Eastern Europe

• 1. Introduction

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  Eastern Europe resists a single definition. Scholars have noted that there are almost as many definitions of the region as there are scholars who study it. That observation, striking on its own, points to something deeper: the very idea of Eastern Europe has been in constant redefinition since the Enlightenment, and the boundaries people draw around it reveal as much about politics and history as they do about geography.

  The Ural Mountains mark the region's eastern edge with relative clarity. The western boundary is another matter entirely. Narrow definitions include only Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. Broader ones sweep in the Balkans, the Baltic states, the Caucasus nations, and the Visegrád Group countries of Central Europe. Russia, by any measure, is the largest and most populous country within the region.

  What makes this more than a cartographic dispute is that the term carries weight. It has been called pejorative, tied to assumptions that the east is poorer and less developed than the west. During the Cold War years of 1947-1989, Eastern Europe became nearly synonymous with the Eastern Bloc and the Warsaw Pact. That association lingered long after the Iron Curtain fell in 1989. Whether the label describes a geography, a religion, a political history, or a stereotype depends entirely on who is drawing the map.

• 2. The Schism That Shaped a Region

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  The East-West Schism of 1054 did more to fix the cultural geography of Eastern Europe than any political border. After the formal break between the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic churches, large portions of the east built a shared identity through the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Church Slavonic liturgical language, and the Cyrillic alphabet. That framework offered a kind of cultural coherence that persisted through centuries of political upheaval.

  Alcuin of York, during the Carolingian Renaissance of the 9th century, had shaped the earliest idea of Europe as a cultural sphere. His conception was limited to territories practising Western Christianity. Eastern Christendom was not fully counted as European in that cultural sense until the early 19th century. The gap that idea created took many generations to close, and some would argue it never fully closed.

  Countries today with dominant Orthodox churches include Belarus, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine, along with Armenia, which is predominantly Armenian Apostolic. Followers of Eastern Orthodoxy also constitute notable minorities in the predominantly Muslim countries of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kazakhstan, and Kosovo. A separate stream developed from the 16th century onward: Eastern Catholic Churches spread across parts of the region, including through the establishment of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in 1596. Forms of Eastern Protestantism also took root in countries ranging from Estonia to Croatia to the Czech Republic.

• 3. Serfdom and the Long Economy

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  Serfdom shaped the lives of agricultural workers across Eastern Europe well into the 19th century. The system bore a resemblance to slavery in one particular way: those under it had no meaningful freedom of movement. The key distinction was that landowners could not buy or sell serfs independently from the land to which those serfs were permanently attached.

  The system had risen in the 14th and 15th centuries, at precisely the moment when serfdom was declining in Western Europe. Its peak came in the 17th and 18th centuries. Russia's abolition of serfdom in 1861 marked a signal moment in its decline, though the terms of emancipation were harsh. Former serfs were required to pay annual cash sums to their former masters for decades after their nominal freedom.

  Historians through the 20th century tended to portray serfs as passive and isolated, emphasizing master-serf labor relations above all else. Later scholars pushed back on this, arguing it minimized the complexity of life under the system. Meanwhile, the economic lag was real: before 1870 and to some extent until World War I, industrialization that had advanced in Northwestern and Central Europe and the United States had not extended in any significant way to Eastern Europe. Russia remained largely rural and agricultural, its autocratic rulers keeping the peasantry bound in place. Areas where women had greater autonomy, the source notes, developed more quickly in terms of numeracy during the 18th-century catch-up period.

• 4. Redrawn After World War I

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  The Versailles Treaty of 1919 validated a surge of ethnic nationalism that reshaped Eastern Europe out of the ruins of three empires. The breakup of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires, along with partial losses to the German Empire, produced a wave of new or reconstituted states. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia all emerged. Poland was reconstituted after the partitions of the 1790s had divided it between Prussia, Austria, and Russia.

  Ukraine appeared briefly as an independent country before being absorbed by the Soviet Union. Austria and Hungary survived with drastically reduced boundaries. Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania remained independent. The new states, however, carried a structural weakness from the start: most were still largely rural, with few urban centres and limited industry.

  Ethnic Germans constituted the largest single ethnic minority across the region. In places like the Sudetenland, parts of Poland, and parts of Slovenia, German-speakers were the local majority. That fact generated persistent conflict over self-determination. The League of Nations minority protection regime was supposed to shield minority populations across the new states. Nearly all of those states moved toward democracy in the 1920s, but by the 1930s depression years, all except Czechoslovakia and Finland had abandoned democratic governance in favour of autocratic or single-party rule. One by one they proved too weak to resist Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, and between 1938 and 1945 they were taken over.

• 5. Iron Curtain Years

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  On the 5th of March 1946, Winston Churchill described what had descended across the continent in his "Sinews of Peace" address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia."

  By 1948, every country in Eastern Europe had adopted communist modes of control. The mechanism was deliberate. The Soviet secret police, the NKVD, worked alongside local communists to create new secret police forces, using leadership trained in Moscow. Political enemies were arrested from prepared lists. Communist parties took power gradually, first allowing coalition partners and then systematically eliminating them. Interior ministries, which controlled local police, were the first prize. Control of mass media, especially radio, followed. Then came the education system, farmland confiscation, and seizure of civil society organizations ranging from church groups to farmers' associations to sports clubs.

  Under Stalin's direct instructions, these nations rejected grants from the American Marshall Plan and joined the Molotov Plan instead, which later evolved into the Comecon. Albania broke with the Soviet Union in the early 1960s over the Sino-Soviet split and aligned with China; it formally left the Warsaw Pact in September 1968 after the suppression of the Prague Spring, then broke from China in 1978 when China established diplomatic relations with the United States. Yugoslavia, meanwhile, had never joined the Warsaw Pact and instead became a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement.

• 6. After 1989

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  Germany's reunification in 1990 set the tone for what followed. The Federal Republic of Germany absorbed the German Democratic Republic peacefully. In 1991, COMECON, the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet Union itself were all dissolved. Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia declared or regained their independence. Czechoslovakia peacefully divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993.

  The initial economic transition was turbulent. High inflation, high unemployment, low growth, and heavy government debt were common problems across the region. By 2000, most of these economies had stabilized. Between 2004 and 2013, ten countries of Central and Eastern Europe joined the European Union: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, and Slovakia entered in 2004; Bulgaria and Romania followed in 2007; Croatia joined in 2013.

  Fiscal patterns within the group vary considerably. Average government debt runs close to 44% of GDP, but the range is wide, from near 10% at the low end to 97% at the high end. Croatia, Hungary, and Slovenia all carry government debt exceeding 70% of GDP. Tax revenues in the region typically fall between 15 and 19% of GDP, with rates above 20% uncommon. Several countries, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, have adopted the euro as their common currency, while others maintain national currencies. As of January 2002, the European Parliament noted that Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia may also enter the European Union in the future.