[The following is cross-posted with the kind permission of Dr. Lonnie Johnson
and the editors of the HABSBURG list.  The essay, posted in two parts, is Dr.
Johnson's contribution to a vigorous discussion occurring on HABSBURG
concerning the "Haider phenomenon."  Both posts remain the property of Dr.
Johnson and HABSBURG.  Please cite only with proper attribution.  For more
information, including numerous responses to the following essay and further
commentary by Dr. Johnson, I refer you to the HABSBURG website (http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~habsweb/). - H-German Editor Jay Lockenour]

<<<CROSS-POSTED FROM HABSBURG>>>
Date:    Mon, 7 Feb 2000 19:20:15 -0600
From:    "James P. Niessen" <habsburg@ttacs6.ttu.edu>
Subject: Essay: Austria's New OeVP-FPOe Government and Joerg Haider, Pt.1

Lonnie Johnson has contributed the following essay detailing the genesis
of the new government.  Although the essay includes analysis of the
current political situation, it is distributed as an aid to our ongoing
examination of the historical antecedents within Austria and neighboring
countries.

Due to the unusual length of the essay, Dr. Johnson has divided it into
two parts.  The second part will be posted shortly.--Ed.


       Austria's New OeVP-FPOe Government and Joerg Haider

                       by Lonnie Johnson
                              Pt. 1

The "Haider phenomenon," which has attracted so much media attention in
recent weeks, needs to be seen in a broader context, and Anton Pelinka's
book _Austria: Out of the Shadow of the Past_ (Westview, 1998) does a
excellent job of outlining the larger structural and political issues
currently at stake in Austria. Pelinka, a professor of political science
from the University of Innsbruck, not only brings his considerable
expertise to bear on the peculiarities of the Austrian political system.
He places its development in a larger, comparative, European context. This
book should be required reading for any one interested in contemporary
Austrian politics.

The events surrounding the establishment of the OeVP-FPOe (Austrian
People's Party-Freedom Party of Austria) coalition government this past
week have been dramatic and disturbing. Israel has recalled its ambassador
from Austria, and the official Israeli diction for the new Austrian
government is "neofascist." Earlier last week the Austrian Green EU
parliamentarian Johannes Voggenhuber used the same term for the FPOe and
referred to Haider as a "fascist" without the qualification of _neo-_.
U.S. Ambassador Kathryn Hall is going to Washington for "consultations."
The threatened EU sanctions against Austria have gone into effect (no
bilateral visits on the ministerial level, although Austria's
participation in all EU bodies, which are ultimately more important, is
intact.) At a SPOe (Social Democratic Party of Austria) commemoration of
the February 1934 uprising, Michael Haeupel, the mayor of Vienna, has
called the new government "exploitive" ("eine Ausbeuterregierung"), a
lapse into Austro-Marxist terminology that is truly spectacular.

There has been considerable protest on the street: at the party
headquarters of the OeVP and FPOe and on Ballhausplatz in front of the
Chancellery of the Austrian Federal President in Vienna, in particular.
Although the great majority of the protesters have conducted themselves
peacefully, a few members of the milieu that refers to itself as
"autonomous anarchist" and other fans of recreational violence have
managed to add a violent accent to demonstrations by challenging the
police lines, throwing projectiles (ranging from eggs to fist-sized
plaster stones), and engaging in collateral vandalism. The Viennese police
have shown great restraint, although thirty of them have been injured to
date. When members of the OeVP-FPOe government were sworn into office at
the Presidential Chancellery this past Friday, the protest on
Ballhausplatz between the Federal Chancellor's Office and the Presidential
Chancellery was so turbulent that the newly sworn-in government, instead
of taking its traditional walk back to the Federal Chancellor's office
with the ritual waving and smiling and cameras, opted to use a
subterranean passage connecting the two facilities to get to the Federal
Chancellor's Office. All of this is related to the fact that Austria, in
complete correspondence with the rules of parliamentary democracy, has
established a coalition government with a clear parliamentary majority of
104 of 183 seats.

