The challenge of demarcating the physical and functional limits of EUrope predates the entering into force of the Maastricht Treaty in November 1993 and has frequently sparked recurring political and scholarly debates since the Rome Treaty was signed in 1957. The latter, in its Article 237, introduced the infamous stipulation that ‘any European state may apply to become a member of the Community’, thus leaving ample room for interpretation as to what and who is and is not ‘European’. It also contained a protocol regulating the Community’s relations with France’s (former) colonies Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, which – in spite of their (debatable) ‘non-Europeanness’ – were offered to be temporarily treated like de facto member states as far as trade matters were concerned. Though this special treatment has to be understood against the backdrop of France’s multi-layered relations privilégiées with its two former protectorates and overseas department respectively and be embedded in the wider decolonisation dynamics at the time, it already offered a foretaste of the EU’s continuous and rather perplexing inability to conceptualise and thereby define what constitutes the territorial, functional, political and cultural borders and boundaries of EUrope. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, this was compounded, for example, by the Community’s Global Mediterranean Policy. The policy framework united non-European countries from the Maghreb and Mashreq, but also European countries such as Spain, Greece, Cyprus and Malta, the latter two of which continued to be treated as ‘Mediterranean partner countries’ until 2004, when they became EU member states and changed their status accordingly. The rejection of Morocco’s EC membership bid in 1987 seemed to have offered some clarity as to where the limits of EUrope lie, given that Brussels for the first time ever rejected a country on the grounds of its geographical positioning. The official recognition of Turkey – a predominantly Muslim country located mainly on the Asian continent – as a candidate for full EU membership by the Helsinki European Council in December 1999, in conjunction with the subsequent bickering in EU decision-making circles over the country’s European credentials, however, laid bare the polysemy of ‘Europeanness’ and the diverging interpretations of the foundational underpinnings of EUrope, all of which continue to influence negatively how the EU relates to, and deals with, countries located at its current geographical periphery.