East-Central Europe is the region between German-, Hungarian-, and West Slavic-speaking Europe and the East Slavic countries of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. Those lands are described as situated "between two": "between two worlds, between two stages, between two futures". The concept differs from that of Central and Eastern Europe which is based on criteria whereby the states of Central and Eastern Europe belong to two different geographical regions of Europe.

Definitions

Oskar Halecki

In the 1950s, Oskar Halecki, who distinguished four regions in Europe (Western, West Central, East Central, and Eastern Europe), defined East-Central Europe as a region from Finland to Greece, "the eastern part of Central Europe, between Sweden, Germany, and Italy, on the one hand, and Turkey and Russia on the other". According to Halecki:"In the course of European history, a great variety of peoples in this region created their own independent states, sometimes quite large and powerful; in connection with Western Europe they developed their individual national cultures and contributed to the general progress of European civilization."

Paul Robert Magocsi

Paul Robert Magocsi described this region in his work Historical Atlas of East Central Europe. His idea distinguished Central Europe into 3 main zones:

United Nations

United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) was set up to consider the technical problems of domestic standardization of geographical names. The Group is composed of experts from various linguistic/geographical divisions that have been established at the UN Conferences on the Standardization of Geographical Names.

Academic institutions

Other contributors

Southeast Europe is distinguished from the Balkans, defined as the region consisting of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia.

Narrow definition

East-Central Europe is sometimes defined as the eastern part of Central Europe and is limited to the member states of the Visegrád Group – Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. This definition is close to the German concept of de:Ostmitteleuropa.