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5-1999 From Habsburg to Hitler to Haider: The Peculiarities of History Harry Ritter Western Washington University, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Ritter, Harry, "From Habsburg to Hitler to Haider: The eP culiarities of Austrian History" (1999). History Faculty and Staff Publications. 38. https://cedar.wwu.edu/history_facpubs/38

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From Habsburg to Hitler to Haider: The Peculiarities of Austrian History Author(s): Harry Ritter Source: German Studies Review, Vol. 22, No. 2 (May, 1999), pp. 269-284 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the German Studies Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1432076 . Accessed: 29/10/2014 16:10

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.72 on Wed, 29 Oct 2014 16:10:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions From Habsburg to Hitler to Haider: The Peculiarities of Austrian History

Harry Ritter Western Washington University

In broadoverview, the definingfeature of Austrianhistory since 1866 has been dramaticand - since 1918 - sometimeswrenching change.* A greatercontrast between the country'sserene, touristic image andthe real historicalexperiences of its people canscarcely be imagined.Other regions - ,the formerYugoslavia, the former Soviet Union - endured,to be sure, greaterhuman extremes and far greatertotal misery in ourcentury. Sadly,the plightof these nationsoften occurred at the hands of Austrian-bredofficials and soldiers, from Hitler, Eichmann, Globocnik,and Kaltenbrunner on down.' Yet if othercountries suffered more, few, in such a brieftime-span,were reimaginedand reinvented so often, in so manyways - politically, geographically,emotionally. Small wonderthat "identity" has long been a quandaryof Austrianlife. Even casual observersof 'smodem past could roughly trace its radicalpeaks and valleys:

...'s exclusion from Bismarck's emerging north following defeat in the Austro-PrussianWar of 1866; ...the final collapse of the centuries-oldHabsburg dynastic state at the end of ; ...creation of a derelict German-Austrianrepublic from (in Clemenceau's phrase)"what was left over" once the empire's non-Germansuccessor states were formed; ...the shortbut savage 1934 civil war and creationof the Dollfuss at the height of the GreatDepression - an entitywhich lacked,however, solid popularsupport ...the absorptionof dwarf Austria - der Staat. den keiner wollte2- into Hitler'sThird Reich in 1938, with the unevencompliance of a majority(though far from all) of its citizens; ...rapidindustrialization of parts of the alpine region in the context of Nazi 'swar economy, abruptlyaccelerating modernization;

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...inventionof a secondKleindsterreich after crushing defeat in 1945 - a state ambivalentlyregarded by the victors as, on the one hand, the "firstvictim of Hitleriteaggression" and, on the other,a conqueredfoe requiringa decade of alien occupationand reeducation; ...and creationof a small, neutralrepublic under the State Treatyof 1955- sovereign,yet still lacking(in the mindsof manyof its residents)a securesense of its legitimacy as a nation.

Recurrent,destabilizing change, then, has been the signal attributeof Austrian Zeitgeschichte,and new shifts are occurringtoday, a subjectto which this article will returnat its conclusion. But the mainpurpose of this essay is to highlightsome peculiarAustrian continuities of the long and mediumterm, or at least patternsof changeslow to unfold,chiefly on the level ofvalues, mentalhabits, political culture, and interactionsbetween and institutionalstructures. The first of these continuitiesis underscoredin the title of ErnstHanisch's impressivenew historyof Austriabetween 1890 and 1990, DerLange Schattendes Staates: OsterreichischeGesellschaftsgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert.3Greeted withcontroversy in ,Hanisch's panorama represents nonetheless a benchmark for future efforts to understandmoder Austria's stormy experience; anyone seeking a reliable guide to the landmarksof contemporaryAustrian history and a balancedappraisal of its key issues will be well advised to startwith this study. In the first third of his book, Hanisch identifies deep structuresof Austria's early moder and modem longue duree- culturaltraditions, mentalites, elite and popularbehavioral patterns, demographic and economic trends- stretchingback to the conflicting legacies of the BaroqueAge and the JosefinianEnlightenment. Despiteformidable tensions between these two grandtraditions ( spirituality, love of ceremony, hierarchy, plenitude, and the ornate; Josefinian austerity, simplicity,practicality, reductionism, and rationality), they nonethelessinterlaced to cast the "long shadow"of legalistic culture,bureaucratism, and the cameralist state over subsequentAustrian history, right down to the presentday.4 Equivocal in its implications,the shadow of early-modernetatism renderedAustrians ill- preparedfor pluralistdemocracy and autonomousindividualism yet ironically,in the long run, eased the path to today's "social partnership,"social-liberal welfare society, and regulatorystate. Overall, Hanisch - a self-professed product of Austria's Catholicpolitical - gives his story (almost despite himself) a liberalizingtwist; he emplots it as an arduous,dialectical expansion of individual "life chances"(RalfDahrendorfs term)over againstthe deep-seatedauthoritarian and antiliberalstructures of Austrianlife - Catholictradition, anti-Semitism, and authoritarianmindsets. At the same time, his voice is modulatedby an ironic tone relatingto these liberalizingand emancipatory processes - one alertto the unheroic side of humanbehavior so abundantlydemonstrated by the recentAustrian past, and mindful of the losses, complexities, and futureuncertainties as well as the gains producedby modernization.

