The term "Eastern Europe" suggests a self-contained world of kindred regions. This is fiction, and to some extent we can reconstruct precisely how it originated. It may be founded on older images of Russia, but it goes back primarily to the French Enlightenment. For centuries before that, the only cultural and political axis of significance had been the north-south divide. Following the Renaissance, the "barbaric" regions north of the Alps sought to appropriate the political and cultural legacy of the Roman Empire. This led to the development in parallel with colonialism of competing notions of what constituted the center of the "civilized" world.

The impetus for a shift to a west-east cultural axis came from Paris around the middle of the 18th century, when French Enlightenment thinkers pronounced the orient – which combines the geographical "east" with proximity to "orient" to be that region that remained closed to the French or European Enlightenment.

The east-west axis marked out a descent from the center of enlightened civilization into less and less civilized zones. For travellers, the road to the East, from its supposed beginnings in Poland, Hungary, or Galicia, became a voyage into increasingly Asiatic zones. In the process, perceptions were adapted, sometimes in highly fanciful ways, to fit in with the preconceived expectation of encountering a lower level of civilization. Barbarism was now located in the East.

It was only with the emergence of this idea that outsiders started to view Eastern Europe as a single entity. The West asserted the right to define the prevailing level of civilization in different regions, and increasingly Europe defined itself against areas to its east. In this context, it was easy to ignore that even more westerly regions did not consist solely of urban centers of modernization, characterized by refined behavior.