How is Ubuntu European?
Mint I'll grant, though I always thought of it as a thin fork of Ubuntu. Interestingly the first version was based on Kubuntu - I wonder what motivated them to change, but the old release notes appear to have disappeared.
Red Hat/Fedora uses Gnome because Gnome is basically a Red Hat product. This has nothing to do with the geography of the distro.
Unfortunately, a lot more people use Gnome. Which is a shame in my opinion. But it is the way it is.