Federation of Leithania

The Austo-Hungarian Empire emerged battered, bruised and, in many people's eyes fatally wounded, from the Great War. Southern Tyrol, the Austrian Littoral and Dalmatia had been lost to Italy while Serbia had taken Bosnia and large areas of southern Hungary. Nevertheless, the empire had survived the war and under Emperor-King Charles I and IV and his successor Otto I somehow managed to weather the turbulence of the 1920s as the dual forces of ethnic nationalism and economic difficulties threatened to tear the country apart.

During the following decades successive attempts at reforms designed to keep Austria-Hungary together where implemented, such as the elevation of Croatia-Slavonia to a full Kingdom within the now Triple Monarchy, which did little to appease anyone except some Croatian politicians who now had more money and power to play with, and the recognition of Croatian, Czech, Polish, Rumanian, Ruthenian (now being written using a Polish-based Latin alphabet), Slovak and Slovene as co-official languages alongside German and Hungarian.

By the 1950s though it was clear that extensive reforms and modernisation of the country's political system was needed. It was out of these seemingly endless discussions, talks and committee meetings that the idea of sweeping away the old states with the boundaries based on medieval dynastic lines and replacing them with new approximately equal sized states based around economic and geographic communities and ties was born. The country would get a new name too - the Federation of Leithania - emphasising the unification of the old divisions of Cisleithania and Transleithania under a single, new cohesive system. The monarchy would be retained, but as an exclusively ceremonial position as a living symbol of national unity. Power would instead be shared between a new federal government based in Pressburg, chosen due to its central location and the 21 new state governments. Thus on 1 January 1956 the new nation of Leithania emerged.

The early years of the new country however seemed to bring little change with the economy struggling due to the uncertainty caused by the protracted constitution reforms and the global effects of the Franco-German and Pacific Wars. One major issue was that of language as although the country now had a plethora of official languages, there was little provision to ensure access to official services in the language of your choice or protection from discrimination on linguistic grounds. In order to address this problem, a second constitutional reform process was put in place in 1968, known as the Little Convention, which introduced a second type of federal unit - Language Communities. The country was divided into 9 Language Communities (LCs), plus a number of bilingual or multilingual areas, which would function separately from the states. The LCs would be responsible for ensuring that all speakers of their particular language, including those living outside their geographical area, would have access to justice, housing, healthcare, education and other state services in their native language and for enforcing anti-discrimination legislation.

The reforms were starting to show positive results by the 1980s with the number of inter-communal hate crimes and nationalist attacks falling dramatically across the country and nationalist political parties finding themselves increasingly irrelevant in a society more focused on social and moral issues such as abortion, legal recognition of same sex relationships and economic inequality. Fast new roads, known as Autoways were built to physically connect the country and more recently a network of high speed rail has been built with new lines planned to connect the southern states to the network.