Europe’s eastern boundary follows the divide between Western and Orthodox Christianity

Evidence

The civilizational paradigm thus provides a clear-cut and compelling answer to the question confronting West Europeans: Where does Europe end? Europe ends where Western Christianity ends and Islam and Orthodoxy begin. This is the answer which West Europeans want to hear, which they overwhelmingly support sotto voce, and which various intellectuals and political leaders have explicitly endorsed. It is necessary, as Michael Howard argued, to recognize the distinction, blurred during the Soviet years, between Central Europe or Mitteleuropa and Eastern Europe proper. Central Europe includes “those lands which once formed part of Western Christendom; the old lands of the Hapsburg Empire, Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, together with Poland and the eastern marches of Germany. The term ‘Eastern Europe’ should be reserved for those regions which developed under the aegis of the Orthodox Church: the Black Sea communities of Bulgaria and Romania which only emerged from Ottoman domination in the nineteenth century, and the ‘European’ parts of the Soviet Union.” Western Europe’s first task, he argued, must “be to reabsorb the peoples of Central Europe into our cultural and economic community where they properly belong: to reknit the ties between London, Paris, Rome, Munich, and Leipzig, Warsaw, Prague and Budapest.” A “new fault line” is emerging, Pierre Behar commented two years later, “a basically cultural divide between a Europe marked by western Christianity (Roman Catholic or Protestant), on the one hand, and a Europe marked by eastern Christianity and Islamic traditions, on the other.” A leading Finn similarly saw the crucial division in Europe replacing the Iron Curtain as “the ancient cultural fault line between East and West” which places “the lands of the former Austro-Hungarian empire as well as Poland and the Baltic states” within the Europe of the West and the other East European and Balkan countries outside it. This was, a prominent Englishman agreed, the “great religious divide … between the Eastern and Western churches: broadly speaking, between those peoples who received their Christianity from Rome directly or through Celtic or German intermediaries, and those in the East and Southeast to whom it came through Constantinople (Byzantium).” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 430

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Mitteleuropa versus Eastern Europe by the reach of Western Christendom, distinguishing Austria-Hungary and Poland from the Orthodox-influenced Balkans and Russia.