Northwestern Europe, or Northwest Europe, is a loosely defined subregionofEurope, overlapping Northern and Western Europe. The term is used in geographic,[1] history,[2] and military contexts.[3]
Geographically, Northwestern Europe is given by some sources as a region which includes Great Britain,[4] Ireland,[4] Belgium,[5] the Netherlands,[5] Luxembourg,[6] Northern France,[5] parts of or all of Germany,[7][6] Denmark,[4] Norway,[6] Sweden,[6] and Iceland.[2][8] In some works, Switzerland, Finland, and Austria are also included as part of Northwestern Europe.[6]
Under the Interreg program, funded by the European Regional Development Fund, "North-West Europe" (NWE) is a region of European Territorial Cooperation that includes Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Netherlands and parts of France and Germany.[7]
During the Reformation, some parts of Northwestern Europe converted to Protestantism,[9] in a manner which differentiated the region from its Catholic neighbors elsewhere in Europe.[10][11]
A definition of Northwestern Europe was used by some late 19th to mid 20th century anthropologists, eugenicists, and Nordicists, who used the term as a shorthand term for the part of Europe with a predominantly Nordic population.[12][13][14][15] For example, Arthur de Gobineau, the 19th-century aristocrat who published works on the pseudoscienceofscientific racism, included parts of Northwestern Europe in what Leon Baradat described as his "Aryan heaven".[16]
There is close genetic affinity among some Northwest European populations,[17] with some of these populations descending from Bell Beaker populations carrying steppe ancestry.[citation needed] For example, the Beaker people of the lower Rhine overturned 90% of Great Britain's gene pools, replacing the Basque-like neolithic populations present prior.[18]
the area covered is northwestern Europe [..including..] the Atlantic coasts of Britain, Ireland and northern France, together with all English Channel coastlines and the fringes of the North Sea as far east as Skagerrak, and as far north as [..] Bergen in Norway
Northwestern Europe: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, United Kingdom, Switzerland
The North-West Europe area [..] programme covers Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Switzerland as well as parts of France and Germany
Protestantism swept over those countries of northwestern Europe which have large proportions of Nordic elements represented in their populations
Most of northwestern Europe converted to Protestantism, while most of southwestern Europe remained Catholic. Whether climate or ethnicity (northwestern Europe was more Germanic, southwestern Europe more latin) was the greater factor in this division remains a matter of dispute
The old immigrants, from northwestern Europe (Ireland, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, the German states, and Scandinavia) [..] were primarily Protestants (except the Irish, who were mostly Catholic)
Extending across northwestern Europe, Gobineau's Aryan heaven included Ireland, England, northern France [..], the Benelux countries and Scandinavia
A statistical summary of genetic data from 1,387 Europeans based on principal component axis one (PC1) [..] may reflect a special role for this geographic axis in the demographic history of Europeans [..] PC1 aligns north-northwest/south-southeast
migration played a key role in the further dissemination of the Beaker Complex, a phenomenon we document most clearly in Britain, where the spread of the Beaker Complex [..] was associated with a replacement of ~90% of Britain's gene pool within a few hundred years