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WithinHanisch's statistframework, one must stress the persistenceand slow transformationof legalisticvalues revolvingaround group status and the protection (via alliancewith the state)ofgroup entitlementsand interests - in short,the values of . Thirtyyears ago, invoking corporatismas a conceptualguide to serious scholarshipwould have raisedarched eyebrows, and even today it excites mixed emotions. A modem version of the ancient notion of corporatismwas notoriously fashionable as a social nostrum in right-wing circles of the early twentiethcentury; after 1922 it acquireda powerfulstigma in the minds of western progressives- liberalsand socialists alike - dueto its associationwith Mussolini's andits emulators.One of these imitatorswas preciselythe 1930s Austrian dictatorshipof EngelbertDollfuss andKurt von Schuschnigg- a political cul-de- sac that remains an embarrassmentin Austriatoday, almost as much as the Nazi regime itself. In the 1970s, however, the corporatisttaboo was refurbishedby political scientists interested in interactions between interest groups and the neoliberalregulatory state, and there is now a swelling literatureon its relevanceto social science.5(To avoid confusion over terms, it should be noted that this essay uses the expression"neoliberal" in the sense of"social "- as bornin the era of FriedrichNaumann - as opposed to the doctrineof the unrestrainedfree market,as the word is sometimes employed nowadays). Philippe Schmitter, a leader in the renaissance of interest.in corporatism, describes contemporarysocial corporatismas:

a distinctiveway of organizinginterests and influencingpublic policy.... one of several possible arrangementsthrough which interest associations can intermediatebetween their members (individuals, families, firms, groups of all kinds) and their interlocutors(especially agencies of the state with authority and other resourcesto satisfy their demands).6

In the schematicparlance of political science, Schmittercontrasts corporatism (characterizedby suchfeatures as "monopolisticunits," "hierarchichal coordination," and "devolved implementation")with "pluralism"(distinguished by "multiple units,""autonomous interaction," and "persuasiveconviction").7 Many authoritieswould concur that, in Austria, membershipin the type of legally defined corporatebodies describedby Schmitterremains a benchmarkof identity and social possibility - i.e., an AustrianSonderbewusstsein.8 This has mitigated the definitive triumphof a pronouncedindividualist and free-market ethos such as that associated with a group of late-nineteenth-centuryAustrian economistsnow known (somewhatparadoxically, considering the small resonance theirdoctrines had in post-1918Austria itself) as the "AustrianSchool" of economic theory. Among scholarship'sunfinished tasks is therigorous grounding ofthe work of these thinkers- Carl Menger, Friedrichvon Wieser, and Eugen von Bohm- Bawerk - in the context of late- nineteenth-centuryAustrian life.9 They were

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drawnto Smithianliberalism precisely because the antitheticalassumptions of the Baroqueand Josefinian Polizeistaat persisted so stronglyand often oppressivelyin the Austriaof their day. Yet even within the Mengerschool therewere echoes of the regulatoryObrigkeitsstaat. Despite their heretical attractionto laissez-faire, theirthought patterns had substantialcameralist roots.'0 They too laboredunder the "long shadow of the state,"and Bohm-Bawerkbecame one of the state's leading minions as Habsburgfinance minister on differentoccasions between 1895 and 1904. It was only a later generationof"Austrian" theorists, led by and Friedrichvon Hayek, who developeda full-blownantistatist version of Menger'sideas - andthey hadto do it mainlyin Anglo-Americanexile. In many ways the of Josef Schumpeter- with its stress on institutionsand governmentsas well as marketsand heroic entrepreneurs- was a more logical extension of the founders'ideas, especially those of Wieser. It would, perhaps,be instructiveto considerthe ideas of the late Wieser, or even the late Menger(if not Bohm-Bawerk) in relationshipto nascent currentsof Austriansocial liberalism representedby someone like the liberalparliamentarian and (briefly) Ministerof TradeJosef MariaBaerenreither.12 Unlike the AustrianEconomic School, scholarshipis amply acquaintedwith the arrayof romanticand corporatism that flourished in Old Austria- those of Adam Miiller, Karl Baron von Vogelsang, and otherprecursors of Hugo von Hofmannsthal'sneo-Baroque, oxymoronic crusade for konservativeRevolu- tion after 1918, of the holist of , and ultimately the FatherlandFront of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg. In practicalterms, however, just as significant as such neoconservativeideas for transformingyet perpetuatingthe corporatistheritage were the chambersof commerceand industry and the weighted voting classes (curia, or electoral colleges) that evolved after 1848 as non- egalitarianmechanisms for representingspecial interestsin the emerging age of mass politics. These institutionswere championednot by antimodernists,but preciselyby the liberalsthat men like Mullerand Vogelsang despised, showing that antimoderists held no monopoly on the corporateparadigm, and that - in the Austrian context - progressivismand corporatismwere perfectly compatible. (And after 1945 it would become clearhow compatiblecorporatist paradigms were with social - which, pragmaticallyspeaking, began evolving into a form of neoliberalismafter the 1880s.) In fact (andthis is perhapsthe main thesis of the present essay), one way to broadlyimagine moder Austrianhistory since 1848 mightbe in termsof a counterpointbetween liberaland nonliberal variations on the corporatisttheme-counterpoint being understoodhere in somethingclose to its literalmusical sense, i.e., "melodynot single, but moving attendedby one or morerelated but independent melodies."'3 (Again, to avoidconfusion, the expression liberal corporatismis used here to mean corporatistarrangements within the frameworkof the existing or emergingparliamentary/democratic Rechtsstaat.)

