Western Europe

Beginning with the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery, roughly from the 15th century, the concept of Europe as "the West" slowly became distinguished from and eventually replaced the dominant use of "Christendom" as the preferred endonym within the area.

[3] Prior to the Roman conquest, a large part of Western Europe had adopted the newly developed La Tène culture.

As the Roman domain expanded, a cultural and linguistic division appeared between the mainly Greek-speaking eastern provinces, which had formed the highly urbanised Hellenistic civilisation, and the western territories, which in contrast largely adopted the Latin language.

In East Asia, Western Europe was historically known as taixi in China and taisei in Japan, which literally translates as the "Far West".

The Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci was one of the first writers in China to use the Far West as an Asian counterpart to the European concept of the Far East.

A number of historians and social scientists view the Cold War definition of Western and Eastern Europe as outdated or relegating.

[8][9][10] During the final stages of World War II, the future of Europe was decided between the Allies in the 1945 Yalta Conference, between the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, the U.S. President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Premier of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin.

This term had been used during World War II by German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and, later, Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk in the last days of the war; however, its use was hugely popularised by Winston Churchill, who used it in his famous "Sinews of Peace" address on 5 March 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri: From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.Although some countries were officially neutral, they were classified according to the nature of their political and economic systems.

[16] 1 The Hague is the seat of government[17] The climate of Western Europe varies from Mediterranean in the coasts of Italy, Portugal and Spain to alpine in the Pyrenees and the Alps.

The western and northwestern parts have a mild, generally humid climate, influenced by the North Atlantic Current.

Western Europe is a heatwave hotspot, exhibiting upward trends that are three-to-four times faster compared to the rest of the northern midlatitudes.

[20] Multilingualism and the protection of regional and minority languages are recognised political goals in Western Europe today.