An Expedient /sɪ’nɛkdəki/?

Now that we’re in an age where it takes a Hollywood arthouser (this does not actually have to be any more oxymoronic than saying ‘French action film’) to make us reach for the dictionaries and learn a new word, the very least we can do is find out if it has a practical application beyond being more pepper to scatter liberally and thoughtlessly across conversations, a new recruit to the ranks of verbiage. It suffers from a basic handicap from the outset: it doesn’t have one delimited meaning, but a set of meanings, some diametrically opposed. So, what is it good for? Or is this the kind of discussion they only fart about with in Europe? 

And there it is. ‘Europe’ is effectively meaningless in that sentence, relying so much on a shared framework of preconceptions to make any sense at all. In as much as you did make some sense of it (the Europe of waffling French philosophers, perhaps, or that of Brussels bureaucrats), it can be said that you’ve already slotted into a certain mode of predictive reading in the preceding sentences, and this contextualizes the use of the synecdoche. 

Except that ‘Europe’ should not be employed as a synecdoche. No term can be said to be satisfactory if its meaning is so entirely dependent on speaker, listener and context. This does not change no matter how much certain meanings attributed to it become engrained through popular usage. Currency does not mean rectitude, and surrender to currency is not an admission of the allowability of alternatives: we may now swallow ‘attendees at the conference’ or ‘David Walliams’ testicles’, but only because there are bigger fish to fry. 

Europe means a continent delineated by the Mediterranean, the Bosphorus, the Caucasus Mountains, the Ural Mountains, the Arctic Ocean and the Atlantic, incorporating a number of islands not tied into other continental plates, most notably the British Isles. Nothing more. It does not mean: the European Union, Western Europe, all the countries on the European mainland other than the Nordic ones or any selection of European countries the person employing the term has cynically chosen in order to illustrate a point for rhetorical purposes. Before long, such laissez-faire usage will result in letting ‘Old Europe’ and ‘New Europe’ through the door unquestioned, never mind that they’re wholly and rather transparently politically weighted, all too easily filed under ‘Fusty’ and ‘Bright’. 

‘England lost to a penalty by Miroslav Klose’ contains an acceptable synecdoche: its meaning is unambiguous. ‘Europe won’t let us run our own affairs’ is unacceptable, even before you get to the question of the likely speaker.