Slovenia

Emona, today's Ljubljana, was a Roman colony on the road from Italy to the Danube. The Protestant Primož Trubar printed the first books in Slovene in 1550 and thereby founded the literary language — the Reformation played there the cultural role it had in Germany or Finland.

The medieval duchy of Carinthia had an enthronement rite in the Slovene language that may have inspired Jean Bodin. Integrated into the Habsburg hereditary lands, Slovenia stayed six centuries in Vienna's orbit, which explains its Central European economy and urbanism.

The nineteenth-century national awakening rested on the poetry of France Prešeren, one of whose verses became the national anthem — a toast to friendship between peoples.

After 1918 Slovenia entered Yugoslavia. It was the first to leave, in June 1991, after a ten-day war. Accession to the Union and NATO in 2004 and to the euro in 2007 made it the most prosperous of the former Yugoslav republics.