What Is Bigger, Europe or the USA?

Let’s explore what is bigger, Europe or the USA? Actually what we need to do is factor out our equational question so that we are comparing apples to apples and not apples to oranges. “Europe,” you know, can mean at least 2 different things!

The short answer is that continental Europe is 1.04 times as big as the USA (complete stats below). However, consider this…

Technically, there are 2 Europes: the first is (1) “Europe” the continental landmass, and the second is (2) the “European Union” which is considerably smaller than the actual continent that bears its name – a union that threatens to get smaller in the upcoming years thanks to Great Britain (we still love you UK!). The first Europe is geographic, the second Europe is political.

(Note to the pedantic: yes, you can define Europe in many more ways than I’ve done, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.)

Notice the map below of the EU (left side) which does not include a few of the classic geographic “European” nations such as Belarus, Switzerland, and, Norway – that reason is political. Now compare that to continental Europe (right side) which includes all of the countries in geographic Europe, including “European Russia” which only comprises about 40% of Russia’s actual size. Crazy right? (The reason behind the 40% is because we are talking “geographic Europe” here and the rest of Russia technically exists in Asia).

Hey, since you’re reading this, take the time to learn about the flags of Europe!

Okay, let’s move on to answering: what is bigger, Europe or the USA?

To answer the question, if we compare the USA to the European Union (EU), two geopolitical units, then we get one answer as to their relative sizes. However, it is still not ‘apples to apples’ because the United States is a singular country and the EU is a conglomerate of member-state countries and is therefore incongruent in this case. Hey, that’s just politics. Confused yet? Let’s dig a bit deeper.

By contrast, if we compare the USA to continental Europe we will arrive at a completely different answer because continental Europe is much bigger than the European Union. The scale is much more in Europe’s favor as a continent when compared to the USA.

Let’s check out the numbers!

• The United States has a landmass of 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2), with a population of 325 million people.
• The European Union has a landmass of 1,728,099 sq mi (4,475,757 km2), with a population of 510 million people. The EU has 28 member states.
• Continental Europe has a landmass of 3,930,000 sq mi (10,180,000 km2). Approximately 50 European nations.

In effect, THE ANSWER IS that the European Union is half the size of the USA with twice as many people! However, continental Europe is 1.04 times as big as the USA; or in reverse, the USA is 0.97 times as big as continental Europe.

This is what it looks like when we compare the United States and Continental Europe as landmasses. They are pretty much identical!

Don’t they look like two best friends at play? Historical irony! The net effect of the question of “what is bigger, Europe or the USA,” they are basically both the same size, continental Europe being a fraction of a percent larger than the United States. I loathe to factor Russia into this equation as I do consider its Federation a part of Europe. If we include Russia (the largest country on earth) then it would contribute to about 66% of Europe’s landmass and is larger than the European Union by 2.2 million square miles! Russia weighs in at a whopping 6,612,100 square miles which would buff out the flexing capabilities of Europe to 10,542,100 square miles.

The images used above come from Map Fight, a cool site dedicated to comparing all your favorite continents. They have interactive, drag around continents that you can reposition them and even gives you comparative data.

Check out this post on YouTube!