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 Austria |  Czech Republic |
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Neighborly relations exist between Austria and the Czech Republic, two member states of the European Union. Austria gave full support to the Czech Republic's membership of the European Union. The Czech Republic is a member state of NATO, while Austria is not.
| Official name | Czech Republic | Republic of Austria |
|---|---|---|
| Common name | Czechia | Austria |
Flag |  |  |
Coat of arms |  |  |
| Kde domov můj (Czech) | Bundeshymne der Republik Österreich (German) | |
| 10,649,800 | 9,027,999 | |
| 78,866 km2 (30,450 sq mi) | 83,871 km2 (32,383 sq mi) | |
| 134/km2 (347.1/sq mi) | 107.6/km2 (278.7/sq mi) | |
| UTC+1 (CET) | ||
Government | Unitary parliamentary constitutional republic | Federal parliamentary republic |
Capital & largest city |  Prague – 1,324,277 (2,677,964 Metro) |  Vienna - 1,794,380 (2,890,577 Metro) |
Official language | Czech | German |
First leader | Bořivoj I, Duke of Bohemia (867–889, traditionally) Václav Havel (1936-2011, current constitution) | Francis II (1768-1835, traditionally) Karl Renner (1870–1950, current constitution) |
Current head of government | Prime Minister Petr Fiala (ODS; 2021–present) | Chancellor Karl Nehammer (2021-present) |
Current head of state | President Petr Pavel (2023–present) | President Alexander Van der Bellen (2017–present) |
| $261.732 billion $24,569 per capita | $479.820 billion $53,320 per capita | |
| $432.346 billion $40,586 per capita | $700.203 billion $64,750 per capita | |
| Czech koruna (Kč) – CZK | Euro (€) – EUR | |
| 0.891 (very high) - 2017 | 0.916 (very high) - 2021 | |
Expatriates | 5,000 Austrians in the Czech Republic | 40,324 Czechs in Austria |
 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2017) |
Both countries have a long common history. For the first time united from 1253 until 1276 under the reign of Ottokar II of Bohemia, they later joined again and, together with Hungary, formed a major European power under the Habsburg dynasty which lasted from 1526 until 1918. Initially only a personal union, the ever more centralized monarchy ruled mostly from Vienna (Prague was the capital only from 1583 until 1611) was increasingly seen as an obstacle of the Czech and German national interests during the uprising of nationalism in Central Europe from the second half of the 19th century. The Czechs demanded to be ruled by a government in Prague, the capital city of their kingdom, not in Vienna, and as part of their main party strategy of passive resistance did not participate for years in the political discussions and decisions of the Austrian Reichsrat, the parliament in Vienna representing all nations of the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarían Monarchy. Ethnic Germans at the same time wanted to participate in the ongoing German unification process.
While the emperor had given internal autonomy to the Hungarians in 1867 to reduce tensions with the Magyar aristocracy, the Czechs' wishes never were fulfilled until the end of the empire in 1918. This was due to the fact that in Bohemia 37% and in Moravia 28% of the population were Germans, who fiercely opposed to represent a minority in a Czech parliament, while they were part of the leading nation in Cisleithania.
Although the Czech lands developed as the industrial centre of the Monarchy, hundreds of thousand Bohemians of poor personal living standard, mainly from agricultural areas of southern Moravia, moved to Vienna between 1870 and 1910 to work there in cheap jobs. Badly educated and not capable of much German language as some of them were, they were considered low class people by the Viennese, and Böhm or Bem (which, in Viennese dialect, means a person from Bohemia) was used pejorative long into the 20th century in Austria. Aside from these the imperial capital attracted a large number of middle-class Bohemians who studied or pursued careers there, including Sigmund Freud, Karel Rokytanský, Gustav Mahler, the future president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and many others. Until today, one may trace Czech migrants in the Vienna Telephone Directory (from Adamec to Zwierzina).
South Moravia was the birthplace of two federal presidents of Austria: Karl Renner, who decisively took part in the creation of the First Austrian Republik in 1918 as State Chancellor and was president from 1945 to 1950, in 1870 was born at Untertannowitz / Dolni Dunajovice in the so-called Dyje arc (Thayabogen). Adolf Schärf, vice chancellor from 1945 to 1957 and president from 1957 to 1965, in 1873 was born in the city of Nikolsburg / Mikulov near the Austrian border. Many aristocratic and bourgeois families of great influence in Austrian politics, economy and the arts had their roots in what is now the Czech Republic.
During the First World War, while nearly 1.5 million Czechs fought in the Austro-Hungarian army, exiled Czech politicians backed by the military legions worked on the regaining of the independence of Bohemia in the form of Czech-Slovak union. The Entente powers supported their plans, which did not provide any autonomy or other special treatment for the Germans in the new country.
