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Lukewarm Neutrality in a Cold War? the Case of Austria

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Lukewarm Neutrality in a Cold War? the Case of Austria Lukewarm Neutrality in a Cold War? The Case of Austria ✣ Erwin A. Schmidl Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/18/4/36/700029/jcws_a_00679.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 In strategic terms, Austria’s position during the Cold War differed significantly from that of Switzerland or Sweden, let alone Ireland. Like Finland, Austria was situated right along the Iron Curtain. In 1945 the “mental” and political divide between East and West (the actual barricade was not built until after 1948) went right through Austria, and the Soviet Union hoped to bring the Austrian Communists to power by more or less democratic means. This goal failed, however, when the Communists were defeated in the November 1945 elections.1 Soviet policy eventually preferred a “neutral” Austria to other options such as a division of the country, which would have left the strategically important western part under Western control.2 Consequently, when the real Iron Curtain with its barbed wire and mine fields was put up in 1948, it followed Austria’s eastern borders, unlike the interzone boundary that divided Germany. The long, hard route leading to the Austrian State Treaty of 1955 and the restoration of the country’s sovereignty in exchange for a commitment to neutrality based on the Swiss model has been amply researched and described elsewhere.3 On 15 May 1955, the four major powers signed the State Treaty in Vienna, reestablishing Austrian sovereignty, albeit with certain restrictions. 1. The Soviet Union had not expected the Communists to receive only 5.4 percent of the vote. The Christian Socialist People’s Party received 49.8 percent, and the Socialist Party received 44.6 percent. 2. See Wolfgang Mueller, Die sowjetische Besatzung in Osterreich¨ 1945–1955 und ihre politische Mission (Vienna: Bohlau,¨ 2005); Wolfgang Mueller et al., eds., Sowjetische Politik in Osterreich:¨ Dokumente aus russischen Archiven (Vienna: Osterreichische¨ Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005). 3. See, first and foremost, Gerald Stourzh’s magnum opus, Um Einheit und Freiheit: Staatsvertrag, Neutralitat¨ und das Ende der Ost-West-Besetzung Osterreichs¨ 1945–1955,5threv.ed.(Vienna:Bohlau,¨ 2005). See also Rolf Steininger, Der Staatsvertrag: Osterreich¨ im Schatten von deutscher Frage und Kaltem Krieg 1938–1955 (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2005); and Manfried Rauchensteiner and Robert Kriechbaumer, eds., Die Gunst des Augenblicks: Neuere Forschungen zu Staatsvertrag und Neutralitat¨ (Vienna: Bohlau,¨ 2005). See also Wolfgang Mueller’s article in this special issue of the journal, as well as the excellent overview offered in Michael Gehler, Finis Neutralitat?¨ Historische und politische Aspekte im europaischen¨ Vergleich: Irland, Finnland, Schweden, Schweiz und Osterreich¨ , Discussion Paper C 92 of Center for European Integration Studies (Bonn: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat,¨ 2001). Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 18, No. 4, Fall 2016, pp. 36–50, doi:10.1162/JCWS_a_00679 C 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 36 Lukewarm Neutrality in a Cold War? The occupation troops were withdrawn in due course, and on 26 October 1955 the Austrian parliament adopted the Neutrality Law as an amendment to the Austrian constitution.4 Shaping a Neutral Policy The Austrian government had pledged to follow the “Swiss model” of neutrality in the Moscow memorandum of 15 April 1955, which was the necessary Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/18/4/36/700029/jcws_a_00679.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 prerequisite for Moscow’s willingness to accept the State Treaty.5 By December 1955, however, Austria had already digressed from the Swiss interpretation of neutrality by becoming a member of the United Nations (UN)—a step Switzerland did not take until 2002.6 Franz Cede, one of the leading Austrian experts in international law and himself a retired ambassador, used metaphors to describe the phases of Austrian neutrality in the following way: After starting with a “Frank Sinatra phase” (“We do it our way!”), neutrality moved on to a “Mushrooming phase” (“everything is neutrality”) in the 1960s and 1970s, when all diplomatic activities were interpreted as a consequence of neutrality. With the end of the Cold War, neutrality reached the “avocado phase,” with the flesh peeled away and neutrality reduced to the core.7 This evolution could hardly have been foreseen in 1955. How would Aus- tria interpret the obligations and possibilities of its newfound status? At first, Western observers were highly skeptical, to put it mildly. In January 1956 the British legation in Vienna complained about Austria’s “lamentably muddled” and “neutralistic” policy, which might lead “toward an ambiguous neutrality” or even a pro-Soviet “satellization” of the country.8 This assessment changed only when Austria took a clear pro-Western stance during the Soviet invasion 4. “Bundesverfassungsgesetz vom 26. Oktober 1955 uber¨ die Neutralitat¨ Osterreichs,”¨ Bundesgesetz- blatt fur¨ die Republik Osterreich¨ , Vol. 57/1955 (4 November 1955), No. 211, p. 1151, available at http://www.ris.bka.gv.at/Dokumente/BgblPdf/1955_211_0/1955_211_0.pdf. 5. The full text is presented online by the Institute for Contemporary History of the University of Innsbruck, http://www.uibk.ac.at/zeitgeschichte/zis/library/steininger2.html#dok2. 