Who are the Europeans?
From the first Greek alphabet to the European Union: the story of a people who reshaped the world — first with ideas, then with empires, and finally with reconciliation.
Last updated: October 2026
Europe is not truly a continent — it is a peninsula of Asia with delusions of grandeur, and the delusions turned out to be true. No corner of the earth has produced so many ideas, so many empires, and so many catastrophes per square mile.
The first thing to understand about Europeans is that there is no single European people. Europe is a geographic convention more than a physical fact: a large peninsula at the western end of the Eurasian landmass, conventionally divided from Asia by the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, and the Caucasus. By that convention, Europe holds roughly forty-four to fifty countries, depending on how disputed states and transcontinental countries such as Russia, Turkey, and Kazakhstan are counted. Its peoples speak hundreds of languages, follow many faiths or none, and carry sharply different histories. What they share is less a common identity than a long, tangled history of living side by side, trading, fighting, copying, and converting one another.
The languages alone show the variety. Most European languages belong to the Indo-European family, which splits into branches including Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Celtic, Baltic, Greek, and Albanian. But Europe also has languages from entirely different families: Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian belong to the Uralic family; Basque, spoken in parts of Spain and France, is a language isolate with no known living relatives; and Maltese descends from Arabic. The European Union alone has twenty-four official languages. Any account that treats Europeans as one uniform group flattens a continent that has never been uniform.
Two institutions gave Europe much of its early common ground: the Roman Empire and the Christian church. Rome began as a city-state in Italy and, over centuries, built an empire that at its height in the second century CE ringed the Mediterranean and reached into Britain, Gaul, the Danube frontier, and the Near East. Rome left behind roads, cities, law, and Latin, the ancestor of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and other Romance languages. When the western empire fell in the fifth century, its eastern half endured as the Byzantine Empire, centred on Constantinople, for nearly another thousand years.
Christianity spread through the Roman world and then beyond it, carried by missionaries, monks, and kings. In the West, the Latin church in Rome shaped law, education, and art; in the East, the Greek church in Constantinople did the same. The two churches formally split in 1054, in what is called the Great Schism, leaving a Catholic-Orthodox divide that still marks the continent. In the year 800, the Frankish king Charlemagne was crowned emperor in Rome by the pope, a gesture that linked kingship, church, and the memory of Rome for centuries. The word Europe itself, used by Greek writers for the lands west of the Aegean, slowly hardened into the name of a civilization, not just a direction.
From the fourteenth century onward, Europe entered a long run of intellectual upheaval. The Renaissance, beginning in the Italian city-states, revived the study of Greek and Roman antiquity and produced new art, architecture, and scholarship. Around 1440, Johannes Gutenberg developed movable-type printing in Mainz, and the printed book began to spread ideas faster than any ruler could control them. Martin Luther's challenge to the Catholic Church in 1517 launched the Reformation, splitting Western Christianity into Catholic and Protestant churches and triggering more than a century of religious wars.
The Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, associated with figures such as Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, replaced inherited authority with experiment and mathematics in the study of nature. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century extended that sceptical spirit to politics, religion, and society, with thinkers arguing for reason, rights, and representative government. These movements did not belong to all Europeans equally — most people lived as peasants, far from universities — but their ideas travelled, and they supplied the vocabulary of later revolutions in America and France.
Europe's outward reach began with the ocean voyages of the late fifteenth century. Portuguese sailors rounded Africa and reached India; Columbus, sailing for Spain in 1492, reached the Americas; Magellan's expedition circumnavigated the globe. Over the following centuries, Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, and the Netherlands built overseas empires that extracted wealth, spread European languages and religions, and carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. The Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 formalised the European partition of Africa. The consequences of colonisation — borders drawn in European capitals, economies built around export, cultures disrupted — are still argued over in the countries affected and in Europe itself.
The same continent that exported its power also turned it on itself. The Industrial Revolution, beginning in Britain in the late eighteenth century, gave Europe coal, steel, railways, and factories, and with them a new capacity for war. The First World War, from 1914 to 1918, killed millions and destroyed four empires. The Second World War, from 1939 to 1945, was worse: it included the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany, along with the murder of Roma, disabled people, and many others, and it ended with Europe in ruins and divided between American and Soviet spheres. Decolonisation followed, as Asian and African nations won independence in the decades after 1945.
Out of that ruin came an experiment with no real precedent: former enemies pooling sovereignty so that war between them would become, in the words of the 1950 Schuman Declaration, not merely unthinkable but materially impossible. The 1951 Treaty of Paris created a common market in coal and steel between six countries. The 1957 Treaty of Rome founded the European Economic Community. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty created the European Union, and the euro arrived as an accounting currency in 1999 and as cash in 2002. Enlargement brought in much of Central and Eastern Europe after the Cold War, and the Union grew to twenty-eight members before the United Kingdom left in 2020, following the 2016 Brexit referendum, leaving twenty-seven.
The Union is neither a country nor a mere alliance: it has a parliament elected by citizens, a court whose rulings bind member states, a central bank, and a single market in goods, services, capital, and people. Its record is contested. Supporters point to decades of peace among members, rising living standards, and a common voice in trade and climate policy. Critics point to democratic distance, debt crises, and uneven burdens in migration and defence. What is not contested is that the project changed what it means to be European, adding a layer of European citizenship and institutions on top of older national loyalties.
Today more than seven hundred million people live in geographic Europe, and the continent is more diverse than at any point in its history. Post-war immigration brought workers from Turkey, North Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean; the fall of the Soviet Union opened movement from the East; and the wars and upheavals of the twenty-first century brought refugees from Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere. European cities are home to mosques, temples, and synagogues alongside churches, and to communities that keep several languages and several homelands alive at once. Debates about immigration, identity, and Islam have become central to European politics, with different countries answering them in very different ways.
Europe also faces questions its ancestors did not. Its population is ageing, and birth rates in many countries are low. Its economies, still among the richest in the world, must manage the shift away from fossil fuels. Its security, long underwritten by the United States through NATO, has returned to the centre of politics since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And its old certainties — that integration would only deepen, that prosperity would only grow — are openly questioned. What remains recognisably European is not a single trait but a habit: argument. A continent that produced both the Inquisition and the Enlightenment, both colonial empire and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, keeps arguing with itself about what it is. That argument is the story.
Further reading in works of reference and scholarship:
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, entries on Europe, the Roman Empire, and the European Union
- Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford University Press)
- Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (Penguin)
- Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin)
- The European Union, official treaty texts including the Treaty of Rome (1957) and the Treaty on European Union (1992)
- United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)