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In view of its overall lack of success as an organizedpolitical movement in Austria (reaching its nadir in the 1930s and early 1940s), the suggestion that liberalismmight help us understandthe peculiarities ofAustrian history might seem far strangerthan the appeal to corporatism. Indeed, a key motif of Hanisch's imposing survey- even thoughits narrativecommences in the heyday of ,the 1890s- is thepersistence in Austriaofa popularUntertanenmentalitdt and the weakness of liberalism,parliamentary institutions, and gener- ally. Granted,in Austria (as in Bismarck's Germany)liberalism operated under significantrestraints right from the outsetof the parliamentaryera in 1867, since its delegates had no solid controlover the appointmentand tenureof cabinetsor over militarybudgets. Moreover, upper middle-class Honoratiorenliberalismus suffered soberingsetbacks after 1879 at the handsof CountTaaffe's "ironring" coalition of , federalists,and clericals (on the imperiallevel) and (in Vienna) amidst the rise of mass politicalmovements of the irrational"sharper key" (schdrfereTonart): , ChristianSocialism, illiberal ,and anti-Semitism.14These counterliberalfactors assumed preeminenceafter 1945 in the minds of scholars understandably intent on uncovering the roots of political extremism and totalitarianismin Austria - e.g., Adam Wandruszka'sclassic, 1954 analysis of "Osterreich'spolitische Struktur,"Carl Schorske's studies of fin- de- siecle Vienna, and John Boyer's books on Karl Lueger.'s Yet despitesuch stress on the demiseof Honoratiorenliberalismus,nineteenth- century liberals did create the rudimentsof a civil society and legal culture that would - though often deeply submerged- endureas a liberalstrain in Austrian history.16What is important,in this regard,is not so much liberalismviewed as a parliamentaryfaction, but liberalism understoodmore broadly as an evolving spectrumof values, traditions,organizational models, andlegal institutionsleading toward enhanced , life chances, opportunities,and human . The subjectof northGerman liberalism has lately drawnincreased attention within the context of comparativehistory, Habermas's idea of the public sphere,and the work of David Blackbournand GeoffEley.'7 GeraldStourzh, in the 1986 introductionto a group of essays on Habsburg-eraroots of Austria'spresent "social partnership," devoted serious attentionto nineteenth-centuryliberal currentsin the history of Austrianlabor relations;and since 1996, Austro-Germanliberalism has its social ,with the appearanceof PieterJudson's prize-winning survey of the years 1848 to 1914, entitled Exclusive Revolutionaries.'8Neither the north nor south- Germanliberal traditions may exactly fit the image of British liberalismso often used as the benchmarkfor all liberalisms(even by CentralEuropean liberals themselves), but Blackbourn and Eley have amply demonstratedthe fallacy of judging all liberalismsby an idealized English standard- even Britishliberalism itself.19 As just noted,liberalism suffered crippling political and philosophical setbacks in the 1880s, but they were not terminal.The middle-class Germanleft

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was not moribund,but evolving. In the context of HabsburgAustria's liberal- corporatist/neo-JosefinianRechtsstaat-satirized (not without reason) as a legalis- tic nightmareby Kafka and Musil - liberals of the fin-de-siecle modified the universalistethos and staid and aloof strategiesof theirmid-century predecessors, moving freisinnig politics toward a less generous and Interessenpolitik.As LotharH6beltshows in his bookKornblumeundKaiseradler,20 they discovered (as the American congressmanTip O'Neill later said) that "all politics is local," and that political success in a democraticage and under Old Austria'spolyglot conditionsdemanded the articulation of local interests,concerns, and fears.21This political tropismis often readnarrowly and againstthe historical grain, as a slippery slope toward the racialist Germanomaniaof Georg von Sch6nerer,understood as portentof Hitler. Hitler certainlycited Sch6nereras a model, but neitherSchonerer nor Hitlerhimself would now be rememberedif not for World War I and the strangecontingencies created by its aftermath.22 One-dimensionalfocus on prewarextremists diverts the spotlight from the successes of mainstreamnational liberals in the hybridized liberal-corporatist cultureof Austriaprior to 1914, andinhibits appreciation of the potentialvitality of that political cultureitself, as well as its relevance for today's Austria. Granted, mainstreamnational liberalism moved in a more ethnocentric,populist direction, andits rhetoricwas frequentlystrident, often embracing(depending on the locality) anti-Czech, anti-Slovene, or anti-Semiticconceits. The fact that it became less generousdoes not disqualifyit as liberalism,however, for ungenerousliberalisms aboundedat the time - not least in Britainand America. It would be foolish to deny thatnational liberalism's adjustments were devoid of disquietingpotential,23 or to speculateon the survivalchances of Old Austria's political culturein the absenceof WorldWar I. Whatis clearis that,with its tactical modifications, pre-1914 liberalism remained quite successful in regional and municipal politics outside Vienna, domain of the renegade liberal Lueger.24 Schorske'sinterpretation (based in turnon Wandruszka)depicted Austrian politics as tending only toward so-called "post-liberal", but pre-1914 Austria includedmore thanVienna and was laden with otherpossible outcomes.25 Thus, a hybridizedliberal/bureaucratic framework for civil society - and the rudimentsof a political cultureto flesh it out - were indeed serviceablelegacies of Old Austriato its successor states. True,as Wolfgang Mantl suggests,26under the world economic and geopolitical circumstancesthat followed World War I those rudiments could not take root, and acute political dysfunction was the consequence. Therewas a dramaticeclipse ofAustrianliberalism and, some feared, all otherliberalisms worldwide. In thatsetting, there never could be a mass-based liberal Lager;the very word "liberal"was additionallyburdened in the Austrian contextby associationswith the 1873 stockmarket crash and -Semitism. What happened in Weimar Germanymore gradually- the contractionof the liberal middle and its absorptioninto polarized factions - was alreadylargely a fact in

