Czech Republic is Central Europe. This is like saying that Kansas is West Coast because it's west of Mississippi.
I guess "Central Europe" is a term only used by people who consider themselves "Central European", everyone else seems to only distinguish between east/west.
Certainly not by everyone. From German Wikipedia: “Deutschland [...] ist ein Bundesstaat in Mitteleuropa.”
Translation: “Germany is a federation in Central Europe”.
It’s part of the western block in the Cold War geopolitical framework, which doesn’t have a Central Europe.
> The presence of Slavs is what differentiates West from Central and East.
That is plainly and egregiously false.
It's just that for about 50 years there was an overriding east/west classification which overrode the old.
Historically, eastern europe was the areas where the orthodox church had primacy (north of the black sea). Basically the european part of the Soviet Union proper excluding the baltic states.
I think the vast majority of people here hear about the concept of time zones the first time in school (or when they go on their first vacation abroad), it's really this abstract thing that one might know exists, but rarely ever has contact with. If you'd ask people on the street how the timezone is called, I wouldn't be surprised if many wouldn't know.
When I was growing up East vs. West was the fundamental political distinction. Check out this map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NATO_vs._Warsaw_(1949-199...
The world was divided right down the to the physical Berlin Wall. It was so amazing when that finally fell.
And Greece was another several hundred kilometres east!
I don't really understand the controversy
I mean Czechia/Eastern Germany/Western Poland is pretty much the centre of the land-mass from Ireland/Portugal in the West to Ukraine/Estonia in the East. So, it's not wrong.
Geographic clustering is always slightly arbitrary, but in American parlance "Eastern Europe" and "Western Europe" are used dichotomously, and with the former usually corresponding to erstwhile Warsaw Pact members.
Czech Rep. is as far east as Austria, and I dont think anyone would question Austria being part of traditional central Europe. I'd think that Hungary and Poland are usually considered the same - just depends on how strongly their cultures were affected by the old iron curtain.
Not to be confused with the West Coast, no one would think that because it doesn't have a coast. But relative geographical terms are, well, relative.
We think of Utah or Colorado as being "The West". I guess like you say, it's all relative.
Midwesterner's east of the Mississippi tend to consider Kansas and the Dakota's "Great Plains" states and not Midwest.
As I mentioned, Kansas is in the West if you're in Michigan, which definitely considers itself Midwestern.
But if you're a Southerner, Michigan is in the North. The North doesn't even exist, outside of the former Confederacy, where it refers to states which were in the Union during the Civil War.
So "the North" is a pure exonym.
What's coming back is the pre-cold-war delineation where areas of orthodox primacy north of the black sea are eastern europe, south of it are south-eastern, and the catholic areas are central, northern, southern and western (with the iberic peninsula often being split out as southwestern).
Basically before WWII "Western Europe" was France, the British Isles and the Low Countries.