Commentary No. 36, Mar. 15, 2000
"The Austrian Extreme Right: Why the Fuss?"
Austria is a small country in the center of Europe, wealthy but not at all powerful today either politically or militarily. It has been one of the most placid countries in the post-1945 world. All of a sudden, it is in the world headlines. The other 14 members of the European Union have officially suspended bilateral relations with its government. Many Austrians are in turn upset with the other Europeans. On the other hand, every Thursday evening, there is a protest march in Vienna against the government under the slogan of Widerstand (resistance). And, for the first time since 1945, Austrians are discussing openly their role during the Second World War. What has happened?
The facts are quite straightforward. In the last Austrian elections, on Oct. 3, 1999, an extreme right party, the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), obtained 26.9% of the vote, the largest vote by far of any such party in any west European election since 1945. This party's platform was primarily racist and anti-immigrant, also anti-European, combined with a strong free enterprise line. The party actually came in second in the vote, nosing out the mainline conservative, Christian Democratic party, the ÖVP, by a few hundred votes. This was a shock to Austrians, and a shock to other west Europeans. No one was quite sure how to react at first.
The shock to Austrians was that the comfortable political system they had put into place was shaken. For several decades now, the two mainline parties, the center-left Social Democrats, and the center-right Christian Democrats, had formed successive "national governments," obtaining until the early 1990's 90% of the vote, and dividing up the spoils in a system Austrians called the Proporz (which means quotas for each of the two mainline parties in all political and civil service posts). It seems Austrians had gotten tired of this cozy system, and in 1999, they brought it to an end. In a book brought out by the leaders of the Widerstand in the last month, the editor poses the problem thus: "Now we see finally that, in Austria, one of the richest countries in the world, what governs is hate."
Austria is in some ways a very particular west European country in its relation to Nazism and Hitler. Germany has come to accept that it bears a moral responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi period. And in the last few years, various Allied countries, such as France and the Netherlands, have begun to admit that they share some of the guilt both because they had not prevented the rise of Hitler and even more because some of their citizens had joined in the Nazi crimes. Only Austria has steadfastly refused all guilt.
Austria was incorporated into the Third Reich in 1938 in what was called an Anschluss. No doubt Austrians varied in their wish for this incorporation. But when Hitler marched into Vienna, the crowds cheered very loudly, and Austrians became Germans without any legal distinction, fully sharing the deeds and misdeeds of the Hitler regime. After the war, Austria was occupied by the four powers - the U.S., the U.S.S.R., Great Britain, and France - just like Germany, but as a separate state. In 1955, the four occupying powers signed a treaty with Austria, the so-called Belvedere Treaty, withdrawing their troops and guaranteeing Austrian independence on the basis of its military neutrality. At the request of the Austrians, the first clause of this treaty calls Austria "the first victim" of Nazism. This is a most dubious assessment of reality, but it has been the governing myth of Austrian politics ever since, and has prevented any discussion whatsoever within Austria of Nazism or of Austria's role in the Nazi regime. This has been a tabu subject, and there exists today probably more nostalgia for Nazi themes in Austria than in Germany.
Jörg Haider, the leader of the FPÖ, has been adept at constant and clever allusions to this Nazi heritage, a source no doubt of the attractiveness of his party. His other theme has been the danger of migrants - from southern Europe, and now from east-central Europe. Despite this fact, after the 1999 elections, the negotiations between the mainline parties to form a new national government failed, and the Christian Democrats decided to form a coalition with the extreme right party.
As soon as this happened, the other members of the European Union decided on the boycott of bilateral relations. Why did they react so strongly? The problem of the growing strength of the extreme right in European countries exists in most of them. Up to now, however, the maximum that any such party has received in the polls has been 15%, and in no country have they been accepted into the government. (Such a party did enter the previous Italian government, but only after having renounced its neo-fascist past before the elections.) What Austria did, what the Austrian mainline conservatives did, was cross a line that western Europe had drawn in the sand since 1945, the moral and political isolation of parties linked in any way to fascism. And the west Europeans governments were afraid not to react strongly. Had they not done so, they could not continue to refuse to make similar alliances with extreme right parties in their own countries.
At this point, in Austria, there were two kinds of reactions. Many persons who were not necessarily partisans of the new government, felt that the boycott was illegitimate, and said that it was hypocritical, since extreme right parties existed in all the other countries as well. They refused to acknowledge that Austria had crossed a line, just as they refused to acknowledge that Austria had anything to apologize for during the Nazi period. But there were others, the Widerstand, who were saying: at last, it's out in the open. We must discuss the past, and we must fight racism in the present.
Of course, the Austrians talking of hypocrisy are right in one sense. Austria is not a unique case. Racism is rampant in all of western Europe, as in North America and indeed throughout the world-system. Racism is a constitutive element of the capitalist world-economy. Nazism and the Final Solution represent only the ultimate consequence of the rhetoric, but they also represent an ultimate consequence that was never supposed to happen. The point of racism has always been to subordinate large groups of people, to keep them as cheap labor and political scapegoats. Wiping them out defies the logic of the capitalist system. The Nazi Final Solution was certainly not the first time large groups of people had been wiped out. But it was the first time this was done so publicly, so proudly, and with such avowed intent. So Nazism had crossed a line, and the rest of the world-system combated it, eventually. Austria raises the fear that the demon might be re-emerging.
But it makes no sense to discuss the current situation in Austria without talking about the centrality of racism to our existing world-system. Today, in Europe, anti-Semitism may be a rhetorical tabu, as is anti-Catholicism in Protestant countries. But racism that refers to Muslims, to Blacks and Asians, to east Europeans, is openly practiced, and not only in Austria. So, in one sense, the Austrians are right. There is a good deal of hypocrisy in what the west Europeans have been saying. Indeed there is one subtext in the European boycott which is perhaps the worst. The west Europeans seem to be saying that ethnic hatreds may be normal in eastern Europe, and in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but are unthinkable in western Europe, because western Europe is "too civilized" for ethnic hatreds. Austria had the misfortune of revealing this mythical self-description of western Europe for what it is, a dangerous self-deception.
The Austrian imbroglio is just the beginning of a major self-reevaluation of European countries. In this sense, it has its positive side. In the meantime, the truly healthy forces are still weaker, in Austria and elsewhere in western Europe, than one would hope they were.
[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315.
These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen
from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]
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