Europe is a huge and complex continent, with some of the longest documented human habitations, settlements and cultures in planetary history. Empires, countries, nations and peoples have come and gone, and many of today's geopolitical borders are at most a few centuries old. the landscape itself has changed over the last few thousand years and whereas the British Isles used to be connected to the continent, this land bridge was lost about 10,000 years ago at the melting of the last great ice age. You used to be able to walk over dry land from Cumbria to Spain.. back in times that our collective memory probably recalls as the Age of Atlantis.. Europa began in Greek mythology as a Phonician princess who was abducted by the Supreme Deity, Zeus and taken to Crete. her brothers were sent out by King Agenor to look for her, and one of them, Cadmus, didn't find her, but he did found Thebes and brought the earliest alphabet to what was soon to be called "Europe". In a sense we are all still looking for Europe. Europe is the lost Goddess, the wronged female, that the hero goes off in search for.. Along the way he writes poetry, invents literature, and founds cities.. Meanwhile, Europa has become a Goddess that leads us on to new vistas, as Homer and Virgil, Goethe and Shakespeare and all the other great poets and bards of our continent realised. But before we can truly find Europe, we have to make peace on this sacred and precious continent of ours, from the Ural Mountains to the Pyrenees, from the Bay of Biscay to the Caucuses Mountains.. and from Crete to Iceland.. Only with peace can the women and men of our beautiful continent cease to fear constant wars and harassment, instability and poverty and unease.. but that might require that Europe also leads the way in achieving peace throughout the world, because a world in which Europe is at peace and yet wars rage in Asia, and Africa and the Americas is unthinkable, as millions of refugees will swamp the fragile life-raft of Europe, as has already begun to happen. Instead, Europe has to pioneer building the structures and institutions for a just and holistic world peace. And that is why we are cooperating through the World Intellectual Forum to do exactly that - to dream the dream of peace that the next generations can inherit from us. You might say its too difficult - lets just be "realistic".. and its beyond the strength of any one group of intellectuals to envision, let alone influence real events in the real way. Well, fortunately Europe is also the home to Heracles, ancestor of the Celtic tribes, who accomplished his 12 labours in record time. So with him and all the other primordial European deities of the past to back us up, as well as the discoveries of modern science and philosophy, how can we fail ? Many of the greatest intellectuals and most fecund and visionary geniuses of human thought have been from Europe, or at least lived here for some of their creative life, and we in WIF (European Wing) are trying to ensure that all their long labours of love will not prove to have been for nothing, but that the peace we all so fervently dream of, whatever our spiritual, religious, intellectual, scientific, political or disciplinary perspective, can come true. As the Bard once put it, Nobel Prize Winner, "we'll let you be in our dream, if we can be in yours.."
Here is the list of European Countries which are members of the European Union: Austria Bulgaria Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Greece Ireland Italy Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Poland Portugal Romania Slovak Republic Slovenia Spain Sweden
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the UK is presently in the long drawn out process of exiting the EU, but there are many of us who are trying to prevent this from happening on legal, constitutional and grounds of criminality)
And here is the list of those countries which are not presently members of the European Union but which are still defined by geographers as European:
(NON EU) EUROPEAN NATIONS: Albania Andorra Belarus Bosnia and Herzegovina Croatia Cyprus (Northern) FYROM (Northern Macedonia) Iceland Liechtenstein Moldova Monaco Montenegro Norway Russian Federation San Marino Serbia Switzerland Ukraine Vatican
BLACK SEA, CAUCASUS AND CASPIAN SEA NATIONS: Armenia Azerbaijan Georgia (Abkhazia, and South Ossetia with an as yet undetermined status) Kazakhstan Turkmenistan Uzbekistan
MEDITERRANEAN SEA NATIONS (NON EU MEMBERS BUT WITH STRONG TIES TO EUROPEAN CULTURE, HISTORY AND CIVILISATION): Algeria Egypt Gibraltar Iran Israel Jordan Lebanon Libya Morocco Palestine Syria Tunisia Turkey