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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 February 2000 Issue No. 469 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 February 2000 Issue No. 469
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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 Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Nazism resurrected
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
The swearing in of a new coalition government in Austria has provoked an international furore seemingly out of all proportion to what is, after all, an internal event in a relatively small country. But the event is heralded by some as a sign that Nazism is on the rise and that, unless stringent measures to prevent the spread of this dangerous ideology are taken, it could spread throughout Europe and, after it, to the whole world. Others believe it is just a transient phenomenon that has been projected as a crisis of far-reaching significance with implications for the world at large by Jewish communities in general and the state of Israel in particular. This attempt to downplay the significance of the event and to minimise the threat it represents is extremely dangerous, and I personally believe that our stand here should not be determined as necessarily the opposite of the stand taken by Israel, but should be reached independently, as action not reaction.
Some observers might not describe Jorg Haider's Freedom Party in Austria as a Nazi party, exactly as some observers would not describe Le Pen's National Front in France as a Nazi party either. But the European peoples who bore the brunt of Nazi excesses throughout World War II have every right to worry about the similarities between the ideological platform of Haider's Freedom party and that of Hitler's National Socialism. If the similarities are not obvious to a majority of Austrians, they certainly are to the majority of citizens of the European Union, of which Austria is a part.
For the Europeans, Haider's rise in Austria is chillingly similar to Hitler's rise in Germany in the early thirties and Mussolini's in Italy in the early twenties. Like them, he is a populist hero who taps into his countrymen's insecurities and xenophobia. Unabashedly anti-immigrant, he accuses immigrant workers of depriving Austrians of the jobs to which they are entitled and of lowering their standard of living because they are willing to accept inferior wages. He has been quoted as praising many of the policies of the Third Reich, and is an outspoken critic of the government's plans to compensate Austrian Jews for the persecution they suffered under Nazi rule, arguing that in such case the ethnic Germans who were driven out of the Sudetland at the end of the war should also receive compensation.
But many Austrians, even those who oppose Haider, fear that the image the Western media is projecting of the leader of the Freedom Party will only fuel his xenophobia. They believe he is not so much a Nazi or a fascist as an opportunist and an unscrupulous populist. They also believe that if the threatened sanctions aimed at isolating Austria diplomatically are imposed, this will make a martyr out of Haider and encourage the Austrian people to stand behind him. Instead, they argue, let him demonstrate his inability to live up to his promises.
And, despite mass demonstrations denouncing the new coalition, most Austrians share Haider's view that the European Union should not interfere in the internal affairs of their country and resent the implication that Austria's national sovereignty should be subsumed into its European identity. In fact, the Austrian crisis has revealed a very real dilemma. If it is true that Haider is a neo-Nazi, it is also true that many of his views enjoy the support of a considerable segment of Austrian public opinion.
Although he has sought to allay Europe's anxieties by promising to stay out of the coalition, Haider has lashed out at the EU for "singling Austria out" while ignoring other similar situations, as when Berlusconi's right-wing government in Italy shared power a few years ago with the "National Alliance" party, which is regarded by most Italians as the heir of Mussolini's fascist tradition.
We all know that fascism and Nazism rose in the aftermath of World War I, when the victors imposed humiliating conditions on a defeated Germany in the Versailles Treaty in 1919. Germany's national pride was deeply hurt; Germans were profoundly frustrated and this became a key factor in Hitler's rise and subsequent building of Europe's most powerful offensive military machine. Far-right ideologies spread wherever frustration and the need for revenge prevail. In France, for instance, Le Pen's party has drawn many of its followers from former leftists who, out of frustration at the corruption and decadence in the political establishment, prefer adhering to a party which pins all its hopes on a fuhrer, an unchallenged leader, rather than on collective militant action.
Contrary to expectations, it seems that many of the scourges from which the world suffered in the twentieth century have successfully made the crossing into the twenty-first. Until recently, the traditional right in Europe remained totally separate from the Nazi/fascist ultra-right. In France, despite the fact that more than 10 per cent of the electorate votes for Le Pen's National Front, the party does not hold one seat in parliament because all the other parties, left and right, built up electoral alliances against it. This need not necessarily remain the case after the recent developments in Austria.
Even though this is not the first time a neo-nazi party has been included in the coalition government of a European state after the war -- there is the precedent of Italy -- the Austrian case has sent shock waves throughout Europe because of the Freedom Party's surprisingly high showing -- 27 per cent in the polls. Haider's strong emergence on the political stage is bound to affect the European political scene as a whole. The lines of demarcation between the traditional right and the Nazi/fascist right will eventually become blurred. Take for instance, Helmut Kohl's Christian-Democrats, the mainstream right-wing party in Germany. The recently revealed campaign-finance scandals involving Kohl and other top leaders of the party have shaken its very structure and paved the way to its fragmentation. Frustrated elements on the right of the party could eventually dissociate themselves from it and join the neo-nazi splinter groups in Germany.
Austria has always been a special case in the heart of Europe. It was not the birthplace of Nazism, although it was the first European country to be annexed by Hitler, who was himself of Austrian origin. Austrians were drafted into the Wehrmacht and fought on Hitler's side. But although Austria was not treated as a vanquished nation after World War II, it was occupied by the four Allied powers after the war and thus had its own reasons to be frustrated. Austria's position was thus ambivalent emerging from the war neither victorious nor defeated, it adopted the mantle of "neutrality".
The furore over the rise of Haider's Freedom Party calls to mind the international reaction to the election of former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim as president of Austria in 1986. Although no conclusive evidence was presented to back accusations that he had hidden his role as a Nazi intelligence officer in the Balkans during World War II, Waldheim has been an international pariah ever since. Despite the fact that Austrian politics have been dominated for long by the Social Democrats, Austria has never been able to shake off suspicions about its ambivalent relationship with the Third Reich.
Frustration has always developed a propensity towards Nazism. When, in Egypt, the Wafd signed a Friendship Treaty with Great Britain in 1936, the most radical trend in the national movement, notably the Young Egypt Party, turned to Hitler's Germany on the grounds that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend'. Resorting to Nazi Germany against colonial Britain was common among leaders of many national liberation movements.
We must not allow the evils that have accompanied the globalisation process to drive us into committing the same mistakes we committed before World War II. Frustration with globalisation should not lead us to espouse Nazism as an expression of protest against, and dissatisfaction with, a unipolar world order led by the United States. Nor should Israel's opposition to the rise of Nazism in Austria be used as a pretext to stand on the side of Nazism wherever it emerges. Israel can fan the flames of the anti-Nazi campaign, but it is not because of Israel that the campaign erupted in the first place. Nor were the Jews the only victims of Nazism; the people of Europe, and of the world at large, have suffered too much from the scourge of Nazism to assume that Europe's outrage is because of the suffering, real though it was, to which its Jewish citizens were subjected.
And, as far as we are concerned, national forces which condemned Nazism in the post-World War II climate, when national liberation movements were at their peak, cannot allow their frustration at their failure to achieve many of the dreams of independence drive them into repudiating this condemnation and turning back to neo-Nazi practices as the appropriate policy to stand up to Western hegemony.
What happened in Austria was not an accidental event. It is the natural outcome of frustration triggered by the processes of globalisation, where authority is in the hands of an ever smaller numerical minority and where frustration is the lot of an ever greater majority. In the post-World War II conditions, the resurrection of Nazism/Fascism has been kept at bay, isolated and constrained, but it is now moving out of its isolation. The Austrian events are very significant in this regard. And the time has come for us to determine our stand towards this new dimension of global conflict.