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Austriain 1919, confirmedby the resoundingfailure of the still-bornBiirgerlich- DemokratischePartei in the elections of that year. Even today the term liberal remainsa political liability, a situationcomplicated by the persistentMarxist myth that liberalismwas really a way stationfor fascism, and the fact thatafter 1945 the words liberal,freiheitlich,and what was left of the old nationalliberal tradition were often used as havens by ex-Nazis.27There is surely much to the notion that, in the bewildering conditions after 1918, the diverse corporatistmindsets of the prewar period helped create a disposition to support,underestimate, or otherwise fail to comprehendthe relatedbut distinctlynew phenomenonof corporatism based on radicallynew concepts of the state, the law, and the individual.28 On the whole, however, I would arguethat in interwarAustria (as in Germany)the triumph ofilliberalism was less the resultof decline thatset in before 1914 thanthe product of short-termcontingencies createdby the radicalizingengine of the GreatWar. The war was indeeda massive cleavage;it was this "radicalrupture," as one recent authorcorrectly affirms, that "more than any kind of perceivedcontinuity between pre- andpostwar German society...produced National Socialism in Germany- and fascism in other countries."29 Still, revisionist socialism was not swamped by the war, and by the 1920s Germanand AustrianSocial Democracy (beneaththeir often extremistrhetoric) had become potential conduits for revisionist liberalismand , shouldfavorable conditions arise. After 1945, amidstnew circumstancesproduced by Hitler's defeat and the advent of the Cold War, a hybridized neoliberal corporatismstrongly indebtedto the statist, bureaucratic,and legalistic political culture of the late Habsburgpast supplantedthe antiliberal corporatismsthat dominatedbetween the wars. To be sure,native liberalism's final victory came only afternative illiberalismswere crushedby foreign powers, and following a decade of alien occupation. But, after all, ten years is not so long a time, and without substantialroots in the moder pastthe new neoliberalsystem could not have taken hold. In this setting,the hermeticallysealed Catholic,socialist, andnationalist Lager that arose in the 1880s - thatpolarized Austria after 1918 and reducedit to civil war in the 1930s - were recastinto neocorporateframeworks for parity, patronage, mutual consultation,conflict resolution,and resource allocation. What formerly dividedthe countrynow held it together.The partiesto this Sozialpartnerschaftdid not call themselvesliberals, but Socialists andChristian populists, and their leaders were certainlynot inspiredby feelings of kinshipwith olderliberal traditions. Their actions were often motivated by the narrowestcynicism and expediency.30The wordsfreiheitlich and liberal, still redolent of musty positivism, dogmatic anti- clericalism,and Austro-German ' s moreethnocentric and exclusionary "nationalliberal" turn on the eve of World War I, were left to the dregs of the nationalistLager - fatally discreditedby its association with Hitler (though its memberswere eagerlyrecruited by the Socialist and Christiandemocratic parties).

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Or,the termliberal was understoodpejoratively in a doctrinairelaissez-faire sense, as alien to Austrianlife, a one-dimensionalinterpretation that seemed ironically reinforcedby the antistatistviews of the Austrianexile Hayek-to the extent that these ideas were known at all in post-1945 Austria. Effortsto weld a non-Socialistand non-Catholic third party option from diverse middle class, nonunionized,displaced ,and ex-Nazi constituencies, culminating in creation of the Freiheitliche Partei Osterreichs (FPO) in 1955, remained factionalized, programmaticallyunstable, and easily stigmatized as rightist and extremist - not least because the first two FPO leaders were, respectively, a former minister in Seyss-Inquart'sAnschluss cabinet of 1938 (), and an ex-member of the Waffen-SS (). Initially ostracized,the party enjoyed minimal electoral success prior to the late 1980s (although the RealpolitikerBruno Kreisky shrewdly employed the small partyto sustain Socialist cabinetsbetween 1970 and 1983, and the FPO was even embracedas a Socialistcoalition partner from 1983 to 1986). Beneaththe language and surface static of histoire evenementielle,however, postwarAustria became a capitalistwelfare state of theneoliberal type, erectedon neocorporatearrangements andlinked economically to West Germany(which allowed it to prosper).And West Germany,in its own peculiarway, exhibitedpronounced neocorporatist features that stretchedback throughthe Weimarto the Wilhelmineperiod. As usual, the peculiarities of Austrian history evolved in the context of a broader German- language frameworkof historicalpeculiarities.31 Whilecitizens ofthe reinventedstate were still not sureifthey were"," ",""Viennese," "Tyrolese," or kinfolk of some otherHeimat, ofthem relishedthe social , affluence,and materialsecurity sustained by the system. Still, the new Kleinosterreichwas not in every respect ideal.32In broad terms, Philippe Schmitterhas describedthe downside of neocorporatistpractices for any society:

Althoughthe findingthat corporatistarrangements contribute to "govemability" throughgreater citizen compliance, and fiscal effectiveness seems widely accepted, the suspicionpersists that they surreptitiouslyundermine democracy. Organizations replacepersons as the principalparticipants; specialized professionals gain at the expenseof citizenamateurs; direct functional channels of representationto state agenciesdisplace territorially based legislativedecision making; monopolies and privilegedaccess are recognizedat the expense of overlappingand competing associations;comprehensive national hierarchies diminish the of localand specializedorganizations.33

Added to these negatives are complicationsproduced by global change: the collapse of Soviet Communismand end of the Cold War, populationpressures createdby attendantmigrations from the south and east, advancingEuropean

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integration(including Austrian membership in the EU in 1995), and fiscal strains within the neoliberal , world wide. Since 1989, amidst the altered setting producedby such changes, it has become fashionableto speak of a "new political landscape"and impending"paradigm shift" of political cultures in the second Austrianrepublic. In today's geopolitical setting it is not (to recall FriedrichHebbel's famous nineteenth-centuryremark) a matterof imperial,great power Austriaserving as a microcosmic theatrewhere the wider world conductsits rehearsals.34It is rathera question of a small European country where - after a few decades of cozy consensualismin which most people generallyknew theirplace andhow to play the game - global insecuritiesintrude and entertheir phase of residualsand reruns.35 The issue fortoday' s Austriais one of adjustmentto rapidlychanging circumstances by a countrywhich, underthe postwarcollusion of Socialist and ChristianSocial elites, created(as outlinedabove) a de facto system of social-liberalcorporatism in the 1950s and 1960s. Buildingon tourismand an industrializedbaseofnationalized enterprisesinherited from the Third Reich and which remained linked to West Germany's dynamic economy, Austria entered the ranks of advanced industrial economies, but remained(obviously) smaller and relatively less modem than the leading world economies (e.g., its greaterreliance on heavy industry,greater labor intensiveness,etc.) The collapse of the Soviet empirein 1989 and Austria'sentry into the were merely culminating events in an evolution of circumstanceswhich broughtto a head an "erosionof traditional[ideological] sub- cultures, social fragmentation and particularization, and processes of individualization."36For politics in the 1990s this means fractionalization,identity politics, the rise ofnew interestgroups and parties, and a new, latetwentieth-century "sharperkey" in rhetoric.It is these historicallyspecific conditionsofthe 1980s and 1990s thatimpact present Austrian social structuresand voter behavior, and that are mainly behind the illiberal protestpopulism exemplified by J6rg Haider and the revampedFPO today - not a vestigial fascism or "unmasteredpast." Diethelm Prowe is correctin maintainingthat the new wave of populism in Europeis not a repriseof interwarfascism.37 "Classic" fascism (as ErnstNolte argued)should be understood in its interwar setting, and we need new terms and categories to designate movementsthat arise from late twentiethand early twenty-firstcentury conditions. This is not to deny the many disturbingaspects of the new populism. And it is not to trivializethe issue of an unmasteredpast. The past is indeed in the present, and its unmasteredaspects are clearly importantfor the ways Austria's scholars,novelists, and mass media conceptualizethe country'shistory, which in turn affect people's presentbehavior and their visions of the future. It is just that the issue of an unconqueredpast should not be confused with the mainspringsof presentpolitical dynamics.Like the olderextremism, the new populismis a product of social alienation,but thatmalaise is not akin to the victimizationpsychosis and antimodernistnostalgia that fed fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. The rootsofprotest

