Eastern Europe is not real

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You mean like when the rest of the world refers to Americans as Yankees or "Yanks" but within the United States itself the only people who are referred to by this word are those living in the Northern/New England states that fought the Confederate Southern states during the Civil War?

Given how the Roman Empire divided, perhaps it would make sense to call Eastern those areas that are predominantly Orthodox. Which leaves us to quibble over the bits and pieces that are predominantly Muslim.

You could slice it that way.

The large region of Eastern Orthodox Christianity plus the tiny enclaves of Islam near the Adriatic together equals "East".

And Roman Catholicism, plus it's heretical offspring: Protestantism, together equal "west".

That way all of what is usually thought of western europe (British Isles, France, Germany, Scandanavia, Italy, Iberia) would still be that, plus the predominanently Catholic westernmost nationalities of "Eastern" Slavic Europe would also be "west":parts of former Yugoslavia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and the Baltic States.

The predominantly Eastern Orthodox regions (most of former Yugoslavia) Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia (west of the Urals) would be "east". Muslim and Orthodox Christian Albania and Muslim regions in former Yugoslavia would be "east".

Turkey, and the former Soviet Republics of the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbijan) are not even be Eastern Europe, but (in my book) are part of Asia and the Middle East.

Not really.

Yanks/Yankee/etc weren't coined by people looking to demean Americans as subhuman and use their alleged backwardness as an excuse to colonize them in order to 'civilize' them.

I guess the point I meant to make was that what outsiders call a region or people from a region is often different from what the locals actually refer to themselves. It happens all over the world.

Definitely there's truth to that. Exonyms vs. endonyms.

In fact I think the "Middle East" is another example, right? Just about everyone in the West refers to this spot in between Africa, Asia, and I think Europe too as such. But my sister has often had to correct me and tell me that the Middle East is not a true thing (maybe it's really called the "Far East"? I'm not sure..)

Also another interesting example is the term "Indians" for the Native Ameticans/Indeginous People here in the US. They were originally called this by white settlers based on the mistake made by Christopher Columbus who thought he had found India. For some weird reason that term stuck for those native people that lived here long before the European colonists arrived. I guess it can be blamed on legit racist laziness?

Did you guys know? Europe is unique among places on Earth in that it has northern, southern, western, and central parts, yet no eastern part! Everyone knows that once you get east of Warsaw it's just a formless void until you hit the Urals.

I got another good one. "Africa" is apparently NOT a 'country'!

If you watch the video he never attempts to say Europe has no eastern portion, only that for the residents of the eastern portion of Europe there's no cohesive identity and that the concept of a cohesive eastern European identity is largely one imposed by outsiders on peoples who typically either identify with Central Europe or with the Baltic.

Those are definitely also examples of endonyms.

The terms near east/middle east/far east have little in the way of a coherent definition. Near East and Middle East also heavily overlap.

In particular the way 'middle eastern' is often treated as shorthand for backwards and uncivilized would make it analogous to how Eastern Europe is/was often used.

That does make sense now. Just like how I pointed out the way outsidera often refer to Africa as if it is just one big country when it's actually made up of several countries any many types of people.

The same rings true the "Indians" label here in the United States imposed on the actual true locals of this country by their white colonial oppressors.

And plus as my sister said there's that whole issue regarding the Middle East...

Those all seem like good examples of the same general thing.

In theory England, Spain, France, etc could have just called the rest of the world Barbaria, based on how they actually viewed it and how much they cared to understand the differences between different peoples.

That makes sense too. Not to mention anything from the "East" is often stereotyped as "mysterious and exotic". Especially the stuff regarding Asians and Arabs.

That's probably the whole reason why using words like "Oriental" or "The Orient" are no longer acceptable.

Yes..."the Middle East" is a really odd concept. Odd because...for starters...what is it in the "middle" of?

Originally Europeans and Americans would talk about "the Near East" (which meant Turkey, North Africa, Arab countries south of Turkey, and maybe Iran). And then there was the "Far East" which meant China, Southeast Asia, Korea, and Japan. And the Middle East was...well...some sources say "Iran", and some say India was "the middle east".

But either way ... at least there was logic to what was pegged as near or middle or far (with respect to Europe).

But since WWII the Arab-Israeli conflict and later the war on Terrorism have dominated headlines. And the media all refer to the Iran/Arab/Israel/Egypt part of the world "the Middle East". You rarely hear "near east" anymore.

So today "the East" is divided between a "middle" and a "far". There is no "near". The subcontinent of India (which could be called "middle") has no equivalent "east" label. And since there is no longer a "Near East" in common parlance (because what was the near east is now the middle east) the Middle East is no longer in ...the middle of the "east", but is the near part of the east!

Last edited by naturalplastic on 26 Apr 2024, 1:40 pm, edited 2 times in total.