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Southern Europe
Three peninsulas, one sea, and the roots of the West
Southern Europe is organized around three peninsulas that reach into the Mediterranean — Iberia, Italy, and the Balkans — and the UN counts sixteen entities there: Spain, Portugal, Andorra, Gibraltar, Italy, San Marino, the Holy See, Malta, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, and Greece. About 149 million people live around a sea that has been a highway rather than a barrier for three thousand years. The southeastern half is the Balkans, a name so freighted that several of the countries in it prefer almost any other label, and whether Slovenia belongs to the Balkans at all is an argument you can still start in a bar in Ljubljana.
Mountains define the peninsulas: the Pyrenees seal Iberia off from France, the Alps do the same for Italy, the Apennines run down its length like a spine, and the Dinaric Alps wall the Adriatic coast from the Balkan interior. The highest ground is on the northern rim, where Monte Bianco reaches 4,806 meters on the Italian-French border. The coastline is immense and deeply indented, Greece alone has some 6,000 islands, and the Mediterranean climate — hot dry summers, mild wet winters — supports the olive, the vine, and the wheat that have fed the region since antiquity. Volcanoes still erupt in Italy: Etna, Stromboli, Vesuvius.
Athens and Rome are here, and so are most of the ideas the West likes to claim: democracy, republican law, the alphabet as Europe uses it, the Renaissance. The Catholic and Orthodox churches split the region between them, and five centuries of Ottoman rule left a substantial Muslim population in Albania, Bosnia, and Kosovo. The twentieth century brought fascism, dictatorship, and, in Yugoslavia's collapse, the worst European violence since 1945. The economies lean on tourism, agriculture, manufacturing in northern Italy, and a great deal of EU money; Greece's debt crisis after 2009 tested the euro nearly to breaking. Six of the sixteen are in the EU and the rest are queuing.