The East-West division of Europe arose out of numerous misjudgments and as a consequence contributed for decades to the imperilment of the entire Atlantic Alliance.

Much that is to be said about the area begins with the terms of identification used nowadays. Misunderstanding Europe East, West and Center by politicians in the 20th century, explains to a significant extent why the region became the cradle out of which WWI and especially its second “improved” round have arisen. The same goes for the not much less violent, but for observers in the West more subdued, conflict that has been referred to in popular terminology as “Cold War” and has been arguably “WWIII.”

Being a point of development along a continuum, “history” does not end conveniently in our own day. A popular error sees history as a conglomerate of information that puts a dot at the end of the sentence that terminates the chapter and the book. Actually, history functions like the sights on a shot-gun that is about to be fired at a target determined by the recoil from the arm’s last use. This feature takes care of another misconception: namely that history predetermines the future. This type of prediction only functions retroactively when a need arises to ingeniously predict the past. The point is that history, if it includes some knowledge of the past, does not repeat itself. There is no side-road leading back to a position suited for a new beginning on the continuum.

If you approach Europe with open eyes you do not get a unit, as the term superficially implies. Simply put, there are several Europes. The reader, if questioned, will be likely to discover – possibly to his own amazement – that by Europe he understands the thin western rim of that continent. This Western Europe ends at best at the eastern terminal of Vienna’s public transportation system. Metternich’s bon mot asserts that that is where Asia begins. Indeed, in the mind of the lucky West, a line separates two divergent entities, two different fates and also the known from a largely unknown zone that becomes notable only on account of the disruptions it causes.

Admittedly, within Europe there are dividing lines. None of them, however, implies that, if evaluated realistically, the fate of one section can be independent of the others. Western Europe, Central Europe and Eastern Europe have been historically, and also in the era of the official and informal world wars, interrelated. Admittedly, these intertwined roles have not only been an expression of geography but also of political cultures and socio-economic development. Whether the similarities or the differences are more significant is a matter of judgment colored by taste. Let us go beyond the unifying factors or religion (the Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant mutations of Christianity) and ethnic belonging (Germans, “Latins” and Slavs) and the Indo-European roots of the majority’s related languages. Once this is done and the histories are analyzed, three, (and not two!) internally dissimilar, main zones emerge. These are Western Europe, Central Europe and Eastern Europe.

The closer definition of the latter two and their comparison with the West facilitates the task of differentiation beyond the trivial, such as in, “East is when the churches have onion-shaped towers.” (As in the case of too many accepted rules, this one is not quite true either.)

The critical features to concentrate upon as one draws dividing lines are derivatives of the Enlightenment which is indebted to the Renaissance and (yes!) Feudalism. The Enlightenment’s consequences include a popularly accepted concept of freedom and the ability to implement (some of) its theory into practice. This practise involves not only institutions, but also a complementary political culture that determines interaction outside of the formally structured political realm. The political dimension has a parallel in the area of economic development, which is constructed out of the scientific revolution and its interaction with capitalism. This leads to the creation of an increasing amount of (not equally) shared wealth and the trend of lessening poverty due to the autonomous economic actions by personally free individuals.

Once the ideal criterion is applied, to the extent that its standards are approximated, dividing lines can be drawn. Some of the instinctive associations involved in the simple East-West terminology collapse if this is done because what is tagged “East” today turns out to be more “West” than assumed. The easternmost renaissance city is Cracow (Poland). One of the greatest renaissance kings is Mátyás Corvinus, who ruled over a Hungary that was then a major power. The kings of Bohemia, Poland and Hungary were once in a position to meet in Visegrád to deal with the “German question.” Until the Communist take-over in 1948 the Bohemian-Moravian sections of Czechoslovakia were among the most industrialized areas of Europe. The Magyars hold about fifteen Nobel prizes, most of them earned in the sciences. (You can thank them for computers, jet planes and nuclear technology.) Until its partition in the 18th century by Russia, Prussia and Austria, Poland regularly elected its kings and had parliamentary rule. In 1222 Hungary produced a document independently of, but in its content most similar, to the Magna Charta. Transsylvania’s laws guaranteed religious tolerance when further west heads were being chopped off in the name of the true faith. The list could go on.

Regardless of the shortcomings inherent in generalizations an allegation can be made: Central Europe has for long been a geographical expression. It describes a region that was similar in kind to the western zone of Europe. The main dividing line now implied by the terms East-West originally delineated the western-central region’s eastern border. Beyond that Caesaropapism (the idiology of the unity of state and church), serfdom, and regimes ideologically opposed to political and economic modernization prevailed. Differently put, the dividing line ran much further to the east of where it is currently postulated to be.