After the end of the empire in October and November, 1918, German Austria and Czechoslovakia shortly quarreled on the issue of the German districts in Bohemia and Moravia, where more than 3 million German inhabitants wanted to join the State of German Austria (and within this state, the German republic). The Czechs immediately occupied these districts to keep the "integrity of the Bohemian lands", and the Treaty of St. Germain of 1919 acknowledged their rights to keep them.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on January 20, 1920. When Austria entered dictatorial rule in 1934, Austrian Social Democrats like Otto Bauer and Julius Deutsch found refuge in the Czechoslovak Republic and founded the ALÖS (Auslandsbüro der österreichischen Sozialdemokraten), the foreign bureau of Austrian Social Democrats, in Brno. There until 1938 they published the Arbeiter-Zeitung (literally the workers' newspaper), which had been the daily organ of the Social Democratic Party of Austria and been prohibited by the Austrofascists, to be "illegally" exported to Austria. In March, 1938, when Austria was annexed to Germany, again some politicians flew to the neighboring country, at this time together with Switzerland the only democracy in Central Europe.
Many Germans in the Czech lands joyfully had welcomed Hitler's annexation of the German districts, called Sudetenland, in September 1938, and had taken part in the occupation of the remaining Czech area in March 1939. This led the Czechs to expel nearly all Germans in 1945 and 1947. The properties these people had to leave behind when moving to their new countries of residence have been in fact nationalized and then redistributed among the Czech population under set rules. Although war damages exceeded value of these properties, Czechoslovakia did not claim any reparations from Germany and Austria and considered transfer of these properties ownership the fastest and most efficient way how to recover the nation after the world war. Many of people expelled moved to the Western zones of occupied Germany, some of them settled in Austria. Some people, however, were either allowed to stay or return to the country when proving their innocence.
In 1948, the Iron Curtain went down between Czechoslovakia and Austria. Many railway tracks and roads connecting the two countries were closed down for a long time. (Railway traffic from Laa an der Thaya to Hevlin and from Fratres to Slavonice has not been reopened until 2009.) In 1968, at the end of the Prague Spring, many Czechs fled to Austria. In 1978, the Czech author Pavel Kohout started to work for the Burgtheater in Vienna; his and his wife's Czechoslovak citizenship subsequently was revoked in 1979 and both were granted Austrian citizenship.
In late 1989, the Czechs for the first time after 40 years could enter Austria as free citizens. In the nineties, Austrian ecologists demonstrated against the nuclear power plant at Temelin, 50 kilometres north of the Austrian border to the Czech Republic. In 2000, in the so-called Protocol of Melk, [1] the two governments agreed on certain nuclear safety standards and cross-border information without delay.
In 2008, Karel Schwarzenberg (Czech minister of foreign affairs) and Jiri Grusa, who has acted as Czech ambassador and as director of the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna, shared the opinion that Austrians and Czechs are of different language, but of "the same nation", the same character. [2] Schwarzenberg himself had lived in Vienna for decades before returning to the Czech lands after 1989.
Austria joined the EU in 1995. Czech Republic joined the EU in 2004.
While Czech Republic became a member of NATO in 1999, Austria has never been a member of NATO.
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Bohemia is the westernmost and largest historical region of the Czech Republic. Bohemia can also refer to a wider area consisting of the historical Lands of the Bohemian Crown ruled by the Bohemian kings, including Moravia and Czech Silesia, in which case the smaller region is referred to as Bohemia proper as a means of distinction.
The Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Historically known as Bohemia, it is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the southeast. The Czech Republic has a hilly landscape that covers an area of 78,871 square kilometers (30,452 sq mi) with a mostly temperate continental and oceanic climate. The capital and largest city is Prague; other major cities and urban areas include Brno, Ostrava, Plzeň and Liberec.
Czechoslovakia was a landlocked state in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland became part of Nazi Germany, while the country lost further territories to Hungary and Poland. Between 1939 and 1945, the state ceased to exist, as Slovakia proclaimed its independence and Carpathian Ruthenia became part of Hungary, while the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed in the remainder of the Czech Lands. In 1939, after the outbreak of World War II, former Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš formed a government-in-exile and sought recognition from the Allies.
The Sudetenland is the historical German name for the northern, southern, and western areas of former Czechoslovakia which were inhabited primarily by Sudeten Germans. These German speakers had predominated in the border districts of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia since the Middle Ages. Since the 9th century the Sudetenland had been an integral part of the Czech state both geographically and politically.
The history of the Czech lands – an area roughly corresponding to the present-day Czech Republic – starts approximately 800,000 years BCE. A simple chopper from that age was discovered at the Red Hill archeological site in Brno. Many different primitive cultures left their traces throughout the Stone Age, which lasted approximately until 2000 BCE. The most widely known culture present in the Czech lands during the pre-historical era is the Únětice Culture, leaving traces for about five centuries from the end of the Stone Age to the start of the Bronze Age. Celts – who came during the 5th century BCE – are the first people known by name. One of the Celtic tribes were the Boii (plural), who gave the Czech lands their first name Boiohaemum – Latin for the Land of Boii. Before the beginning of the Common Era the Celts were mostly pushed out by Germanic tribes. The most notable of those tribes were the Marcomanni and traces of their wars with the Roman Empire were left in south Moravia.
