I wrote a major part of this book during my stay at the University of Granada in the late summer and autumn of 2017. It was a good place to reflect on Europe as a global player. More than 500 years ago, in 1492 to be precise, this southern Spanish city—the last stronghold of Arab rulers on the Iberian peninsula—was recaptured. With this, the ‘Moors’ not only lost their ‘European capital of Islam’, but also ended eight centuries of more or less peaceful co-existence between Muslims, Jews, and Christians. The Catholic King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile celebrated their reconquista by rather fanatically giving shape to the restored unity of Spain. Jews and Muslims were presented with a simple choice: they could leave the country or convert to Christianity. Religious intolerance was a fact, and dissenters came into direct contact with the Inquisition instituted by the same Reyes Católicos.

1492 was also the year that the Catholic Kings had a historic conversation with Christopher Columbus, in the hamlet of Santa Fe, a few miles from Granada. He was commissioned to discover a faster westward route to Asia, as recorded in the Capitulaciones of 17 April. Unhindered by a thorough knowledge of actual distances and packed with an insufficient supply of food, Columbus had fortune on his side and found an unknown continent in the middle. Europe's overseas expansion towards America had begun, as well as the Eurocentric view of world affairs that was to last for centuries. Global Europe was born.

In the course of the 19th century, this situation gradually came to an end and a process was started that was once summarised by the British historian Geoffrey Barraclough as ‘the dwarfing of Europe’ (Barraclough 1967). World politics was lifted out of its Eurocentric phase by the rise of two superpowers on the flanks of (Western) Europe—the United States and Russia—together with the emancipation and ultimate liberation of non-European peoples from the colonial embrace of modern imperialism. In the 20th century, the ‘European world’ was replace by a contemporary version of the Treaty of Tordesillas—the 1494 agreement between Spain and Portugal that divided the non-European world between the two kingdoms.