Map of the countries included in a minimum definition of Northwestern Europe
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]
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]
^Pounds, Norman J. G. (September 1967). "Northwest Europe in the Ninth Century; Its Geography in Light of the Polyptyques". Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 57 (3). Taylor & Francis Ltd: 439–461. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1967.tb00615.x. JSTOR2561644.
^"North-West Europe campaign (1944–5)". Oxford Companion to Military History. Oxford University Press. 2001. ISBN9780198606963.
^ abcBarnes, R. J.; Barnes, Richard S. K. (1994). The Brackish-Water Fauna of Northwestern Europe. Cambridge University. ISBN9780521455565. 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
^ abcVerhulst, Adriaan (1999). The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe. Cambridge University Press. ISBN9782735108176.
^ ab"Interreg North-West Europe". nweurope.eu. Interreg NWE. Retrieved 17 August 2023. The North-West Europe area [..] programme covers Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Switzerland as well as parts of France and Germany
^Boettiger, Louis Angelo (1938). Fundamentals of Sociology. Ronald Press. p. 325. Protestantism swept over those countries of northwestern Europe which have large proportions of Nordic elements represented in their populations
^J. Richard, Carl (2006). The Battle for the American Mind: A Brief History of a Nation's Thought. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 20. ISBN9780742534360. Retrieved 15 April 2015. 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
^Baradat, Leon P. (2015). Political Ideologies. Routledge. ISBN9781317345558. Extending across northwestern Europe, Gobineau's Aryan heaven included Ireland, England, northern France [..], the Benelux countries and Scandinavia
^Novembre, John; Johnson, Toby; Bryc, Katarzyna; Kutalik, Zoltán; et al. (2008). "Genes mirror geography within Europe". Nature. 456 (7218): 98–101. Bibcode:2008Natur.456...98N. doi:10.1038/nature07331. PMC2735096. PMID18758442. 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
