Listening to an Iranian official describe his region as “West Asia” got me wondering if the word “Middle East” is on the outs and why. I suspect Middle East is eurocentric for some reason, but West Asia also preserves Europe as a continent, which is Eurocentric in its own way because Europe is not a continent and never was. If we’re calling anything West Asia, it should be Spain and Portugal.
Europe is only in the middle because that’s where the prime meridian is at. Everyone uses the same longitude and latitude and the hemispheres are the same for everyone. It’s definitely in the middle third of the Eastern hemisphere.