„East – Central Europe” has been, and still is, defined [...] as a „part of Europe of an individual special character”. Geographically it is limited by the Baltic and the Adriatic seas, internally it is naturally divided by the Carpathians, and it is characteristic of fluid borderlines in both the east and the west, moved forwards and backwards depending on „powers at work but also perspectives on the transformations of the political space”. This concept is not merely a part of "the artificial academic systematics" i.e. a hueristic instrument, but it results from actual "structural-historical research". In particular, these are the similarities in social and cultural that allow "East-Central Europe" to come out as an actual autonomous historical category distinguished from both Eastern and Western Europe.

Eduard Muhle,

East-Central Europe in Historiographic Concepts of German Historical Studies...