Joerg Haider in historical perspective
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 08:46:16 +0100 From: "Lonnie R. Johnson" lrj@usia.co.at
In response to some of the recent postings, I would like to share a few observations about the diversification of the Austrian political spectrum in the past 15 years, the new alignment of political constituencies, and some of the historical and terminological problems related to defining "left" and "right". The "old" Austrian political spectrum -- with Austria being understood as the territories that became the Republic of Austria in 1918 -- was based on the existence of three "camps" (_Lager_) dating back to the late 19th century: Christian social (or Christian democratic), social democratic, and liberal-national. One can trace the continuity of these three camps through the interwar period and up to the immediate post-WW II emergence of the OeVP, SPOe, and FPOe. Until the mid-1980s, the Austrian political system was characterized by the fact that the two largest camps (SPOe and OeVP) divided over 90% of the votes between themselves. The "third camp" of the FPOe was of negligible size (6% in the 1986 elections) and consisted of a "liberal" and a "national" wing. In 1986, two events marked the beginning of the end of the "old" Austrian political spectrum: the advent of the Greens as a parliamentary faction and the rise of Joerg Haider to the party chairmanship of the FPOe. The Greens have drawn on the left-wing and intellectual constituencies of both the SPOe and the OeVP, and this party has a predominantly urban, bourgeois, well educated following. Haider's rise to power in the FPOe generally is interpreted as a victory of the "national" wing of the party over its "liberal" wing, represented at that time by presiding party chairman Norbert Steger. The shift of the party under Haider to a more aggressive populist-nationalist agenda laid the foundations for an internal party split between what could best be called "liberal liberals" and "national liberals" in the FPOe. In 1993, a small group of FPOe parliamentarians, led by the FPOe candidate for president in the 1992 elections, Heide Schmidt, established a "liberal club" in the Austrian parliament. The "Liberal Forum" (LiF) then campaigned successfully in the parliamentary elections of 1994 and 1995, but did not manage to attract enough votes to be represented in parliament after the elections of October 1999. The deterioration of Austria's three political camps produced five political parties in Austria. The rise of the smaller parties (Greens, FPOe, and LiF) has been at the expense of the the SPOe and OeVP and indicates to what extent they have not managed to maintain their traditional core constituencies. These "big two" political parties used to garner over 90% of the votes cast jointly, but they successively have lost 30% of their voters to other parties in the past two decades. The rise of the FPOe has been at the expense of the OeVP and in particular the SPOe, as the dramatic shift in the electoral behavior of the Austrian working class in the past twenty years has illustrated. In the elections of 1979, the SPOe attracted 63% of the working class vote (OeVP 29%, FPOe 4%, others 4%); in the elections of 1999, the FPOe emerged as the largest "working class party": SPOe 35%, OeVP 12%, FPOe 47%, others 6%. Anton Pelinka has referred to this phenomenon as the "proletarization" of the FPOe. At the same time, the FPOe has succeeded in attracting a considerable number of younger voters. In the past elections, one-third of the FPOe voters were under 35. Under these circumstances one must ask what has motivated a considerable portion of the Austrian working class -- politically socialized in the SPOe tradition of antifascism -- to vote for a "right wing" party and why an equally considerable portion of younger Austrians have been willing to vote for a party accused of being a haven for "old Nazis" and criticized for its historical revisionism. In other words, does FPOe historical revisionism, which has been one of the greatest sources of domestic and international concern and criticism and one of the reasons the party has been designated as "far right," attract the younger and the working class vote in Austria or are their other reasons for the success of the FPOe under Haider? Historical revisionism, although the most controversial and high profile issue, does not seem to be a plausible explanation for the success of the FPOe in comparison to the party's appeals to "Austrian nationalism" (which for its critics includes xenophobia) and its scathing criticism of traditional Austrian institutions of governance: power-sharing coalitions, duopoly, neo-corporatism, social partnership, political privilege and patronage, etc. Many of Haider's critics accuse him of being a revisionist, a racist, and a populist: usually in that order. The reasons for his success, however, are inverse order. Haider's liberal critique of traditional forms of Austrian post-WW II governance (or populism) appealed to many Austrians who felt that it is more than high time for a change: less regulation, less intervention, more transparency, more equal opportunity. The two major parties have indulged in extensive systems of proportional power-sharing and political patronage (called _Proporz_ and _Partiebuchwirtschaft_ or "the economics of party membership") and those Austrians who have not been or are not benefactors of these arrangements have expressed their discontent by voting for the FPOe as a means of protest. (In a posting last week Steven Beller observed: "Austrian politics needed a change, it is true. The question remains, however, why it needed to happen in THIS way?" Given the results of the elections, the history of the various negotiations, and parliamentary mathematics, there was no other way to establish a government. Of course, this does not answer Mr. Beller's real question: the international cost of this domestic decision for Austria.) At the same time, the level of subjective insecurity in Austria has increased tremendously in the past decade. The fall of the Iron Curtain and Austria's EU membership completely changed the position of Austria in Europe and instigated a wave of modernization that has threatened lower income groups with lower levels of education and skills, in particular: the potential "losers" in the process of modernization who, at the same time, are most susceptible to populistic appeals such as "Austria first" with its implicit or explicit xenophobia (or "racism" mentioned above). Security is the most highly esteemed social value in Austria, and Haider repeatedly appeals to it: to secure Austrian jobs and business sites, to