Here’s a funny thing about the words “Eastern Europe”.
It’s a geographical region. It is by no means a cultural entity.
This does not stop so many people from making this confusion. I, for one, have been making this confusion for a long time, but I can only blame how history has been taught to me. It’s always taken as a single region with a single place in history. My ninth grade history textbooks would talk about it as a single region ruled once by Ottomans, by Viennese monarchs, by Russians, briefly by Germans, and by the Soviets. When I was preparing for the SAT II (on which I even got 800/800), the standard international prep books also talked about it as a singular region.
But it is wrong and oversimplified. There is about as much common between the various nations of Eastern Europe as there is between all the nations of the Equator; there is about as much common between the cultural groups in the entire region as there is between all the ethnicities in sub-Saharan Africa. There is very little common between Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine, Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Romania, Montenegro, and Serbia.
Belarus and Ukraine would have more in common with central European nations like Hungary and Poland, than the rest of the bunch. Estonia has more in common with Finland and Nordic Europe. Macedonia and Albania are curiously included in Eastern Europe while Greece is not. If proximity to Russian region and culture are the criteria, one wonders why Georgia and Azerbaijan are not included. Problem is that all these places are lumped together on the general criteria of their Byzantine, Orthodox Church, and later Soviet connection.
Funny thing is that the same applies to India. India is just a geographical region. There is very little common between northeastern India (which is closer to East Asian culture), southern India (which is closer to South East Asian culture), or the northern and western parts of it. Except, unlike Eastern Europe, India actually is constituted as one country.
And it makes me realize: nation-states are theoretically formed on the basis of common ethnicities and languages, but in practice, they manage to exist against the very existence of those things. Eastern Europe has historically been a bunch of territories that have been ruled over by other nation-states, and the result of that may have been that it has led to this part of the world being less apparent on the map. While a few nations there progress towards economic freedom and non-intervention, the attention to that by international businesses of the world is little, because they have not been marked on the map for them. Where you had different cultures and groups who have the ability to be intelligent and productive, those cultures have been historically marginalized by larger more homogenizing nation-states, which must dictate policies from bureaucratic establishments thousands of miles away from people who have nothing in common with them. Same is true for India, where statist policies are established by groups in the capital region, who plan out industrial and agricultural schemes for disparate regions, instead of local people and local groups who understand their own culture and region better. Instead of allowing the local cottage industries of various regions to flourish, the India government has historically nationalised banking industry and heavily regulated all possible industries, just in order that their own plan for development succeeds, rather than the simple small businesses of locals.
Much the same way nobody recognizes the significant aspects of a single eastern European nation, thanks to historical nature of the polity there, nobody recognizes a single Indian region or culture, which has potential for being a useful place to invest in to start a business; and even if one did, the federal government of India would intervene in any foreign investment, and demand they take permission from them first.