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Central Europe
A region whose membership has always been a political argument
No European region has been drawn and redrawn as often, or for such transparently political reasons. German geographers of the nineteenth century wrote of Mitteleuropa, and by 1915 Friedrich Naumann had turned the phrase into a program for German economic dominance from the Baltic to the Balkans, which is why the word became unusable after 1945 and the Cold War simply erased the middle, splitting the continent into East and West. Dissidents revived it: Milan Kundera argued in 1984 that Prague, Budapest, and Warsaw were kidnapped pieces of the West, culturally central and only politically eastern. The map that emerged after 1989 is still contested at every edge, and the arguments are never really about geography.
Take the widest common reading and Central Europe holds Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Liechtenstein: some 167 million people across roughly a million square kilometers. The terrain runs from the North European Plain, flat and open all the way to the Baltic, south across the loess basins and the Bohemian massif to two great mountain systems — the Alps, cresting at 4,634 meters on the Dufourspitze, and the arc of the Carpathians curving through Slovakia toward Romania. The Danube ties it together, rising in the Black Forest and running east past Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest, while the Elbe, the Oder, and the Vistula drain north to the sea. Narrower definitions drop Germany and Switzerland entirely.
For most of a thousand years this was the space of the Holy Roman Empire and then the Habsburg monarchy, a multilingual patchwork of Germans, Slavs, Magyars, and Jews in which cities mattered more than borders: Vienna, Prague, Krakow, Budapest, Leipzig. Two world wars, the Holocaust, and the expulsions that followed emptied that world of much of what made it central, and forty years behind the Iron Curtain finished the work. Recovery since 1989 has been swift. Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia joined the European Union in 2004, and the region now supplies the factories and supply chains that German industry depends on. The Visegrad Group and the Three Seas Initiative are the latest attempts to give the middle a voice.