© Richard Randall

Caribbean

Sundries

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

Oceania

Climate

The greater part of Austria lies in the cool/temperate climate zone in which humid westerly winds predominate. With over half of the country dominated by the Alps the alpine climate is the predominant one. In the East the climate shows continental features with less rain than the areas with high rainfall averages. The six highest mountains in Austria are:

Economy

Austria has a well-developed social market economy and a high standard of living. Until the 1980s many of Austria's largest industry firms were nationalised, however in recent years privatisation has reduced state holdings to a level comparable to other European economies. Labour movements are particularly strong in Austria and have large influence on labour politics.

Germany has historically been the main trading partner of Austria, making it vulnerable to rapid changes in the German economy. Slow growth in Germany and elsewhere in the world affected Austria, slowing its growth to 1.2% in 2001. But since Austria became a member state of the European Union it has gained closer ties to other European Union economies, reducing its economic dependence on Germany. In addition, membership in the EU has drawn an influx of foreign investors attracted by Austria's access to the single European market and proximity to EU aspiring economies. Therefore estimates of growth in 2005 (up to 2%) are much more favourable than in the crippling German economy.

Agriculture: Austrian farms, like those of other west European mountainous countries, are small and fragmented, and production is relatively expensive.

Industry: Although some industries, such as several iron and steel works and chemical plants, are large industrial enterprises employing thousands of people, most industrial and commercial enterprises in Austria are relatively small on an international scale.

Services: Like in other western countries, the biggest contributor to Austria's GDP is its service sector. Most notably is tourism, especially winter tourism.

Demographics

Austria's population was estimated in July, 2005 as 8,184,691 persons. The population of the capital, Vienna, exceeds 1.6 million (2 million with suburbs), representing about a quarter of the country's population, and is said to constitute a melting pot of citizens from all over Central and Eastern Europe. In contrast to the capital, other cities do not exceed 1 million inhabitants: the second largest city Graz is home of 240,000 people, followed by Linz with 187,000, Salzburg with 147,000, and Innsbruck with 116,000. All other cities have fewer than 100,000 inhabitants.

Austrians of German mother tongue, by far the country's largest group, form 91.1% of Austria's population. The Austrian federal states of Carinthia and Styria are home to a significant (indigenous) Slovenian minority with around 14,000 members (Austrian census; unofficial numbers of Slovene groups speak of about 40,000). Around 20,000 Hungarians and 30,000 Croatians live in the east-most Bundesland, Burgenland (formerly part of Hungary). The remaining number of Austria's people are of non-Austrian descent, many from surrounding countries, especially from the former East Bloc nations. So-called guest workers (Gastarbeiter) and their descendants also form an important minority group in Austria.

The official language, German, is spoken by almost all residents of the country. Austria's mountainous terrain led to the development of many distinct German dialects. All of the dialects in the country, however, belong to Austro-Bavarian groups of German dialects, with the exception of the dialect spoken in its west-most Bundesland, Vorarlberg, which belongs to the group of Alemannic dialects. There is also a distinct grammatical standard for Austrian German with a few differences to the German spoken in Germany.

Politics concerning ethnic groups (Volksgruppenpolitik)

An estimated 25,000–40,000 Slovenians in the Austrian state of Carinthia as well as Croatians and Hungarians in Burgenland were recognized as a minority and have enjoyed special rights following the Austrian State Treaty (Staatsvertrag) of 1955. The Slovenians in the Austrian state of Styria (estimated at a number between 1,600 and 5,000) are not recognized as a minority and do not enjoy special rights, although the State Treaty of July 27, 1955 states otherwise. The right for bilingual topographic signs for the regions where Slovene and Croatian speaking Austrians live alongside with the German speaking population (as required by the 1955 State Treaty) is still to be fully implemented. There is also an undercurrent of thinking amongst parts of the Carenthian population that the Slovenian involvement in the partisan war against the Nazi occupation force was a bad thing, and indeed "Tito partisan" is a not an infrequent insult hurled against members of the minority. Many Carinthians are afraid of Slovenian territorial claims, pointing to the fact that Yugoslav troops entered the state after each of the two World Wars and considering that some official Slovenian atlases still show parts of Carinthia as Slovenian cultural territory. The current governor, J–rg Haider, has made this fact a matter of public argument in fall 2005 by refusing to increase the number of bilingual topographic signs in Carinthia. A poll by the K”rntner Humaninstitut conducted in January 2006 states that 65% of Carinthians are not in favour of an increase of bilingual topographic signs, since the original requirements set by the State Treaty of 1955 have already been fulfilled according to their point of view. Another interesting phenomenon is the so called "Windischen-Theorie" [2] stating that the Slovenians can be split in two groups: actual Slovenians and Windische, based on differences in language between Austrian Slovenians, who were taught Slovenian standard language in school and those Slovenians, who spoke their local Slovenian dialect but went to German schools. To the latter group the term "Windische" (originally the German word for Slovenians) was applied, claiming that they were a different ethnic group. This theory was never generally accepted and has been ultimately rejected several decades ago. It's population below the poverty line is about 2%.

Religion

While northern and central Germany was the origin of the Reformation, Austria (and Bavaria) were the heart of the Counter-Reformation in the 16th and 17th century, when the absolute monarchy of Habsburg imposed a strict regime to maintain Catholicism's power and influence among Austrians. The Habsburgs always saw themselves as the spearhead of Roman Catholicism and all other confessions and religions were oppressed. In 1781 Emperor Joseph II issued a Patent of Tolerance that allowed other Christian confessions a limited freedom of worship. Religious freedom was declared a constitutional right in the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich in 1867 thus paying tribute to the fact that the monarchy was home of numerous religions beside Roman Catholicism such as Greek, Serbian, Romanian, Russian, and Bulgarian Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims (Austria neighboured the Ottoman empire for centuries), Mormons and both Calvinists and Lutheran Protestants.