States of Austria

Since Austria is a federal republic according to the constitutional framework of Austrian politics, Austria's nine provinces are customarily referred to as States of Austria or Bundesländer, singular Bundesland.

Historical development

In terms of boundaries, the state of Salzburg is equivalent to the former Austro-Hungarian Duchy of Salzburg, where Austria-Hungary was the wide-stretching multinational empire from whose ethnically Germanic kernel the Republic of Austria emerged when the empire was torn apart by nationalist and republicanist forces near the end of World War I. The states of Upper Austria and Lower Austria are mostly equivalent to what formerly were the two semi-autonomous halves of the Archduchy of Austria, a principality which formed the empire's historic heartland and which had to cede significant tracts of land to Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the empire's dissolution. Similarly, the state of Carinthia descends from the Duchy of Carinthia, the state of Styria descends from the Duchy of Styria, and the state of Tyrol descends from the Princely County of Tyrol; these provinces had to cede territories to Italy and Yugoslavia when Austria emerged in its present form. Also, the state of Vorarlberg had been a part of the County of Tyrol up until 1918. The city state of Vienna was a part of Lower Austria up until 1921. The state of Burgenland is a more or less artificially agglutinated entity consisting of four ethnically Germanic districts of Hungary that were ceded to Austria in 1920-1921.

Related Topics:
Austria-Hungary - Empire - Germanic - Nationalist - Republicanist - World War I - Czechoslovakia - Italy - Yugoslavia - 1918 - 1921 - Hungary - 1920

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