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populismtoday do not lie in the estrangementofAustrian voters from the conditions of modem life - democratization,industrialization, secularization, urbanization - but in fear (increasinglyamong blue collarworkers) that the fruitsof these very modem conditions- securejobs, affluence,and welfare safety nets - will be lost. In a sense, the inventorsof post-1945 Austria'sblack- consensualism were too successful. They fashioned a model welfare state which integratedordinary Austrians into modernity. But problems arise when this ingrown elite cannot quarantineits creationfrom externalchange, and also succumbsto the corrupting seductionsof wealth andpower based on old-boy networksand bureaucraticbloat and inbreeding. Nimble opportunistssuch as Jorg Haiderwill, not surprisingly, arise to capitalize on resentmentsover the "politics as usual" corporatismof mismanagement,waste, and personal enrichment,and will exploit fears that the modernizingachievements of this very corporatistsystem will be squandered.In his frequentreliance on the tactics of negative integration,the "telegenic"Haider may indeed recall der sch6ne Karl Luegerof a previousfin-de-siecle;his speech, and the unspokenlines between it (like thatof Luegerbefore him), is reckless and stretches the boundariesof "civil" discourse-a notoriously sensitive issue in German-speakingEurope, precisely because of thatregion's troubledrecent past. But the global, European,and local setting in which Haider operates is rather differentfrom the world of Lueger. From a new turn-of-the-centurystandpoint, one may hazard some final thoughtsregarding Austria's position in Europe,the currentlanguage of scholarship and politics, and the historiographicaland political relevance of Austria's liberal tradition.The thoughtof instrumentalizingheritage, or "memory,"as a means to noble or ignoble ends, of constructing"usable" pasts to promotecurrent agendas, must properlyhaunt those who honor the past's alien integrity- for the good of presentand future as well as the past itself. Nowherehave orchestrationsof history been more notoriouslyabused than in moder CentralEurope. Yet pastand present are existentiallyinseparable. Liberalism, as this essay has argued,has demonstratedvastly more stayingpower thanpundits predicted in the troubledaftermath of WorldWar I and the GreatDepression, or even in the more hopefulwake of WorldWar II. Nowhere,in those days, did liberalism'sfuture look more bleak than in Germanyand Austria. Today, self-styled "Liberal"parties remainrelatively weak sistersin the middle Europeanpolitical game (the FDP, the FPO). Yet who could deny that,at the end of ourshort twentieth century, neoliberal structuresgovern the limits of the possible in Centraland Western Europe, and free marketrhetoric controls global political discourse? As Austrians,in this world setting and in the course of a new kind ofAnschluss, engage the German- and French-ledprocess of EuropeanUnion, sharingthe challenges of inventingthat emerging polity, they may graduallyfind it increasinglynatural to attend more closely to thecomparativestudy of liberalismin its many guises, to attachgreater value to CentralEuropean liberalism's peculiar native roots, andto allow a critical regardfor Austria'sown liberaltraditions larger room in theirpsychological space.

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In a modest way, somethingof the sort has been going on for some time now to the north, in the scholarship and political discourse of the German Federal Republic. Despite the still unmasteredpall of 's illiberal past, the task of unearthingthe history of CentralEuropean liberalism is, in fact, slightly easier in Germany, where the liberal Freie Demokratische Partei - despite its small electoralbase - played a key nationalrole as a coalitionparty from 1949 to the late 1990s. In displacedform a new interestin the liberalheritage is actuallymanifest in Austria,in the guise of heightenedinterest in middle-class social history, civil society, and biirgerlicheculture during the late Habsburgperiod. Excavationof liberalism'slegacy in Austriacan only happenslowly, for in the historicalcontext of the region's political semantics the word and idea of liberalism must be disentangledfrom its peculiarliaison with the tacticalrhetoric of late nineteenth- centurynational progressivism and emerging deutschnational populism,38 an idiom ironically reinforcedby political speech underpost-1945 contingencies. In this connection,perhaps the most interestingHaider in Austriatoday is not so much J6rg but the historianBarbara Haider. She is the authorof the Austrian Academy of Sciences' new edition of the protocols of Habsburg Reichsrat's committee of constitutionalinquiry duringlate 1867,39when nineteenth-century Austro-Germanliberalism completed one of its chief tasks: the transformationof the 'swestern half into a parliamentaryRechtsstaat. The catalog of civil rights producedby this committee later became the backbone of Austria's first republicanconstitution in 1920, andunderpins the Second Republic's constitution of today. In light of the relativelyslight explicit attentionthat even recentAustrian have given to liberalism as a strain in Austria's modem past, it is noteworthythat Barbara Haider deliberately presents her work as a "smallpiece of thepuzzle knownas the 'historyofliberalism'" in CentralEurope.40Her introduction to the protocols is a judicious appreciationof the fact that midnineteenthcentury Austrianliberalism, despite its manifold shortcomingsfrom presentperspectives, createdthe foundationsof a civil society andpolitical culturethat would - though often deeply submerged- endure and become part of a liberal strain of deep structuralcontinuity in moder Austrianhistory. Two or three decades ago, a book such as this might have been presentedas something more abstractand less immediatelyrelevant to present concerns- a contributionto OldAustria's Staats- undReichsproblem, the historyofthe empire's presumedterminal dysfunctionality, the nationalityproblem, or the political dregs ofthe 1867Ausgleich.Haider's gloss ofthe documentsis amodelofhistoriographical tact,one thatsituates the protocols firmly in thepsychic space and social circumstances of theirown time. Yet despiteher healthyrespect for old-fashionedVerstehen, the fact that she conceptualizes her book not only as a contribution to Austria's "constitutionaland parliamentary history," but to the history of liberalismas well, seems-under present circumstances-not merely historiographicallysignificant but politically aktuell.