secure families, to secure the Austrian standard of living, to secure pensions, to secure public safety, to secure Austria's frontiers, etc. FPOe policy on asylum, immigration, naturalization, and EU enlargement also are part of this "security policy." Mark Pittway and Steven Beller exchanged views on the potential relationship of Austrian economic performance to the success of the FPOe. Indeed, before and after the elections of last October, many Austrian observers were baffled by the fact that the numbers for the economy were so good but the general atmosphere was so bad and foreboding. Are there material reasons for discontent in one of the richest countries in the European Union (with one of its lowest rates of unemployment) that is enjoying modest economic growth and whose rate of inflation just has reached a thirty year low? I would venture the conjecture that there may well be a relationship between prosperity, insecurity, and the rise of the FPOe in the Austrian case: people having the feeling that they have something to lose and voting for a party that they feel will best protect their interests. We are accustomed to explaining the rise of "old" forms of radicalism, such as Nazism and Communism, in terms of the relationship between economic hardship and a propensity for political extremism. The rise of the "New Right" in Europe may well combine relatively high levels of prosperity with appeals to anti-modernization. Given the diversity of its constituency and the ideological potpourri of its program, the FPOe is not a representative of the "Old Right" but of the "New Right," which ultimately raises the question of the FPOe's relationship to the "Old Right," revisionism, and which terminology is most appropriate for describing the "New Right." In this context, one must also distinguish between the political weight of Haider's previous revisionism, on the one hand, and the moral, historical, and political implications thereof, on the other. It would be erroneous to assume that the younger and working class elements of the FPOe constituency are politically motivated by revisionism, and I have suggested above that discontent and insecurity are more plausible motives for their electoral behavior. However, Haider's previous revisionist statements have attracted the most attention and criticism. Some critics of Haider are representatives of what perhaps could be called the "Old Left," and, as such, are proponents of "classic" or "historical anti-fascism," who see revisionism as a programmatic and methodological link between the fascism of the past and the anticipated danger of a reversion to fascism or neo-fascism in the future. The relationship between anti-fascist vigilance and the generous rhetorical use of anti-fascist terminology is the issue at stake here. The propensity of some critics to use the terms "fascist," "neo-fascist," or "quasifascist" (_faschistoid_) in the debate or to anticipate putsches or pogroms does not necessarily promote the type of differentiated analysis that is necessary for dealing with the phenomena of the "New Right," which is ideologically much more diffuse and amorphous than the "Old Right." In other words, when the "New Right" intentionally or inadvertently flirts with revisionism, which has an especially high political and historical load in Austria and Germany but a considerably lower political draw among younger voters who are either not motivated by historical issues or disinterested in history, the "Old Left" indulges in a form of rhetorical overkill that treats the "New Right" agenda in a historically monocausal and relatively undifferentiated manner: as an extension of the "Old Right" agenda. Ascertaining historical continuities and affinities between the "Old" and the "New Right" where they exist is important. However, an ideological reduction of the "New Right" agenda to "Old Right" precedents is problematic. Insinuating such continuities where there may be none and then postulating political intent upon that basis is irresponsible. There is a considerable amount of novelty on the "New Right," including its commitment to representative democracy. Furthermore, the strategy of the "New Right" is a mirror reverse version of the strategy of the "New Left" in many respects: the attempt to maintain a commitment to traditional partisan values and objectives for "old supporters" and dwindling constituencies and to move towards the center to recruit new voters from new constituencies at the same time. In a recent posting, Mark Pittaway advised us not only to view the rise of right-wing populist movements as a pan-European phenomenon related to the fragmentation of the European political spectrum but also to take the national historical backgrounds of individual populist movements into account to explain the genealogy of the discontent upon which they feed. We should heed his advice and attempt to come up with meaningful criteria that allow us to differentiate among the various movements in terms of the historical experiences that individuate them, one the one hand, and to generalize about the attributes and degrees of radicalism that allow us to compare them, on the other. Conservative, right-wing, far-right, extreme right, populist, neo-populist, and neo-fascist all are terminologically vague, and lumping all "New Right" movements into one historical or one political category merely obscures the historical and political complexity of these phenomena. Politicians, and not historians, ultimately bear responsibility for making tactical decisions regarding how to deal with the rise of the "New Right." Many observers of the Austrian scene retrospectively feel that the tactics of exclusion the major parities employed to keep the FPOe out of power ultimately worked to the advantage of the FPOe to get into power. A further assumption of this argument is that if exclusion enhanced its popularity, "inclusion" may diminish it. Under these circumstances, one may draw parallels between how German conservatives "included" Hitler in 1933 and Austrian conservatives have "included" the Haider FPOe in 2000 to argue that this strategy backfired once in a big way and consequently is the wrong one to chose now. (This is a good example of a "Old Left" interpretation of a "New Right" phenomenon.) However, comparing the constitutional framework and political culture of Weimar Republic with those of the Austrian Second Republic, the program of the NSDAP with that of the FPOe, or the political dynamics of interwar Europe with those of the European Union at the dawn of a new millennium shows how weak some provocative historical parallels can be. They ultimately obscure many of the issues at stake. Lonnie R. Johnson