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Europe and Russia
Key Terms
Term | Definition |
---|---|
Land Hemisphere | The half of the globe containing the greatest amount of land surface, centered on western Europe. |
City-State | An independent political entity consisting of a single city with (and sometimes without) an immediate hinterland. |
Local Functional Specialization | A hallmark of Europe's economic geography that later spread to many other parts of the world, whereby particular people in particular places concentrate on the production of particular goods and services. |
Industrial Revolution | The term applied to the social and economic changes in agriculture, commerce, and especially manufacturing and urbanization that resulted from technological innovations and greater specialization in late-eighteenth-century Europe |
Complementary | Exists when two regions, through an exchange of raw materials and/or finished products, can specifically satisfy each other's demands. |
Transferability | The capacity to move a good from one place to another at a bearable cost; the ease with which a commodity can be transported. |
Centrifugal Forces | A term employed to designate forces that tend to divide a country- such as internal religious, linguistic, ethnic, or ideological differences. |
Centripetal Forces | Forces tat unite and bind a country together- such as a strong national culture, shared ideological objectives, and a common faith. |
Supernationalism | A venture involving three or more states- political, economic, and/or cultural cooperation to promote shared objectives. |
Four Motors of Europe | Rhone-Alpes (France), Baden-Wurttemberg (Germany), Catalonia (Spain), and Lombardy (Italy). Each is a high-technology-driven region marked by exceptional industrial vitality and economic success not only within Europe but on the global scene as well |
Devolution * | The process whereby regions within a state demand and gain political strength and growing autonomy at the expense of the government. Ex: France, Spain, United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, Sweden. |
Microstate * | A sovereign state that contains a minuscule land area and population. They do not have the attributes of "complete" states, but are on the map as tiny yet independent entities nonetheless. Ex: the eleven microstates of Liechtenstein. |
Site and Situation | The internal attributes of an urban center, including its local spatial organization and physical setting; The external attributes of an urban center, including its relative location or regional position with reference to other non-local places. |
Conurbation * | General term used to identify a large multimetropolitan complex formed by the coalescence of two or more major urban areas. Ex: Randstad, Netherlands |
Shatterbelt * | Region caught between stronger, colliding external cultural-political forces, under persistent stress, and often fragmented by aggressive rivals. Ex: Eastern Europe. |
Entrepot* / Break of Bulk* | A place, usually a port city, where goods are imported, stores, and transshipped; a location along a transport route where goods must be transferred from one carrier to another. Ex: Copenhagen, Denmark. |
Exclave * | A bounded (non-island) piece of territory inhabited by a population governed from a capital city by a representative government.. Ex: Kaliningrad, Russia. |
Continentally | The variation of the continental effect on air temperatures in the interior portions of the world's landmasses. |
Forward capital * | Capital city positioned in actually or potentially contested territory, usually near an international border: it confirms the state's determination to maintain its presence in the area of contention. Ex: St. Petersburg, Russia |
Command economy | The tightly controlled economic system of the former Soviet Union, whereby central planners in Moscow assigned the production of particular goods to particular places, often guided more by socialist ideology than the principles of economic geography. |
Satellite state | The countries of eastern Europe under Soviet hegemony between 1945 and 1989. This tier of countries-the "satellites" captured in Moscow's "orbit" following World War II- was bordered on the west by the Iron Curtain and on the east by the USSR. |
Distance decay | The various degenerative effects of distance on human spatial structures and interactions. |
Unitary state | A nation-state that has a centralized government and administration that exercises power equally over all parts of the state. |
Federal system | A political framework wherein a central government represents the various subnational entities within a nation-state. |
Double complementarity | Exists when two regions, through an exchange of raw materials and/or finished products can specifically satisfy each other's demands. |