Europe’s Geopolitical Regions As an Intellectual Construct: the Challenges of Positioning Ukraine

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The article presents an analysis of geopolitical regions in Europe as intellectual constructs rather than objective phenomena. It offers an overview of past and present approaches to defining regions of the world and of Europe. The approaches, which scholars employed to define Europe’s outer and inner regional boundaries reveal that geographic regions often reflect geopolitical rationale, which often prevails over objective spatial differentiation of social life. Deconstruction of both past and present approaches to regional representation of Europe shows that there are two alternating intellectual constructs. The first one is a unified (or uniform) Europe with a clear outer boundary. The second one is a model of several Europes (Western, Central (Middle), and/or Eastern). These two alternating representations interchange depending on the current geopolitical situation and may involve various rationales including cultural, religious, economic, or political ones. We stress that a set of imagined geographical boundaries, when becoming a common ground, in their turn appear to be a defining factor for geopolitical events. This is specifically the case for Europe, where a long prevailing idea about “Russian” space, a vague region, which one could define as an area of the Russian imperial claim resulted in spatial limits for the projects of European and Euroatlantic integration over the last thirty years. We believe, that the prevailing way of spatial thinking in the West about this “Russia” region as being beyond Europe contributed to the hardening of the Russian foreign policy and ultimately, to a series of military aggressions, first in Georgia, and then in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine has proven that presently the model of many Europes gave way to the one of a single Europe and a clear geopolitical boundary between the free democratic and the non-free authoritarian realms. Therefore, we stress that there is a challenge for Ukraine to position itself within the European region and make this construct an intellectual common ground, especially among western academic and political elites.