Seminar 3 - Eastern Europe

DEFINITION OF THE TERMS EASTERN EUROPE AND REGION, ITS RELATIONSHIP, AND COMPARATION WITH ANOTHER SIMILAR CONCEPT, WESTERN EUROPE

Everybody has a particular idea of the concept region in his or her mind. It can vary depending on the place where you come from, your educational backgrounds or even your ideology, but it always refers to a minimally similar image. Regarding the general definition, we can talk about region as a bounded segment of earth space [1]. And this, is an answer likely to be widely accepted, talking about geography terms.

A comparable phenomena may occur with the concept of Eastern Europe. Let's try to talk about this term with somebody who has no advanced knowledge in the field. The most likely think to happen is that this person tells you about a region in the oriental part of the European continent, with culturally similar countries and all related with the old Soviet Union in terms of economy and polities. But this will only happen when the mentioned individual comes from a western background, or in other words, form somewhere in the rest of Europe or in North America. Nonetheless, it will not be the answer if you talk to, for instance, a Polish or a Serb. So the idea is going to change depending on which are your backgrounds. And it will be almost impossible to give an universal definition at all.

Latter evidences considered, we can see that the difference between both concepts lays mainly in the fact that Eastern Europe has no concrete definition, as it does the term region.

However, due to current requirements in terms of geography, polities, economy, medias and also education, the word region has become not fully useful or appropriate. For that reason, Ostergren and Rice, established three different types of regions [2], with different characteristics among them. A brief description, of them would be:

• Instituted regions: the official ones, defined by the authorities.

• Naively perceived regions: popularly recognized, referring to the notion of community.

• Denoted regions: established with pedagogic purposes.

So taking this classification in account, and the respective development in the mentioned text, we can say that Eastern Europe, as a region, has to be clearly included within the naively perceived regions. On one hand, it is not possible to find an official map representing the countries that this concept includes, and besides, it would be much more difficult to create such one. And on the other hand, it is neither a term used in schools or universities to teach the students. It could be that the term fitted in more than one category, but this is not the case.

It is in the popular thinking where the term takes roots, and it has been developed through the history and the events that involved Eastern Europe countries presence. It is an "imagined community", continuously subjugated to debate and reinterpretation[3]. But who is the subject of such interpretation? It has been the non-Eastern European people who developed the concept, an so, it is an externally perceived definition.

We do not have to forget the geographical proximity or even the immediate territorial contact among the Eastern Europe countries, it is completely unavoidable. However, it is not the main feature that comes to our minds when we talk about them. As initially said, we think about the remaining of communism polities in the area, the strong religion-culture relation or maybe similar traditions among countries. And, as we have been able to observe during the creation of our blog[4], none of this facts is completely true.

It is important to say that there is a general politic pattern, where real democracy does not fit, but many countries are trying to get rid of this old perception in order to be able to enter the EU and open themselves to the whole world, as Poland[5], but not precisely as Russia, who prefers to keep on his own. So we can say that some countries are definitely giving an opportunity to democracy and trying to develop their political system in that way.

Another relevant characteristic of Eastern Europe region would be that it is one of the parts of the whole Europe where people more tend to strongly believe in religion. The reasons for that, more deeply analyzed in our blog, come from the past struggles that people have had to overcome, as a result of wars, crisis and conflicts at internal and external level of the countries. So yes, it is possible that most of them have convinced ideas about God or any other divine entity, but they have developed this thoughts maybe as a way of feeling more confident in their daily lives, as a natural reaction of the human mind. So this is neither a reason that we can properly use to define Eastern Europe as a term.

So again, and using the arguments developed above, we can assume that Eastern Europe is a term developed to define a geographical zone from the outside, because people from outside thought that the countries included have such things in common as to be identified as an unique and united region. Or, as Ostergren and Rice would say, it is a naively perceived region and, what's more, externally perceived.

Immediately next to Eastern Europe we find Western Europe. As the names tell us, these are two similar regions, by the fact that both are Europe, but they have something that differences one to the other, for the mere fact that one is on the East and the other on the West of the geographic centre of the continent. But is geographical closeness the only feature that makes both terms similar?

According to one of the divisions of the UN, the countries included in this region are Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom[6]. This is only one of the amount of definitions that we can found, but gives us a rough vision about what the term Western European is used for. All of them are developed countries, with the real democracy as one of the main subjects in their agenda, an established welfare state and a minimum of economic stability. However, when you ask citizens of the latter mentioned countries, it is probable that not all of them tell you such beautiful things, despite some others can tell. There are economic crisis, as well as human and political ones. Democracy seems to be respected by politicians, but without knowing how to name it, people of the street see that there is something that is not working properly (call it corruption, incompetence, media pressure or whatever you want). And it maybe does not occur explicitly in Finland, Luxembourg or Austria, but it does in Spain, Greece and Ireland.

Thus, this is the same as in Eastern Europe: people from inside the region don't see themselves as others see them. And we can conclude that Western Europe is also a naively perceived region from an external point of view.

A difference could be that the countries are likely to feel as a region, but again, there is nobody that can clearly identify this bond.

So, after all, we can conclude that, despite the use that medias can make of this terms[7], or the conceptions that people can have about them, both Eastern and Western Europe are terms with only geographical closeness as a fact in their definition.

We have to be careful when using this terms (Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and even region), because they can derive to a wrong interpretation and give us some tricky problems. It is important to call things for their proper names, but it is even more important and crucial to not generalize and to be careful of the scope of our words. Or it can end in media misinterpretations or political confusion, for instance. In a globalized world, where every idea easy spreads and runs away of our hands, ideas have to be well expressed and we have to use the proper terms for each things. If not, conflicts can rise where there was supposed to be a quiet land and, for today, there are enough struggles around the globe.

[1] , [2] : As said in Ostergren, Robert C. and Rice, John G. 2004 The Europeans. A Geography of People, Culture, and the Environment. Chap. 1 Introduction: Europe as a Culture Realm.

[3] Concept used by Ostergren and Rice in their definition of naively perceived regions.

[4] http://juliloti18.wixsite.com/easterneuropeupf, 07/11/2016.

[5] https://www.euractiv.com/section/elections/opinion/eastern-europe-s-third-decade-of-democracy/, 08/11/2016, Eastern Europe’s third decade of democracy.

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Europe, 08/11/2016.

[7] See http://juliloti18.wixsite.com/easterneuropeupf/single-post/2016/10/31/Recent-News-Concerning-Eastern-Europe, 08/11/2016