Why do people in the UK often pretend they're not in Europe?

[Final-Fan]

Kasz216 said:

Final-Fan said:

Kasz216 said:
1) Nah, I wouldn't consider it an Island because it's connected to eurasia by a big enough piece of land.

America would be considered an Island because it's only conected by Panama which isn't a big enough connection for North and South America to be considered one continent, with South America being a sub continent.

If that was the case... North America would be part of the South American continent... though not even in the form of a sub continent... like how East Russia isn't a sub continent.

2) The Urals are the common answer... but are a physical seperation, when most people were claiming the cultural seperation is what makes europe different.  However with the Urals being the split... there is no cultural difference between Europe and Asia, because East Russia or Asia Russia has an IDENTICAL culture more or less to West Russia or Europeon Russia.

It's kind of like the greeks.  They split Europe and Asia where they did because it put the Ionian greeks on one side... and the "mainland" greeks on the other side.  In otherwords... the Free greeks were on one side... while the enslaved by the persian "loser" greeks were on the other side.

In this case... you don't even have that criteia... making the whole reason for europe being a continent even more murky.

1.  Well you still have a situation of justifying Europe as being a peninsula due to its status as geologically placidly attached to Asia on the Eurasian plate, but you also say that far east Russia is also Asia despite that it is separated geologically by a fault zone and is on the North American plate. 

It's not an island, and I tend to agree that it would be weird to consider it a subcontinent, but it's something. 

2.  Well, maybe we could say that it WOULD be at the Urals, but 'Asian Russia' gets to be "Grandfathered in" because it has a European foot in the door.  After all, that's probably how Asian Russia got to HAVE the same culture ... European Russians moved there.  Am I wrong?  If not, that's why we can say that Europe ends at the Urals even while saying a European country & culture extends to the Pacific Ocean. 

1) It's part of Eurasia.  If I were a geographer or geologist, i'd consider it a sub continent, but they don't.  For some reason you need possession of the plate.

2) Couldn't you also make the case that the USA and Canda would have to be "grandfathered" in as well.  Leaving North America rather bare?  Afterall we're bypassing one geographical barrier that matter yet not another in such a case.

This is why I like to keep continents to geography and geology... and just use Socio-political zones for culture.  It's much better represented since you have East and West Europe split, South and west africa.   Egypt is part of the Middle East instead of Africa, which makes more sense since egypt is much more culturally similar to the middle east then either south africa or the Carthginian influenced west africans...

1.  Oh, I'm actually fully on board with that in a geological sense.  It's currently a part of the Eurasian plate.  Europe is an ex-continent. 

2.  Well, that's different since it was more colonization than expansion.  Non-contiguous etc. etc. 

3.  But there, you just called it Europe too, East Europe or South/West/whatever.  Face facts, Europe is the name on all those sociopolitical zones, and if you want to refer to all of the ones with "Europe" in the name, you just call it Europe. 

also, how different are Egyptians from the other Africans north of the Sahara, vs. the Middle East?