EU Says the Right Stops Here

Friday, after the swearing in of the new Austrian government that includes Joerg Haider’s extreme-right Freedom Party, the European Union began to put in place measures that would for the first time sanction and virtually isolate a member nation. The United States followed suit, if more cautiously, vowing to take steps that would conform to those proposed by the Europeans and temporarily recalling its ambassador from Vienna.

Many immediately voiced misgivings about the EU’s expanded compass, asserting that direct interference with the outcome of a democratic election in a peaceable and stable European polity was a disturbing precedent. Nonetheless, the European Union spoke with unusual clarity; it chose the Austrian crisis to take a stand on what Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema called “standards and values” of European unity: a refusal to countenance even faint echoes of Europe’s totalitarian and racist past.

Why has the EU chosen to put those values to the test in the case of Austria, a prosperous, somewhat sleepy Alpine country with only 7 million inhabitants? One answer lies in Austria’s Nazi years, in Haider’s xenophobic slogans and in his often quoted--and halfheartedly retracted--sympathetic statements on behalf of Waffen SS and Wehrmacht veterans. More alarming than his extremism, however, is his political success, especially in a country where local excesses have historically tended to spill over into the rest of Europe.

The EU’s threat to isolate Austria diplomatically is an expression of Europe-wide sensitivity to the real danger: the potential for Haider’s Austrian brand of xenophobia to ignite similar movements elsewhere. Haider evokes the specter of a democratically elected far-right government long resisted by politicians and electorates everywhere in Europe.

Here, the memory of the 1930s, not simply of Nazism, plays a crucial role. Since 1945, European Social Democrats and liberals, but also traditional conservatives, have been firm in giving no place to racist, xenophobic and extreme nationalist parties in democratic governments. They understand it was the authoritarian right, not the communist left, that constituted the greatest threat to constitutional and parliamentary government in interwar Europe.

This new government in Vienna violates a major taboo of postwar European politics. A party of the radical right has become a major player in the domestic politics of a European state for the first time since World War II. Austria could also potentially block east-central European nations from the EU. French President Jacques Chirac is right to worry that Haider could reinvigorate the now divided Jean-Marie Le Pen movement in France. His anxiety is shared by other European leaders wary of such shadowy figures as former Slovakian Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar and Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky in Russia. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who also fears a growth of the extreme right in the wake of the scandal surrounding former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, emphatically warned against Austria’s path. So Haider is anything but a local phenomenon.

Most alarming is the fact that ideology plays a relatively small role in Haider’s success. Though he is a populist who is genuinely popular, especially outside of cosmopolitan Vienna, he appeals to Austria’s corporate elite, which regards his party as a reform movement, more economically liberal than extremist. Haider has been called a postmodern politician, lacking in strong ideological commitments, quixotic on issues, mediagenic. His strength in the October elections came largely from voters under 30, who preferred what some call his “non-ideology.” Haider speaks to widespread frustration with the entrenched two-party stranglehold on Austrian public life that turns all jobs, from professorships to firemen, into party patronage.

The new ruling coalition (Haider himself remains a provincial governor) will not mean a return to the kind of authoritarian rule that toppled democracy in 1934, nor does it signal a return to the euphoria that greeted the Anschluss with Germany in 1938. Austria is a stable, prosperous democracy, and Haider plays by democratic rules.

But the new government is hardly as benign as the 1994 Italian government of Silvio Berlusconi, which included Gianfranco Fini’s neo-fascist National Alliance. Unlike Italy, where the neo-fascists have a small percentage of the votes, and where there has been a reckoning with the fascist past, Haider’s Freedom Party is the largest far-right party in Europe, and the second strongest in a country where no such reckoning has taken place. Also unlike Italy, there is no guarantee that the mainstream conservative People’s Party, Haider’s partner in government, can keep Haider’s movement in a subordinate role.

The initial Austrian reaction to the EU protest was predictably indignant. Haider denounced the EU as “corrupt” and People’s Party head and new Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel retorted that “Austria does not have to be liked.” Austrian conservatives have also shown little understanding for the opprobrium of their colleagues in the Europe-wide People’s Party, who demanded the ouster of the Austrian faction when Haider’s party joins the government. Seeking to put an end to the escalating problem, on Thursday Austrian President Thomas Klestil insisted that both Schuessel and Haider sign a lengthy declaration committing their government to adhere to Europe’s “spiritual and moral values” and to admit Austria’s responsibility for the “terrible crimes of the National Socialist regime.”

The EU’s fear that events in Austria might spill over onto the rest of Europe also has deep historical justification. During the 1880s, an Austrian, Georg von Schoenerer, invented modern anti-Semitism; and his rival, Vienna’s popular Mayor Karl Lueger, refined the tactical use of anti-Semitism as a political instrument. Adolf Hitler’s years in Vienna before World War I provided a first-rate education in anti-Semitic demagoguery.

Haider does not seem to know much about Austrian history, but his political career is a product of postwar developments. Both the Haider phenomenon and Austria’s cultural isolation from the rest of Europe have their origins in the peculiar postwar Austrian system of “Proporz,” or parity. It was a decision to share power between the Socialists and the People’s Party at all levels, ending the enmity that dominated interwar Austria and giving the Second Republic a stable foundation.

The aim was to evade any public confrontation with Austria’s violent history. Between 1918 and 1934, armed Socialists and Christian authoritarians battled in the streets; from 1934 to 1938, the Christian Social Party and the Nazis vied for control; and between 1938 and 1945, Nazified Austria was deeply implicated in the crimes of the Reich. This violent past was swept under the rug by political leaders who exaggerated the need to avoid rekindling the political passions that had inflamed all Austrians.

The ultimate consequence was to keep a tight lid on anything that might threaten the core myth of postwar Austria: that Austria was a victim of Nazi aggression and most citizens had been opposed to the Nazification of Austria. This national myth, ritualistically repeated in countless public statements since the war, made all Austrians privy to a kind of state secret. Since each major party was made up of voters who knew differently, it became necessary for politicians and citizens alike to maintain this deception. To the dismay of Simon Wiesenthal, in 1975 Chancellor Bruno Kreisky refused to remove a former SS officer from his cabinet.

The Waldheim affair that exploded in 1986, when President Kurt Waldheim was revealed to have been involved in Nazi atrocities, was traumatic because it exposed the national secret: Austria had been a willing collaborator in Hitler’s new order; many Austrians had rallied to Hitler in 1933 and were among his most loyal supporters. Austrians played a disproportionate role in the destruction of European Jewry. Unlike West Germany, which made restitution and remembrance an integral part of the new democracy, Austrians preferred to conceal the past, often angrily and arrogantly. Not surprisingly, many Austrians identified with Waldheim as a symbol of the national syndrome: an innocent with a dark secret.

In a bizarre irony, Haider’s emergence on the national scene marked the end of the old model. Haider represents the coming out of Austria’s secret, and, at the same time, the modernization of the political system that kept it in the closet.

The dilemma, as Haider frequently asserts, is that his Freedom Party cannot be denied the right to participate in a coalition without undermining democratic principles. There can be no doubt that keeping Haider’s Freedom Party out in the cold only enhances his prestige. That is why the EU’s insistence on democratic virtues, as well as formal democratic principles, is both timely and eloquent.

If Austria is faced with sanctions, it is because its isolation from Europe produced Haider, not vice-versa. Whether he represents Austria’s future is up to Austrians to decide. *