Austria is bordered by Germany to the northwest, the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia to the northeast, Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west.

[40][41] In 1496, his son Philip the Fair married Joanna the Mad, the heiress of Castile and Aragon, thus acquiring Spain and its Italian, African, Asian, and New World appendages for the Habsburgs.

[44] In late September 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent launched the first siege of Vienna, which unsuccessfully ended, according to Ottoman historians, with the snowfalls of an early beginning winter.

During the long reign of Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor following the successful defence of Vienna against the Turks in 1683, under the command of the King of Poland John III Sobieski,[45] the Great Turkish War resulted in most of Hungary being controlled by Austria.

From that time, Austria became the birthplace of classical music and played host to different composers including Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert.

Austria later became engaged in a war with Revolutionary France, which was highly unsuccessful in the beginning, with successive defeats at the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte, meaning the end of the old Holy Roman Empire in 1806.

[49][50] After the defeated Hungarian Revolution of 1848, the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the Ausgleich, provided for a dual sovereignty, the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary, under Franz Joseph I.

As a result, ruling Austria-Hungary became increasingly difficult in an age of emerging nationalist movements, requiring considerable reliance on an expanded secret police.

Many Austrians, especially those involved with the pan-German movements, desired a reinforcement of an ethnic German identity and hoped that the empire would collapse, which would allow an annexation of Austria by Germany.

The First Austrian Republic lasted until 1933, when Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, using what he called "self-switch-off of Parliament", established an autocratic regime tending towards Italian fascism.

During the November pogrom in 1938 ("Reichskristallnacht"), Jews and Jewish institutions such as synagogues were subjected to violent attacks in Vienna, Klagenfurt, Linz, Graz, Salzburg, Innsbruck and several cities in Lower Austria.

[88][89][90][91][92] Otto von Habsburg, a vehement opponent of the Nazis, the last Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, an honorary citizen of hundreds of places in Austria and partly envisaged by Schuschnigg as a monarchical option, was in Belgium at the time.

[98] At this time, because the territory was outside the operational radius of Allied aircraft, the armaments industry was greatly expanded through the forced labour of concentration camp prisoners, this was especially the case with regard to the manufacture of fighter planes, tanks and missiles.

The invading Allied powers, in particular the Americans, planned for the supposed "Alpine Fortress Operation" of a national redoubt, that was largely to have taken place on Austrian soil in the mountains of the Eastern Alps.

The Ministry of Property Protection and Economic Planning (Ministerium für Vermögenssicherung und Wirtschaftsplanung) was responsible for directing the nationalized industries under the directorship of Minister Peter Krauland (party ÖVP).

However, the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, has a limited right of veto (the Nationalrat can—in almost all cases—ultimately pass the respective bill by voting a second time; this is referred to as a Beharrungsbeschluss, lit.

Austria began to reassess its definition of neutrality following the fall of the Soviet Union, granting overflight rights for the UN-sanctioned action against Iraq in 1991, and since 1995, it has developed participation in the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy.

[143] All males who have reached the age of eighteen and are found fit have to serve a six months compulsory military service, followed by an eight-year reserve obligation.

This assistance came to an end when Hungary and Slovakia joined the EU Schengen Area in 2008, for all intents and purposes abolishing "internal" border controls between treaty states.

[160] Austria's mountainous regions are highly sensitive to climate change and are experiencing reduced snowfall, earlier snowmelt and glacier loss.

Until the 1980s, many of Austria's largest industry firms were nationalised; in recent years, however, privatisation has reduced state holdings to a level comparable to other European economies.

[174] In 1972 the country began construction of a nuclear power plant to produce electricity at Zwentendorf on the River Danube, following a unanimous vote in parliament.

Taken as a collective whole, German languages or dialects are thus spoken natively by 88.6% of the population, which includes the 2.5% German-born citizens who reside in Austria, followed by Turkish (2.28%), Serbian (2.21%), Croatian (1.63%), English (0.73%), Hungarian (0.51%), Bosnian (0.43%), Polish (0.35%), Albanian (0.35%), Slovenian (0.31%), Czech (0.22%), Arabic (0.22%), and Romanian (0.21%).

A unification of the two countries was forbidden by the 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye as one of the conditions imposed by the victorious Allies of World War I upon the vanquished nation, to prevent the creation of a territorially extensive German state.

[205] At least since the 1970s, a few decades after the fall of the Habsburg monarchy and the transformation of Austria into a federal republic, there has been a continuous decline of Christianity (with the exception of Orthodox churches) and a proliferation of other religions, a process which has been particularly pronounced in Vienna, with its large foreign and immigrant populations.

[207] Austrian Christians, both Roman Catholic and Protestant,[g] are obliged to pay a mandatory membership fee (calculated by income – about 1%) to their churches; this payment is called the Kirchenbeitrag ("ecclesiastical contribution").

As at primary school, lessons at Gymnasium begin at 8 am and continue with short intervals until lunchtime or early afternoon, with children returning home to a late lunch.

In the 20th century, contributions by Lise Meitner, Erwin Schrödinger, and Wolfgang Pauli to nuclear research and quantum mechanics were key to these areas' development during the 1920s and 1930s.

In addition to them, biologists Gregor Mendel and Konrad Lorenz as well as mathematician Kurt Gödel and engineers such as Ferdinand Porsche and Siegfried Marcus were Austrians.

Due to the mountainous terrain, alpine skiing is a prominent sport in Austria and is extremely valuable in the promotion and economic growth of the country.