Austria's elections, the radical-right and the lessons for Europe

In yesterday’s general elections in Austria, two radical right-wing parties, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and the Union for the Future of Austria (BZÖ) polled together almost 30 percent of all votes cast. Having been in Austria twice since elections became inevitable as a consequence of the breakdown of the grand coalition between the two big parties in June, this aspect of the results was no surprise – but it is nevertheless shocking. The FPÖ has adopted positions that are openly racist, while the BZÖ is effectively the political creation of the Governor of Carinthia, Jörg Haider, whose reputation as one of Europe’s leading radical right-wing politicians was established during the 1990s.

Much ink is likely to be spilled in the mainstream media across Europe and North America, seeking to argue that the roots of this election result lie in Austria’s National Socialist past and its failure to come to terms with that legacy during much of the post-war period. I am highly sceptical of these explanations. This is not to deny that political elites during the first forty-five years of the Second Republic sought to whitewash the reality of Austrian support for National Socialism, and the complicity of Austrian society in maintaining a criminal regime. Nor do I want to deny that this whitewashing and the dominance of the politics of statist consensus during the post-war period had baleful effects on the development of Austrian political culture. When Austria was subject to EU sanctions in early 2000 following the inclusion of the FPÖ in a right-wing coalition, I argued in my contribution to a discussion on the HABSBURG list that the rise of the radical right in Austria was related far more to contemporary political, social and economic pressures than a past that was then fifty-five years distant.

Not only was this true then, but it is equally true almost nine years after the FPÖ won the same kind of share of the vote that the FPÖ and BZÖ won together yesterday. While most media commentary focuses on the past, they miss the more crucial, important and worrying point – that this result points to the future of politics in Europe, rather than its past. To see why this is the case one only needs to examine the relationship between society and politics in Austria during the post-war period, and some of the parallels (and points of divergence) with other European states.

During the years of four-power occupation between 1945 and 1955, Austria’s political elites were forced to build a political system based on elite consensus. The presence of Soviet troops in the east of the country, and much of Austria bordered socialist states from the late 1940s cemented elite co-operation. The centre-right majority and socialist/social democratic minority co-operated. The left’s supporters were integrated through the development of a welfare state, that continued after Austria signed its peace treaty in 1955, and reached its apogee during the 1970s when the Socialist Party (re-named in 1991 as the Social Democrats) won a series of absolute majorities. In the early 1980s as the cold winds of new right politics blew through North America and Europe, Austria continued to enjoy full employment, and welfare-based politics based on a high degree of elite consensus.

Given the changes in the international economic environment during the 1980s this did not last, and from 1986 under a grand coalition of the two major parties, budgets were cut, full employment abandoned, and state industries were privatized – unemployment reached 7 percent by 1993, and Austria became a two-thirds, one-third society like its neighbours. During the same period, the cold war border between east and west disappeared, with a consequent pick-up in economic migration – a process exacerbated by flight from the consequences of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. This was the environment which enabled Jörg Haider’s rise during the 1990s.

Up to five years ago, it seemed that the radical right’s incorporation into government in 2000 had led to its marginalization. The responsibility for governing and supporting some fairly unpleasant neo-Thatcherite policies undercut its ability to play the populist cards Haider used to such effect in the 1990s. The FPÖ split between Haider and his “moderates”, and the anti-immigrant, racist radicals. Aided by the stupidity of those leading a renewed grand coalition of the two parties that took power in 2007 (especially of the Social Democrats in agreeing to most of the neo-liberal agenda of the party they defeated after spending an election campaigning against it), they have returned with a vengeance.

