ABSTRACT
The regional understanding of the concept of Central Europe is in itself the product of geo-cultural and geopolitical positioning in perceived global hierarchies by local and emigrant intellectuals in the 20th and early 21st century. The fact that some Western nations could detach from the rest of the world was not based on an overall superiority of Western European economic development but on special geopolitical techniques to counterbalance European disadvantages in the world economy. The combination of hierarchical colonial imagination and new techniques of European colonization proved to be a potent mix, which led to the unquestioned dominance of the West in the world. The geopolitical construction of the concept of Central Europe first appeared during the First World War, and it served German geostrategic interests. Central Europe was seen as a hinterland of German claims toward a better position among the leading nations at the end of the period of imperialism.
