Which cities are Central European?

[Crawford]

There is no Central Europe. The Cold War destroyed the concept.

Eastern Europe is former Eastern Bloc, + states nominally aligned with former Soviet Union. Western Europe is everything else, more or less.

Nowadays, Vienna and Amsterdam are more alike than Vienna and Bratislava.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by 10023

I know that this is the traditional definition, but I just don’t agree with it.

Most of Germany is not really Central Europe (although the German concept of Mitteleuropa includes Germany). Bavaria is, and Thuringia, and perhaps Saxony, but I certainly wouldn’t include Cologne, and maybe not Berlin.

If the western part of Germany is included, then why not Switzerland? And Cologne is like 50 miles from Aachen, which was Charlemagne’s capital... how could it possibly be anything but Western Europe?

Poland is also split, IMO. What was Silesia, now mostly in Poland, is Central Europe. So is Kraków, perhaps. But I would consider Warsaw and eastern Poland part of the East, along with the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine.

A more meaningful historical and cultural definition, not so dependent upon shifting and somewhat arbitrary political boundaries, and cognisant of the fact that most of Europe was long made up of smaller, distinct kingdoms (Bavaria, Bohemia, Silesia, Saxony, etc), would look to other geographical features.

I would propose great rivers, and I’d start with the Danube River and its tributaries. If you’re in that drainage basin, upriver from about Novi Sad (the southern end of the Pannonian Plain), then you’re probably in Central Europe. East of that you hit the southern Carpathian Mountains and some deep, dark forests (Europe’s largest), so quite a natural frontier.



Beyond that you reach the North German Plain, and toward the Baltic cultural zone (Hanseatic League and all that) that I would call Northern Europe. Where exactly you draw that line is subjective.


Kraków is actually on the Vistula River, which subsequently flows through Warsaw and later Gdańsk, but is contained almost entirely within Poland, with tributaries that rise in Ukraine and Belarus. So that’s an Eastern European river, and perhaps it’s more correct to think of Kraków as an Eastern European city. I’ve never been. But then again, Kraków was part of the Slavic kingdom of Great Moravia (this is c.9th century), so there’s a historical/cultural Central European identity there.


In any event, it’s defintely hard to spend time in Munich, Salzburg, Prague and Vienna, and not understand that all of these have more in common with each other than any of them do with Cologne. National borders are sometimes surprisingly irrelevant in Europe, and the longer the EU and Schengen exist, the more that will be the case.

I think the concept of East, Central and Western Europe are more arbitrary and subjective with the East and West being political divisions during the Cold War but that is changing with former Warsaw Pact countries in NATO and in the EU and the continent homogenizing and unifying. 50 years from now, "Western Europe" will essentially be countries physically to the west.

[Jonesy55]

Originally Posted by Crawford

There is no Central Europe. The Cold War destroyed the concept.

Eastern Europe is former Eastern Bloc, + states nominally aligned with former Soviet Union. Western Europe is everything else, more or less.

Nowadays, Vienna and Amsterdam are more alike than Vienna and Bratislava.

Hmm, I don't know. That might have been true in 1992 but that's becoming less distinct as time goes by, and also there's a big difference between Prague or Ljubljana on one hand and Minsk or Chisinau on the other.

[ThePhun1]

Originally Posted by Crawford

There is no Central Europe. The Cold War destroyed the concept.

Eastern Europe is former Eastern Bloc, + states nominally aligned with former Soviet Union. Western Europe is everything else, more or less.

Nowadays, Vienna and Amsterdam are more alike than Vienna and Bratislava.

I think Central Europe is pretty much anything associated with Germany, including Austria, Switzerland and even Poland.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by Crawford

There is no Central Europe. The Cold War destroyed the concept.

Eastern Europe is former Eastern Bloc, + states nominally aligned with former Soviet Union. Western Europe is everything else, more or less.

Nowadays, Vienna and Amsterdam are more alike than Vienna and Bratislava.

Are Dresden and Leipzig "Eastern European" cities?

[Docere]

Vienna, Budapest and Prague are leading the poll. Which probably come closest to the traditional "image" of Central Europe historically.

[Docere]

Central European University is in Budapest. Orban threatened to shut it down because SOROS!

[Miu]

The only defintion of 'Central Europe' with any basis in cultural similarities is one more or less corresponding to the Visegrad countries, or Western Slavic nations plus Hungary. That was probably true even before WW2.

Despite their shared socialist history, the cultural border between Eastern Germany and Poland is among the most pronounced in Europe (although this is much less true as you move further south, the Czech Republic being fairly Germanized, and Austria having a somewhat different cultural profile from Germany and Switzerland).

Based on actual research on social norms and values, Europe's cultural map looks something like this:

Northern with strong Protestant influence (with Anglo, Nordic and Dutch/German-speaking sub-groups)

Latin (with Iberian and French-speaking, Italian sub-groups)

Catholic Eastern Europe or Central Europe

Orthodox (including Greece)

There are outliers and the degree of internal homogeneity varies between the groups, but the pattern is remarkably consistent throughout different studies.

Now, if your focus is on more superficial cultural markers such as food, architecture, folklore or even political trends to a degree, these tend to be much more fluid and often don't correspond to the above borders. In that case, Bavaria and much of Eastern Germany can be considered Central Europe.

