Western Europe

Western Europe is a geographic and cultural subregion of Europe. Across the UN geoscheme, the CIA World Factbook and the EU's own EuroVoc classification, the most consistently included states are France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria and Switzerland, with the United Kingdom and Ireland folded in under broader definitions. The term originally distinguished the Latin West of the former Roman Empire; during the Cold War it took on a sharply political meaning after Winston Churchill's 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech split the continent into opposing blocs. Since the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, the term has drifted back toward a geographic and cultural grouping rather than a political one, though the Cold War division still shapes how some analysts use it.