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Lookingbackward- andwithout minimizing the powerfulilliberal strands of Austrianhistory (one wouldbe utterlyblind to do so) - the storyof Austriabetween 1848 and 1998 looks less like one of liberalism's defeat than one of liberal continuity,with a spectacularilliberal hiatus between the Dollfuss dictatorshipof the 1930's and annihilationof the Anschlussdystopia in 1945. Or, perhaps,it has been a roller coasterwith more or less significantliberal upturns: 1848-1849, the years from 1867 to 1914, the firstrepublican ordeal of the 1920s, the erasince 1945. If the "puzzle"of liberalismever does become a majorfocus forresearch in Austrian history, perhapsAustrians will be slightly better equipped,in terms of enhanced awarenessof partof theirheritage, to confronttwenty-first- century membership in a EuropeanUnion in which liberalism- in one guise or another(as a TimesLiterary Supplementheadline recently declared)- is "the only ideology still afloat."4

Notes

*This is a revised version of a luncheonaddress delivered to the GermanStudies Association in Salt Lake City, October9, 1998. I am indebtedto ProfessorEdward Kaplan of Western WashingtonUniversity for his comments on the paper. An earlierversion was presentedat the ThirdSymposium on GermanHistory at the Universityof BritishColumbia, May 24, 1997. Some of the essay's languageand ideaspreviously appeared in bookreviews forthe journal Central European History and for the on-line discussion groupHABSBURG.

'Onthe other hand, the extent of Austria'ssuffering - forwhatever reason - mustnot be minimized.According to officialfigures relating to theNazi era, 65,459 Jewish Austrians werekilled; among non-Jewish Austrians, 2,700 were executed, 32,600 perished in prisonsor concentrationcamps, 24,300 civilians died during the war, and 247,000 soldiers werekilled in battleor missingin action.This amounts to 5.58 percentof thepopulation. DieterA. Binder,"The Second Republic: Austria Seen as a Continuum,"Austrian History Yearbook,26 (1995): 18, n. 3. 2HelmutAndics, Der Staat, den keinerwollte: Osterreich1918-1938 (Vienna, 1962). 3Vienna,1994. 4Fromthe standpointof state-building- asidefrom their piety, parent/child disfunctions, andcapacity for patience - therewas less oppositionand more continuity between ,epitome of theBaroque, and her enlightened son Josef than used to be thought.For a recentstudy, see DerekBeales, Joseph II (Cambridge,1987), volume I. 5PhilippeC. Schmitter,"Corporatism," The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World,ed. JoelKrieger (New York, 1993), 195-98. 6Ibid.,195-96. 7Ibid., 198. Schmitterdescribes pluralismas the more characteristicmode of organizing interests and influence in the "advanced industrial polities" (196) of the mid- and late twentieth century. Indeed, he believes that cases of markedby a high degree of institutionalizedcorporatism have been "relativelyrare" in history(196). At the same time, however,he discernsa late-twentieth -century trend in the directionofcorporatism; for better

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orworse, he suggests,all advanceddemocracies are currently veering from the "spontaneous, voluntaristic,and autonomous features of pluralism"toward more structured,organized interestrepresentation and vicarious (rather than direct) participation on thepart of individuals - traits typical of neocorporatism. Today, Schmitter believes, "democracy is being transformedby modem corporatism.... Organizationsare becoming citizens alongside individuals. Accountabilityand responsiveness are increasing,but at the expense of citizen participationand access for all groups. Competitionis less interorganizationaland more intraorganizational....all modem democraciesare becoming more 'interested,'organized, and vicarious"(198). 8Austria,, ,, and the are frequently cited as the best-case examples of neocorporatismin the contemporaryworld. Referringto a chart designed to juxtaposethe ideal-typicalfeatures of the "purecorporatist" versus "pure pluralist" model of representationand control in currentsocieties, Schmitterasserts: "No existing polity exactly replicatesthe arrangementsummarized in eithercolumn, although Austria comes closest to the former and the to the latter"(Schmitter, "Corporatism," 196) (emphasis added). For a good explorationof the subject,and manyreferences to the relevantliterature in political science, sociology, and history, see the essays in GiinterBischof and Anton Pelinka,eds., Austro-Corporatism:Past, Present, Future, ContemporaryAustrian Studies, 4 (New Brunswick,N.J., 1996). 9Somehelpful steps in this directionhave been made in numerousessays on the history of Austrianeconomic theoryby the Universityof Vienna economist ErichStreissler and in an unpublished1984 doctoraldissertation by Paul Silvermanon "Law and Economics in InterwarVienna: Kelsen, Mises, and the Regenerationof Austrian Liberalism." '?PaulSilverman, "The Cameralistic Roots of Menger'sAchievement," History of Political Economy,22 (1990), supplement: 69-91. For a good appreciationof the importanceof Austrianlegalism and administrativeculture for the Austrianeconomic theorists, consult Silverman's dissertation,"Law and Economics in InterwarVienna" (see note 9). "Mises, a student in Bohm-Bawerk's seminar, was perhaps influenced by the latter's Laocoon despairover his inabilityto promotereform as financeminister amidst the coils of bureaucratichypertrophy. I owe this idea to a suggestion by Erich Streissler. '2OnBaerenreither, see EverhardHoltmann, "'Sozialpartnerschaft' und 'Sociale Frage': KorporatistischeTradition in Osterreich: Der Standige Beirat des Arbeitsstatistischen Amtes als Beispiel paritatischerInteressenvertretung in der Spathabsburgerzeit,"Der Staat 27 (1988): 244-49. On Schumpeter,see the recent flurryof studies: EduardMarz, Joseph Schumpeter: Scholar, Teacher and Politician (New Haven, 1991); Richard Swedberg, JosephA. Schumpeter:HisLife and Work(Cambridge,1991); RobertLoring Allen, Opening Doors: TheLifeand WorkofJosephSchumpeter, 2 vols. (New Brunswick,N.J., 1991). Erich Streissler designates Wieser (albeit somewhat ironically) as the "central figure of the Austrian School" in his essay "Armavirumque cano: Friedrichvon Wieser, the Bard as Economist,"inNorbert Leser, ed., Die WienerSchulederNationalokonomie (Vienna, 1986), 104. As LotharH6belt notes, "thoroughgoingManchester Liberals were scatteredfairly thinly among Austrian Liberals. The dominant centrist group of the Liberals almostunequivocallysupported the protectivetariff; it was only the Progressives- and not even all of them - that voted againstthe TariffBill of 1878. But even they did not regard it as a majorissue.

