TL;DR: Central Europe is a real region, sitting between Western and Eastern Europe, too often forgotten and mixed up with Eastern Europe. The two have different histories, culture, societies, and naming the difference is a way of respecting this identity.

I keep witnessing the same thing, and lately more than ever with the internet newfound’s love for Poland: someone calls Polish, Czechs, or Hungarians “Eastern European”. Plenty of westerners (and non-westerners) place these countries under an Eastern European label they don’t belong to. I consider myself Central European, and I want to set the record straight. I’ll try to keep it short, this won’t be a diatribe on contemporary geography.

Defining Central and Eastern Europe

Human geography is not a hard science, so no two geographers will share the exact same opinion. There is usually a kernel a majority agree on, surrounded by more thinly-defined borders, exactly like the definitions we want to address.

Central Europe sits between Western and Eastern Europe. Definitions in their narrower senses reliably include Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, often Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Slovenia, and sometimes many more. Eastern Europe is reliably comprised of Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, often Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, and again others. The farther you move from the core, the more blur the definitions get, but these uncertainties are relative to that fixed core.

Wikipedia is full of interesting maps and definitions, so go ahead and check them out: Central Europe, Eastern Europe. Keep in mind that most definitions stop at the country-level, but countries are not homogeneous, as well as what the author intended their definition to be used for, before claiming “but the United Nations Statistics Division doesn’t mention the existence of Central Europe!”.

Summarizing centuries of history and millions of pages on the subject is too much for this article, so I encourage interested readers to do their own research. Some of the most important historical, cultural, and societal distinctions can however be summarized as:

• History: Central European identity grew up within the Holy Roman Empire, later under Habsburg influence; Eastern Europe grew up around Kyiv, then Moscow.
• Religion and writing: Latin Christianity and the Latin alphabet in the centre; Orthodoxy and Cyrillic to the east.
• Society: Central European countries were Soviet satellites states, not really independent but maintaining their own languages and churches. They were NOT part of the USSR. Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, and others, were the USSR, with far deeper Russification and larger Russian-speaking populations. Day-to-day sentiment toward Moscow varies, but Central Europeans generally feel repulsion towards Russia and their Soviet heritage.

Where I believe the confusion comes from

There are two main reasons why I believe Central Europe is forgotten. The shallowest one is simply direction and a lack of geographical knowledge: it’s east of Western Europe, so it ends up rounded up to “Eastern”, especially by Americans. The more historical reason is that for several decades, until the fall of the Iron Curtain, Central Europe was subjected to Soviet domination and therefore was Eastern Europe. While remaining distinct from Russia, Central European culture was being absorbed into the Soviet/Russian one, a traumatizing experience. That attempt at absorption, and the remnants we still see today through Russia’s war of influence, is exactly what is worth resisting.

In conclusion

Plenty of Central Europeans call themselves Eastern European, and that’s fine. The regions share history, borders, and influence, and anyone can identify however they like. However, everyone else, especially westerners just discovering the region, should be aware and mindful of the distinction. Central Europe is real, and it is, by my own thoroughly unscientific measure, the best place on Earth.