Hitherto, Austria’s radical-right has been most effective as a vehicle of protest, but they may not stay as such (a unified radical-right party, combining the FPÖ and BZÖ, would have come within one percent of winning more votes than any other party on the basis of yesterday’s scores). Therefore the phenomena which have made them a major political force need to be grasped. The first of these is the tabloidization of the mass media. The FPÖ especially speak the language of tabloid populism effectively – looking at their posters, their layout, and language I was reminded of the front-pages of tabloid newspapers across Europe (there is a very good example of what I mean here). It is difficult not to draw the conclusion that the rise of the radical-right in Austria demonstrates the dangers of the debasement of political debate that the growing tabloidization of the media has brought in train.

The second and more serious issue is the salience of the politics of immigration. Austria seems to me to be a prime example of a state where legitimacy was built among the population through offering nationally-bounded social citizenship. During the post-war period the authority of the state was based on offering Austrian citizens full employment, relative security, and a welfare state. Ironically because of the success and the nationally-bounded nature of this bargain many of its core supporters have reacted to its erosion by believing that if it were restricted only to “true Austrians” then it would gain a renewed viability. The futility and inhumanity of such politics of restriction have not stopped many people believing in them (aside from the size of the combined vote of the FPÖ and BZÖ, one of the most depressing features of this election was the way in which all mainstream Austrian parties bought into the anti-immigration consensus).

I think the description I have given is good reason to ignore smug analyses that suggest this election result was rooted in Austria’s Nazi past. I recognize many of the phenomena behind the large vote for radical-right parties in Austria in most western European states, including my native Britain. Given the state of the Schengen border regime in Europe one can imagine ever more futile and barbaric anti-immigration measures being pursued, accompanied by neo-nationalist politics of restriction and exclusion on lines of citizenship within Europe’s nation-states. While I find such a future profoundly abhorrent, there seems to be little debate (and even less political will) about when it comes to developing an alternative based upon principles of non-racism and greater social justice (both locally and globally).

Borders and Border Regimes - Part Two

What do I mean by a “border regime”? I’m using the concept in order to capture the way in which the government of a given international border is not just best captured by the legal regulations that govern it in theory, but the range of social and political relations within which these regulations operate and interact. “Border regimes” shift, depending not only on their political context, but also as a consequence of the changes in the ways in which borderland societies interact with the reality of their border, and each other.

In recent years the history of borders has become a topic that has attracted considerable interest. Most of this literature is a history of how the linear borders of modern territorial states came into being – at least in so far as they examine borders within Europe. This strong point of this literature is that it demonstrates that the linear, well-defined border between states has never been a natural state of affairs, but became hegemonic across the continent at the end of the nineteenth century. It has also underlined the way in which this was the product of historical forces and of events. Its weak point stems from the fact that most of the work done hitherto regards the formation of the territorial state as the end of the story. It fails to examine a reality of border-making as an incomplete and profoundly contested project.

Since 2004, I have been researching the history of a stretch of the Austrian-Hungarian border between 1938 and 1960. This border had been defined as a linear border between two states, regulated by international law as the product of a process of a contestation between 1918 and 1921. The borderland had before been a multi-lingual, culturally-shared region. The border certainly re-shaped this reality, but did not lead automatically to a separation of the territories that lay on either side. Throughout the inter-war years the Austrian-Hungarian border was a region that was contested politically, while remaining a culturally-shared space. In 1938, with Austria’s incorporation into Germany the nature of the border regime shifted. Strangely, the designs of some of those who supported the new National Socialist regime on territories within Hungary populated by German speakers, and Hungarian reactions to those designs preserved the culturally-shared nature of the borderland. As I have argued in a recent article, it was the end of the Second World War and its consequences, with the expulsion of German speakers and the related growth of mutual suspicion across the border that initiated a dynamic of separation which divided the region. This process of separation complemented the broader international dynamic, which marked the beginning of the Cold War in Europe, and reinforced many of its effects. The cold war border – with its watch-towers, barbed wire and minefields – reduced cross-border traffic sharply, but was seen as deeply illegitimate by populations on both sides of the border, though for different reasons. While the Austrian population saw the presence of the Cold War border as actively threatening, for many Hungarians it symbolized a lack of political freedom. Thus, when the regime attempted de-Stalinization in summer 1956, one of its early steps was to remove the barbed wire and minefields (only to replace them after the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution later that year). It played a central, and relatively little-known role in the events of 1989.

