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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 February 2000 Issue No. 468 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 February 2000 Issue No. 468
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Profile Travel Books Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Never again?
By Sameh Naguib
The entrance of Jorg Haider's Freedom Party (FP) into the Austrian government, as coalition partners with the Conservatives, marks the second time in six years that the extreme right have come to power within a member state of the European Union.
In 1994, the National Alliance of Italy, whose roots can be traced back to Benito Mussolini's fascist party, became junior partners in a government led by media-baron Silvio Berlusconi. At the time, the EU remained silent. Now, however, the Union's leaders are threatening sanctions and the severing of bilateral links with Vienna. How effective these measures will prove remains to be seen.
Vienna itself was transformed into a battlefield last week as the new government was sworn in. Friday's demonstrations took place only a few metres from the Helden Platz (Square of the Hero), where in 1938 Hitler addressed a crowd of some 250,000 Viennese citizens following the Anschluss -- the annexation of Austria by Germany. Some of Friday's demonstrators held banners reading, "1938 reasons to be against Haider."
Hundreds of police in riot gear faced the protesters as they tried to break through the security barriers which surrounded the parliament. Truncheons were used against the crowd as they threw blue paint (the FP's party colour) at police officers. Black flags were hung from the trees, and many of the protesters were dressed in black. More than 50 people were injured.
On Saturday, the demonstrations continued with several thousand taking part. Anti-FP protests have also been held in several European capital cities. In London, anti-Nazi demonstrators marched on Downing Street to hand in a petition calling for sanctions against Austria's new government. Meanwhile, Austrian trade unions have threatened to launch strikes and street protests against the new government's right-wing economic policies.
Leading Austrian artists have also been among Haider's earliest and most vocal opponents, many of them threatening to leave the country or even renounce their citizenship. The FP has signalled its dislike of creative minds and cosmopolitan free-thinkers by threatening to cut state subsidies to the arts. Not only would this move have serious consequences for many artists' livelihoods, but there are those who fear the FP will seek to control both art and the media by imposing strict censorship. It was in this context that on Friday evening around 1,500 protesters occupied Austria's national theatre just as the performance was about to begin, where they stormed the stage to a standing ovation from the paying audience.
The Freedom Party, not surprisingly, is trying to talk down fears that its name is just an alibi for authoritarian rule. The FP claims that its cultural roots should be traced back to German romanticism, rather than to fascism. But as Isaiah Berlin observed more than 40 years ago, it was romanticism that provided the cultural foundation for the Nazi ideas of German racial superiority.
The FP's debt to the fascist milieu of the immediate post-war years, on the other hand, is incontrovertible. Indeed, there has been a well-organised and deep-rooted German nationalist camp within Austrian society ever since the late 19th century. During the period of Nazi rule, most of its supporters took the opportunity to join Hitler's own National Socialist Party (NSDAP). Following the war, the Organisation of Independents (VDU), founded in 1949, played an important role in reuniting the Austrian far right. In 1956, the VDU was dissolved, to be reborn as the Freedom Party. The chairman of the new organisation was a former high-ranking NSDAP official, Anton Reinthaller.
In its early days, the FP concentrated on campaigning for the rehabilitation of former Nazis. Perhaps that is not surprising: Reinthaller's successor as chairman of the FP was himself a former officer in Hitler's Waffen SS. The 1970s saw the emergence of a liberal wing within the party, but by the mid-1980s the right had reorganised under the leadership of Haider, and in 1986 their chief won control of the party apparatus.
If the Freedom Party were to succeed in establishing itself as a central component of the Austrian government, the consequences could be catastrophic. Immigrant workers, minorities, trade unions and cultural freedom are all destined to find themselves under attack. Moreover, the FP's success in attaining this level of respectability and power would give an enormous boost to fascists and neo-fascists throughout Europe. As the FP programme states, "Egalitarianism is the enemy of freedom... Liberty and equality are not only incompatible, but contradict one another... As a general rule, the consequence of freedom can never be equality."
The explicit aim of the FP is to establish a new, "Third Republic," by which it means an authoritarian society whose economy will be based on extreme neo-liberal theories and dominated by "the market". Party officials have publicly described immigrants as "genetically programmed to be criminals or breed excessively." They are virulently opposed to the enlargement of the EU, because it will open up Europe's frontiers to "racial undesirables".
The FP's attitude to foreign workers has already played a major role in fuelling the growth of broader far-right feeling in Austrian society. Indeed, the main reaction of the Social Democrats to Haider's increasing influence was to adopt many of the FP's slogans in a futile attempt, as their own strategists put it, "to make the [FP] superfluous."
The 20th-century history of Vienna is one of turbulence and contradictions. In 1900, the city was an extraordinary ethnic and cultural melting pot. The first two decades of the century saw an exceptional flowering of art, science and literature, which made Vienna the avant-garde capital of Europe. The painters Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the political economist Rudolph Hilferding, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, the film director Fritz Lang and the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, were just a few of those who contributed to the frenzy of modernist creativity which defined the city at this time. But this multi-national modernist Vienna also produced a backlash, particularly among the German speaking lower-middle-classes, in whom anti-Jewish and xenophobic sentiments became deeply entrenched. It was in this milieu that Austrian fascism first gained ground.
The new wave of reaction did not go unopposed, for all that. It was in the working class quarters of Vienna that the first mass armed resistance to fascism in Europe was seen, in the early 1930s. But it was fascism which emerged victorious from this battle, as the modernists fled the city and Hitler's forces marched in.
Are we about to see this history repeat itself? One young man who took part in the demonstrations last Saturday, a member of the youth wing of the Social Democrats, fiercely declared before the cameras, "The people will bring the Conservative and Freedom Party government to its knees. They should enjoy every single day they spend in office, because there will not be many of them." Let us hope he is proved right.