[lio45]

I agree with Crawford and 10023.

Also, no way areas where French is the language (such as Geneva) can be considered anything but Western Europe. Same with extreme western Germany (Aix-la-Chapelle would definitely be nowhere but in Western Europe historically - that's the city Germans call Aachen, i.e. Charlemagne's capital).

The German-speaking area of Europe is kind of the Texas of Europe, you can't fit the whole of it in a single region no matter how hard you want to try. From the Alps and Tyrol, to Baltic shores in Pomerania, to Belgium, it's clearly straddling the borders of "neat" clear regions.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by Crawford

There is no Central Europe.

If you put a gun to my head and forced me to name a city in "Central Europe" I'd go with Prague.

Vienna and Budapest would be the next contenders. So I'm not surprised those are leading the poll.

[Docere]

Yeah, I think the Czechs have the most "legitimate" reason to object to the Eastern European label, given their close ties to Vienna historically.

[10023]

Originally Posted by lio45

The German-speaking area of Europe is kind of the Texas of Europe, you can't fit the whole of it in a single region no matter how hard you want to try. From the Alps and Tyrol, to Baltic shores in Pomerania, to Belgium, it's clearly straddling the borders of "neat" clear regions.

A large part of Germany’s struggle historically is that it is the place where Europe’s region’s meet, for the most part (though Lombardy in Italy is where Northern Europe, or Central Europe if you’d rather, meets Southern Europe).

That’s why it bore the brunt of the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th c., and why they desired Lebensraum a century and a half later.

But I disagree with Crawford somewhat and think there’s still a Mitteleuropa. The Cold War didn’t completely wipe out the cultural differences, or even differences in wealth and standard of living, between the Czechs and the Romanians or Belarussians. And the Czech region is clearly so much more similar to the German sphere than parts farther east. Nor is Austria just like France, even if Vienna does its best impression of Paris. If Vienna does not seem “Central European” to you, then it’s your idea of Central Europe that is off.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by 10023

If Vienna does not seem “Central European” to you, then it’s your idea of Central Europe that is off.

Certainly there's a Central European "look" due to legacy architecture. Vienna and Munich have many physical similarities to Prague and even Budapest (at least what wasn't destroyed or turned into commieblocks). There are traditions and foods than span Central Europe. The food even in Veneto or Trieste (excepting seafood) isn't that different than what's traditionally served in Vienna or Prague.

But, culturally and economically, I don't think they inhabit the same space anymore. Yes, Prague is richer than Bucharest, but it's much poorer than Vienna or Munich. The immigrant flows to Vienna in 2018 are essentially the same as to Rotterdam, Hamburg or Lyon.

Vienna and Bratislava are just a few km apart. It feels almost like the U.S.-Mexican border, with really distinct cultural and economic shifts.

[McBane]

There was another thread here and someone mentioned that Central European countries don't refer to themselves as being in Central Europe. It's a term only used by Eastern Europeans who believe their country is in Central Europe as opposed to Eastern Europe. It sounds like an inferiority complex to me. I'd imagine most people living in "Central Europe" are comfortable enough in their own skin to simply refer to their geographic position simply as "Europe". And for historical reasons, no one in Eastern Europe wants to accept the fact that they live in Eastern Europe. I'm not expert, that's just my take.

[10023]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Certainly there's a Central European "look" due to legacy architecture. Vienna and Munich have many physical similarities to Prague and even Budapest (at least what wasn't destroyed or turned into commieblocks). There are traditions and foods than span Central Europe. The food even in Veneto or Trieste (excepting seafood) isn't that different than what's traditionally served in Vienna or Prague.

But, culturally and economically, I don't think they inhabit the same space anymore. Yes, Prague is richer than Bucharest, but it's much poorer than Vienna or Munich. The immigrant flows to Vienna in 2018 are essentially the same as to Rotterdam, Hamburg or Lyon.

Vienna and Bratislava are just a few km apart. It feels almost like the U.S.-Mexican border, with really distinct cultural and economic shifts.

Except that when I want a cheap flight to Vienna, I land at Bratislava’s airport and hop a train into Vienna Hbf.

And who cares about “immigrant flows”? Honestly.

[MolsonExport]

I think there is a lot of feigned ignorance in this thread.

[Docere]

Budapest was a pretty prosperous city with a very large Jewish population of the assimilated "Western" type. But then Hungarain part of the Austro-Hungarian empire was also less liberal and economically than the Austrian part and developed par and retained a feudal ruling class right up until 1945. The poorest parts of Hungary ended up in Czechoslovakia and Romania after WWI though.

[JManc]

Are there any Europeans here? How about Europeans tell us what is or isn't in Central Europe?

[10023]

Originally Posted by JManc

Are there any Europeans here? How about Europeans tell us what is or isn't in Central Europe?

There aren’t any Central Europeans here, if that’s what you’re asking. There may have been an Austrian forumer once?

And I’m not sure their opinion is any more valid. An American with a strong understanding of history has a more informed (and unbiased) opinion than a Pole without, especially when, as someone mentioned, “central” European identity may be more desirable than “eastern” European identity.

[Docere]

Prague takes the lead...