THE SALIENT IS PROTESTANT/CATHOLIC:

A Tale of Two Europes: Forget East and West, Europe is dividing itself into North and South. (Anne Applebaum, Sept. 6, 2010, Slate)

North and South: Not everybody is going to like that concept, especially not the new South, some of whose members are not necessarily in the southern half of the continent. For these are not geographical designations, but political terms of art. The South contains all those countries whose political classes have not been able to balance their national budgets, whose bureaucrats have not been able to reduce their numbers, whose voters have not learned to approve of austerity: Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, and—at the moment—Ireland.

The North contains the budget hawks: Germany, Poland, Estonia, Scandinavia, the Czechs, and the Slovaks. Britain's new government, with its austerity budget, aims to return to the North, following its recent experience of life in the South. France floats somewhere in between. Wealth, as such, isn't northern: Much of the South is very rich. But in the North, private wealth has grown more or less in tandem with the public sector. Private wealth and public squalor are more typical of the South.

Or at least that's one point of view. I do realize that these are subjective categories, and I also realize that the membership of these two clubs, as listed here, could easily be disputed. Polish bureaucracy is no better than the Spanish kind. Irish capitalism is in some ways healthier than the Czech version. Living standards are still higher in Italy than in Estonia. And some leaders of the South—socialist governments, ironically, in both Greece and Spain—are now struggling to institute reforms that should have been made years ago and are intended to make their economies more northern.

But even if we swap a few of the names around, or at least agree to disagree about some of them, it's still hard to avoid the existence of this new North-South division, which is suddenly so much more important that that old East-West division.