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In conversations with Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky was wont to call the region in question "Western Asia," in response to "Eastern Europe." In point of fact, it is no simple task to define an area in which borders have as a rule been fluid, where competing empires have divided the region over the years with little regard to its inhabitants or their desires. And in the twentieth century, the domination of the former-Soviet Union in this sphere made most definitions politically sensitive, ideologically bound. For many years, the region has been called Eastern Europe. Which countries ought to be included in the notion of a "Central and Eastern Europe"? Perhaps here we can rely on Milan Kundera, who saw this cultural space as comprising Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia; the countries of the former Yugoslavia; the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia; Ukraine and Belarus; and the countries of the Balkans - Rumania, Moldova and Bulgaria - countries that, as the Czech author has noted, were in the Soviet period "threatened with the loss of their cultural and spiritual identity," and which now are faced with new challenges in determining their "cultural and spiritual" identities. At the same time, the geographical terminology for the region continues to be at the very least confusing, and as yet unresolved.

Questions of geography are certainly of less import in areas like the U.S. where borders are clear and uncontended, where demarcations between the states, for example, are but minor points of passing interest on the interstate. In other parts of the world, however, where borders have been changed, often by force and with sometimes alarming frequency, where political regimes and systems change, where matters of ethnicity merge and blend with notions of the national, geography becomes a matter of utmost importance, one that is intimately connected with questions of national and self-identity. In this light, the question of whether we term the region in question Central or Eastern is not easily answered--and not for lack of effort over the last sixty years. It can be argued, however, that the habit of labeling the region "Eastern Europe" is one informed by the era of the Cold War, when the countries of the Warsaw Pact, together with Yugoslavia were viewed from the West as one monolithic zone, an area dominated by totalitarian ideology and a frequent assumption of uniformity of culture. This pertained not only to the fraternal "People's Democracies" of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Rumania, but to the now independent states of the Baltics (Estonia, Lativia and Lithuania) Belorus', Ukraine and Moldova. Until the momentous 1990s, studies of the region were peripheral to Soviet studies--which in many ways were primarily directed at things Russian. Slavic and Russian departments throughout the country, to be sure, housed the odd Czech, Polish, Ukrainian or Serbo-Croatian program, but by and large these cultures, apart from some notable exceptions, received scant attention in the academy. Eastern Europe became the double-E in many area studies programs (REES, CREES) and professional journals and associations (SEEJ, AATSEEL), and the naming of the region became automatic and fixed.