The First Czechoslovak Republic emerged from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in October 1918. The new state consisted mostly of territories inhabited by Czechs and Slovaks, but also included areas containing majority populations of other nationalities, particularly Germans (22.95 %), who accounted for more citizens than the state's second state nation of the Slovaks, Hungarians (5.47 %) and Ruthenians (3.39 %). The new state comprised the total of Bohemia whose borders did not coincide with the language border between German and Czech. Despite initially developing effective representative institutions alongside a successful economy, the deteriorating international economic situation in the 1930s gave rise to growing ethnic tensions. The dispute between the Czech and German populations, fanned by the rise of Nazism in neighbouring Germany, resulted in the loss of territory under the terms of the Munich Agreement and subsequent events in the autumn of 1938, bringing about the end of the First Republic.
The Czech lands or the Bohemian lands is a historical-geographical term that, in a historical context, refers the three historical regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia together before Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic were formed. Together the three have formed the Czech part of Czechoslovakia since 1918 and the Czech Republic since 1 January 1993.
The Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 established the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.
Czech nobility consists of the noble families from historical Czech lands, especially in their narrow sense, i.e. nobility of Bohemia proper, Moravia and Austrian Silesia – whether these families originated from those countries or moved into them through the centuries. These are connected with the history of Great Moravia, Duchy of Bohemia, later Kingdom of Bohemia, Margraviate of Moravia, the Duchies of Silesia and the Crown of Bohemia, the constitutional predecessor state of the modern-day Czech Republic.
The Lands of the Bohemian Crown were the states in Central Europe during the medieval and early modern periods with feudal obligations to the Bohemian kings. The crown lands primarily consisted of the Kingdom of Bohemia, an electorate of the Holy Roman Empire according to the Golden Bull of 1356, the Margraviate of Moravia, the Duchies of Silesia, and the two Lusatias, known as the Margraviate of Upper Lusatia and the Margraviate of Lower Lusatia, as well as other territories throughout its history. This agglomeration of states nominally under the rule of the Bohemian kings was referred to simply as Bohemia. They are now sometimes referred to in scholarship as the Czech lands, a direct translation of the Czech abbreviated name.
German Bohemians, later known as Sudeten Germans, were ethnic Germans living in the Czech lands of the Bohemian Crown, which later became an integral part of Czechoslovakia. Before 1945, over three million German Bohemians constituted about 23% of the population of the whole country and about 29.5% of the population of Bohemia and Moravia. Ethnic Germans migrated into the Kingdom of Bohemia, an electoral territory of the Holy Roman Empire, from the 11th century, mostly in the border regions of what was later called the "Sudetenland", which was named after the Sudeten Mountains.
The Republic of German-Austria was an unrecognised state that was created following World War I as an initial rump state for areas with a predominantly German-speaking and ethnic German population within what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with plans for eventual unification with Germany. The territories covered an area of 118,311 km2 (45,680 sq mi), with 10.4 million inhabitants.
The First Czechoslovak Republic, often colloquially referred to as the First Republic, was the first Czechoslovak state that existed from 1918 to 1938, a union of ethnic Czechs and Slovaks. The country was commonly called Czechoslovakia, a compound of Czech and Slovak; which gradually became the most widely used name for its successor states. It was composed of former territories of Austria-Hungary, inheriting different systems of administration from the formerly Austrian and Hungarian territories.
The history of the Jews in the Czech lands, historically the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, including the modern Czech Republic, goes back many centuries. There is evidence that Jews have lived in Moravia and Bohemia since as early as the 10th century. Jewish communities flourished here specifically in the 16th and 17th centuries, and again in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Local Jews were mostly murdered in the Holocaust, or exiled at various points. As of 2021, there were only about 2,300 Jews estimated to be living in the Czech Republic.
The history of Moravia, one of the Czech lands, is diverse and characterized by many periods of foreign governance.
Czech–German relations are the relationship between Germany and the Czech Republic. The two countries share 815 km of common borders and both are members of the European Union, NATO, OECD, OSCE, Council of Europe and the World Trade Organization.
The Czech Republic and Slovakia established diplomatic relations on January 1, 1993. The two countries became members of the European Union in 2004.
Czech Republic–France are the current and historical relationship between the Czech Republic and France. The first diplomatic contacts between the two countries date back to the Middle Ages.
Czech heraldry was formed from 12th to 13th century by Premyslid dukes and kings of Bohemia, beginning with flaming eagle of Saint Wenceslaus on coins of Duke Frederick in 1179.
Czech Republic–Spain relations are the bilateral and diplomatic relations between these two countries. Relationships are mainly defined by the membership of both countries to the European Union and NATO. The Czech Republic has an embassy in Madrid and consulates in Barcelona, Benidorm, Bilbao, Oviedo, Palma de Mallorca and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Spain has an embassy in Prague, as well as an Education Attaché, a Commercial Office and an Instituto Cervantes; the Delegation of Spanish Tourism for this country operates from Vienna.
