The islands of Europe are typically divided into four groups: Mediterranean, Atlantic, Baltic and Overseas. This is a natural and clever segmentation, based on regional and cultural dimensions.
The European Economic and Social Committee has a Study Group on Islands. When taking part of their meeting on February, 4, we thought it might be interesting to use other dimensions to describe the islands: the political dimension, describing the islands’ degree of autonomy, and the geographical dimension, describing the remoteness of the islands.
Professor Godfrey Baldacchino at the University of Malta has kindly helped us to work out the matrix with the 2,140 populated European Union Member States islands grouped with the help of these two dimensions, distributed into 16 cells, plus a conclusion and some reflections.
Thank you all for your help!
Christian Pleijel
ESIN 