There is nothing radical or spectacular about the coalition program that
the OeVP-FPOe government has produced. (The 125 page document with its 3
page "preamble" may be downloaded from various servers. Consult
http://www.austria.gv.at which also
provides links to the websites of the
individual political parties under the icon parliament.) It is divided
into 15 points and fits into the political mainstream of conservative
European politics. It contains a clear commitment to the EU, addresses a
number of important issues related to social security and institutional
reform, outlines policies on immigration and integration, and describes
the objectives of the government in all primary fields of political
endeavor: ministry by ministry.

The old SPOe-OeVP coalition government failed to agree on a budget for the
year 2000, and one of the most pressing issues at hand is to get one
through Parliament because the government cannot continue to operate on
the basis of a provisional arrangements. Austria has a considerable
deficit problem (which no one in office talked about before the elections
of October 3 last year), and it must meet certain budgetary (or deficit
management) criteria related to the "convergence criteria" stipulated by
the introduction of the Euro. The government is planning more
privatization and is going to have to raise some taxes. Restrictive
immigration and asylum policies are nothing new in the European Union.
There is an emphasis on "family policy."

It is important to distinguish between the FPOe program as articulated in
the coalition agreement and the person and persona of Joerg Haider, who is
not in the government cabinet and has reaffirmed his promise to serve as
the governor of Carinthia for the entire legislative period for which he
was elected. However, the FPOe is not a "normal" political party in which
the membership ultimately controls the leadership. On the contrary, the
rise of the FPOe under Haider is to a great extent his personal political
achievement, and he exercises a tremendous amount of authority in the
FPOe. The party structure and his leadership style have motivated some of
his critics to use the term _Fuehrerpartei_. There is no need to comment
on the terminological associations this evokes. One Austrian politician
came to power democratically in Germany in 1933 and another has come into
power democratically in Austria in the year 2000. Is it legitimate to spin
out the parallels?

One of the big open questions is to what extent Haider is going to let the
FPOe ministers in Vienna do their jobs or whether he will try and call all
of the shots from Klagenfurt. On Sunday, he appeared on television in _Die
Pressestunde_, the Austrian version of _Meet the Press_, and he maintained
that he did not have the intention of intervening in the operations of the
federal government because he in not a member thereof.

Although there is a plethora of worst case scenarios for the OeVP- FPOe
coalition, there are two best case scenarios related to the FPOe
participation in the government: (1) Being in the opposition, criticizing,
and making wild promises is easy; assuming political responsibility and
realizing political promises is much more difficult. Neither Haider nor
the FPOe will be able to do what they always said they could do so easily.
Assuming political power and working with hard numbers will turn Haider
into a "normal" politician and the FPOe into a "normal" political party
that cannot deliver to the extent it promised (with a subsequently
somewhat disillusioned clientele). (2) The empowerment of his own party
members in public office will give them more authority in the party itself
and help turn the FPOe into a more democratic forum of opinion- building
that has a stake in being in office. The party thus will more effectively
control its own leader and perhaps produce other political FPOe figures
with a media presence who could serve as a balance or potential
"alternative" to Haider.

It is worth noting that President Klestil refused to appoint two ministers
that the FPOe initially had on their list of candidates for ministerial
posts: Thomas Prinzhorn, an industrialist designated to serve as minister
of finance, due to his "verbal excesses" ("verbale Entgleisungen") and
Hilmar Kabas, the head of the FPOe in Vienna designated as minister of
defense who was responsible for posters during the October electoral
campaign that explicitly appealed to xenophobic sentiment by warning
against "Ueberfremdung" (the excessive influence of foreigners). These
posters incidentally were a "local initiative" and only appeared in
Vienna.

