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( Low Countries)
The Low Countries, the historical region of de Nederlanden, are the countries on low-lying land around the delta of the Rhine, Scheldt, and Meuse (Maas) rivers. The term is more appropriate to the era of the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Europe when strong centrally governed nations were slowly forming and territorial governance was in the hands of a noble or of a noble house. Therefore, the Low Countries were swapped around by inheritance leading to such historical terms as Burgundian Netherlands, French Netherlands, Spanish Netherlands and Austrian Netherlands. With the reorganization of the region during and after the Napoleonic Wars, the term Low Countries gradually became more appropriate to romantic descriptions by writers rather than having a useful diplomatically or geographically accurate and well-defined meaning. This is analogous to the way the literal and purely geographic term Eastern Europe came to be used as a euphemism for "countries behind the Iron Curtain" or "Eastern Bloc", and was converted into a political term instead. In the case of the term "Low Countries," it became, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant as a geo-political term. Nonetheless, in modern English usage, the term is occasionally to be found, and it then means the Kingdom of Belgium and (European mainland part) of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Sometimes the French Netherlands are also included in this definition. The term is not particularly current in modern contexts because the region does not very exactly correspond to the sovereign states of The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, for which an alternative term, Benelux was employed after the Second World War, but only to describe them as a trading union.
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