Century, and most of them left eventually. North African migration to Europe, aside from Iberia, wasn't a significant phenomenon until the post-colonial era in modern times. I'd assume in this world, there would be a lot of Greeks going to Egypt, a lot of back-and-forth between Spain and Morocco, and perhaps a lot of communication between Tunisia and Italy.

Scandinavia might even stay pagan in this timeline and be left outside of the Christian sphere, and thus be left outside of the definition of "Europe" even.
 

Sycamore

Banned
Could the name "Europe" still be used in a cultural sense like Arabia and India, not as a continent but as a part of one? Or would we have to change the name to something more generic like "The Far West" or "Western Eurasia"?

Yes, it could still be used in that sort of context.
 
Persia takes over Greece and Carthage and Persia become the main civilizations on the continent.

-or-

Islam takes Constantinople, France, etc. in the early phases of expansion.

-or-

Mongol invasion trashes Europe and it, like Russia becomes more eastern oriented politically and culturally.

No, this probably would not decisively change things.

You are forgetting that Persia actually took over a large part of Greece in OTL. That there were more greek soldiers in the army of Darius than in the army of Alexander the great. The point is that the persian empire was just a very light structure : persians did not "persianize" the other cultures inside the empire. Same for the mongols who did not "mongolize" the chinese.

When a group of people perceive their own culture as more advanced, they don't give it up. That's why the romans never could latinize the greeks while on the contrary they were able to latinize/romanize the gauls and the iberians.

So I agree with yourworstnightmare when he states that you have to "Avoid the rise of classical Greece. They were the ones who made up the concepts of Europe and Asia anyways." And the greeks felt and were considered by most people around the mediteranean sea as the model culture.
 
When a group of people perceive their own culture as more advanced, they don't give it up. That's why the romans never could latinize the greeks while on the contrary they were able to latinize/romanize the gauls and the iberians.

So I agree with yourworstnightmare when he states that you have to "Avoid the rise of classical Greece. They were the ones who made up the concepts of Europe and Asia anyways." And the greeks felt and were considered by most people around the mediteranean sea as the model culture.

I find it hard to believe that the Gauls or any other cultures actively percieved themselves as being "inferior" to the Romans or anyone else. The Etruscans certainly didn't. Many Greek-speaking Anatolians, did, after all, give up their language and cultural identity in favor of those of Turkic nomads, just as nomadic Magyars and Arabs asserted their language and culture on "high-cultured" Pannonians and Egyptians, respectively, and don't forget the spread of Indo-Aryan languages to Harappan India.

You don't need to destroy the Greeks to demote perception of Europe as a continent. The original Greek continental model had Libya as a continent, which was later demoted to the name of a single region, while the name "Africa" was promoted from a single province to the whole continent.
 
I got a different solution altogether. It involves a very late PoD.

Let's say the Great War goes even worse for everyone as a result of greater German successes at the beginning and the United States not getting involved. And let's say Germany gets all the more wrecked when its downfall finally comes, but so is France, which has been stomped all over, Britain, having held up a disproportionate portion of the sky for the Entente, Austria, completely exhausted after a lost, protracted war and Italy, having been pushed all the way to the outskirts of Rome by crazed Austrians egged on by triumph-drunk, Paris-occupying Germans.

Now, the German masses, even more outraged at its defeat after even more ridiculous efforts than in our timeline, push through a successful Soviet-sponsored communist revolution and a similar thing happens in France and Austria. Great Britain gets overrun by syndicalist unionists in a general strike completely out of the league of the OTL 1926 one, so the Brits end up quasi-communist too. Revolutionary fervor predictably follows in Italy and Spain, and soon a united communist alliance "liberates" the Scandinavian countries and Balkan countries too. Before long the whole of Europe is communist. Now, communists have a tendency to rewrite and reinterpret history, and communist Europe at some point decides the word "Europe" has too many imperialist connotations and replaces it with something like "Western Eurasia". So there, you have a PoD in the 20th Century. It might sound far-fetched, but crazy stuff does happen in real history.
 
I find it hard to believe that the Gauls or any other cultures actively percieved themselves as being "inferior" to the Romans or anyone else. The Etruscans certainly didn't. Many Greek-speaking Anatolians, did, after all, give up their language and cultural identity in favor of those of Turkic nomads, just as nomadic Magyars and Arabs asserted their language and culture on "high-cultured" Pannonians and Egyptians, respectively, and don't forget the spread of Indo-Aryan languages to Harappan India.

You don't need to destroy the Greeks to demote perception of Europe as a continent. The original Greek continental model had Libya as a continent, which was later demoted to the name of a single region, while the name "Africa" was promoted from a single province to the whole continent.

The Gauls and Spaniards quickly and freely romanized because the roman way of life appealed much.

Sure, some greeks gave-up their identity for a turkic one out of interest. But the greeks of the 14th or 17th century had not much in common with those of the times of Pericles, Caesar or Hadrian. They had long ceased being the cultural reference of the mediterranean world. And many of the people who became turks did it either through religion (Islam was a necessity if you wanted to succeed and not pay discriminatory taxes) or were in fact former hellenized asian-anatolians who progressively lost the hellenic polish and acquired a turkic one.

The point is that probably just Islam could do it (destroying the notion of Europe) but that, to achieve it, Islam needed to hold not only a part but almost all of Europe and to do so for many centuries.

In fact, Europe redefined itself as what is not the Islamic world, what resists islamic expansion, what defines itself as christian by opposition to what is not christian (considering that christianism was almost limited to Europe).

Just consider Spain. Although a large part of Spain was ruled by muslims for centuries, it very quickly lost its islamic polish when christian rulers reconquered the territories. And then, there were not many people to question that 14th or 15th century Spain was european.
 
i think the real thing would be more easterward expansion so that their is more earlier continental mix / trade..

create a real russian / byzantine connection where the russians feel fully engaged as a part of the byzantine empire. have them stop the ottoman's together.. and retake italy with a more eastern leaning church..

Rome left a lasting impression to western europe that it was singular.. and the sates that followed being heavily christian expanded on this separateness..

This is a time when traveling from ocean to ocean would take years... very vast distances by foot/horse/boat .. The Urals, Caspian, Black seas making a unique boundary to signify the end of "Europe"

also generally speaking .. the way to asia was via ship. and of course you would go around africa.. and then the mid east.. past india.. to the orient.. these people looked much different then those of western europe..

so another option would be a more domesticated mongol empire that was stronger and more inclusive that interbred with the west. one needs to build bridges of continental inclusiveness ..
 
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Somehow, I think had the Roman Empire not arisen, there'd have been more concentration with Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China and the Greek city states for a longer period of time . Hence, t regardless of what other nations may have developed later on in the western part of that westernmost peninsula of the Asian continent, I seriously doubt there would have been a concept [or conceit] to consider Europe an actual technical continent.
BTW, technically speaking the 'subcontinents' of Arabia and India have JUST as much right to be considered continents as Europe.
 
Somehow, I think had the Roman Empire not arisen, there'd have been more concentration with Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China and the Greek city states for a longer period of time . Hence, t regardless of what other nations may have developed later on in the western part of that westernmost peninsula of the Asian continent, I seriously doubt there would have been a concept [or conceit] to consider Europe an actual technical continent.
BTW, technically speaking the 'subcontinents' of Arabia and India have JUST as much right to be considered continents as Europe.

The Indian and Arabian peninsulas are significantly smaller than Australia and Europe. How about we call them "dwarf continents?"

*ducks*
 
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