One of the strongest economies and nation-states in the world, Germany, situated in Central Europe, is the continent's most industrialised and populated country, comprising of 82 million inhabitants.
With an aggressive and tumultuous past that has left Germany in shatters following World War II, the country became one of the founders of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, which was a forerunner of the later European Union.
Germany today is a promise to the journey it has taken as a country that carries within its past Nazism, the Holocaust and the division between Europe's cold war blocks.
After the breakdown of the Cold War order and rising authoritarianism around the world, Germany, under Chancellor Angela Merkel, has been holding on to the principles of liberal democracy.
However, especially after the reunification of West- and East-Germany, right-wing extremism, fuelled by anti-immigrant, anti-muslim and anti-semitic ideologies, has been on the rise ever since.
Whereas, in the wake of the Syrian war, Germany has been in many ways a blueprint for welcoming immigration policies, but continues to face domestic resistance against its absorption of more than 850,000 refugees during the 'European refugee crisis' of 2016.
