The paper analyses categorisation of the semantic field ‘Europe’ in Croatian and Serbian daily newspapers between 2007 and 2017. A large corpus of articles is used to select keywords and examples for analysis. Random samples of concordances featuring the syntagms ‘Eastern Europe’ and ‘Central Europe’ are then analysed to reconstruct their semantic extensions and connotations. The widespread use of metonyms ‘EU’ – ‘Europe’ is evidenced, as well as strong synonymity of these collocations and ‘post-socialist countries’. The analysed examples also suggest that the choice between binary (East – West) and ternary categorisation (East – Centre – West) is heavily dependent on the semantic domain and genre of a given text.