How Europe divides into regions

The eastern boundary is a convention

The line usually drawn runs along the Ural Mountains and southwest along the Emba River to the northern coast of the Caspian Sea. Europe's boundaries have been especially uncertain on that side, and much debated, because the continent merges into western Asia without any physical feature separating the two. Transcaucasia is conventionally split, with its southern part read as Asia, which leaves Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in a position that has to be resolved rather than observed.

This catalogue resolves it the same way everywhere: a country is filed once, under the continent of the institutions it belongs to and the government it answers to. That places the three South Caucasus states here, along with Cyprus and Türkiye, and it places Greenland here as well, because the roster records Greenland as a dependency of Denmark. The rule is stated on every page it touches, so a reader who prefers the physical reading knows exactly what was done.

What is here that is not a state

The roster records seven dependencies on this continent and names the state each answers to: Greenland and the Faroe Islands under Denmark, Åland under Finland, and Gibraltar, Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man under the United Kingdom. Only Gibraltar appears on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories. The other six do not, and the catalogue records the difference without explaining it away.

Ten regions rather than four

The continent is divided more finely here than the usual north, south, east and west, because those four put Estonia beside Russia and Portugal beside Greece. The Baltic states, the Balkans, Central Europe and Northern Europe are grouped as they group themselves, and Anatolia, the Eastern Mediterranean and the South Caucasus are named separately rather than folded into a heading that would flatten them. Europe occupies close to one-fifteenth of the world's land area and carries ten regional groups in this catalogue, which is what a continent of small states with long institutional histories produces.