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Up to World War I, "Western Europe" was thought to comprise France, the British Isles and Benelux. These countries represented the democratic victors of both world wars; and their ideological approach was spread further east as a consequence, in a process not unlike the ideological effect of the Napoleonic Wars, when new ideas spread from revolutionary France.
During the Cold WarThe Cold War (c. 1945- 1991) was the open yet restricted rivalry that developed after World War II between groups of nations practicing different ideologies and political systems. On one side was the Soviet Union and its allies, often referred to as the E, this ideological designation of Western Europe was supplemented with the aspect of market economyA market economy is an economy in which most allocations of resources occur as a result of interactions between buyers and sellers of goods and services. It is often contrasted with a planned economy in which most allocations of resources occur as a resul in the West versus the planned economyIn a state with planned economy economic decisions are made by planners, acting (in theory) on behalf of the public, who determine what sorts of goods and services to produce and how they are to be allocated. Since most known planned economies rely on pla of Eastern Europe, reflecting the anti-Bolshevism that was aroused in Western Europe by the Russian Revolution of 1917The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a political movement in Russia that climaxed in 1917 with the overthrow of the provisional government that had replaced the Russian Tsar system, and led to the establishment of the Soviet Union, which lasted until its co and the remaining opposition to the Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR ( Russian: ; tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (SSSR) also called the Soviet Union ( ; tr. Sovetsky Soyuz , was a state in much of the northern region of Eurasia that existed from 1922 until 1 in general. Thus Western Europe came to include both traditional democracies outside of NATOThe North Atlantic Treaty Organisation NATO , sometimes called North Atlantic Alliance Atlantic Alliance or the Western Alliance is an international organization for defense collaboration established in 1949, in support of the North Atlantic Treaty signed, as Finland, Sweden and Switzerland, and some market economy dictatorships, as Portugal and Spain. This is also why NATO members such as Greece and Turkey were generally considered Western European even though they are geographically in the southeast. The borders between Western and Eastern Europe, the Iron Curtain, were securely defended.
Until the enlargement of the European Union of 2004, Western Europe was sometimes associated with that Union, although non-members such as Norway and Switzerland unquestionably were considered parts of Western Europe, although the connection to NATO or to the European Union increasingly may be perceived as historical. Today, a common understanding of Western Europe includes the following parts:
It ought to be borne in mind that the concepts of Europe's division overlap. The Nordic countries being counted to Western Europe does not at all hinder their also being considered part of Northern Europe. Similarly, the Alpine countries may be considered part of Central Europe, and Italy, the Iberian countries, Monaco, Greece and southern France part of Southern Europe as well.