Greater Europe

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (December 2007) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2007)

Greater Europe is an increasingly popular term in the scholarly community for referring to the area of the Earth inhabited by ethnic Europeans, whether in Europe itself or in former European settler colonies in the Americas and Australasia. The term "Greater Europe" is often preferred to "Western" in order to avoid confusion about the potential inclusion of indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia, as well as immigrants and imported slaves from other areas. Greater Europe includes only persons of predominantly European descent; as such, it is a geographic term with ethnically defined, and hence extremely fluid, boundaries--wherever there is a community of European descended people living according to their European cultural heritage, there is Greater Europe.

"Greater Europe" also differs from the classical definition of "the West" in that, while Christianity is often considered integral to the definition of Western civilization, it is not a component of the definition of Greater Europe, which includes the pre-Christian cultures of Europe (in addition to modern practitioners of the pre-Christian faiths) as well as the natively European populations located in Albania, Bosnia, and Macedonia which have practised Islam since the Turkish conquest.