General Introduction

Abstract

This handbook on The Central and East European Population since 1850 is an extension of the previous two handbooks on the West European population. The main argument for publishing this data handbook is the ongoing extension of the European Union towards the south-east and east of Europe. The pulling down of the Iron Curtain in 1990 opened the barrier separating West and East Europe. It is therefore quite obvious that ‘European’ data handbooks should cover the whole of Europe. This data handbook and the previous two volumes on West and central Europe should therefore be looked at as one entity. Of course, it would have been best from the outset, to write one data handbook for the whole of Europe, but that was not possible during the 1990s, when we started our work.