Natural disasters, perhaps.
That region doesn't have a great record in terms of political stability, and often has the bad luck of being in the middle of a warzone though.
There's about 1/10th of the region that was in a war zone in the last 70 years (Yugoslavia, Eastern Ukraine), and those wars didn't really concern neighboring countries.
Regarding political stability, I'd argue that a huge part of the region was very stable for 40 years, under the Communist yoke :p
That 70 years (which is debatable!) maybe the longest period of peace in the area in recorded history. Possibly the peace of 1871 to 1914 is the only other alternative.
Here's a list of conflicts in Europe since 1945[1]. Even before the fall of the Soviet Union there were some conflicts. For example, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was in 1968 and was a reasonable major conflict.
(Note that I'm not claiming that Eastern/Central Europe is unique in this! Mostly densely populated areas are similar, and Western Europe scores only slightly better if you don't count revolutionary movements within the counties).
Regarding political stability, I'd argue that a huge part of the region was very stable for 40 years, under the Communist yoke
Yes, indeed this is true. As I note above the 1945-1990 period was very stable except for Czechoslovakia invasion of course. They were pretty lucky in Poland in the 1980s too.
You can never predict the future but I'm willing to bet that the following countries will be peaceful for at least the next 20 years:
- Czech Republic
- Slovakia
- Poland
- Hungary
- Slovenia
- Croatia
- Romania
- Albania
Places like the Czech Republic will probably be among the safest places on Earth, both regarding economic, political stability and possible outside aggression, for the next half a century, in my opinion.
On the other hand, people were saying similar things before WW1 :D
Hmm. I'm not sure that is a great way of looking at it while Russia is still there.
Poland
I'm not sure about that. The Kaliningrad Oblast is a real problem - historically oblasts haven't been very stable politically.
Generally speaking though, I think most of those countries are NATO members (not sure about Albania?). That means that if any NATO member country is attacked they will all be dragged in.
If the US got dragged into a war on the Korean peninsular then I'm not sure Putin could resist the temptation of Estonia or Latvia. And I'm not sure what would happen then.
Or who knows what will happen in (NATO Member) Turkey. Three years ago they nearly got in a shooting war with Russia. Now they are good friends.. at the moment.
I've spent some great times in Central Europe, and I'm cautiously optimistic about the area. But that doesn't mean there aren't real, significant risks.
Social connections, networks that enable employment, and a lack of serious financial reserves (which will always be true for ~50% of people) are the main reasons.
And no area is immune to disaster and lacks challenges.
The "low natural disaster" areas have a total lack of warning before disaster strikes, heavy snowfall that can cripple normal services, deserts with poisonous creatures, or some combination of those three.
For the most part, to be perfectly honest, as long as you are capable of picking up and moving on short notice...hurricane country is actually safer due to the amount of warning you get.