Central Europe is the region lying between the variously and vaguely defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe. In addition, Northern, Southern and Southeastern Europe may variously delimit or overlap into Central Europe. The term has come back into fashion since the end of the Cold War, which had divided Europe politically into East and West, with the Iron Curtain splitting "Central Europe" in half. The understanding of the concept of Central Europe varies considerably from nation to nation, and also has from time to time.

The region is usually used to mean:

•  Austria
•  Czech Republic
•  Germany
•  Hungary
•  Liechtenstein
•  Poland
•  Slovakia
•  Slovenia
•  Switzerland

Rather than a physical entity, Central Europe is a concept of shared history, in opposition to the East represented by the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Russia, as well as the associated religions of Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam—with Central Europe generally defined as an overwhelmingly Catholic area, and up to World War I distinguished from the West as an area of relative political conservatism opposed to the liberalism of France and Great Britain and the influences of the French Revolution. In the nineteenth century, while France developed into a republic and Britain was a liberal parliamentary monarchy in which the monarch had very little real power, Austria-Hungary and Prussia (later German Empire), in contrast, remained conservative monarchies in which the monarch and his court played a central governmental role, along with some influence of religion. Following World War I, nations in Central Europe, with exception of Czechoslovakia, rapidly fell under authoritarian regimes while Western European countries maintained their parliamentary systems, and although the divide between Western and Central Europe became somewhat obsolete after World War II and the fall of Nazism, it remains as a historic and cultural boundary.

In the English language, the concept of Central Europe largely fell out of usage during Cold War, shadowed by notions of Eastern and Western Europe. It may be seen in historical and cultural contexts. However, the term is being increasingly used again, with the recent expansion of the European Union.



It is sometimes joked that Central Europe is the part of the continent that is considered Eastern by Western Europeans and Western by Eastern Europeans.

Between the Alps and the Baltics

Geography strongly defines Central Europe's borders to its neighbouring regions to the North and South: namely Northern Europe (or Scandinavia) across the Baltic Sea and the Apennine peninsula (or Italy) across the Alps. The borders to Western Europe and Eastern Europe are geographically less defined and for this reason culture and geographical definitions migrate easier West-East than South-North. To note the Rhine river which runs South-North through Western Germany is a speciality.

This may explain why according to most English-language encyclopedias, such as the Encyclopædia Britannica, the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica and the Columbia Encyclopedia, as well as the CIA World Factbook, the term Central Europe is taken to include:

Switzerland Germany Liechtenstein Austria Slovenia		Alpine countries (west to east)
Poland Czech Republic Slovakia Hungary		Visegrád group (north to south)

In the article on Europe, the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia counts Germany (that then reached east of the Baltic) but not Switzerland to Central Europe; Liechtenstein is not mentioned. In other articles of that encyclopedia, France and Switzerland are included.

The notion of Alpine Countries extending to the Baltic Sea and the North Sea is not uncontroversial. While Germany without any doubt has formerly been considered a Central European land, both by Germans and by others, it has at least for the 19th and 20th century had an identity and self-image as located North of the Alps rather than in the Alps. This holds true even for Bavaria, the most Alpine of the German states, where most people live below the Alps, not in them.

Culturally Central-European

Several other countries have regions that retain a Central European character as well, having historically been part of the central European kingdoms and empires such as the Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of Hungary, the Habsburg monarchy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Imperial Germany. These are:

• Belarus (western parts)
• Bosnia and Herzegovina (the northern chunk adjacent to Vojvodina and Slavonia)
• Croatia (Dalmatia is often excluded)
• Lithuania
• Romania (Transylvania, Banat and Bucovina)
• Serbia (Vojvodina, Belgrade City Region)
• Ukraine (Carpathian Ruthenia, Galicia, Volhynia, Podolia)

Central Europe behind the Iron Curtain

Following World War II, large parts of Europe that were culturally and historically Western became part of the Eastern bloc, which effectively removed the concept of Central Europe; if anything, it could have meant neutral Switzerland and Austria. Following the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the end of the Cold War, this distinction has again come into use and includes many of the same regions it once had. Consequently, some of the Warsaw Pact members, now members of NATO and the European Union, are included.

During the Cold War, the English term Central Europe was increasingly applied only to the westernmost former Warsaw Pact countries (Poland to Hungary) to specify them as communist states that were culturally tied to Western Europe. This usage continued after the end of the Warsaw Pact when these countries started to undergo transition.

Central European contributions to world culture

Although Central European is a rather loose geographical term, the region has produced quite a sizeable contribution to world culture that is clearly recognised as distinctly "Central European". Its peak time was the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when the Golden Triangle of Prague-Vienna-Budapest, as well as numerous other centres of culture radiated to the entire world. The region produced outstanding talents in science, such as the psychologists Sigmund Freud, Adler and Jung, or the philosophers Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In music some truly Central Europe figures include the Strauss family, Arnold Schönberg, Gustav Mahler, Antonín Dvořák, Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók. In painting Gustav Klimt, Paul Klee and Oskar Kokoschka and Alfons Mucha are defining artists, all belonging to the Secessionist movement, a distinctly Central European phenomenon. Also Jacek Malczewski should be pointed. Secession was present in architecture, with Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos and Ödön Lechner being leading figures. In literature one might mention Jaroslav Hašek, Václav Havel, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Kundera, Péter Esterházy, György Konrád and Danilo Kiš. In terms of cooking, the area has contributed the meat dish Wiener schnitzel, the cakes Sachertorte, Gerbaud and dobostorta, as well as Gugelhupf. The lager (pils) variety of beer can also be identified as being of Central European origin.

The new members of the European Union

After the enlargements of the European Union of 1 May 2004 and 1 January 2007, the term Central Europe is sometimes incorrectly used in a way that means "the new members of EU"—from Estonia to Malta—perhaps in particular by writers who want to avoid the term coined by Donald Rumsfeld, New Europe, which may be perceived to carry too much American ignorance of European matters. Malta and Cyprus, as well as Estonia and Latvia, are sometimes now also included, but as these new members of the EU are clearly more differentiated from most of the western EU members economically it is arguably an inaccurate construction in its own right. It can be also questioned what there is that unites the nations of a region so constructed apart from a less advanced economy. A usage that closer adheres to the common cultural traits, and also the shared experience of post-war Stalinist rule, may be less prone to cause confusion.

Remnants of the Holy Roman Empire

The German term Mitteleuropa (or alternatively its literal translation into English, Middle Europe) is sometimes used in English to refer to an area somewhat larger than most conceptions of 'Central Europe'; it refers to territories under German(ic) cultural hegemony until World War I (encompassing Austria-Hungary and Germany in their antebellum formations but usually excluding the Baltic countries north of East Prussia). In Germany the connotation is also heavily linked to the pre-war German provinces east of the Oder-Neisse line which were lost, annexed by People's Republic of Poland and the Soviet Union, and ethnically cleansed of Germans by national and communist authorities and forces (see expulsion of Germans after World War II). In this view Bohemia, with its Western Slavic heritage combined with its historical "Sudetenland", is a core-region illustrating the problems and features of the entire Central European region.

See also

• Central European Initiative
• Central European Time
• Międzymorze

Further reading

• Jacques Rupnik, "In Search of Central Europe: Ten Years Later", in Gardner, Hall, with Schaeffer, Elinore & Kobtzeff, Oleg, (ed.), Central and South-central Europe in Transition, Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000 (translated form French by Oleg Kobtzeff)
• Article 'Mapping Central Europe' in hidden europe, 5, pp. 14-15 (November 2005)
• A journal in three languages (English, German, French) dealing with the region: http://www.ece.ceu.hu

External links

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