The apparently simple question about the boundaries of Europe - it's really rather convoluted. If you take a geographical approach, there's absolutely no problem about the north, south and west, but when it comes to the east, geographers tell us that all those apparently natural boundaries are simply a matter of convention. The Urals were reckoned to be the eastern border only from the middle of the 18th century. Less than fifty years previously, the line was drawn much further to the west between what is today Finland and the Black Sea. The situation is similarly unclear if we take an institutional perspective. Kazakhstan and Israel are both members of the European Football Association UEFA. And the cultural heritage of the continent is certainly by no means the homogenous unity of Christian and western that many would like to believe.

There's simply no easy way of getting a systematic handle on the question "Where does Europe end?" The final debate in the series of discussions entitled "Debate on Europe" staged by the Allianz Cultural Foundation and national daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, held last Sunday, focused on this issue. The event at Munich's Residenztheater was a sell-out. In view of the complexity of the issues involved, the logical approach seemed to favor a platform debate not between high-ranking politicians or academics but poets and artists. The intention was to provide a forum for intellectuals who are not trammeled by the straitjacket of academic reason. Moderator Sonja Zekri, SZ editor, was joined by Ukrainian author Yuri Andrukhovych, Swiss author and translator Ilma Rakusa, who was born in Slovakia, Swiss art historian and head of London's Serpentine Gallery Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and German author and translator Ilija Trojanow, who was born in Bulgaria.

Where does Europe end? Andrukhovych - awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding in 2006 - gave a very personal answer to this question. He read a diary entry dated October 23, 2006, which describes a scene on Zurich's central station. A hundred policemen were waiting there in order to arrest around two dozen "tall blacks" who were distributed throughout the train in small groups and were now getting out. To this day, he has no idea what this was about, his connecting train was already waiting there. "I didn't even have time to be ashamed of my first thought: How wonderful to be white in Europe." But later, on the train to Berlin, he had plenty of time to reflect: "The old world is actually the youngest of all the continents. It has no idea where its boundaries are. On that day, its boundaries were on platform 8 of Zurich's train station." Europe's borders are in reality everywhere and yet nowhere. "Our honorable mission is to prove to Europe that it's bigger than it believes itself to be - and by this means rescue anyone on any station in the world who is about to be ambushed." Ilma Rakusa also recalled the humanist potential of the European project and referred to a different border of the continent, which didn't run along its edge: the aggressive mission of the Saudi Wahhabis in Bosnia. "We can stop philosophizing about other borders while the Balkans have not become European!""

However, none of the debaters wanted to be interpreted as disseminating apparently true European values with missionary zeal. They saw themselves more as celebrating a diversity that transcends national boundaries and hence excludes all extremists. A special European consciousness of diversity, according to Ilija Trojanow, author of the much acclaimed novel Der Weltensammler (The World Collector), could come into being if the aspect of multilingualism was retained. In addition to learning a foreign language at school, children should also learn the language of a neighbor, he commented. Exhibition director Hans-Ulrich Obrist also supported the concept of "multilingualism as a form of resistance against empire." An empire is precisely what Europe should never become. "The EU is the antithesis of Europe," interpolated Ilija Trojanow and was himself taken aback by the force of this concept. In response to the eager question as to what he actually meant, he responded with appealing modesty: "It's really only just come into my mind, I'd need to think about it first of all." We need to look out for the thoughts of such a wonderfully scrupulous European.

JENS-CHRISTIAN RABE. All rights reserved: Süddeutsche Zeitung