The de-metaphorization of the term ‘Eastern Europe’ in the twenty-first century

The article analyses the term ‘Eastern Europe’ as it is used in specialist texts. While the political concept has been extensively covered in academic literature, the term itself has not been dealt with. Eastern Europe is a western concept, invented, maintained and debated by western academics, journalists and commentators. It is commonly believed to be a cold-war term solely. Although it was known and used in western discourses much earlier than the post-World War II order, its heyday is generally linked with the cold war. The metaphorical aspect of the key concept has not been researched by metaphor scholars despite an enormous amount of attention paid by them to various political concepts in recent decades. This article synthesizes the linguistic behaviour of the key term. Its metaphorical character is diagnosed in various time periods. Decrease in its metaphorization has been observed thanks to a corpus-based analysis of relevant data.