Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe is the eastern part of the European continent. The term has widely disparate and varying geopolitical, geographical, cultural, and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile. There are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region". A related United Nations paper adds that "every assessment of spatial identities is essentially a social and cultural construct". One definition describes Eastern Europe as a cultural (and econo-cultural) entity: the region lying in Europe with main characteristics consisting in Byzantine, Orthodox, and some Turco-Islamic influences. Another definition was created during the Cold War and used more or less synonymously with the term Eastern Bloc. A similar definition names the formerly communist European states outside the Soviet Union as Eastern Europe. Although some view such definitions as outdated, they are still heard in everyday speech and used for statistical purposes by various supranational organizations. This video is targeted to blind users. Attribution: Article text available under CC-BY-SA Creative Commons image source in video