Definition
The first known usage of the term 'Southeast Europe' was by Austrian researcher Johann Georg von Hahn (1811–1869) as broader term than the traditional Balkans. Unlike the United Nations definitions of Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Southern Europe and Northern Europe, there are no clear and universally accepted geographical or historical divisions that delineate this region. However, if United Nations definitions of bordering macroregions are done, the rest can be considered as Central Europe.
There are four possible definitions of "Southeastern Europe". The Balkan Peninsula south of the River Danube-River Sava-River Kupa line; the European territories of the former Ottoman Empire; and the substantially larger space with a northern delineation that respects actual borders, promoted by the European Union from 1999. Finally, there is a European Union co-funded regional development model that adds Austria, the eastern Regions of Italy and southwestern Ukraine.
Read more about this topic: Southeast Europe
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“It’s a rare parent who can see his or her child clearly and objectively. At a school board meeting I attended . . . the only definition of a gifted child on which everyone in the audience could agree was “mine.””
—Jane Adams (20th century)
“Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in
principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic
definition of truth is doomed to failure equally.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)