Liechtenstein

A principality bought into being, the last survivor of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled from afar before it found itself.

Liechtenstein is a tiny Alpine state that owes its existence to ambition and to paperwork. The fabulously wealthy Austrian House of Liechtenstein, whose estates in Bohemia, Moravia and Austria dwarfed anything on the upper Rhine, lacked the one thing their riches could not buy: land held directly under the Holy Roman Emperor and a seat in the Imperial Diet. They acquired it by purchase, buying the lordship of Schellenberg in 1699 and the county of Vaduz in 1712, and on 23 January 1719 Emperor Charles VI united the two and raised them to the rank of an Imperial Principality named after the family. For more than a century its absentee princes never set foot in it. Liechtenstein drifted from the Holy Roman Empire into the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806, into the German Confederation, and into full sovereignty when that confederation dissolved in 1866. After the First World War it abandoned a ruined Austria-Hungary for Switzerland, binding itself by customs and monetary union and adopting the Swiss franc. Neutral through both world wars, it lost its vast Czechoslovak estates to the Beneš decrees in 1945, a wound that left it without diplomatic relations with Prague until 2009 and produced the International Court of Justice case Liechtenstein v. Germany. The modern principality is a prosperous financial centre, a member of the United Nations and the European Economic Area, where women won the vote only in 1984 and the reigning prince's powers were enlarged by referendum in 2003.