Austria

Austria is a landlocked federation of nine states in Central Europe's Eastern Alps, with Vienna as its capital and most populous city, covering 83,879 square kilometers with about 9.2 million people. It emerged around the first millennium from the remnants of the Eastern and Hungarian March, becoming a duchy in 1156 and an archduchy in 1453, and from the late thirteenth century the Habsburg dynasty ruled it as a major imperial power in Central Europe. The First Austrian Republic was proclaimed in 1919 after the First World War and the Austro-Hungarian Empire's collapse, but Austria was annexed by the Third Reich in the 1938 Anschluss and ceased to exist as an independent state until 1945. After liberation and Allied occupation, Austria regained its sovereignty and declared perpetual neutrality in 1955, founding the modern Second Republic; it operates today as a federal semi-presidential republic, with a popularly elected president as head of state and a chancellor as head of government, and has been a European Union member since 1995.