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The European Union (EU) is among the leading players in the international political arena. Made up of 27 countries and home to 500 million people, the EU is responsible for political, economic, and cultural decisions which impact all its member states and the conti-nent at large. But regardless of the EU’s power in terms of policies and regulations, there still remain questions about its scope and extent on a more abstract level. In particular, scholars have been unable to reach a conclusion regarding what chracterizes and differentiates this supranational entity. The notion of a single identity is complicated by the fact that the EU is neither a body politic which operates in a vacuum, nor merely a sum of its member states (van Gerven, 2005). The discourse regarding the EU’s identity may be easier to tackle by creating a frame-work for discussing the nuances of the entity at large as well as the contemporary issues affecting member nation states. One such framework, used by scholar Achille Mbembe in his article “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa, ” can be adapted from Mbembe’s own focus of the African continent to fit a cov-ersation about the EU. In this article, Mbembe discusses the challenges in Africa throug