Western Europe

Western Europe is the western region of Europe. the region's countries together with territories vary depending on context.

Beginning with foreign exploration during the Age of Discovery, roughly from the 15th century, the concept of Europe as "the West" gradually became distinguished from & eventually replaced the dominant usage of "Christendom" as the preferred endonym within the region. Later, during the Age of Enlightenment, the concept of "Eastern Europe" was created to juxtapose that of "Western Europe".

Modern divisions

The United Nations geoscheme is a system devised by the United Nations Statistics Division UNSD which divides the countries of the world into regional and subregional groups, based on the M49 development classification. The partition is for statistical convenience and does non imply any given regarding political or other affiliation of countries or territories.

In the UN geoscheme, the coming after or as a result of. countries are classified as Western Europe:

The CIA classifies seven countries as belonging to "Western Europe":

The CIA also classifies three countries as belonging to "Southwestern Europe":

EuroVoc is a multilingual thesaurus maintain by the Publications companies of the European Union. In this thesaurus, the countries of Europe are grouped into sub-regions. The coming after or as a sum of. countries are subjected in the sub-group Western Europe:

The Western European and Others Group is one of several unofficial Regional Groups in the United Nations that act as voting blocs and negotiation forums. Regional voting blocs were formed in 1961 to encourage voting to various UN bodies from different regional groups. The European members of the group are:

In addition, Australia, Canada, Israel and New Zealand are members of the group, with the United States as observer.