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'3Webster'sCollegiate Dictionary, 5th edition(emphasis added). On the generalquestion of the appropriatenessor inappropriatenessof using the words "liberal"and "corporatist"in tandem,note the remarksof Schmitter,"Corporatism," 196: "Inthe mid-1970s, a groupof scholars revived the concept [of corporatism]to describe and explain certain puzzling featuresof advancedindustrial that could not be understoodby the heretofore dominantparadigm, pluralism. To differentiatethe new variety from discreditedprevious experiences,these scholarsusually added a prefixsuch as 'liberal,' 'societal,' or 'neo-' to the corporatistroot." '4CarlE. Schorske, "Politics in a New Key: An AustrianTriptych," Journal of Modern History 39 (Dec. 1967): 343-86. '5AdamWandruszka, "Osterreichs politische Struktur," in HeinrichBenedikt, ed., Geschichte der RepublikOsterreich (Vienna, 1954);Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna:Politics and Culture(New York, 1980); John W. Boyer, Political Radicalismin Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the ChristianSocial Movement,1848-1897 (Chicago, 1981); idem, Cultureand Political Crisis in Vienna(Chicago, 1995). '6See also HarryRitter, "Austro-GermanLiberalism and the Moder Liberal Tradition," GermanStudies Review 7 (May 1984): 227-48. For a judicious critique of older survey histories and balancedappreciation of more recentwork on HabsburgAustria's emerging civil society and politics of democratic engagement, consult Gary B. Cohen, "Neither Absolutism nor Anarchy: New Narrativeson Society and Governmentin Late Imperial Austria,"Austrian History Yearbook29, PartI (1998): 37-61. '7DavidBlackbourn and GeoffEley, ThePeculiarities ofGerman History. Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-CenturyGermany (New York, 1984). By now the new interest extendsto the thesis advisorsof some of academichistory's next generationof practitioners. A recent graduatestudent workshop at Harvard(November 1996), for instance, invited apprenticehistorians from across North America to present their researchon the general theme of"Liberalism and Civil Society in Moder Britainand Germany." '8GeraldStourzh, "Zur Institutionengeschichteder Arbeitsbeziehungenund der sozialen Sicherung-eine Einfiihrung,"in Stourzand Margarete Grandner, eds., HistorischeWurzeln der Sozial Partnerschaft (, 1986), esp. 25-28; Pieter M. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: LiberalPolitics, Social Experience,and National Identityin the , 1848-1914 (Ann Arbor, 1996). Judson's study won the American Historical Association's HerbertBaxter Adams Prize for the best book in Europeanhistory in 1998. See, as well, Judson'sWien Brennt! Die Revolutionvon 1848 undihr liberalesErbe(Vienna, 1998). '9Thoughthe emphasisin his work has always been on old-style liberalism'sdemise due to its loss of "social relevance,"John Boyer himself notes that after 1867 in Austria liberals created a hybridizedcivil society in which extensive protectionsfor individualrights and mechanisms for effective political action coexisted and interlacedwith broadbureaucratic imperatives. It was, in his words, a uniquely "complex system of neocorporate and institutionalprivileges [emphasis added],"a "mixed constitutional-bureaucraticpolitical systemin which theGerman Biirgertum and the Imperial bureaucracy both gainedconsiderable leverage againstthe ruling sovereign. The Austriansystem combinedboth municipaland regionalpolitical autonomy with statecentralism to an extentunprecedented in Prussiaor the rest of centralEurope." JohnW. Boyer, "Freud,Marriage, and Late Viennese Liberalism: A Commentaryfrom 1905,"The Journal of ModernHistory 50 (March1978): 73. See also Cohen, "NeitherAbsolutism nor Anarchy,"44-48.

