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Europeans felt refreshed after the end of the Cold War and needed to emphasize what made them different from Americans.

Europe has a long history, stretching back to ancient times. The disgust felt by European elites for the catastrophic wars of religion in the 17th century was one of the reasons that the earlier term was unsatisfactory. Their growing admiration for the tolerant and sophisticated values of the pre-Christian civilizations of Greece and Rome was blended with that sentiment. Intellectual elites differed about which qualities were most characteristically European, but they still felt a sense of common identity by the 18th century.

The Europeans' sense that they enjoyed "liberties" that non- European civilizations did not is one of the most important aspects of that common identity. Europeans took growing pride in the rich variety and free interplay of the many cultures and languages within their states, with no single language or culture imposed from a ruling elite. European civilization in the previous thousand years had been Christian, despite the ill-repute the term took on for some European intellectual elites. The majority of Europeans were Christian well into the twentieth century. Europeans who were dissatisfied with Christianity still had an identification with the art and music of the past, both Christian in themes and inspiration.

By the early 19th century, Europeans were bound together by this sense of European cultural commonality. European was easy to say. The Turks were not considered European. European peoples were subjected to their rule for many years as their empire extended into part of the European landmass. Istanbul is as close to Rome as Warsaw is. Constantinople, the capital of the Turks, was once a Christian capital. The peoples of Asia Minor, the Turkish heartland, resemble Europeans physically and are surrounded by European bodies of water. The Turks were not considered Europeans because they lived in Asia Minor and did not enjoy European liberties.

The other issues were not limited to the lack of liberty. The Russians made more persuasive claims to be considered than the Turks in the 18th century. For much of the early modern period of Christendom, the Turks were the Enemy because they were Muslim. Europe's sense of itself as a whole with common interests to defend was greatly affected by the Turkish-Muslim military threat in early modern times, just as it was in the 19th century.

The Turks' origins, in the prehistoric movements of peoples, were believed to be different from those of the great majority of Europeans, as was confirmed by the nature of the Turkish language. The Turks spoke a language that belonged to the Altaic family of "Asian" languages, while most European tongues derive from the "Aryan" family of languages. This was only one part of a cumulative sense of Turkish difference. The Hungarians and the Finns were notable for their non-Aryan origins.

A geographical definition of Europe was easier to come up with than a religious, cultural, or linguistic one. There was a point in the southeast where the Anatolian and Balkan peninsulas meet. Russia's status as fully European remained in question on Europe's northeastern edge.

The lands dominated by the tsars by the late eighteenth century extended from east central Europe, where a large portion of Poland had recently been annexed into the Russian Empire, across the Ural Mountains into the vast territories of Siberia. The area west of the Ural Mountains is referred to as "European Russia". The empire of the tsars extended into central Asia, with many Turkic people and millions of Muslims. The history of Russia's past of Tartar domination was marked by the rule of the tsar in European Russia. Many of the Russian Empire's other nationalities had not converted to Christianity, but the Russians did.

The tsarist empire came to play a key role in European power politics in the 18th century. The tsars were more Germanic by the 18th and 19th century. Military alliances between the Turks and Christian states occasionally occurred, but marriages between Christian and Muslim dynasties were not possible.

For Turkish or Muslim armies to have done the same would have been quite shocking.

At Europe's northwestern edge, there was a different kind of ambiguity about Europe's natural or physical bounda ries. The inhabitants of the British Isles retained a subtle if sometimes adamant sense of separateness from the Continent; they did not actually consider themselves non-European, but they cherished an identity as physically, culturally, and diplomatically separate from the Continental states. The British looked out over the oceans, beyond Europe, to their vast imperial holdings, just as the Russians looked out over the non-European east. British cultural distance from other Europeans was less than that of the Russians. British "liberties" were admired by many on the Continent, in contrast to the revulsion felt for the harshly despotic rule of the tsars. It makes no sense to describe the British as non-European because European civilization was so influenced by them.

The Mediterranean Sea on the south, the Atlantic Ocean on the west, and the Ural Mountains to the northeast were all visible by the year 1814. Some of the preconditions for nation- building and national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were established by an intricate network of internal barriers and byways. Europe's greatness was explained by the fact that it was composed of many nations, according to the celebrated nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke. Europe's many states were never completely dominated by one of their own states, they remained separate yet still part of a larger civilization.

Europe's leaders were often tempted to try to add a neighbor's territory to their own because the internal natural borders of Europe's nation-states were often highly uncertain. Poland's borders were drawn mostly in the plains and swamps on the east and west, and were not beyond dispute along the Baltic Sea to the north. Poland's geography made it likely that its history as a nation would be in danger. Poland's recurring national tragedies were a central theme of modern European history.

The natural frontiers of France, considered by many to be the model modern nation-state, were obvious at the Atlantic, Pyrenees, and Alps but still ambiguous along its northeast to be a source of repeated conflict.