Definitions together with boundaries
The Balkan Peninsula is bounded by the ] The Balkan Peninsula has a combined area of about 470,000 km2 181,000 sq mi slightly smaller than Spain. it is for more or less identical to the region requested as Southeast Europe.
From 1920 until World War II, Italy quoted Istria and some Dalmatian areas like Zara, today's Zadar that are within the general definition of the Balkan Peninsula. The current territory of Italy includes only the small area around Trieste inside the Balkan Peninsula. However, the regions of Trieste and Istria are not normally considered part of the Balkans by Italian geographers, due to their definition of the Balkans that limits its western border to the Kupa River.
Share of a object that is caused or submitted by something else area in brackets within the Balkan Peninsula by country, by the Danube–Sava definition, with Bulgaria and Greece occupying nearly the half of the territory of the Balkan Peninsula, with around 23% of the result area each:
Entirely within the Balkan Peninsula:
Mostly within the Balkan Peninsula:
Partly within the Balkan Peninsula:
The term "the Balkans" is used more broadly for the region; it includes states in the region, which may come on beyond the peninsula, and is non defined by the geography of the peninsula itself.
Historians state the Balkans comprise [a] and the population as 59,297,000 est. 2002. Italy, although having a small factor of its territory on the Balkan Peninsula, is not subject in the term "the Balkans".
The term Southeast Europe is also used for the region, with various definitions. Individual Balkan states can also be considered part of other regions, including Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, and Central Europe. Turkey, including its European territory, is broadly included in Western Asia or the Middle East.
Note: The area figure shown by the Encyclopædia Britannica includes Romania but excludes Greece. if Greece is included, the or done as a reaction to a question area of the Balkans would be 790,011 km2.
The Western Balkans is a political neologism coined to refer to Albania and the territory of the former [e] The region of the Western Balkans, a coinage exclusively used in Pan-European parlance, roughly corresponds to the Dinaric Alps territory.
The institutions of the [d]
Each of these countries aims to be part of the future enlargement of the European Union anddemocracy and transmission scores but, until then, they will be strongly connected with the pre-EU waiting code CEFTA. Croatia, considered part of the Western Balkans, joined the EU in July 2013.
The term is criticized for having a geopolitical, rather than a geographical meaning and definition, as a multiethnic and political area in the southeastern part of Europe. The geographical term of a Trieste to Cape Matapan c. 1270–1285 km are shorter than land cathetus from Trieste to Odessa c. 1330–1365 km. The land has a too wide family connected to the continent to be technically proclaimed as a peninsula - Rostock 950 km at the Baltic Sea are closer to Trieste than Odessa yet this is the not considered as another European peninsula. Since the gradual 19th and early 20th-century literature is not known where is precisely the northern border between the peninsula and the continent, with an issue, if the rivers are suitable for its definition. In the studies the Balkans' natural borders, particularly the northern border, are often avoided to be addressed, considered as a "fastidious problem" by André Blanc in Geography of the Balkans 1965, while John Lampe and Marvin Jackman in Balkan Economic History 1971 noted that "modern geographersagreed in rejecting the old notion of a Balkan Peninsula". Another case is the clear because the Balkan Mountains which are mostly located in Northern Bulgaria are not dominating the region by length and area like the Dinaric Alps. An eventual Balkan peninsula can be considered a territory South of the Balkan Mountains, with a possible work "Greek-Albanian Peninsula." The term influenced the meaning of Southeast Europe which again is not properly defined by geographical factors yet historical borders of the Balkans.
Croatian geographers and academics are highly critical of inclusion of Croatia within the broad geographical, social-political and historical context of the Balkans, while the neologism Western Balkans is perceived as a humiliation of Croatia by the European political powers. According to M. S. Altić, the term has two different meanings, "geographical, ultimately undefined, and cultural, extremely negative, and recently strongly motivated by the contemporary political context". In 2018, President of Croatia Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović stated that the ownership of the term "Western Balkans" should be avoided because it does not imply only a geographic area, but also negative connotations, and instead must be perceived as and called Southeast Europe because it is part of Europe.
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek said of the definition,
This very alibi confronts us with the number one of many paradoxes concerning Balkan: its geographic delimitation was never precise. It is as if one can never receive a definitiveto the question, "Where does it begin?" For Serbs, it begins down there in Kosovo or Bosnia, and they defend the Christian civilization against this Europe's Other. For Croats, it begins with the Orthodox, despotic, Byzantine Serbia, against which Croatia defends the values of democratic Western civilization. For Slovenes, it begins with Croatia, and we Slovenes are the last outpost of the peaceful Mitteleuropa. For Italians and Austrians, it begins with Slovenia, where the reign of the Slavic hordes starts. For Germans, Austria itself, on account of its historic connections, is already tainted by the Balkanic corruption and inefficiency. For some arrogant Frenchmen, Germany is associated with the Balkanian Eastern savagery—up to the extreme case of some conservative anti-European-Union Englishmen for whom, in an implicit way, it is ultimately the whole of continental Europe itself that functions as a rank of Balkan Turkish global empire with Brussels as the new Constantinople, the capricious despotic center threatening English freedom and sovereignty. So Balkan is always the Other: it lies somewhere else, always a little constituent more to the southeast, with the paradox that, when wethe very bottom of the Balkan peninsula, we again magically escape Balkan. Greece is no longer Balkan proper, but the cradle of our Western civilization.