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Comment by nannal | Hacker News Reader

Where do you think Kosovo is?

East Europe. Also it won't be considered a Western country, even if you say it's in the central Europe (with the latter starting at the Ural mountain). The west is more of a cultural term than geographic one, e.g. Finland is West, but Estonia, Latvia and Bulgaria are not, even though their capitals are roughly at the same meridian... and Estonia & Finland having the same song as national anthem.

This is as coherent as talking of "black culture". There is no west, people who use it are chinese to dismiss everything not chinese (so Japan is western) and the US uses it to force us to join their stuff.

Have you ever been to any Baltic country?

Your argument is coming across as vaguely racist and appears to be based on nothing but the divisions imposed between the second and first world.

>Have you ever been to any Baltic country?

All 4 of them (if you count Poland, counting Finland or Sweden would be even harder). Here is a Latvian joke about Estonia: "no sex or future in Estonia". I have been in pretty much any European country, minus Portugal. No idea where the racism idea comes from, though.

There are only 3 Baltic countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_states), Neither Poland, Finland nor Sweden are Baltic.

Well that's the joke. Other than that I find Gdansk more similar to Riga than Warsaw.

Estonia and Latvia aren't western countries? What else then?

You just showed how stupid of a construct the whole 'western/eastern' nonsense is

Why is it nonsense? The fact that borders between binary concepts are fuzzy doesn't make the whole concept nonsense.

At least in Italy we tend to consider the western/eastern division to be the ex iron curtain.

So here we would consider the balkans to be eastern.

So you consider Kosovo to be a western country?

Im in China, yes. It s not Asian, it's not African, those people seem to live in the chistriano-muslim vector on the west of China, anyone here would say they're western.

So what exactly is the criteria for a country to be called Western or Eastern?

Is there a hard criteria at all?

It would also be handy if the parent used the common English meaning when writing in English.

Sorry but English is spoken all over the world. When I speak of the president, I mean Rutte. If someone in India (English is an official language there) speaks of the president, I'm sure they mean someone else. If English were to be beholden only to USA-centric concepts, we're going to need a new universal language because that's going to be super annoying.

And even in "the west" (by which I would mean the top ~40 countries by HDI), "the west" is a poorly-defined term.

Edit: turns out Wikipedia has an article about "Western world", which makes it quite clear that the term is vague. Apparently the original meaning was "Western Christendom", so it's a religious thing. TIL.

First, president isn't a common name, but you know very well that you'll confuse people if you use it in a context in which people don't assume the is Rutte. Look up Gricean maxims. They're not the be-and-end all of language, but they do explain a large part of how we communicate. And Rutte is a prime minister, of course, not a president. Mine too, alas.

> USA-centric concepts

It means the same in other languages. And English is, AFAIK, also spoken outside the USA. If I'd call anything to the east of the Poland "Mongolia" or "Eastern Asia", I think people wouldn't understand me or think I was being obtuse.

The Ural mountains.

The West / East divide is fundamentally a European concept, because it has existed there in one way or another for almost 2000 years. The West is associated with Germanic peoples / languages, Catholic / Protestant churches, West Roman Empire, capitalism during the Cold War, EU / NATO, and Europe. The East is associated with Slavic peoples / languages, Orthodox churches / Islam, East Roman Empire / Ottoman Empire, communism during the Cold War, Russia, and Asia. The more boxes you tick, the more strongly you are in that camp. Countries far away from Europe are only Western or Eastern by extrapolation.

(In a similar way, the Europe / Asia / Africa divide is fundamentally a Mediterranean concept. The farther away from the Mediterranean you go, the less sense it will make.)

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