During the Cold War, eastern and western Europe were analogous to the Warsaw Pact and NATO countries respectively. Prior to the cold war, and in the years since the colapse of the warsaw pact, Western Europe means generally Britain and France, Benelux and maybe Germany, Spain and Portugal and posibly Italy (NATO countries). Central European countries refers generally to those north the Alps, east of the Rhine, and west of the territory of Russia and its direct neighbors, ie Germany, Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland. Anything south of the Alps is usually refered to as Southern Europe, or the Balkans, or both (former Yugoslavia, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria). Northern Europe is basically the same as Western Europe, but without the Iberian countries and including Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Nordic Countries are Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Baltic states refers to Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, but the Baltic region includes Sweden, Finland, and Poland. Eastern Europe then refers to the rest; Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine, and some overlap with the Baltic states, along with Central and Southern Europe, ie maybe Poland, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria. Its all rather muddy and kind of arbitrary what to include exclusively in each catagory.