체제 전환 이후 폴란드 학계에서 논의된 중유럽 지역 명칭 연구

Abstract

The region called ‘Eastern Europe’ in Korea lies between three European seas - the Adriatic Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the Black Sea. In the Polish academic world, this region was called Central Europe, Central-Eastern Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Central and Southern Europe, or several other ways, depending on time and conditions. And each of these names had justification to be called that. In this paper, the authors will focus on the use of the term ‘Central Europe’ and make the argument. Based on the research achievements of the Institute of Political Studies, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the current discourse in Polish academic world is the subject of this thesis. Numerous attempts have been made to define the concept of Central Europe in Polish literature on international relations. In this process, controversy often arose over which countries should be included in the Central European region. In this paper, while developing the thesis on Central European terminology, it was divided into four stages by period. With the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian War in 2022, the concept of ‘Central-Eastern Europe’, which was widely used in Polish academic world, began to lose its reason for existence. In the authors’ opinion, it seems logical to refer to the territory of the Three Seas Initiative as Central Europe. In other words, we conclude that it is reasonable to call Central Europe the group of 12 countries of the Three Seas Initiative, which are members of the European Union.