The Idea of Europe

Abstract

We live in a European world. It is a multicultural world, to be sure, but most if it has been colonized at some point by one European power or another, and the vast majority of people live in societies that are either based on the European cultural tradition or influenced on a daily basis by the norms and values of that tradition. The ‘world culture’ described by the American political scientist Lucien Pye (1966) is ultimately European in origin, even if it is most actively promoted and exported by the United States (which is itself primarily a product of European culture).