Actually, the “P” country is Portugal. You forgot Andorra and (the British colony of) Gibraltar.
Montenegro.
Giles: That bid of Moldova whose name escaped you is Transnistria, or (more formally) the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic.
:smack: Portugal. I’ll claim a Freudian slip on that one. My Ex lived a number of years in Portugal. And I like the Poles.
Andorra was a total miss. But I remembered and left Gibraltar off intentionally. It is a British Overseas Territory, and their participation in international organizations is as part of GB. Eg in European Parliamentary elections, they vote as part of the South West England constituency. So as far I am concerned it doesn’t count as a country.
For me a division like this would come naturally:
Northern Europe
Nordic Countries : Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland
Baltic Countries: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia
Eastern Europe
Most of the countries formerly belonging to the Soviet Union, and everything east of Austria and Germany.
Western Europe
UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Austria etc.
Southern Europe
Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece, and some of the countries in the Balkans.
France historically has provinces, which are similar to but not quite the same as the regions (example: Brittany is a region of four departmented; add Nantes and you have the province of Brittany).
Ireland historically has five provinces—the Old Irish word for province is coiced, “fifth.” Basically Connacht, Ulster, Munster, Leinster, and the other one. The big four are relatively stable over time, but the borders did move a bit. The fifth one is usally Meath (mostly Meath & Westmeath).
I divide it a bit hierarchically, partly by historic religion and partly by language, and partly by geography.
Celtic—1) Ireland; 2) N. Ireland, Scotland, Man; 3) Wales, Cornwall, Brittany
Romance—1) N. France; 2) S. France, Monaco; 3) Spain, Portugal, Andorra; 4) N. Italy, microstates, Malta; 5) S. Italy / Sicily; 6) Romania, Moldova
Germanic—1) England / S. Scotland; 2) Iceland; 3) Norway, Sweden, Denmark; 4) Germany; 5) Benelux; 6) Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Hungary
Baltic—1) Finland, Estonia; 2) Latvia, Lithuania
Slavic—1) Poland, Czech, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia; 2) Russia, Belarus, Ukraine; 3) Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Albania
Extreme SE—1) Greece & Greek Cyprus; 2) European Turkey & Turkish Cyprus; 3) Azeris and Turkic Caucausus; 4) Georgia, Armenia, Chechnya, Ossetia, etc.
The UK has the individual countries/provinces, and each of these are split into counties. London has its own assembly ruling on local issues.
Themselves divided into cantons and further down into communes (and, according to an online joke then into cafe booth and floor tiles)
Nitpick : Maltese isn’t a romance language. It’s an Arabic language with borrowings from other languages from around the Mediterranean sea.
Cyprus should be somewhere in your list.
(if it wasn’t for the ridiculous qualifiers for the eurocup I wouldn’t have remembered.)
I know—there are a few other inconsistencies in my list, like Belgium and Albania and what have you. What can I say, it’s idiosyncratic.
It was in my list… kinda… it was explicitly mentioned as being excluded. Nicosia is closer to Beirut (151 miles), Damascus (204 miles), Tel Aviv (228 miles), Ramallah (249 miles), Jerusalem (257 miles), Gaza (261 miles), Amman (267 miles), Ankara (336 miles), Cairo (378 miles), Istanbul (470 miles), and Mosul (553 miles) than it is to Athens (570 miles), which is the closest European capital. Geographically Cyprus is clearly Asian.
It has clear social and economic ties with Europe (namely Greece), which have lead to its inclusion in the EU. But it is no more European than Egypt is. And Alexandria is only 15 miles further from Athens than Nicosia.
North: Baltic, Scandinavian
South: Iberian, Italy, Malta, Balkans
West: Ireland, the UK, France, Benelux
East: Russia, Ukraine, Caucasus, Belarus
Central: the rest
I live in England - all of the above would be comprehensible to me. I would not be able to reel off such an extensive list as that, but I would pretty much instantly understand what anyone was talking about, if they mentioned any of those categories.
you can also divide Europe in :
Rich vs Poor
Small vs Large
Original EU vs Newcomers
Schengenvs Non Schengen
Some of my mental limits don’t include only European countries, and/or include only parts of some countries: Mediterranean. That includes Southeastern France but not the rest, as well as Turkey, Israel and any countries on Africa’s northern shores (and also Portugal, San Marino, the Vatican and Andorra, although they don’t have a Med shore per se, and Monaco).
There’s also Western Europe, and Northern Europe (anywhere which is not Eastern and not Mediterranean), and Eastern Europe (aka former Communist bloc), and Scandinavia, and Those People Who Live on Islands and Speak English.
ETA: the Spanish kingdoms used to have different divisions (and the names of those divisions could be unhomogeneous within a same kingdom - what is that “simple” thing thee speakest of?); the Napoleonic invasion gave us “provinces”, which nowadays are grouped into “Autonomous Regions” defined to correspond more-or-less to historic divisions. Pre-1978, we had provinces and regions but the regions were a mental construct: they didn’t have any kind of government body. Now each AR has an Autonomous Government, as do the two Autonomous Cities, whereas the Provinces are an administrative division but their main impact on government is being the defining unit for Parlamentary elections - there’s no “provincial governments” (there are civil and military provincial governors but they’re administrative managers, not legislators, and they’re sent from Madrid).
Well yeah: ever wonder what all the violence and trouble was about in Ireland in the second half of the 20th century? There’s your answer.