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The region is usually meant to include:
Rather than a physical entity, Central Europe is a concept of shared history which contrasts with that of the surrounding regions. Immediately to the east and southeast lie regions which had for longer periods been under the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Russia, with relics of a strong Hellenic cultural influence (eg. Cyrillic descending directly from Greek). These phenomena collectively established religions such as Eastern Orthodoxy, Uniate Catholicism, and Islam (ie. Sunni), with Central Europe generally defined as an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic area.
Up to World War I, it was distinguished from the region immediately to its west as an area of relative political conservatism opposed to the liberalism of France and Great Britain and the influences of the French Revolution.[citation needed]. 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 Germany), in contrast, remained conservative monarchies in which the monarch and his court played a central governmental role, while still subject to some influence by religion.
In the English language, the concept of Central Europe largely fell out of usage during Cold War, overshadowed by notions of Eastern and Western Europe. However, the term is increasingly returning to everyday usage again, partly due to the recent expansion of the European Union, but mainly through the attempt by post-Communist governments in former Eastern European lands to create national images distancing themselves from their predecessors. An example is found in one of Europe\'s trading blocs - CEFTA - which is labelled Central European, and yet only comprises entities which were previously Communist territories. The founding members were Czechoslovakia (now two countries in the EU), Poland and Hungary, whilst its current members include Macedonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania and Moldova).
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.
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Geography strongly defines Central Europe\'s borders with 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 the cultural and historical boundaries migrate more easily West-East than South-North. The Rhine river which runs South-North through Western Germany is an exception.
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:
Post-1989 European regions
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In the article on Europe, the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia counts Germany, but not Switzerland, as part of Central Europe; Liechtenstein is not mentioned. In other articles of that encyclopedia, France and Switzerland are included.
The Pannonian Plain, between the Alps (west), the Carpathians (north and east), and the Sava/Danube (south)
Satellite view of the Carpathians
Geographically speaking, Carpathian mountains divide the European Plain in two sections: the Central Europe\'s Pannonian Plain and Transylvanian Plateau in the west, and the East European Plain, which lie eastward of the Carpathians. Southwards, the Pannonian Plain is bounded by the rivers Sava and Danube. This area mostly corresponds to the borders of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Apart from the aforementioned nations, the Pannonian Plain extends into the following countries:
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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:
Following World War II, large parts of Europe that were culturally and historically Western became part of the Eastern bloc. Consequently, the English term Central Europe was increasingly applied only to the westernmost former Warsaw Pact countries (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary) to specify them as communist states that were culturally tied to Western Europe"Central versus Eastern Europe". This usage continued after the end of the Warsaw Pact when these countries started to undergo transition.
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, the philosophers Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the mathematicians Stefan Banach or John von Neumann, the physicist Albert Einstein, or the logicians Kurt Gödel and Alfred Tarski. In music some truly Central European figures include the Strauss family, Franz Schubert, Anton Bruckner, Arnold Schönberg, Gustav Mahler, Antonín Dvořák, Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók. In painting Gustav Klimt, Paul Klee, Egon Schiele, 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 out. 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, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, Witold Gombrowicz, Czeslaw Milosz, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Milan 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.
Since 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 founding EU members economically it is arguably an inaccurate construction. 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 more closely adheres to the common cultural traits, and also the shared experience of post-war Stalinist rule, may be less prone to cause confusion.
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.
Look up Central Europe in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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