Editing Central Europe (section)

===Democracy Index===
{{Further|List of central European countries by development indexes#Democracy}}
[[File:Democracy Index 2022.svg|thumb|upright=1.35|The [[Economist Intelligence Unit]] Democracy index map for 2022, with greener colours representing more democratic countries]]

Central Europe is a home to some of world's oldest democracies. However, most of them have been impacted by [[totalitarianism]], particularly [[Fascism]] and [[Nazism]]. Germany and Italy occupied all Central European countries, except Switzerland. In all occupied countries, the [[Axis powers]] suspended democracy and installed puppet regimes loyal to the occupation forces. Also, they forced conquered countries to apply racial laws and formed military forces for helping German and Italian struggle against Communists. After [[World War II]], almost the whole of Central Europe (the Eastern and Middle part) had been transformed into [[communist states]], most of which had been occupied and later allied with the [[Soviet Union]], often against their will through forged referendum (such as the [[1946 Polish people's referendum|Polish people's referendum in 1946]]) or force (northeast Germany, Poland, Hungary et alia). Nevertheless, those experiences have been dealt in most of them. Most Central European countries score very highly in the [[Democracy Index]].<ref>{{cite news|format=PDF |url=https://portoncv.gov.cv/dhub/porton.por_global.open_file?p_doc_id=1034 |title=Democracy index 2012: Democracy at a standstill: A report from The Economist Intelligence Unit |newspaper=The Economist |year=2013 |access-date=15 October 2015 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150103104154/https://portoncv.gov.cv/dhub/porton.por_global.open_file?p_doc_id=1034 |archive-date=3 January 2015 }}</ref>