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20LotharH6belt, Kornblume und Kaiseradler: Die deutsch-freiheitlichen Parteien Altosterreichs1882-1918 (Vienna and Munich, 1993). 21Oneof the earliest liberals to learn this was Karl Lueger, who defected to the Christian Social camp andcreated a powerfulpolitical machine in Viennausing the political strategies of what would now be termed"negative integration." On Lueger's early careeras a liberal, see KarinBrown, Karl Lueger, the Liberal Years: Democracy,Municipal Reform, and the Strugglefor Power in the ViennaCity Council, 1875-1882 (New York, 1987). 22Ofcourse, World War I did occur,and so in hindsightwe have to takethese extremistsmost seriously-which most of their contemporariesdid not. If one insists on reading things againstthe grain,there were other,"social liberal" fringe groups on the evolving Germanleft who oughtto be rememberedas well as the Sch6nerianer,since somethinglike the reformist liberal system they envisioned has, today, been in place in CentralEurope for close to half a century.Cf. Eva Holleis, Die SozialpolitischePartei: SozialliberaleBestrebungen in Wien um die Jahrhundertwende(Munich, 1978); IngridBelke, Die sozialreformischenIdeen von JosefPopper-Lynkeus(1838-1921) inZusammenhangmitallgemeinen Reformbestrebungen des WienerBiirgertums um die Jahrhundertwende(Tiibingen, 1979); Karl Holl, Giinter Trautmann,and Hans Vorlander, SozialerLiberalismus (G6ttingen, 1986); Richard Charmatz, Deutsch-OsterreichischePolitik: Studieniiber den Liberalismusund iiber die auswdrtige Politik Osterreichs(Leipzig, 1907);Harry Ritter, "Progressive Historians and the Historical Imagination in Austria: Heinrich Friedjung and Richard Charmatz,"Austrian History Yearbook19-20 (1983-1984), PartI, 78-81. 23Seethe concise but subtle exposition in Judson'swork of historicalpopularization, Wien Brennt!, 144-50. 24Boyer'sformer stress on the liberals' "inabilityto retainlocal and regionalpower bases" after initial reverses on the imperial level in 1879 ("Freud,Marriage, and Late Viennese Liberalism,"74) has been provenwrong by subsequentresearch. It is now widely agreedthat our understandingof civic cultureand its vitality in late HabsburgAustria has been skewed by focusing so much on Vienna which, except for the fact thatit was the imperialseat, was in many ways only one of many diverse regional cases. 25H6belt'sKornblume und Kaiseradler argues that, even on the imperiallevel, liberalswere more politically successful than was previously thought. Thus, in modified form, liberal structuresand habits of thoughtand action remained alive, sustainedin partby a corporatism compatible with the enlightened bureaucratismof Josefinian rationalism and the more democraticmechanisms of the constitutionalRechtsstaat. One of his morenovel ideas in this regardis thatthe convolutedsystem of governmentby threatof emergencydecree employed by Austria'sprime ministers after 1900 was rathersuited to local circumstances,and actually worked, if not always well. At least therewas not paralysis. 26WolfgangMantl,"HistorischeundaktuelleAspekteder6sterreichischenVerfassungsentwicklung seit 1918," Osterreichin GeschichteundLiteratur 36 (1992) 6: 368. 270n this subject see Max Riedelsperger,The LingeringShadow of : The Austrian IndependentParty Movement Since 1945 (New York, 1978);idem., "FPO:Liberal or Nazi?" in Conquering the Past: Yesterdayand Today, ed. Francis Parkinson (Detroit, 1989): 257-78. 28Wieser,in his Gesetz der Macht (Vienna, 1926), may be a case in point. 29ElisabethDomansky, "Militarization and Reproduction in WorldWar I Germany,"in Geoff Eley, ed., Society, Culture,and the State in Germany,1870-1930 (Ann Arbor, 1996), 433-

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34. On this point vis-a-vis Germany,see also the concludingchapter of David Blackboum's TheLong NineteenthCentury: A History of Germany,1780-1918 (New York, 1998). 30Fora concise discussion, see Binder, "The Second Republic,"esp. 19-28 and 36-43. 3On West Germany,see WernerAbelshauser, "The First Post-Liberal Nation: Stages in the Developmentof Moder Corporatismin Germany,"EuropeanHistory Quarterly 14 (1984): 285-318. The mainpillars of Austria'scomplicated system, put in place in the late 1950s and early 1960s, were the chambers of labor, agriculture,and commerce (with compulsory membership);a tightlycentralizedlabor force under the OsterreichischerGewerkschaftsbund; the JointCommission on Wages andPrices (ParitdtatischeKommission-the linchpinof the scheme, bringingtogether state bureaucrats,party, and union leaders,formed in 1957); and a governing traditionof grandcoalitions between the two main parties(although the OVP ruledon its own from 1966 to 1970, andthe Socialistsgoverned either alone orwith the small third party, the Freiheitliche Partei Osterreichs [FPO] from 1970 to 1986). For a brief overview see Andrei S. Markovits,"Austrian Corporatism in ComparativePerspective," in Bischof and Pelinka, eds., Austro-Corporatism:Past, Present, Future, 5-20. 32Thetitle of KurtWaldheim's book notwithstanding-The AustrianExample (New York, 1973). The Germantitle is actuallyDer OsterreichischeWeg. 33Schmitter,"Corporatism," 197. 34As Tony Judt has said in a well-informedessay, "It has been a long time since Austria mattered much for anyone who doesn't live there" (which is precisely what Austrian supportersof in all ideological camps fearedduring the 1920s and 1930s). New YorkReview of Books, Feb. 15, 1996, 22. 35Hans-GeorgBetz, "The Transformationof the Austrian Party System 1986-1996," unpublishedconference paper, German Studies Association, Seattle, October, 13, 1996. 36Ibid.,12. 37DiethelmProwe, "'Classic' Fascism and the New in Western Europe: Comparisonsand Contrasts,"Contemporary European History 3 (1994): 289-312. 38Judson,Wien Brennt!, aptly characterizesthis language as "a strange blend of shrill, defensive, nationalistrhetoric and the most radicallyprogressive, optimistic assertions of the effectiveness of educationand science for the good of mankind"(150; see also 151-55). 39BarbaraHaider, Die Protokolle des Verfassungsausschussesdes Reichsrates vom Jahre 1867 (Vienna, 1997). 40Ibid.,11. 41The Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 16, 1998, 6. As this articlewent to pressthe following essay by PeterPulzer, closely relatedin its concernsand some of its suggestions,came to my attention:"Between and Liberalism:The Political Evolutionof Austriasince 1945" in Kurt RichardLuther and Peter Pulzer, eds., Austria 1945-95: Fifty years of the second republic (Aldershot, 1998), 227-33

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