The OeVP-FPOe coalition agreement is not the problem. The previous conduct
and reputation of Joerg Haider is. The Austrian journalist Hans-Henning
Scharsach described the political genealogy of Haider in a biography that
appeared in 1992 (_Haiders Kampf_ (Vienna: Orac Verlag), and although it
is eight years old, it is still well worth reading. Haider has been a
"revisionist" with regard to Nazi-German history, and he is a
law-and-order populist- nationalist, who regularly and effectively appeals
to base sentiments such as fear and insecurity as well as feelings of
injustice and inferiority (the proverbial "kleiner Mann"). Anton Pelinka
describes the ideology of the FPOe in the following manner. It "combines
pan-German traditions with Austrian patriotism, mixes opposition rhetoric
with an appeal to xenophobic resentments, and plays with Nazi revisionism
and Holocaust denial. The FPOe is populist and has a "New Right" agenda,
and both aspects are legitimate in liberal democracies. But at the same
time, parallels to Nazism have not ceased to exist." (p.201)

Haider also is (in purely descriptive terms) a rhetorically brilliant
politician and exceptionally effective with the media. Austrian
journalists, who have been sparring with Haider in the media ring for the
past ten years, have taken considerably more punches than they have landed
Haider is a counter-puncher and he has handled the moderators of the
German and other TV stations that have been interviewing Haider regularly
this past week and their tough questions with great ease.

Haider loves the political show and is a master of political effect. The
only things sharper than his intelligence and his wit are his temper and
his tongue. In an interview held during his 50th birthday party (and
during the OeVP-FPOe negotiations), he insulted the president of France
("what has he achieved?") and the entire Belgian government ("corrupt").
In a recent interview in _Die Zeit_, he said that the did not know what
all of the excitement was about in the chicken stall [of the EU] because
the fox was not inside yet. Haider's provocative tone and style
(trademarks and useful instruments of his oppositional polemics) are a
potential diplomatic deficit for the Republic of Austria of gigantic
dimensions. President Klestil, a seasoned diplomat himself and man of
great public restraint, has admonished Dr. Haider that statements that do
not correspond to "diplomatic conventions" (_diplomatische
Gepflogenheiten_) are simply unacceptable.

Haider is a master of insinuation, implication, and ambiguity. Pelinka
provides an overview of Haider's most infamous statements related to
"playing down the special character of the Nazi rule and to relativize the
Holocaust" (pp. 198-199), the great majority of which date back to the
late 1980s and early 1990s and are being re- cited today. Since then,
Haider has attempted to qualify his statements as "misinterpreted,"
apologized, and condemned the Third Reich and the Holocaust a number of
times. His critics accuse him of half-heartedness and insincerity, but
when he is confronted with his previous statements, he refers to the fact
that he has clearly gone on record to the contrary. Haider's morally
reprehensible and historically untenable revisionist statements, which are
the primary source of his current bad reputation, have ceased to be part
of his politically operative vocabulary. They may have served a purpose at
one time, but they do not any longer. However, he still suffers from a
lack of credibility. Can Haider be trusted? Is he credible? Can or should
a politician, who has made such statements, be given a chance or has he
disqualified himself from participating in the political process?

Pelinka also points out to what extent Haider has shifted ideologically
away from a combination of traditional Pan- Germanism and apologetic
revisionism to patriotic populism. (Aging ex-Nazis, as important as they
once may have been in the FPOe, have become a demographically negligible
variable in Austria.) Haider has been a ruthless critic of the established
Austrian institutions of governance, based on elite decision- making,
neocorporatism, and political patronage, and argues for an
anti-establishment empowerment of the citizenry.

In 1993, Haider initiated an FPOe campaign based on the slogan "Austria
First" which openly appealed to xenophobic sentiment. This campaign
galvanized anti-Haider sentiment in Austria and led to the establishment
of an umbrella organization called _SOS- Mitmensch_. This organization
organized a gigantic anti- xenophobic protest on Heldenplatz in 1993,
rehabilitating it to a certain extent as a "place of memory" exclusively
associated with Hitler's March 15, 1938 Anschluss speech. Recently, SOS-
Mitmensch organized 50,000 people in a similar rally in Vienna in
December, and within two days this past week it brought 15,000- 20,000
protesters to the central offices of the OeVP for a march from there to
the central government offices on Ballhausplatz. (Invitations to most
recent demonstration were not in print but went out over the web in the
form of e-mail chain letters.)