6. For a detailed account of Switzerland’s neutrality, see the article by Thomas Fischer and Daniel Mockli¨ in this special issue. 7. Franz Cede, “Staatsvertrag und Neutralitat¨ aus heutiger Sicht,” in Rauchensteiner and Kriechbaumer, eds., Die Gunst des Augenblicks, pp. 526–527, 531. For a recent account, see Franz Cede, “Die osterreichische¨ Neutralitatskonzeption¨ im Jahre 1961,” in Stefan Karner et al., eds., DerWienerGipfel 1961: Kennedy-Chruschtschow (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2011), pp. 809ff. 8. Report of the UK Legation in Vienna, Confidential (1012/-/56), Twice Monthly memorandum No. 2, 20 January 1956, in The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNAUK), Public Record Office, Foreign Office (FO), 371/124082. 37 Schmidl of Hungary in 1956, which it harshly denounced. The nascent Austrian army guarded the Hungarian border, across which nearly 200,000 Hungarians even- tually fled for safety. In a serious incident, a Soviet soldier was killed when he crossed the border into Austrian territory while chasing Hungarian refugees.9 In an annual report for 1956, British diplomats praised Austria’s performance: For Austria, 1956 was pre-eminently a year of unspectacular but steady consoli- dation. Her infant neutrality which had been delivered with such haste and had Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/18/4/36/700029/jcws_a_00679.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 at first toddled so uncertainly, learned to walk with a welcome sense of purpose and direction.... Austria has converted a dangerous lack of direction in her policy into a positive concept of neutrality.10 Although Austria’s policy became more cautious during the later stages of the crisis than in in the early days, the concept of “being neutral militarily but pro-Western politically” continued in subsequent years. During the Lebanon crisis of 1958, discussions about unannounced flights over Austrian territory by U.S. planes provided the Soviet Union with a pretext to warn Austria that the pro-Western interpretation of neutrality could go too far.11 One might doubt whether this demonstration was really necessary, though, as Austria increasingly developed an agenda of its own. In 1960, for example, Foreign Minister Bruno Kreisky, who shaped Austrian foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s, decided to bring the issue of the German-speaking population of South Tyrol to the UN despite strong U.S. reservations.12 Even so, a degree of independence from U.S. or Western policy never meant that Austria wanted to follow a Soviet lead. When the Soviet Union proposed to move the UN headquarters from New York to Vienna in 1961, or when Moscow first proposed a European security conference, Austrian diplomats were careful to avoid giving the impression that their country was acting like another of Moscow’s satellites.13 9. For a more detailed account, see Erwin A. Schmidl, ed., Die Ungarnkrise 1956 und Osterreich¨ (Vienna: Bohlau,¨ 2003). 10. Annual Report, R. P. Heppel for Sir Geoffrey Wallinger, Vienna, 24 January 1957, in TNAUK, FO 371/130273, RR 1011/1. 11. See Walter Blasi, “Die Libanonkrise 1958 und die US-Uberfl¨ uge,”¨ in Erwin A. Schmidl, ed., Osterreich¨ im fruhen¨ Kalten Krieg 1945–1958: Spione, Partisanen, Kriegsplane¨ (Vienna: Bohlau,¨ 2000), pp. 239–259. 12. Erwin A. Schmidl, Blaue Helme, Rotes Kreuz: Das osterreichische¨ UN-Sanitatskontingent¨ im Kongo, 1960 bis 1963, 2nd Rev. Ed., Vol. 1 of Peacekeeping-Studien (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2010), pp. 45–46. 13. Ibid., p. 15; and Thomas Fischer, Neutral Power in the CSCE: The N+N States and the Making of the Helsinki Accords 1975 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2009). 38 Lukewarm Neutrality in a Cold War? Phases of Austrian Foreign Policy Kreisky shaped Austria’s foreign policy for three decades—first as deputy for- eign minister (1953–1959), then as foreign minister (1959–1966), and even- tually as chancellor (1970–1983). The 1966–1970 conservative government was but a brief interlude; the short-term foreign ministers Lujo Tonciˇ c-Sorinj´ and Kurt Waldheim did not come close to fundamentally altering the coun- try’s foreign policy. When Kreisky became chancellor in 1970, career diplomats Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/18/4/36/700029/jcws_a_00679.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Rudolf Kirchschlager,¨ Erich Bielka-Karltreu, and Willibald Pahr more or less executed his policy as his foreign ministers.14 Nevertheless, the Austrian foreign policy of the 1970s differed from that of the 1950s. In the 1970s Austria started to conduct an increasingly pro– Third World policy. Austrian his torians still discuss to what extent this was a continuous development of Kreisky’s “active neutrality policy” or whether he consciously changed his priorities at some point.
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