Europe is one of the traditional seven political continents, and a peninsular sub-continent of the geographic continent Eurasia. Europe is bounded to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the west by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by the Mediterranean Sea, and to the southeast by the Caucasus Mountains, the Black Sea and the waterways connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. To the east, Europe is generally divided from Asia by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, and by the Caspian Sea.[1]
Europe is covering about 10,180,000 square kilometres (3,930,000 sq mi) or 2% of the Earth's surface and about 6.8% of the planet's total land area. It hosts a large number of sovereign states (ca. 50), whose precise number depends on the underlying definition of Europe's border, as well as on the inclusion or exclusion of semi-recognized states. Europe contains both Russia, the world's largest by area and Europe's largest by population, as well as the Vatican, the smallest on both counts (not counting the non-sovereign Pitcairn Islands in the Pacific). Europe is the third most populous continent after Asia and Africa with a population of 731,000,000 or about 11% of the world's population. According to UN population projection (medium variant), Europe's share will fall to 7% in 2050, numbering 653 million.[2] However, Europe's borders and population are in dispute, as the term continent can refer to a cultural and political distinction or a physiographic one.
Europe is the birthplace of Western culture. European nations played a predominant role in global affairs from the 16th century onwards, especially after the beginning of colonization. By the 17th and 18th centuries European nations controlled most of Africa, the Americas, and large portions of Asia. World War I and World War II led to a decline in European dominance in world affairs as the United States and Soviet Union took prominence. The Cold War between those two superpowers divided Europe along the Iron Curtain. European integration led to the formation of the Council of Europe and the European Union in Western Europe, both of which have been expanding eastward since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1
Похожие работы
... after lengthy negotiations. Finally, on 27 and 28 January 1949 the five ministers for foreign affairs of the Brussels Treaty countries, meeting in the Belgian capital, reached a compromise: a Council of Europe consisting of a ministerial committee, to meet in private; and a consultative body, to meet in public. In order to satisfy the supporters of co-operation the Assembly was purely consultative ...
... and the development of commercial rather than planning criteria in banking it also of the utmost important. 3) The Political Economy of Transition in Eastern Europe: Packing Enterprises for Privatization. An abstract model of the transition from a centralized command economy to a market economy focusing on privatization is a novel orientation for this chapter. In much of the literature on ...
... conflicts arising from immigration of Muslims in Western Europe. Because of all these associations, immigration has become an emotional political issue in many Western nations. Chapter 2. Immigration in Europe 2.1. France As of 2006, the French national institute of statistics INSEE estimated that 4.9 million foreign-born immigrants live in France (8% of the country's population): The ...
... Chapel vault at Ottery also anticipates Prague's continuous patterning of lozenges at the vault crown, as well as the heavy longitudinal stress winch the patterning imparts to the basic tunnel. In Central Europe the Prague choir vault came as a relevation and more or less immediately assumed the status of fountainhead of a tradition of large-scale vault design which was to flourish spectaculary ...
0 комментариев