EuroBroadMap is one of the extensions of the ESPON project 3.4.1 'Europe in the World'.
This project started in January 2005 and achieved in June 2006 gathered 6 European teams (UMS RIATE, UMR LADYSS, UMR Géographie-cités, IGEAT and ITPS -The Swedish Institute for growth policy studies-) plus 5 expert teams. It was organised aroud 4 main questions:

• the delimitation of world regions;
• the place of European Union in the world network;
• the area of influence of European Union and its relations with neighbouring countries;
• the influence of globalisation process in the internal differentiation of the European territory.

The teams involved in ESPON 3.4.1 Europe in the World have therefore a strong background in the European and World level analysis.

Within the framework of the 1st question in ESPON 3.4.1. Europe in the World, a survey has been conducted on researchers, spatial planners and politic representatives in order to study their representation of Europe. For this survey we developed methodologies concerning the questionnaire and its analysis. This survey brought more questions than answers and after the end of the project it as been decided to propose an enlargement of the survey to the rest of the world and on a different sample.

As one part of the ESPON 3.4.1. project was related to the delimitation of European Union area of influence this gives us background and experience in the different 'cultural, economic, historical, linguistic, political, religious and/or technological ties' that could be used to explicit the different ways people are seeing Europe in the world. But more, concerning the survey on the representation (seen previously) we explore some methods to test the correlations between the strong of drawn limits of world regions and the major economic and socials discontinuities at global scale. In consequence we already have an explorative work on how to cross 'subjective' data (representations) and 'objectives ones' (socioeconomics data).

This project ended by two major publications: 'Europe in the World; territorial evidence and visions' and 'Atlas de l´Europe dans le Monde'.

To benefit from the rich and fruitful research relations build in ESPON EIW we asked our main partners from Sweden (Nordregio), Belgium (ULB) and France (UMS RIATE, UMR Géographie-cité) to join the project. The expert team from Romania (UAIC) join the FP7 project as a full partner. To enlarge our skill range and fulfil our aim to produce a non Eurocentric view of Europe in the World we enlarged our team with new partners from European Union, neighbouring countries and remote countries.

We first developed the French team with the arrival of two more CNRS team: URMIS and IDEES. The first one is specialised in the study of migration and interethnic relations. The second one gather researchers working on mobility, identity and spatial analysis. One more French team join the project through Denis Diderot University: ICT is an interdisciplinary research centre reassembling researchers in history, cultural and linguistic studies. The Belgium team has also been strengthen with the joining of REPI, a research network specialised in international politics from a political science and international relation studies perspective.

More European teams also join the project. IRMCo from Malta, focused on conducting researchin various environmental and related discipline; DEU from Turkey, monitoring Turkey-European relations, CEG from Portugal, gathering portugese geographers.

Last but not least, the project team was enlarge to 'remote countries' partners, with the major objective to internationalise the survey but also to benefit from advise in the analysis from non European researchers in order to to develop an non Eurocentric analysis. Those teams are CAUPA, from Cameroon, USP from Brazil, ECNU from China and DEU from India.