The purpose of this essay is to correct misapplied terms. The errors in terminology lead to the imprecision of political judgments and therefore involve more than bad history. The East-West division of Europe arose out of  numerous misjudgments and has as a consequence contributed for decades to the imperilment of the entire Atlantic Alliance.

As far as the misjudgments are concerned, they go back to a mistaken security policy of Paris.  Due to the ignorance regarding the region of the British and of President Wilson that became the basis of a peace in 1919. It not only failed to solve the problems of central Europe (note that Germany is also in “Mitteleuropa”) but additionally it exacerbated tensions while weakening the region’s political structures that were to deal with them. Notice: the core of Hitler’s power was the consequence of his control of Central Europe that the negligent “peace makers” had dropped into his lap. Subsequently Stalin proved to be a worthy successor of Hitler.

Along with other factors the idea that east is east, west is west, Soviet Russia is “east,” therefore the east is to be the Soviets’ zone, led to the drawing up of a murderous line across Europe. This Iron Curtain became a front line separating two different, and accordingly hostile, worlds at the verge of confrontation. In this ongoing political-economic-social-ideological conflict, one of the major liabilities of the West – organized as NATO – was that the resources and the know-how of central Europe had been ceded to Moscow in 1945. Being able to use the region as a launching pad once the cold war grew hot significantly augmented the Kremlin’s advantage. The USSR’s control of that part of “eastern Europe” that was actually “Central Europe” has explicitly not been contested. Even John Foster Dulles, long everybody’s favorite right-wing extremist Commie-hating hard-liner, went to great pains to reassure the Soviets that central Europe was considered to be in its sphere. Therefore, the east-west concept that overlooked the existence of a “central Europe” made uncontested what Moscow held because of an amalgam of mindless Western acquiescence and physical conquest. The abnormal situation was regarded, as the terminologies reveal, as being natural. (In the case of Yugoslavia, the inclination to declare Croatia and Slovenia to be Balkan countries whenever it was convenient represents a comparable error grown out of an ignorance that contributed to injustice.)

The error inherent in the labels that tag Europe’s regions involve more than injustice to the indigenous. Those who nurture the misconceptions also suffer, whether they notice it or not. At the end of the second world war Stalin was handed as a reward not only what Hitler granted him while they were still cronies, but heaps more. This could happen not only because FDR misjudged “Uncle Joe.” It came about on account of an equation of central Europe with eastern Europe and therefore having no qualms about declaring that all that falls within a natural sphere of interest of the Russian state of the moment. Once Stalin assumed Hitler’s inheritance and threatened from his newly gained western bases the remnant of Europe (to the extent that external, that is US help, was needed to hold the line) he benefited from having been given areas that had never before been under Russia’s control.

Once the east-west struggle became apparent, an east-west division of Europe (at the expense of the ignored middle) became a natural adjunct. The trap involved in this concept was that it allowed a cop-out. In the west it seemed that its security problem was to contain the USSR in its lot and to prevent it from grabbing the real-estate across the fence. The result was a strategic advantage for the USSR. Regardless of the cheap talk about decolonization (to be implemented elsewhere) the USSR’s control of conquered land and people utterly alien to her was, not seriously challenged. All that the West really asked for was to be allowed to retain what it held rightfully. In offering the Kremlin recognition of its conquests in exchange for being left alone, the West had an excellent internal excuse for offering a foolish deal. Consciences were eased and the justified fears of an expansion-bent system quelled, by alleging that the situation was somehow natural. Moscow had what it could have due to affinities. Therefore the task was to convince the Kremlin that it should be content with what was rightfully its by the distorted east-west logic and to accept the existing division of the Continent (and the world) as nature-given and permanent.

Summing up, the misuse of the term “Eastern Europe” has, in a way that would not surprise Orwell, helped to cover up several improprieties. These began with the effortless giving away of central Europe, once proclaimed to be “eastern” to Stalin. Afterwards the terminology proved to be useful for putting a good face on the division of Europe as being God given and culturally-politically pre-ordained. This involved more than injustice to the countries and peoples of central Europe. Besides implying that dictatorship, underdevelopment and systems of inequity are natural to the entire region (central and even eastern Europe included) the traps inherent in the term justified an unnatural situation. The convenient cop-out that allowed the West to pretend “there is no problem as things are the way they are regrettably naturally meant to be” did more than allow them to acquiesce in the enslavement of the majority of Europeans. The successful verbal manipulation meant that the playing field was not even and that a massive advantage was credited to the Soviets’ score before the match began. That this foolishness did not finally result in a military confrontation that imperiled the existence of the free part of Europe is due more to the resistance of the subjugated and the built-in weaknesses of any Communist system, than to the heroic resistance of the West, especially western Europe and, sorry to say, her intellectuals.