The Haider Phenomenon in Austria The Haider Phenomenon in Austria Ruth Wodak and Anton Pelinka, editors Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2002 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX 14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2002 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2001034722 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Haider phenomenon in Austria / Ruth Wodak and Anton Pelinka, editors, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7658-0117-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7658-0883-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Freiheitliche Partei èsterreichs. 2. Austria—Politics and government— 20th century. 3. Haider, Jèrg. 4. Right and left (Political science) I. Wodak, Ruth, 1950- II. Pelinka, Anton, 1941- JN2031.F73H3552001 324.2436'035—dc21 2001034722 ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0883-7 (pbk) Contents Introduction vii Part 1 1. FPÖ, ÖVP, and Austria's Nazi Past 3 Walter Manoschek 2. The FPÖ, Foreigners, and Racism in the Haider Era 17 Reinhold Gartner 3. Discourse and Politics: The Rhetoric of Exclusion 33 Ruth Wodak 4. Who the Hell is Jörg Haider? 61 John Bunzl 5. A Man for All Seasons: An Anthropological Perspective on Public Representation and Cultural Politics of the Austrian Freedom Party 67 Andre Gingrich Part 2 6. Austrian Exceptionalism: Haider, the European Union, the Austrian Past and Present 95 Andrei S. Markovits 7. Haider—The New Symbolic Element of the Ongoing Discourse of the Past 121 Michal Krzyzanowski 8. Anti-Foreigner Campaigns in the Austrian Freedom Party and Italian Northern League: The Discursive Construction of Identity 157 Jessika ter Wal Part 3 9. Austria all Black and Blue: Jörg Haider, the European Sanctions, and the Political Crisis in Austria 179 Richard Mitten 10. The FPÖ in the European Context 213 Anton Pelinka 11. Constructing the Boundaries of the Volk: Nation-Building and National Populism in Austrian Politics 231 Rainer Baubock Contributors 255 Index 257 Introduction From Waldheim to Haider Ruth Wodak and Anton Pelinka Sometimes—not often—Austria makes political headlines. In past years and decades, this has happened at least twice: in 1986, when the "Waldheim Affair" was debated worldwide; in 1999, when the Aus- trian Freedom Party, under the leadership of Jörg Haider, received 27 percent of the vote in the national election. The Freedom Party (FPÖ) became part of the Austrian government when it formed a coalition with the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) on February 4, 2000. The two events generated discourse, which, both in Austria and beyond its borders, was similar and yet different. The similarities con- cern the difficulties of confronting Austria's Nazi past (Waldheim was part of the Wehrmacht; Haider, a member of the postwar generation, appealed to "old" sentiments; see Zöchling 1999, Ottomeyer 2000, Scharsach and Kuch 2000). In both cases, Austrians saw themselves as the victim of conspiracies against them, and a nationalistic, chau- vinistic discourse emerged, in public as well as in daily life. The differences lie in the importance of these elections and in their consequences. Waldheim served as a symbol of a generation that had "done its duty" (Manoschek 1986), while Haider stood for a right- wing populist program, and the FPÖ was the first party of its kind to be represented in the government of the European Union (ter Wai 2001). International reaction to these developments cannot be understood without taking into account Austria's role in the Second World War. vii viii The Haider Phenomenon in Austria In the following, we will summarize briefly the two phenomena before introducing the chapters in this volume. This short history and both the Austrian and European backgrounds are necessary to understand the strong emotions, international reactions, and scandals of 1986 and 1999/2000. The Waldheim Affair Postwar Anti-Semitism in Austria In his book, Der ewige Antisemit (1986), the German-Jewish author Henryk Broder repeated the phrase attributed to Zvi Rix, namely that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. In surveying past decades in Austria, it would appear that Broder's cynical phrase, an ironic description of the Germans' rationalizing projection, which was aimed at shifting the guilt to the victims, could apply equally well to Austria. Kurt Waldheim's 1986 presidential election campaign ef- fectively put an end to many of the qualms Austrians might have harbored earlier. During the campaign, few Austrians with anti-Semitic convictions felt a need to keep their views to themselves, particularly in the context of private discourse, and anti-Jewish prejudice found various verbal outlets of a more or less explicit nature. The sociologist Bernd Marin has characterized the postwar situation in Austria as "anti-Semitism without Jews and without anti-Semites" (Marin 1983, 2000). He assumed that anti-Semitism was functionalized and constantly used as a political tool, but that few dared to call themselves anti-Semitic after the Holocaust. This is generally true, although politicians like Oskar Helmer, a socialist and the first Aus- trian Minister of the Interior of the Second Republic, as well as Leopold Kunschak, the first leader of the Christian Austrian People's Party (OVP), made no great secret of their anti-Semitic attitudes even after 1945. Anti-Semitism existed in Austria immediately before 1938, during the Second World War, and after 1945, and it is still present today. Throughout the past fifty-five years, statistical surveys, opinion polls, and content analysis have developed various standardized quantitative research and survey procedures for identifying and measuring anti- Semitic prejudice. Of course, these procedures are always dependent on the design of the studies, the intentions of the researchers, the questions Introduction ix asked, and the samples themselves (e.g., Weiss 1987, Kienzl and Gehmacher 1987, and Gottschlich 1987). One of the polls (Kienzl 1987) identified an average of 7 percent of Austrians as radical anti- Semites; however, no one has clearly defined what a radical or less radical anti-Semite might be. In Kienzl and Gehmacher's study (1987) which presented this "famous" 7 percent, 40 percent of those asked gave no answer. The persistence of anti-Semitic attitudes in the above-mentioned opinion polls is ascribed to a small group of right-wing radicals. The number of such (radical) anti-Semites could thus be carefully delim- ited and their numbers shown to be falling. Anti-Semitism is also frequently identified with a purely racist variety of anti-Jewish preju- dice which is equated with Nazism or with the Nazi extermination of the Jews (the "Auschwitz" symbol), thereby effectively excluding or minimizing other anti-Semitic trends in Austria, such as the Christian or the Christian-Social traditions (see Reisigl and Wodak 2001; Mitten 1992). With the collapse of the Third Reich, many in Austria as well as in Germany were forced to acknowledge the extent of the Nazi crimes. Their doubts, feelings of guilt, and need to justify or rationalize their behavior encouraged the development of strategies for "dealing with the past": playing down the actions and events themselves, denying knowledge of them, or transforming the victims into the cause of present woes. Moreover, since the Moscow Declaration of 1943 was interpreted as an Allied offer of support for Austria's claim to have been the first "collective victim" of Nazi aggression, such reversals were able to draw upon an especially potent form of legitimation. The putative victim status also made it possible to deny any respon- sibility that went beyond individual crimes. The newly constructed Austrian identity produced stronger feelings of nationalism, which, in turn, reinforced a specific definition of insiders and outsiders and the separation of "us" from "them." Compared to the wave of anti-Semitic hostilities unleashed by the events of 1986, prior scandals were minor affairs. In 1986, during the "Waldheim Affair," there was a perceptible shift in public discourse, which developed a distinctive "us" and "them" pattern. The in-groups in this discourse ("Us") were Austria (note the metonymic-synecdochic totum pro parte), Waldheim (often taken as a pars pro toto for all "respectable" Austrians), the People's Party, the Wehrmachtgeneration,