Luxembourg

The territory of present-day Luxembourg lies on a long-contested corridor between the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Moselle, and its earliest known inhabitants were Celtic peoples, most prominently the Treveri, who occupied the region in the centuries before Roman conquest. Following the campaigns of Julius Caesar in the mid-first century BCE, the area was incorporated into the Roman province of Gallia Belgica and later into Germania Prima, developing villas, roads, and small towns along the Moselle valley. After the collapse of Roman authority in the fifth century, the region passed to the Franks and was absorbed successively into the Merovingian and Carolingian realms, becoming part of the lands divided at Verdun in 843 and assigned to Lotharingia.

Luxembourg as a distinct political entity dates conventionally to 963, when Count Siegfried of the Ardennes acquired the rocky promontory of Lucilinburhuc and built a fortified residence there. From this nucleus the County, and later Duchy, of Luxembourg expanded under the House of Luxembourg, which in the fourteenth century supplied four Holy Roman Emperors, including Charles IV. The duchy was raised in status in 1354 but was sold in 1443 to the Dukes of Burgundy, after which it was inherited by the Habsburgs and ruled in turn by their Spanish and Austrian branches. Repeatedly besieged and partitioned during the wars of Louis XIV, the French Revolutionary period, and the Napoleonic campaigns, Luxembourg lost territory in successive treaties and became one of the most fortified places in Europe, earning the nickname "Gibraltar of the North."

The Congress of Vienna in 1815 created the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and placed it in personal union with the King of the Netherlands, while also enrolling it in the German Confederation and garrisoning the capital with Prussian troops. A first partition in 1830 ceded the western, French-speaking districts to newly independent Belgium. The London Treaty of 1839 fixed the modern borders, and the Treaty of London of 1867 guaranteed Luxembourg's perpetual neutrality, withdrew the Prussian garrison, and required the dismantling of its fortress. In 1890, on the death of William III of the Netherlands, the personal union ended and the throne passed to the House of Nassau-Weilburg, beginning the line of grand dukes that continues to reign.

Despite its declared neutrality, Luxembourg was occupied by German forces in both world wars, in 1914 and again from 1940 to 1944, and during the Second World War it was annexed administratively to the Reich, its young men conscripted into the Wehrmacht, and its Jewish community largely destroyed. Liberated by American forces and battered again during the Battle of the Bulge, the country abandoned strict neutrality after 1945 and became a founding member of the United Nations, the Benelux customs union, NATO in 1949, and the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, the institutional ancestor of today's European Union.

Postwar Luxembourg evolved from a steel-producing economy into a major financial centre, hosting key European institutions in Luxembourg City, including the Court of Justice and the Secretariat of the European Parliament. A new constitutional revision adopted in 2023 modernised the basic law without altering the nature of the state. Today the Grand Duchy is a parliamentary constitutional monarchy, with the hereditary grand duke as head of state, a unicameral Chamber of Deputies, and a prime minister leading the government, providing the framework for the institutions described in the remainder of this dossier.