Central Europe, Eastern Europe or the Balkans? What the regional names mean
Few parts of the world are named in as many overlapping ways as the lands between Germany, Italy, Russia and Turkey. The institute this site documents called itself the Institute for Central-Eastern and Balkan Europe; university programmes speak of East European or Eurasian studies; the European Union speaks of the Western Balkans; statistical offices use yet other groupings. None of these names is neutral, and none has fixed borders. Knowing where each comes from helps when writing a thesis, an application or a database search.
Eastern Europe: a Cold War map that outlived the Cold War
For most of the second half of the twentieth century, "Eastern Europe" meant a political bloc rather than a place: the states under Soviet influence after 1945, tied together by the Warsaw Pact and Comecon. Prague, which lies west of Vienna, was in "Eastern Europe"; Athens and Helsinki were not. After 1989 many people in the region rejected the label as a leftover of that division.
The idea is older than the Cold War. The historian Larry Wolff argued in Inventing Eastern Europe (1994) that Western European travellers and philosophers of the Enlightenment shaped an image of a backward "East" of the continent, replacing the older division of Europe into a Mediterranean south and a barbarian north.
Statistical geography uses the term too, in a narrower sense. The United Nations' M49 standard, which many international datasets follow, groups ten countries as Eastern Europe: Belarus, Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, the Republic of Moldova, Romania, the Russian Federation, Slovakia and Ukraine. It places the three Baltic states in Northern Europe, and Slovenia, Croatia and the other states of the former Yugoslavia, together with Albania, in Southern Europe. If you compare figures from different sources, check which definition each one uses.
Central Europe: a cultural claim
"Central Europe" has always been as much an argument as a location. In German, Mitteleuropa was given a political programme by Friedrich Naumann's book of that title, published in 1915 during the First World War, which imagined a German-led bloc in the middle of the continent. In the 1980s the term took on a very different meaning: the Czech novelist Milan Kundera's essay translated as "The Tragedy of Central Europe" (1984) described Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary as part of the West, culturally, that had been "kidnapped" by the East.
After 1989 the name became a statement of belonging. The Visegrád Group, formed in 1991 by Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, and four states since Czechoslovakia split in 1993, used it as a platform for joining the EU and NATO. Regional bodies adopted it too: the Central European Initiative, founded in 1989, took its present name in 1992 and has reached well beyond the core countries usually called Central European.
Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)
In EU policy, business and much social science, "Central and Eastern Europe" or "CEE" became the umbrella term for the post-communist states preparing for EU membership. Eight of them joined in 2004 (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia), Bulgaria and Romania followed in 2007 and Croatia in 2013. The term is convenient, but its edges move: some authors include the Western Balkans, Ukraine and Moldova; others mean only EU members.
The Balkans and South-East Europe
The word "Balkan" comes from Turkish, where it refers to a mountain or a chain of wooded mountains. Western geographers first used it for the mountain range that runs across Bulgaria, still called the Balkan Mountains (Stara Planina in Bulgarian). In the early nineteenth century the German geographer August Zeune extended it to the whole peninsula, on the mistaken assumption that the range crossed it from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. The northern edge of the peninsula has never been agreed; it is often drawn along the Danube and the Sava.
During the twentieth century "Balkan" acquired strong negative connotations, and "balkanisation" came to mean fragmentation into small, hostile units. The historian Maria Todorova analysed this in Imagining the Balkans (1997), describing a discourse she called "balkanism", related to but distinct from orientalism.
Partly for that reason, many institutions prefer "South-East Europe" (or "Southeastern Europe"). The Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe, set up in 1999 after the Kosovo war, and its successor the Regional Cooperation Council, launched in 2008 with a secretariat in Sarajevo, both use it. So does the journal Southeastern Europe to which the network's scholars contributed. Depending on the author, South-East Europe can include or exclude Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Slovenia, Romania and Moldova.
The Western Balkans: an EU category
"Western Balkans" is a newer and more administrative term. It came into use in EU policy at the end of the 1990s for the countries of the former Yugoslavia, minus Slovenia, plus Albania: states with which the EU was building a separate relationship. It does not describe the western half of the peninsula in any geographic sense; Greece and Bulgaria were never included. Since Croatia joined the EU in 2013, the term usually covers six countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia. Spain and several other EU member states do not recognise Kosovo, and EU documents mark its status with a standard footnote.
Post-Soviet space and Eurasia
For the former Soviet republics, researchers use "post-Soviet space" or, increasingly, "Eurasia", which joins Russia, the South Caucasus and Central Asia in one field. The renaming of degree programmes reflects the shift: the master's once known as Interdisciplinary Research and Studies on Eastern Europe in Forlì now runs as East European and Eurasian Studies, and similar changes have taken place in area-studies centres and journals elsewhere.
Using the names in practice
- Define your region once, early. In a thesis, grant proposal or report, list the countries you mean the first time you use a regional name. A reader in Ljubljana, Warsaw or Washington may assume a different list.
- Follow your source's definition for data. International statistics follow the UN M49 groupings or their own regional lists; do not merge figures from sources that define "Eastern Europe" differently.
- Search under several names. Library catalogues and journal indexes file the same subject under "Eastern Europe", "Central Europe", "Balkan Peninsula", "Southeast Europe" and individual countries. Search them all, and include older names such as Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia for historical work.
- Use the name people use for themselves. Many Czechs, Poles, Hungarians and Slovenes describe their countries as Central European; many in the Baltic states prefer Northern Europe. Respecting self-description costs nothing and avoids friction in interviews and fieldwork.
- Be careful with "the Balkans" as a metaphor. In academic writing, describe the specific conflict, policy or country rather than relying on a regional label that carries a century of stereotypes.