What makes Western Europe a region

One letter, and everything it reached

The Statute of the Council of Europe was signed in London on 5 May 1949 by ten governments, and Belgium, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom were six of them. The European Convention on Human Rights followed, carrying a mechanism that matters here more than in most of Europe: Article 63 of the original text allowed a state to declare that the Convention extended to territories for whose international relations it was responsible. The United Kingdom sent such a letter to the Secretary General of the Council of Europe on 23 October 1953, and the Isle of Man was among the territories it named.

A quarter of a century later that letter decided a case. Anthony Tyrer, then aged 15, pleaded guilty before the juvenile court at Castletown on 7 March 1972 and was sentenced to three strokes of the birch, carried out at a police station once his appeal had been dismissed. Strasbourg held on 25 April 1978, by six votes to one, that the punishment was degrading within the meaning of Article 3, and held unanimously that the island had no local requirements capable of altering how Article 3 applied there. Tynwald legislates for the island in domestic matters and the island returns nobody to Westminster. It was bound regardless.

A statute that names five countries in one subsection

Section 1(3) of the Immigration Act 1971 provides that a person arriving in the United Kingdom from the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man or the Republic of Ireland is not subject to control under the Act, and that the United Kingdom together with those places is collectively "the common travel area". The arrangement is older than the statute and has never rested on a single treaty. The United Kingdom and Ireland restated it in a memorandum of understanding signed on 8 May 2019.

The other frontier bargain, signed inside the region

The Schengen Agreement was signed on 14 June 1985 at Schengen, a village on the Moselle in Luxembourg, by Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the Federal Republic of Germany. The convention implementing it was signed on 19 June 1990, and the records of the four signatories filed here date their entry into the area to 26 March 1995.

Ireland and the United Kingdom are not parties to it, and Monaco is not a party either. The region therefore holds both the ground the agreement is named after and, off to the northwest, the states that kept the older bargain instead.

How little of the membership is shared

Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands date their European Union membership to 25 March 1957 and Ireland to 1 January 1973. Monaco holds a seat in the Council of Europe and joined the United Nations on 28 May 1993, and belongs to neither the European Union nor the European Free Trade Association. Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man have no group at all on their records, and never had a membership of their own to lose.

What the sea between them settled

Jersey and Guernsey record no land neighbour, though they lie off the Norman coast rather than off England. Guernsey's record dates the bailiwick from 1204, the year the continental duchy was lost and the islands stayed with the English crown, and the Isle of Man's from 10 May 1765, when the lordship of the island was bought back into the hands of the British Crown.

The rocks between Jersey and France were argued over for far longer. France and the United Kingdom submitted the question to the International Court of Justice by special agreement, and judgment came on 17 November 1953, in the same autumn as the declaration that carried the Convention to the islands. The Court held that sovereignty over the islets and rocks of the Minquiers and Ecrehos groups, so far as they were capable of appropriation, belonged to the United Kingdom.

Two of the countries have given their names to cattle kept a long way from either of them, the Jersey and the Guernsey, each of them a dairy breed registered by a society on its own island.

Where the edges are argued

M49, the statistical standard published by the UN Statistics Division, files Western Europe as Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands and Switzerland, and places the United Kingdom, Ireland, Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man in Northern Europe. This catalogue differs at both ends: Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein and Switzerland are filed under Central Europe, and the British Isles are filed here. The World Factbook, as the Wikipedia article on the region reports it, draws Western Europe as Belgium, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the same sovereign states this catalogue files here. EuroVoc, the thesaurus of the Publications Office of the European Union, runs wider, adding Andorra, Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. M49 states that its groupings are a statistical convenience carrying no political meaning, and the reading applied here is a filing decision on the same terms. All of these are in print, and none is settled on this page.