The broader conclusion I draw from this is that international borders and border regimes have shifted constantly throughout the century. Both historians and commentators more generally should play close attention to the attitudes and mentalities of those who seek to cross them, and who live either side of them. Attempts to control these borders through the policies of restriction are likely to prove ineffective.

As an historian I am bound to say that the first lesson of this analysis is that more research needs to be done on the different border regimes, raising the issue of how borderland populations interacted with them on an everyday level throughout the twentieth century. Starting from specialized local studies we should aim to use comparison in order to examine why border regimes have shifted during the period. From this kind of work, we would gain, I think, a much greater appreciation of how Europe is changing than we have now.

Although there is much we do not know, I think the following comments might be made about the state of border regimes, and about migration-related controversy in contemporary Europe. The first point I would make is the one I would make above is about the futility of a policy of restriction. For the past thirty years western European governments have introduced ever more restrictive policies in an attempt to shut migrants from the South out. The human costs of this policy in terms of the real human suffering of those attempting to reach the EU illegally are deeply worrying. Furthermore, they have contributed to a huge shadow workforce of illegal immigrants in many European states who live in conditions of deep insecurity and misery, while the bargaining power of certain sections of the documented workforce is undermined profoundly. Secondly, much discussion of globalization has highlighted its cultural and economic dimensions, and has neglected the pull of globalization on the world’s workforce through mass migration. Certainly, mass migration in search of greater economic opportunity is nothing new, as the social history of territories such as the United States shows. However, larger numbers of people are increasingly prepared to move across well controlled international borders in search of economic opportunity. Behind this lays one of the largest social justice issues of our time; that of the yawning economic chasm between different states and regions within the world economy, and its very real and disturbing human consequences. Thirdly and lastly, the politics of migration and border control have helped drive the growing saliency of radical right-wing politics across much of western Europe. While plain racism and xenophobia is a substantial part of the explanation for this development it is also the product of another process. During the twentieth century notions of citizenship were re-defined by the process of both war, and the making of welfare settlements as national social citizenship. States have been expected to provide jobs and basic material welfare to their citizens. Over the past twenty-five years the ability of states to meet these aspirations have been eroded by the hegemony of neo-liberal politics. Protest – as projects such as the pan-European SIREN project have shown – has become displaced onto migrants.

All of these developments suggest that the dynamic history of “border regimes” in contemporary Europe is far from over ………

Borders and Border Regimes - Part One

Borders have been at the heart of political discussion in Europe during the past two decades, and throughout the post-war period. They symbolized the political division of the continent into "east" and "west" prior to the events of 1989-1991. Their symbolic centrality to the events of 1989 is clear.




The video above is a reminder of the ways in which the events of 1989 were experienced. Based on footage from the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint between East and West Berlin taken on the evening of 9th November 1989 it captures the uncertainty and confusion that characterized the wall opening. It is also a reminder that for those living on either side of them borders form part of an everyday reality of division.

The "border regime" that exists in contemporary Europe has changed considerably over the last nineteen years. With the entrance of former socialist states into the European Union beginning in May 2004, and their entry into Schengen area in December 2007, restrictions on travel for the citizens of their states have eased considerably. Europe has not become borderless: the UK and Ireland still retain border controls, while more importantly a patchwork of restrictions - allowed as transitional measures under the terms of accession treaties - prevents citizens of Central and Eastern Europe from participating legally in many western European labour markets. Most importantly, the Schengen regime has established a fortress-like wall between the interior of the European Economic Area, and those states that lie outside it; especially those states in the South that lack the bargaining power with Brussels, London, or Paris, to negotiate exemptions to the stringent visa requirements imposed. In Spain's African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla physical barriers have been built to literally fence Europe off to those who would travel to it from outside. In a brilliant essay, Navid Kermani has drawn our attention to the ways in which the management of Europe's borders reveals a striking contrast between the success of Europeans in overcoming internal political divisions, and their utter failure in managing the consequences of the economic gulf that separates Europeans from the majority of the global population that live in the South.

