Monday 23 February 2009

Is there a Central and Eastern Europe (CEE): Polandian's NO!

Polandian wants to "kill" the term Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) because it doesn't reflect the differences between the countries summed up under this headline.

Yet, I am convinced that there is something like "CEE", and have commented in this regard to the article linked above.

1 comments:

Ralf Grahn said...

Julien,

I tend to agree with you. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall it was convenient to speak of Eastern Europe.

After that I have started to think of (roughly) the new EU member states as Central Europe, and their eastern neighbours as Eastern Europe.

Naturally, there are huge differences between the different countries, but so there are between the countries in Western, Southern and Northern Europe.

We need convenient tags, although we do not always define them exactly.

The Polandian's alternative would lead us to write two lines of country names each time we want to speak about the countries in Central Europe - a waste of bytes, I think.

But the main thrust seems to have been the demand to mention Poland separately every time and everywhere.