Haider fits well into the Austrian tradition of "verbal radicalism." In
his standard work on Austrian Social Democracy (_Zwischen Reformismus und
Bolschewismus_ (Vienna: Boehlau, 1985), Norbert Leser discusses interwar
Austrian social democracy in terms of the disparity between the
"radicalism of the word" and the "radicalism of the deed." In other words,
Austro-marxists were good at talking revolution and bad at doing it. The
propensity for rhetorical exaggeration, combined with inaction, has been
part of Austria's consensual political culture: rhetorical confrontation
in public and political collaboration among elites in private. Haider is
an exception insofar as his tactics have been based on confrontation and
polarization. Be that as it may, it is worth noting that the Austrian
Second Republic actually has a comparatively good record of political
non-violence (or an absence of radical deeds). With reference to racially
or politically motivated violence against foreigners, a comparison of the
incidents and statistics from Austria with those of Germany, for example,
result in a favorable balance for Austria.

The only victims of racially inspired political violence in Austria to
date have been four Roma, who were killed by a booby-trap bomb in
Burgenland five years ago. The perpetrator, allegedly lone wolf who
maintained to be representing an underground organization called the
"Bauvarian Liberation Army," also was responsible for a series of letter
bombings, one of which deformed the hand of the then presiding mayor of
Vienna, Helmut Zilk. The bomber since has been apprehended, put on trial,
and is now in prison. However, unlike Germany, there have not been
fire-bombings of asylums or apartment buildings inhabited by foreigners or
skin-head excesses on the streets in Austria. It is also worth mentioning
in this context that Austria also has done an admirable job of
assimilating over 60,000 Bosnian refugees.

More importantly, Pelinka points out how the clientele of the FPOe has
shifted under Haider's leadership. According to Pelinka, the initial rise
of the FPOe was based less on the variable of age than on its ability to
attract working class and male voters, the "proletarization and
masculinization" of the FPOe (p. 197), the former at the expense of
Austrian social democracy, in particular. More recently the FPOe has made
considerable gains among younger voters and women. Here one could speak of
a "rejuvenation" and "feminization" of the FPOe, even if the latter is
based on a traditional role model for women (as mothers) and related
issues, such as maternity leave and the level of direct government child
support payments for families ("Familienpolitik").

Over the past ten years, one also notes a shift in Haider's political
rhetoric that corresponds to the shift in the FPOe's political clientele.
As a populist (or as many of his critics would maintain, as an
opportunist), Haider has sought out a new constituency and correspondingly
adopted a new political terminology that is less "revisionist" and more
"populist." Haider has shifted his positions on so many major issues so
many times in the past decade that it is difficult for observers to
ascertain what his political agenda really is, but populists are motivated
by popularity more than ideological rigor. The fact that the Freedom Party
has increased its constituency from 5 to 27% between 1986 and 1999 under
Haider can be interpreted in terms of two trends: Has the Freedom Party
moved from the right toward the center in order to attract a larger pool
of voters or has a larger pool of voters in Austria has moved from the
center to the right?

Pelinka places the rise of the FPOe under Haider in the larger context of
the erosion of traditional ideologies and camps (_Lager_) in Austria and
traditional Austrian institutions, such as "social partnership." In
discussing the "end of subsocieties," he describes the demise of
(political) Catholicism and socialism (pp. 97-128) and in "a farewell to
corporatism" (pp. 139-156) he discusses how the dovetailing of political
parties and organized economic interests (chambers of industry, commerce,
labor, agriculture) is beginning to fade. The period of what Pelinka calls
consociational democracy (characterized by the ability of political elites
to arrive at a high degree of consensus based on power-sharing agreements)
is coming to an end. The fragmentation of the Austrian political spectrum
is the inevitable result of the modernization of Austria: something
Pelinka calls the "Westernization of a Central European democracy." (p.
205)

   Copyright Lonnie Johnson and HABSBURG, 2000.  All rights reserved.

[Part 2 will follow]

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