Austria

The territory of present-day Austria has been inhabited since the Paleolithic, with some of Europe's oldest figurative art, including the Venus of Willendorf, originating in the Danube valley. By the Iron Age, the region was a centre of the Hallstatt culture, named for the salt-mining settlement in the Salzkammergut, and was later organised under the Celtic kingdom of Noricum. Rome absorbed Noricum in the late first century BC and established the provinces of Noricum, Raetia, and Pannonia along the Danube frontier, founding garrison towns such as Vindobona, the nucleus of modern Vienna. After Roman authority collapsed in the fifth century, successive movements of Ostrogoths, Lombards, Bavarians, Avars, and Slavs reshaped the region until it was integrated into the Frankish realm under Charlemagne, who organised a Carolingian march on the eastern frontier.

The name Ostarrichi is first attested in a document of 996, by which time the March of Austria had been entrusted to the Babenberg dynasty. The Babenbergs ruled for nearly three centuries, raising Austria to a duchy in 1156 under the Privilegium Minus. Following their extinction, the duchy passed in 1278 to Rudolf I of Habsburg, beginning a dynastic association that would last until 1918. Through marriage, inheritance, and election to the Holy Roman imperial throne, the Habsburgs assembled a vast composite monarchy spanning Bohemia, Hungary, the Low Countries, and parts of Italy and Iberia, while Vienna twice withstood Ottoman sieges in 1529 and 1683. The eighteenth century brought the reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, and after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, Francis II reconstituted his lands as the Austrian Empire. The Compromise of 1867 reorganised the realm as the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, a multinational state stretching from the Alps to the Carpathians.

Defeat in the First World War led to the empire's dissolution in 1918 and the proclamation of a small German-speaking republic, its borders fixed by the Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919. The interwar First Republic was destabilised by economic crisis and paramilitary conflict, culminating in a brief civil war in February 1934 and the establishment of an authoritarian corporatist regime. In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss, and the territory remained part of the Third Reich until liberation by Allied forces in 1945. Austria was then occupied jointly by the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France until the Austrian State Treaty of May 1955 restored full sovereignty, immediately followed by a constitutional declaration of permanent neutrality.

The Second Republic developed as a stable parliamentary democracy, with politics long dominated by the Social Democratic and Austrian People's parties, often in grand-coalition government. Austria joined the United Nations in 1955, the Council of Europe in 1956, and the European Free Trade Association in 1960. After the end of the Cold War, it acceded to the European Union in 1995 and adopted the euro in 1999, while maintaining its neutral status outside NATO. In recent decades, coalition arrangements have broadened to include the Greens and the Freedom Party at various points, and federal presidents have been elected by direct popular vote.

Austria today is a federal parliamentary republic of nine Bundeslander, headed by a directly elected federal president and governed by a chancellor responsible to the bicameral Federal Assembly in Vienna.