Regional Outlook : A New Continental Divide? : Forget the compass. Europe is no longer East and West. But what is it? In a search for the answer, the State Department is heading for middle ground.

On a continent where countries have such odd names as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and some cities have undergone three name changes this century, it should come as no surprise that Europeans take geopolitical designations very seriously.

So it was with considerable appreciation that officials of the formerly Communist nations of Europe received a decision by the U.S. State Department to do away with the unpopular term “Eastern Europe” in describing the onetime satellite states of the former Soviet Union.

The policy shift has drawn little notice in Washington, where it was first mentioned publicly by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke in testimony to Congress in late September. But to those attuned to the historical and cultural sensitivities in this region, the pronouncement is seen as long-overdue confirmation that Europe cannot be defined merely by the compass points East and West.

The middle is back, and it goes by the name Central Europe.

“The change helps make each country here visible as an individual entity rather than a sub-part of one big, gray mass,” said Pavel Bratinka, Czech deputy foreign minister. “It is a clear sign that even beyond the Atlantic Ocean they are starting to differentiate among us.”

It did not, of course, require a State Department decree to resurrect Central Europe in the minds of Czechs and other self-described Central Europeans, many of whom have been speaking rather directly about their distaste for the “Eastern Europe” label.

The notion of returning to Central Europe first became popular a decade ago among intellectuals and dissidents disenchanted with Communist rule in the former Czechoslovakia and elsewhere.

Czechs have been particularly perturbed by the “Eastern” designation, noting that Prague lies west of such indisputably non-Eastern capitals as Vienna and Stockholm.

“ ‘Central Europe’ has been the PC thing to say around here for quite some time now,” said Jason Kelleher, admissions officer at the Central European University in Prague, a graduate school whose main campus is in Budapest, Hungary.

In part, the move toward Central Europe is cultural snobbery, an effort by former Soviet client states to distance themselves from countries such as Ukraine and Belarus that were actually part of the Soviet Union. In the pecking order of subjugation, many self-described Central Europeans see a huge difference between countries that were under Soviet dominance and those actually consumed by the empire.

“I wouldn’t admit it publicly, but part of this has to do with all of us looking down on our eastern neighbors,” a high-ranking Polish official said.

But the rush to embrace Central Europe also has some very practical considerations. For countries with aspirations to join the European Union, NATO and other European institutions, the shift from Eastern to Central Europe is seen as a large step toward the West. This is particularly true for the so-called Visegrad countries--Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic--whose representatives met in Visegrad, Hungary, two years ago to coordinate their bids for European integration.

“For some time it was Eastern Europe, and now it is Central Europe,” said Longin Pastusiak, deputy chairman of the Polish Parliament’s foreign relations committee. “I am looking forward to the period when it is only Europe.”

Countries such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania trace their Central European credentials to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the great European power, seated in Vienna, that emerged in the 16th Century. Even after its dissolution at the end of World War I, its former subjects never gave up on the empire’s notion of being at the core of the Continent.

But history intervened near the end of World War II, and then there was a hole in the center of the European doughnut for almost four decades.

The disappearance of Central Europe is most commonly blamed on the Yalta Conference in February, 1945, the last wartime meeting of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, during which the postwar settlement dividing Europe into spheres of influence was worked out. Afterward, convenient political delineations--namely, East and West--took precedence over strictly geographic and historic ones in charting a new map of Europe.

The terms “East” and “West” were soon applied to the occupied zones of vanquished Germany as well, designations that were easier understood than the Federal Republic of Germany (West) and the German Democratic Republic (East).

With Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and East Germany relegated to satellite status of the Soviet Union--a country so eastward that it straddled the Ural Mountains and spilled into Asia--it was simple for the world to refer collectively to the Soviet subjects as Eastern Europeans.

“An artificial map was imposed on Europe that divided everything into ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western,’ ” said Piotr Nowina-Konopka, a foreign affairs expert in the Polish Parliament. “There was a clear division of influence, and such countries as Poland were simply sent to the corner. Our bad luck was that we were sent to the eastern corner.”

This folding of Central Europe into Eastern Europe occurred gradually as the Cold War grew more intense and the rhetoric of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry more pronounced. In a famous 1946 speech, Churchill pronounced: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia.”

With Europe separated into two ideological camps, the Cold War lexicon soon grew geographically simplistic. Americans and West Europeans began referring to the “East-West” divide, and terms such as “Eastern bloc” became synonymous with Soviet-dominated Europe.

For propagandists, it was easy to vilify things “Eastern” and make people fearful of them, since the “East-West” metaphor had a long tradition apart from superpower politics. “East-West” also referred to centuries-old cultural differences between European and Asian peoples, the latter regarded as mysterious and backward.

It was along such lines in the early 1980s that the idea of Central Europe first re-emerged in the Soviet bloc countries. Czech writer Milan Kundera and others, disenchanted with Soviet-style Communist rule in Europe, began drawing distinctions between European and Russian culture, nudging Russia farther and farther east and virtually off the European map.

Former Czech Prime Minister Petr Pithart, a Communist-era dissident who lectures on law and politics, said the concept of Central Europe also focused less on geography than on culture and history. The idea, he said, was that Europeans living roughly between Germany and Russia had a special role to play on the Continent.

This idealized vision of Central Europe emphasized pluralism, multiculturalism, and in the post-Communist context, a civil society in which citizens would fill the moral and social void created by communism. At its core, it included Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and Hungarians but could also extend to Germans, Austrians and Ruthenians, part of present-day Ukraine.

“Central Europe is not for us merely a neutral geographic concept,” Pithart said. “It has certain values on which doubt is cast all the time, which are threatened all the time. It is the most dense area of European pluralism, something like a dark forest where you don’t want to live, but you can’t be without.”

But with the fall of communism, a debate that had been confined mostly to literary circles soon found itself on the political agenda, and with time, into the briefing books at the U.S. State Department. The road from theory to political practice has not been without its bumps, however.

Holbrooke has proposed reorganizing the Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs to reflect the new geopolitical realities of the European Continent.

Unfortunately, reality can be subjective. Ukraine, for example, wants to be known as Central Europe but none of its Central European neighbors include it in the club.

The State Department is also stumped over what to call its office dealing with Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The Germans regard themselves as Central Europeans, but their notion of the region--known as Mitteleuropa--has been interpreted in the past as license to dominate neighbors. Many Europeans would prefer to leave Germany in Western Europe.

So, where is Central Europe?

“It is a touchy thing,” said Bratinka, the Czech deputy foreign minister. “You will not wring out of me anything other than the assertion that the Czech Republic is in Central Europe.”

Reworking the Political Geography of Europe

The Continent’s new politics are challenging traditional terms like “Eastern Europe” and “Western Europe.” Here’s a look at the map of Cold War Europe and how the U.S. State Department is now tentatively proposing to group some of the nations:

COLD WAR EUROPE

1. Western Europe

2. Eastern Europe

3. Soviet Union

CURRENT PROPOSAL

1. Baltic-Nordic

2. North-Central

3. Eastern

4. South Central

Note: Western Europe is being defined as France, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain. Germany, Austria and Switzerland are grouped together; whether they belong in Central Europe is being debated.