This emergent "Schengen border regime" is contested in a number of ways in contemporary Europe. Populist politics directed against immigration are one of these ways. Yet this populist politics rests on a notion that the border of a territorial state, firmly under the control of its national government is somehow the natural state of things - hence the tabloid demand for secure borders. An examination of the "border regimes" that have existed in Europe's recent history suggests that this notion is flawed ......

Why Rethinking Europe?

Most commentary on Europe starts from a cold war perspective, which, almost twenty years after the end of the political division of the continent into east and west persists in both journalistic commentary and in historical writing. I don't wish to deny the importance of this division for thinking about what happened in Europe between 1945 and the end of the 1980s. Nor do I wish to deny the importance of its legacy - especially as far as the differences in living standards, and general levels of economic prosperity are concerned for the two halves of continent. What I'm really getting at is the ways in which commentators (including some historians) have sought to use this past political division to explain events/phenomena in ways which distort their reality.

I'll give an example of what I mean here. Not too long ago I was present at an academic conference where the participants began to discuss the relative political significance of consumerism in socialist Central and Eastern Europe, and capitalist western Europe. One participant argued that the difference was that east of the "iron curtain" consumption was politicized, while west of the dividing line it was not. Coming from the UK, where at least until the arrival of Tony Blair, Labour argued for the primacy of collective consumption (council housing, free state-provided health care, education, extensive welfare benefits), and the Conservatives challenged them by advocating a greater role for consumer choice and the private sector (council-house sales, half-hearted promotion of private health care, private pensions etc.) I found this a little difficult to accept.

The lesson I drew from this was that while there were important differences between "western" and "eastern" Europe, many of which still persist, the nature of those differences are still poorly understood by commentators and specialists alike. There is, therefore, a need for some form of discussion which advances understanding of these differences, and engages, however, partially in the task of both "re-thinking European history", and "re-thinking" what we mean by "Europe".

This has become a more urgent task since May 2004, and the beginnings of the "eastern" enlargement of the European Union. Four years on, there is a growing recognition of the radical implications of expanding the EU not only for the social, economic and political structures that exist across the continent, but for identities in the former "east", as well as the former "west". I also believe, unsurprisingly given my own professional background, that "History" is important in understanding the nature of this change.

As an academic I could have explored these theme through the traditional format of the publication of a programmatic article in a journal somewhere. I've opted for a blog for three reasons, which are interconnected:

1. The formats of academic publication would require to me to have well-formed, highly-polished answers to the questions that I am raising here, that I could defend. They would then be used to advance the discussion. I am not altogether sure that my ideas are as well-worked out as necessary.
2. My academic research and publication addresses these themes anyway through the medium of highly-specialized, focussed academic research (on workers in Hungary, and now the social history of the Austrian-Hungarian border). I wanted to do something different, more open-ended, and also more fragmented in content here.
3. I also wanted to experiment with the blog as a forum for advancing ideas, and engaging with these themes. I want to find out whether keeping a blog is a meaningful activity, and whether it is capable of advancing debate. How useful, therefore, is a blog, as a tool for the dissemination of ideas, and for discussion of them?

While the blog is focussed around large themes, it also reflects my local interests as a specialist of the history of modern Hungary, and of Central and Eastern Europe more generally. I believe that this focus can shed much light on broader European processes, and hope to be able to demonstrate that here. I don't believe that it is the only standpoint at all.

That is also why most of the resources have a Hungarian focus. Please do note that while I will write in English, not all of the resources posted here will be.