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Western Europe
Nine wealthy states from the North Sea to the Alps
Western Europe is the smallest of the UN's European subregions by area and the richest by almost any measure: nine countries — France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein, and Monaco — with about 199 million people on 1.1 million square kilometers. The label carries Cold War baggage, when Western Europe meant everything on the free side of the Iron Curtain, including Britain, Italy, and Spain. The UN's version is narrower and geographic, and it produces the odd result that Austria, which sits east of Prague, is Western European while Poland is not. Germany and France between them hold three-quarters of the population.
The land runs uphill from northwest to southeast. It begins below sea level in the Dutch polders, reclaimed from the North Sea and held back by dikes, crosses the North European Plain and the fertile basins of the Rhine, the Seine, and the Loire, and ends against the Alps, the mountain wall that Switzerland and Austria share and that rises to Mont Blanc at 4,806 meters on the French-Italian border. The Rhine is the region's working artery, carrying more freight than any other river in Europe. The climate is temperate and maritime, mild and damp near the Atlantic, more continental as you move inland toward the Alpine valleys.
The European project was built here, out of the wreckage of two wars that started here: the Coal and Steel Community of 1951 bound France and Germany together deliberately so they could not fight again, and Brussels remains the capital of what became the European Union. This is the birthplace of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and the industrial economy of the continent, and its cities — Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Vienna, Zurich — still set the terms for European art, finance, and diplomacy. Switzerland stays outside the EU and neutral by tradition; Monaco and Liechtenstein are microstates that live on banking, and Luxembourg has the highest income per head in the world.