Central Europe's Limits in the North and the South

the discussion against a brief historical overview of how Europe and its main regional divisions were forged and morphed during the past three centuries. From Northern to Eastern EuropeIn the early twenty-first century, the widely accepted convention is to construe Europe as consisting of Western Europe, Central Europe, and Eastern Europe.Some would add to this tripartite division the subdivisions of Northern Europe for Scandinavia and Southeastern Europe for the Balkans.Yet, in most cases, these two regions are seen as subsets of the three "basic areas" in the aforementioned tripartite division of the continent.However, prior to the fall of communism and the end of the Cold War, the bipartite division of the continent prevailed, namely, into Western Europe and Eastern Europe.The West-East standoff between the United States-led "Free World" and the Soviet Bloc underwrote this Manichean-like dualist split of Europe both in politics and conceptualizations.Certainly, there is nothing "natural," "predestined," or "God-given" in how a certain territory is defined and subdivided for the sake of classification and spatial orientation.It is humans and their groups who invent such definitional and classificatory schemata, 3 including the mathematicized one of "modern" (meaning, Western-style) cartography itself. 4 They project this or that schema onto geographical space (territorium), or rather the ecumene, in other words, the inhabited world or land(mass).Geographers would say that, in this essentially language-based act of symbolical appropriation, which is what naming is, humans "domesticate" pre-human (natural) territorium and overhaul it into (civilized, de-naturalized) territory. 5Such human-inflected or even -dominated geographical space is construed, classified, and used by people in accordance with their needs and wishes.Different human groups may differ in their predilection for schemata of this kind that obtain in a given period, and such preferences change with time. 63 Christian Grataloup, L'invention des continents.Comment l'Europe a dcoupe le Monde (Paris: