This article was downloaded by: [Northeastern University]On: 20 November 2014, At: 08:29Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

National IdentitiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cnid20

The ‘Habsburg Dilemma’ Today:Competing Discourses of NationalIdentity in Contemporary AustriaChristian KarnerPublished online: 19 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Christian Karner (2005) The ‘Habsburg Dilemma’ Today: CompetingDiscourses of National Identity in Contemporary Austria, National Identities, 7:4, 409-432, DOI:10.1080/14608940500334382

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14608940500334382

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

The ‘Habsburg Dilemma’ Today:Competing Discourses of NationalIdentity in Contemporary AustriaChristian Karner

This article analyses discourses of Austrian national identity. It discusses the

reproduction (and contestation) of national identities on the levels of everyday language,

political debate and policy. Three discursive formations of the nation*/and their

histories*/are discussed: a nowadays marginal and de-legitimated discourse of pan-

Germanic ethnicism; the hegemonic paradigm of ‘Austrian-ness’, which itself comprises a

range of ideological positions and constitutes the over-arching framework to most

(relevant) debates; and counter-hegemonic discourses including European- and ‘post-

national’ identity formations. The article also discusses individuals’ ongoing negotiation

of, and possible resistance to, discourses of national belonging, and concludes by relating

its findings to the contemporary salience of national identities as a reaction to the

(perceived) consequences of economic globalisation.

Keywords: Austria; Discourse Analysis; Identity Negotiations; Globalisation

Introduction

In his (posthumously published) Language and Solitude , Ernest Gellner (1998) terms

two diametrically opposed philosophical discourses that circulated on the territories

of the decaying Habsburg Empire the ‘universalistic-atomic’ and the ‘romantic-

organic’ vision, respectively. The former was associated with an individualistic

worldview based on the Enlightenment notion of ‘Universal Man’ and a ‘bloodless[ly]

cosmopolitan’ laissez-faire liberalism (Lukes, 1998). Its discursive rival, Gellner

argues, conceived the individual to be intrinsically part of a linguistic/cultural

collective. In part inspired by Herder and Fichte, such ‘holistic’ romanticism provided

the ‘rationale’ underlying the various ethnic nationalisms that contributed to the

disintegration of the Habsburg Empire. The same ideological configuration informed

Correspondence to: Christian Karner, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham,

Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK. E-mail: christian.karner@nottingham.ac.uk

ISSN 1460-8944 (print)/ISSN 1469-9907 (online) # 2005 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14608940500334382

National Identities

Vol. 7, No. 4, December 2005, pp. 409�/432

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

the negotiations at Saint Germain after the end of the First World War, resulting in

the redrawing of the borders in Central Europe and several newly legitimated nation-

states. Austria*/as stated by Karl Renner, its Socialist representative at Saint Germain

and first Chancellor*/was ‘what was left’ of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Reduced by two-thirds in territory and three-quarters in population, the German-

speaking First Austrian Republic was*/from its creation until its infamous Anschluß

to Hitler’s Germany in 1938*/unsure of its cultural identity and political destiny

(Brook-Shepherd, 1997).

Following the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust, postwar

reconstruction, decades of political neutrality and consensual democracy on the

Western side of the Iron Curtain, the revolutions of 1989 and Austria’s European

Union (EU) membership in 1995, discourses of national identity are being

negotiated, albeit to a profoundly different historical and ideological backdrop, in

contemporary Austria (and as indeed they are in many parts of the globe). The

temporary imposition of sanctions on the country by her then-14 EU partners in

2000 following the formation of a coalition government between the centre-right

Austrian People’s Party (OVP) and the controversial Freedom Party (FPO),1 formerly

led by Jorg Haider, testified to this.2

In this article, I analyse competing constructions of (national) identity and

belonging articulated in contemporary Austria. Taking Gellner’s archaeology of

thought as a conceptual point of departure, I discuss (the co-existence of) three

frameworks for thinking about ethnicity and nationality in Austria today. The first of

these amounts to a nowadays peripheral and de-legitimated pan-Germanic ethnicism

ideologically rooted in the organic romanticism discussed in Language and Solitude .

Re-appropriating Benedict Anderson’s (1983) seminal term, the second and

hegemonic framework has been crucial to the ‘re-imagining’ of Austria’s national

community since the end of the Second World War. Constructing Austrian ethnicity/

nationality as different and distinct (from German and other ‘others’), this discourse

came to underlie the reconstructed Austrian nation-state after 1945. I then go on to

discuss select counter-hegemonic constructions of the (post-national) ‘self ’. This is

followed by a brief discussion of the (relative) fluidity of practised or experienced

identities. The article concludes by relating its analysis to recent debates about the

contemporary resurgence, salience and appeal of discourses of national belonging in

(partial) reaction to the dislocations of globalisation.

Theory and Method

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) comprises an internally heterogeneous and

interdisciplinary set of approaches that, by studying ‘symbolic practices’ (i.e., written

and spoken language) in their wider contexts, analyse ‘the mediation between the

social and the linguistic’ (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999, p. 16), ‘between

communication and institutions, between discourse and society’ (Weiss & Wodak,

2003, p. 9). Language is thus conceptualised as a ‘social practice’ (Fairclough, 1989)

410 C. Karner

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

helping to either uphold or subvert existing relations of power, both ‘structured’

(though not determined) by social systems and crucial to their reproduction or

transformation (Weiss & Wodak, 2003, p. 10). In the terminology of the Italian

neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci, ideological struggles between the forces of hegemony

(i.e., social reproduction through intellectual/moral leadership) and counter-

hegemonic contestation are reflected and encountered in written and spoken

language (Fairclough, 1992). At the heart of much discourse analytical work is the

notion of ‘interpretative repertoires’, defined as ‘broadly discernable clusters of terms,

descriptions and figures of speech . . ., the [collectively available] building blocks . . .

for manufacturing versions of actions, self and social structures’ (Potter & Wetherell,

1998, p. 147). Given CDA’s focus on the connections between language and power,

‘interpretative repertoires’ are therefore frameworks of historically grounded, widely

circulating*/yet frequently contested*/meaning (Marshall, 1994, p. 93) that

combine a cognitive sense-making role with a crucial political function.

The ideological effects of the ‘interpretative repertoires’ analysed here concern the

construction, reproduction and contestation of ethnic/national boundaries in and

through public discourse in contemporary Austria.3 The data examined includes

media discourse4 obtained through a close reading of the country’s main newspapers

and its national broadcasting network (ORF) between August 2001 and April 2002, as

well as September 2003 and January 2004, which saw intense public debates

concerning issues (and definitions) of national belonging/exclusion as well as

Austria’s past, present and future.5 The material analysed also includes (written

and/or spoken) statements enunciated by politicians, writers, political commentators

and academics as well as by ‘ordinary social actors’.6 While discourses of national

inclusion/exclusion are often articulated consciously, they also resonate in the

minutiae of language (Fowler, 1991) and are implicit in some largely taken-for-

granted everyday activities. The data discussed in this article therefore ranges from

the explicit politicisation of ‘Austrian-ness’ to some instances of implicit, ‘everyday’

(Edensor, 2002)7 or ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig, 1995; De Cillia, Reisigl & Wodak,

1999). In light of the discourse analytical emphasis on the ‘historically grounded’

nature of all frameworks of meaning, I draw attention to the histories of the three

‘interpretative repertoires’ discussed. However, my argument focuses on contempor-

ary Austria and the respective content*/not their relative quantitative distribution*/

of three ‘discursive formations’ extrapolated from recent and ongoing debates

concerning Austrian national identity. Given limitations of space, I will confine

myself to extracts representative of considerably larger bulks of data.

Traces of Pan-Germanic Ethnicism

The first, historically significant, but now distinctly marginal, discourse of national

identity recognises little or no distinction between Austria and Germany, but

presupposes the existence of a single ‘German(ic) nation’. Its discursive logic

resembles Gellner’s account of organic-romanticism and its essentialising ideology

National Identities 411

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

of ‘blood, soil and people’. Such a discursive formation underlies a particular, and

nowadays counter-hegemonic and de-legitimated, construction of Austrian history as

part of a pan-Germanic entity and the latter’s juxtaposition to perennially excluded

‘others’.

Historical Precedents

Well-known video footage of Hitler’s arrival in Vienna in March 1938, with

thousands cheering on the Heldenplatz (lit. ‘heroes’ square’), testifies to the

previously mentioned identity crisis that plagued many Austrians between 1918

and 1938. The viability of the First Republic had been widely questioned across the

political spectrum ever since Saint Germain, with only (former) monarchists, some in

the conservative Christian Social Party and Austrian communists asserting Austria’s

political and cultural distinctiveness (Thaler, 2001, pp. 72�/74; Bukey, 2000, p. 22). As

shown by Ernst Hanisch, calls for an amalgamation with Germany were ‘ubiquitous’

(though contextually/regionally variable in ‘vehemence’) in Austria of the interwar

period,8 a historical context characterised by severe economic crises, political conflicts

and a gradual descent into authoritarianism.9

Under the leadership of Engelbert Dollfuss*/and following years of economic

hardship, civil war between the socialist (Schutzbund) and the conservative

(Heimwehr) paramilitaries, and the dissolution of the Austrian parliament*/the

Austro-fascist Standestaat was imposed in 1933. Advocating a hierarchical, Catholic

and supposedly distinctly Austrian social order, Dollfuss was initially assured of

Mussolini’s support and from the start opposed by both Hitler and the growing Nazi

movement on Austrian territory. The latter staged an unsuccessful coup in 1934,

resulting in Dollfuss’s assassination and his succession by Kurt Schuschnigg, who

initially continued his predecessor’s politics and insistence on (Austrian) indepen-

dence. However, when confronted by an increasingly hostile Adolf Hitler in 1938, he

conceded to the latter’s demand for a Nazi minister of the interior (Arthur Seyss-

Inquart) and eventually to the Anschluß to Germany. Schuschnigg’s widely quoted

explanation that he did not want ‘German blood to be spilled’ (Brook-Shepherd,

1997, p. 318), revealed an underlying and widespread assumption of a shared ‘racial’

or ethnic essence common to both Germans and Austrians that goes some way to

explaining the enthusiasm displayed by thousands of Austrians over their incorpora-

tion into Hitler’s Reich . The ease with which Austria was transformed into a German

province (i.e., Ostmark), the dramatic and rapid increase in Austrian Nazi Party

membership in the immediate aftermath of the Anschluß , the scale and intensity of

the anti-Jewish pogroms in Vienna during the Kristallnacht in November 1938

(Bukey, 2000, pp. 131�/152; Brook-Shepherd, 1997, p. 344), all suggest that Hitler’s

message found a large and susceptible audience in Austria. Though of course never

uncontested,10 the ‘organic-romanticist’ idea of Austrians as a generic part of a single

German Volk undeniably constituted a widespread (and increasingly dominant)

‘interpretative paradigm’ during the 1930s and 1940s. Following the Anschluß , this

412 C. Karner

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

pan-Germanic discourse was transformed from its previously oppositional status in

the Standestaat into the hegemonic definition of nationality serving to perpetuate

Nazi rule over Austria.

Although the pan-Germanic paradigm was overtly pushed back beyond the

margins of political respectability and displaced by a distinctly Austrian national

‘imagining’ after 1945, occasional traces of a Germanic (deutschnationale) discourse

of identity can be detected in the history of postwar Austrian society. Among these,

we must distinguish between the explicit (de-legitimated and marginal) re-

politicisation of pan-Germanic sentiments, on the one hand, and implicit (non-

reflexive) articulations of ethnic/national proximity (if not historical sameness)

between Austria and Germany, on the other.

Sub-cultural Extremes

Some of the most explicit articulations of nationalist sentiment in contemporary

Austria borrow from the pan-Germanic discourse, often refusing to acknowledge the

legitimacy of the now dominant discourse of a distinct Austrian identity that I will

discuss shortly. Extremists of this far-right variety appear to regard current political

entities and boundaries between Austria and Germany as aberrations and obstacles to

the realisation of an assumed ethnic (or ‘racial’) ‘Germanic destiny’. Part of a

numerically insignificant, xenophobic and not infrequently law-breaking11 sub-

culture, advocates of this extremist version of the pan-Germanic narrative tend to use

several channels of mobilisation including demonstrations, pamphlets and news-

letters.12

The role of the ‘ordinary (German) soldier in WWII’ constitutes a crucial site for

competing imaginings of the nation(s) and its/their history/-ies both in Germany and

Austria. Questions of obedience, duty and conscience under totalitarianism as well as

of knowledge of (and responsibility for) war crimes are simultaneously evoked by the

historical figure of the soldier who served in the German Wehrmacht . Proposed

answers vary from the apologetic to the highly critical, regarding ‘ordinary soldiers’ as

passive, innocent pawns or responsible agents and perpetrators of genocide,

respectively. The latter (critical) discourse was articulated by two exhibitions of the

alleged crimes committed by the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. The

second of these exhibitions started in Vienna in April 2002.13 Predictably, it rekindled

public debate about the responsibility, role (and (il)legitimacy) of Austrians fighting

for Hitler’s Reich . Two diametrically opposed constructions of history clashed on

April 13 on Vienna’s Heldenplatz , when 100 neo-Nazis were confronted by a left-wing

‘counter-demonstration’ of some 4,000 sympathisers with the exhibition’s aim to

rethink Austrian history self-critically. The neo-Nazi minority’s pan-Germanic

discourse was epitomised in their signs thanking the Wehrmacht for its ‘deeds of

heroism’ and declaring that ‘we are all Germans’ (‘Wir hier sind alle Deutsche ’) (Kleine

Zeitung , 14 April 2002).

National Identities 413

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

The weekly National Zeitung provides a further graphic illustration of such explicit

and decidedly counter-hegemonic pan-Germanism. Published in Munich, it operates

its own website and epitomises an unashamedly xenophobic organic-romanticism of

the Germanic Volk . Discursively subsuming Austria into the ‘German people’, it

articulates a conspiratorial Weltanschauung based on the recurrent motives of

encroaching American hegemony, the threat of illegal immigration and allegedly anti-

Germanic misconstructions of the Second World War. Declaring it to be the nation’s

conscience (Das Gewissen der Nation), its editor defines the National Zeitung as ‘our

voice for truth and justice for the German people’ (‘unsere Stimme fur Wahrheit und

Recht des deutschen Volkes ’) (National Zeitung , 5 April 2002).

The Politically Controversial

Traces of an ideologically very different and implicit form of pan-Germanism have

resonated in some controversial political rhetoric on a ‘linguistically microscopic’

level, where boundaries are (re-)drawn, naturalised or contested through ‘familiar

habits of language’ that imply notions of national identity often ‘beyond conscious

awareness’ (Billig, 1995, p. 94). One such instance occurred in the context of the

Waldheim controversy. Kurt Waldheim, former United Nations general secretary, was

nominated as the OVP’s presidential candidate in 1986. His ultimately successful

candidacy gave rise to heated transnational debates concerning his role during the

Second World War and subsequently triggered considerable public debate and critical

soul-searching concerning the darkest chapter in Austrian history (Pick, 2000). While

the details of the controversy, including a disconcerting antisemitic backlash in the

tabloid press, have been analysed most comprehensively by Richard Mitten (1992),

Waldheim’s alleged ‘amnesia’ concerning his past was, according to numerous

commentators, paradigmatic of a previous and relatively widespread (though

certainly never all-embracing14) reluctance to confront Austria’s role in the Second

World War.

In terms of the pan-Germanic historical narrative, one of Waldheim’s most widely

quoted statements was particularly revealing: his declaration that his role in the war

had simply been that of the ‘ordinary soldier doing his duty’. As argued by Josef

Haslinger (1995, pp. 26�/27), this statement by the Austrian President at the time is

remarkable for it presupposed the ‘naturalness’ of an Austrian serving in the German

army, swearing allegiance to the Reich , and fulfilling his ‘duty’ for a dictatorship that

had eradicated Austria as a separate political entity. Clearly, Waldheim’s statement

could only make sense in a context where Austria’s assumed (historical) German-ness

constituted a still available, though now marginal and of course strongly contested,

‘interpretative paradigm’.

Arguably less implicit and more consciously ideological were some of the

statements made by Jorg Haider, former head of the FPO and governor of Carinthia,

in the early part of his political career. His at least occasional invocation of the pan-

Germanic discourse during the 1980s was most clearly revealed in a controversial

414 C. Karner

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

reference to the Austrian nation as ‘an ideological miscarriage’ (ideologische

Mißgeburt) (quoted in Haslinger, 1995, p. 48; see also Auinger, 2000, p. 52). Haider’s

populist ‘credentials’ are well known and provided, in 2000, the other EU Member

States’ official justification15 for the temporary imposition of sanctions on Austria

following the FPO’s inclusion in a coalition government with the OVP. Haider’s

discourse, compellingly analysed by Wodak (2000), derives rhetorical energy from the

construction of an antinomy between German-speaking Austrians and ‘culturally

alien’, allegedly encroaching, ‘foreigners’.

Yet, as Pelinka (2000) argues, Haider’s rise to political prominence and success on a

national level was less a symptom of xenophobic nationalism than of a power vacuum

left by increasingly de-legitimated political configurations formerly dominated by the

Social Democrats (SPO) and the OVP.16 Widespread discontent with the old Proporz

system of consensual politics, or the systematic power sharing within the country’s

large public sector among the two largest parties of the postwar era,17 was

undoubtedly a major factor contributing to the FPO’s gradual rise to power between

the mid-1980s and 2000 (Morrow, 2000). Haider’s political career has thus been aided

by wider structural factors (rather than mere ideological appeal) and his rhetoric has,

since the 1980s, distanced itself from earlier echoes of pan-Germanism (Auinger,

2000, p. 30). He has, however, more recently*/and on a regional/Carinthian level*/

tapped into a long history of conflict18 still relatively widely understood in terms of a

fundamental divide between the ‘German self ’ and the Slavic/Slovenian ‘other’, by

rekindling public debate about bilingual ‘village-signs’ (Ortstafeln) enshrined in the

state treaty of 1955. According to a political compromise designed by the Socialist

Chancellor Bruno Kreisky in the 1970s, villages with a Slovenian minority population

of 25 per cent or more were required to provide bilingual signs at all in- and out-

going roads (Portisch, 1996, p. 385). In November and December 2001, the issue re-

emerged in a row between Haider*/who voiced his intention to either raise the

demographic benchmark for bilingual Ortstafeln or, allegedly, to get rid of them

altogether (Die Presse , 20 December 2001)*/representatives of the Slovenian

minority of Austria, and Ludwig Adamovich, president of the constitutional court

(Verfassungsgerichtshof ).19 On 13 December 2001, the Verfassungsgerichtshof declared

the 25 per cent benchmark to be unconstitutional and granted one year for the full

implementation of minority rights for bilingual Ortstafeln as envisaged in the state

treaty.20

Soon thereafter, Haider postulated a Slovenian conspiracy to steal territory from

Carinthia (‘uber Schleichwege ein slowenisches Staats-Territorium in Karnten zu

schaffen’) (Die Presse , 20 December 2001). Significantly, much local discourse

continues to interpret past and present struggles (over language and/or territory)

between Slovenians and German-speaking Austrians not in terms of citizenship,

which would require an ‘interpretative paradigm’ distinguishing between the Austrian

and former Yugoslavian/ now Slovenian states, but in ‘organic-romanticist’ terms.

Language thus becomes a surface marker for an assumed underlying ethno-national/

ethno-linguistic (i.e. ‘German-national’ or ‘deutschnationale ’) essence. In a detailed

National Identities 415

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

regional study, Obid, Messner and Leben (2002) confirm that such conflicts and their

histories continue to be conceptualised in essentialist terms that presuppose fixed and

mutually exclusive, either ‘Germanic’ or ‘Slavic’, identities. Tellingly, they speak of a

continuing*/though of course contested*/‘deutschnationale hegemony’ in parts of

Austria’s southernmost region (Obid et al., 2002, pp. 145�/149). The Ortstafel

controversy therefore allows insights into local traces of the discourse of pan-

Germanism in a part of Austria with a long history of ethno-nationalist conflict and

‘organic-romanticist’ identity politics.

‘Austrian-ness’: Heterogeneous Hegemony

The second, in contemporary Austria hegemonic, discourse of national identity in

contemporary Austria is premised upon Austrian distinctiveness. Like all identity

constructions, this discursive formation relies on the delineation of various ‘others’,

which include*/depending upon enunciative context and ideological ‘preference’*/

Germans, Eastern Europeans and ‘immigrants’, as well as, in some articulations, the

EU. Clearly and importantly, this dominant discourse of national belonging includes

a diverse range of political positions. Their inclusion in a single discursive framework

is justified by a shared assertion of Austria’s historical and cultural uniqueness or

what De Cillia et al. (1999) have termed the ‘discursive construction of national

sameness’.

The Second World War and Beyond: Germany Becoming ‘Other’

As argued earlier, widespread receptivity to the pan-Germanic discourse aided

Austria’s largely unresisted Anschluß to Hitler’s Reich in 1938. As the war wore on,

however, ideological resistance and counter-hegemonic activity by Austrians

increased. Although never as organised as the French Resistance, Austrian contesta-

tion of its (continued) inclusion in Nazi Germany took various forms (Bukey, 2000,

p. 219): linguistic and economic differences, food rations as well as the trauma and

casualties of war contributed to growing discontent and rekindled stereotypes of the

German/Prussian ‘other’ as ‘the arrogant Piefke ’.21 Actual political activism included

the resistance group O5, known for its use of graffiti to call for Austrian

independence (Kleindel, 1984; Hanisch, 1994, pp. 389ff), as well as some individual

Austrian participants in the unsuccessful 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler (Operation

Walkure). This is to say nothing of the tens of thousands Austrian Jews, Romanies,

communists, homosexuals and other ideological ‘undesirables’ murdered in the gas

chambers of Hitler’s death camps.22 Many more thousands escaped, resulting in the

mass exodus of Vienna’s intellectual and artistic elite.

With the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, the end of the war and the formation of a new

Austrian government (albeit in the context of allied military occupation for ten years

until 195523), previously marginal or counter-hegemonic imaginings of Austria as

culturally/historically distinctive were gradually transformed into the new official

416 C. Karner

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

narrative of nationality. This ideological project of (re-)conceptualising Austria as a

nation in its own right with a unique history and place in the postwar ‘order’ derived

considerable discursive ‘energy’ from the allied forces’ Moscow Declaration of 1943

(see, e.g., Thaler, 2001, p. 27). This document defined Austria as ‘Hitler’s first victim’

before going on to state that any future Austrian government would, due to

widespread and willing Austrian participation in the war, have to bear part of the

responsibility for the horrors committed by the Hitler regime. However, postwar

re-imaginings of Austria appropriated this verdict selectively, reproducing only the

idea of Hitler’s ‘first victim’ and formulating a myth of Austrian passivity and

innocence.24 In doing so, Germans gradually came to be constructed as a significant

ethnic ‘other’*/a theme particularly prominent in Austrian postwar cinema

(Mappes-Niedik, 2002, p. 38).

This highly selective construction of Second World War history challenged the

pan-Germanic discourse and facilitated a (relatively) widespread amnesia concerning

Austrian contributions to the Holocaust (Wassermann, 2002) that has been

contrasted with German attempts to confront her recent past (Vergangenheitsbewal-

tigung) and mourn for the millions of victims of Hitler’s ‘final solution’.25 It may be

further queried if increasingly prominent representations of Germans as different and

‘other’ and the repression of memories of the Holocaust were partly interrelated, and

if ideological absolution of the horrors of the Second World War could be achieved

through the dual strategies of repression and projection of all things bad onto the

newly constructed German ‘other’. Meanwhile, the now hegemonic re-imagining of

Austria as a separate state and nation took place in the context of postwar

reconstruction and the creation of Austria’s consensual political system that was in

turn intended to avoid rekindling the centrifugal forces that had thrown the First

Republic into civil war (Sully, 1990; Fitzmaurice, 1991).

In his study of Austrian postwar ‘nation-building’, Peter Thaler argues, from an

instrumentalist perspective, that the construction of Austrian distinctiveness was

driven by political elites, succeeded against the backdrop of Austria’s ‘economic

miracle’ and was supported by the education system as well as ‘the widening of legal

restrictions on Germanist discourse’ also enshrined in the 1955 state treaty (Thaler,

2001, p. 121). Regularly conducted surveys since 1945 suggest a steady increase in the

demographic spread of the idea of Austria as a separate nation. According to a much-

quoted opinion poll, the proportion of Austrians who thought of themselves as ‘a

separate people’ (‘ein eigenes Volk ’) rather than ethnically German was 49 per cent in

1956, 66 per cent in 1970, 75 per cent in 1987 and has continued to rise since

(Reiterer, 1988). These percentages are indicative of the increasingly widespread

articulation of the official postwar narrative of the Austrian nation. While we ought

to be cautious not reify (or ‘freeze’) national identities on the basis of answers given

to opinion polls (see below), these figures do indicate that certain situations*/

including the explicit discussion of national identities in the survey context*/have

elicited increasingly widespread assertions of Austrian ‘distinctiveness’ since 1945.

National Identities 417

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

At the same time, conceptions of Austrian nationhood vis-a-vis the German

neighbour can vary from outright opposition to a more graded perspective that,

while asserting Austrian identity, also postulates a relative cultural proximity to

Germany. The first variant, which postulates radical otherness, was articulated by an

informant, who argued that she had always taken the existence of profound

differences separating Austrians from Germans for granted (‘wir kriegen das, glaub

ich, mit der Muttermilch’ [‘we get that, I believe, with mother’s milk’]) (Interview, 2

January 2004), thus also corroborating Wodak et al.’s (1999, pp. 192�/193) findings of

many people’s emotional investment in the discursive construction and maintenance

of boundaries separating Austria from her northern neighbours.

More famously, the World Cup in Argentina in 197826 provided a moment of

continuing significance to the discourse of Austrian distinctiveness. Austria faced

Germany on 21 June in Cordoba and managed, in contrast to many defeats Austrian

football has suffered at the hands (or feet) of the German national team over the

years, a 3�/2 victory (Ingrao, 2001). The style of the victory was perhaps even more

significant, with Hans Krankl (a much-celebrated striker, cultural icon and, until

recently, coach of the national team) scoring two spectacular goals. Television footage

of his second and decisive goal, and of a famous commentator screaming himself into

a celebratory frenzy, continues to be broadcast by the ORF (and to be demanded by

the audience) on a relatively regular basis to this day. No other victory in the history

of Austrian football meant nearly as much to the Austrian public, no other television

footage continues to be celebrated as widely, and no other opponent could elicit the

same ‘spell’ of national identification.

Against the backdrop of linguistic and geographical proximity, the significance of

German tourism to the Austrian economy and a large ‘degree of Austro-German

cooperation in the sphere of media’ (Thaler, 2001, p. 38), much everyday discourse

also asserts national difference through ideologically connoted concepts as vague and

varied as Austrian ‘Gemutlichkeit ’ (‘conviviality’), ‘cultural sophistication’ and a sense

for ‘the good life’. Contrasting cliches of German rigidity, formality, efficiency but

lack of enjoyment or cultural ‘depth’ semiotically resonate in such stereotypes.

However, hegemonic ‘Austrian-ness’ can also be compatible with the discursive

maintenance of cultural affinity to Germany: national differences therefore also

appear, on occasion, to be conceptualised as graded phenomena and hence a matter

of degree. Thus, in surveys between the 1970s and 1990s between 60 and 70 per cent

of Austrians named ‘Germany as the country most similar to their own’ (Thaler,

2001, p. 79; Reiterer, 1988; Ulram & Tributsch, 2004). More recently, a weekly

magazine identified (with) Germans as ‘our favourite neighbours’ (‘unsere Lieblings-

nachbarn’) (TV Woche , 20 December 2003, p. 4).

Identity and Boundaries

De Cillia et al.’s (1999, pp. 158�/160) discourse analysis of Austrian national identities

reveals five areas of identity construction: notions of ‘homo austriacus ’, ‘narratives of a

418 C. Karner

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

collective political history’, the ‘discursive construction of a common culture’, of a

‘collective present and future’ and of a ‘national body’ (spanning landscape,

architecture and sports personalities). Clearly, all five areas imply the delineation

of boundaries between the ‘self ’ and (contextually variable) excluded ‘others’. The

nature (or permeability/negotiability) of these boundaries in turn raises the question

as to which ‘model of the nation’ has been constructed, and is being reproduced, in

public discourse in Austria.

It has been suggested that contemporary Austria adheres to a territorial,

assimilationist or ‘French’ concept of the nation,27 rather than the ‘German’

(organically romanticist) model based on unchangeable ethnic criteria of belonging

(Kohn, cited in McCrone, 1998, p. 8). Mappes-Niedik (2002), for example, induces

from his own experience in a rural (Styrian) context that assimilation into the

Austrian ‘self ’ is strongly encouraged and expected of immigrants. On the level of

policy, some recent legislation, such as the controversial Integration Act (Integra-

tionsvertrag) that sought to define compulsory German-language courses as a

prerequisite for renewing immigrants’ residence permits,28 may indeed be interpreted

as evidence of an underlying model of assimilation. A similarly ‘demanding’ version

of integration is advocated by an Austrian academic and journalist arguing that

Austria only has space for immigrants willing to adapt (‘nur fur integrationswillige

und anpassungsbereite ‘‘Auslander’’ gibt es in Osterreich Platz ’).29

However, a closer look at current legislation and public discourse reveals that

contemporary Austria combines elements of both the ‘French’ and the ‘German’ ideal

types of national belonging. Such hybridity or empirical blurring of analytical

alternatives is by no means unusual. As shown by Brubaker (2001), recent changes in

German citizenship laws represent a clear ‘assimilationist turn’, while France appears

to be returning from a period of relative ‘differentialism’ to its traditional model of

civic nationalism (a tendency perhaps epitomised in Chirac’s intention to prohibit

public displays of religious symbols30). Similar to other EU countries, residence

permits in Austria do not automatically confer work permits, thus condemning many

asylum seekers and refugees to unemployment. Exclusion from the job market (plus

the inevitable cycle of dependency and relative deprivation this implies) constitutes

the most frequently voiced complaint by ‘foreigners in Austria’ (Kleine Zeitung , 23

December 2001). While such structural marginalisation/exclusion constitutes a very

common experience for asylum seekers and refugees in most countries in and beyond

‘fortress Europe’, Austrian citizenship law is arguably becoming less ‘usual’: several

years after Germany introduced new legislation, according to which ‘citizenship will

be attributed at birth to children born in Germany to foreign parents, one of whom

has resided legally in Germany for at least eight years’ (Brubaker, 2001, p. 538),

similar proposals have only relatively recently appeared in the Austrian realm of

political debate. In November 2003, the SPO and the Greens (Austria’s current party-

political opposition) voiced their support for proposals to replace ius sanguinis (i.e.,

descent-based citizenship)31 with ius soli (i.e., place of birth conferring citizenship

National Identities 419

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

rights),32 thus underlining that Austrian national identity and citizenship are subject

to discursive contestation and, quite possibly, imminent legislative redefinition.

The shockwaves of the most recent French headscarf controversy reached Austria

in October 2003, shortly after Baden-Wurttemberg had become the first German

Bundesland to prohibit teachers from wearing the Islamic hijab at school while

exempting Catholic nuns from this. On this particular question of cultural pluralism

and the public expression of an Islamic identity, Austria constitutes an interesting

contrast (arguably comparable to the British model of multiculturalism (Baumann,

1999)) to both the French and the German examples. This is reflected in Austria’s

Islamgesetz that, as early as 1914, protected the right to ‘free and public Islamic

worship’, was ‘rediscovered’ in the 1960s and informed the introduction of Islamic

religious studies to schools in 1982.33 While not uncontested itself (there have been

some voices from within the FPO for ‘more assimilation’34), the Islamgesetz suggests

that pluralist discourses co-exist with elements of the ‘French’ (i.e., Integrationsver-

trag) and the ‘German’ (i.e., citizenship) models of the nation.

Returning from policy to everyday language, and in keeping with the discourse

analytical study of language in context, the ideological reproduction of boundaries

also emerges from annual surveys of Austrians’ favourite and most disliked words.

According to the country’s biggest (tabloid) newspaper,35 a survey of positively and

negatively connoted signifiers in 2001 revealed that the majority of Austrians

evaluated the terms ‘security’, ‘home/roots’, ‘order’, ‘stability’, ‘independence’, ‘work/

productivity’ and ‘political neutrality’ (‘Sicherheit ’, ‘Heimat ’, ‘Ordnung ’, ‘Stabilitat ’,

‘Selbststandigkeit ’, Arbeit ’ ‘Neutralitat ’) most positively. On the other hand, their

negatively evaluated discursive opposites, or ‘Austria’s most disliked word[s] of 2001’,

were ‘nuclear energy’ and ‘genetic engineering’ (Gnam, 2002). Both sets of terms

carry hardly subtle connotations in contemporary Austria. The positively evaluated

terms not only suggest a conservative discourse of national belonging (Rauscher,

2002), but are also semiotically meaningful only in relation to ‘that which they are

not’. Such implicit contrasting signifiers include social/political change (seemingly

opposed to ‘order’ and ‘stability’) associated with EU expansion (Osterweiterung) and

the problems, including unemployment and a national identity crisis (as the

opposites implied by ‘work’ and ‘roots’), widely assumed to be the likely

consequences. ‘Nuclear energy’*/the allegedly most negative term*/resonated with

one of the main political controversies of 2001 that centred on a nuclear power plant

in the Czech town of Temelin, near the northern Austrian border. Widely alleged to

be unsafe (Kronen Zeitung , 29 December 2001), Temelin came to be interpreted

through a pre-existing environmentalist discourse and rekindled memories of the

nuclear disaster in Chernobyl in 1986. This time, according to widespread fears, the

accident would occur on the Austrian doorstep and the consequences for Austria

would be disproportionately higher. Temelin and the Czech Republic provided the

‘connotative domain’ (Hansen, 1999, p. 43) to ‘nuclear energy’, whose negative

associations arguably also implied a delineation of the national ‘self ’ threatened by a

politically encroaching and environmentally irresponsible ‘other’.

420 C. Karner

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

This second discursive formation and its core notion of Austrian distinctiveness

undoubtedly constitute the now dominant, though not uncontested, ‘interpretative

paradigm’ for defining ethnicity and national identity. As briefly indicated in the

preceding section, however, this discourse contains a variety of ideological positions.

The often profoundly antagonistic stances taken by the four main parties (OVP, FPO,

SPO and Greens) on asylum and immigration, citizenship (see above), the future of

the EU and Austrian neutrality all suggest that the same discursive framework of

‘Austrian distinctiveness’ can accommodate heterogeneous ideas concerning the

nation and its history (past, present and future) as well as competing definitions of

ethnic boundaries, their salience, significance and permeability. While a discussion of

party political differences within the dominant framework of the ‘imagined’36

Austrian community exceeds the scope of this article,37 I now turn to a selection of

grassroots expressions of counter-hegemony in contemporary Austria.

Counter-hegemony

Discursive struggles over national identity to be briefly discussed in this section can

be divided into three ‘ideal types’38: critical narratives that challenge some of the

premises, particularly those related to the Second World War and the Holocaust,

underlying certain versions of the discourse of ‘Austrian-ness’ summarised above;

grassroots political opposition to the current government and (some) of its policies;

and new imaginings of what we may tentatively term the ‘post-national self ’.

Although it is impossible to do justice to the range and nature of such counter-

hegemonic activities (many of which query the very notion of static and/or unitary

identities) in the space available here, mention must be made of some of them.

Literature constitutes the best-documented arena for ideological resistance and

cultural critique in postwar Austria (Chalmers, 2002; Fliedl, 1998). Some of her most

widely acclaimed novelists and playwrights, notably Elfriede Jelinek and the late

Thomas Bernhard, have found themselves at ideological loggerheads with the

dominant paradigms for constructing the Austrian nation and its history. The

previously mentioned ideological amnesia concerning Austria’s role in the Second

World War as well as contemporary xenophobia and antisemitism have provided the

raw material for these (and other) authors’ critical reflections (Hanisch, 1994, pp.

476�/481). Their literary works, most famously Bernhard’s Waldheim-inspired play

Heldenplatz (Bernhard, 1988), have resulted in public debate and controversy.

Challenging the assumption of Austrian ‘World War II victim-hood’39 and taking

issue with all forms of nationalism, several authors (including Bernhard and recent

Nobel-Price winner Jelinek (Kosta, 2003)) have been accused of ‘national defamation’

(‘Netzbeschmutzung ’, lit. ‘fouling the nest’) in the tabloid media and beyond (Saville,

1999). Other articulations of counter-hegemonic narratives of the nation and its

history are encountered in political essays written by left-wing writers and poets

(Haslinger, 1995; Roth, 1996). Most of these constitute critical/polemical responses to

what their authors perceive to be disconcerting shifts to the right epitomised in the

National Identities 421

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

Waldheim controversy of 1986 and Haider’s gradual rise to political prominence and

success since the mid-1980s (Menasse, 2000). There is also evidence to suggest that

Austro-Pop (Austrian popular music) has occasionally served as a vehicle for critical,

inclusivist and counter-hegemonic constructions of Austrian history and national

identity (Karner, 2002).

As for grassroots political opposition, the most conspicuous examples of a clash

between the forces of hegemony and ideological resistance were provided by ritual

demonstrations starting in February 2000 against the OVP-FPO Government. Prior

to its official formation on 3 February, thousands protested against the then

imminent inclusion of the FPO and its anticipated consequences for Austria and the

EU (The Guardian , 3 February 2000). Several weeks later, a day of protest was

organised throughout Vienna. Its message of opposition to the OVP-FPO coalition

subsequently continued to be articulated by weekly Thursday night demonstrations

in the Austrian capital. Opposing the nationalist populism widely associated with

Haider, the demonstrations created shared political/symbolic space for a variety of

social movements, organisations as well as ‘resisting individuals’. This form of

ideological resistance (Widerstand) arguably epitomised the contentiousness of

discourses of national identity and belonging in contemporary Austria.

More recently, a controversial new Asylum Act became the object of criticism

voiced by the ‘Greens’ and the SPO, several non-governmental and charitable

organisations as well as by protesters (reading the names of homeless asylum seekers)

in front of the Ministry of the Interior.40 The problems faced by asylum seekers have

also become associated with the (by now) legendary Frau Bock , a Viennese woman

associated with several initiatives in aid of asylum seekers including the (private)

‘running’ of 28 flats for more than 100 asylum seekers (offering food and

accommodation as well as a postal address).41 Oppositional voices are also

encountered in various local papers including the Viennese Falter and the Megaphon

in Graz, Austria’s second largest city. The latter, conceived as ‘street magazine and

social initiative’ (‘Straßenmagazin und soziale Initiative ’), has taken a vocal stance

concerning a range of issues including ‘everyday racism’ (Essed, 1991), the likely

human consequences of the new Asylum Act (Megaphon , December 2003, pp. 4�/7)

and women’s plight in a globalising world (Megaphon , September 2003, pp. 6�/7) as

well as the advocacy of a local initiative of Austrian ‘support families’ for teenage

refugees (Megaphon , September 2003, pp. 8�/9).

Austria’s accession to the EU in 1995 has, of course, had an impact on discourses of

central-/pan-European42 or transnational identity as well as on (often diametrically

opposed) nationalist counter-reactions (see below). One version of the former, or of

what we may term ‘post-national’ imaginings, has been articulated by cultural

theorist Wolfgang Zinggl in a critical commentary on representations of Austria as a

‘cultural nation’ (‘Kulturnation’) that bear the hallmarks of the discourse of ‘Austrian-

ness’ analysed above. Zinggl describes such representations as premised on the

assumption that Austria’s artistic legacy determines a collective identity, as though

contemporary Austrians were ‘responsible for’*/or were innately predisposed to

422 C. Karner

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

emulate*/cultural history (‘als waren die heute Lebenden fur diese Kunstschatze

ruckwirkend verantwortlich oder hatten es im Blut, auch solche zu produzieren’). Zinggl

suggests that while this ignores omnipresent cultural complexities (e.g., diversity

within, and marriage outside, the ‘group’), it is particularly unsuited to the

contemporary era. The latter, he argues, is a time of multiple ‘communities of

interest’ that crosscut or reject national boundaries and their legitimating ideologies.

Illustrating this, Zinggl (2002) argues that feminist animal rights campaigners from

Sweden will identify with like-minded sub-Saharan Africans rather than with co-

patriot lorry drivers transporting livestock across the EU. While it seems in the light

of recent (Austrian and global) history sociologically impossible to agree with

Zinggl’s conclusion that ‘flags and anthems belong to a by-gone era’, the publication

of his article in one of Austria’s most reputable newspapers illustrates that the

meaningfulness of ‘the nation’ as an identity-bestowing concept in the contemporary

world is being questioned by some.

Discursive Fragmentation

Drawing on post-structuralism, much discourse analysis challenges essentialist

definitions of the ‘self ’ through the ‘deconstruction of the unitary subject’ (Marshall,

1994). Individuals are re-conceptualised as continuously engaged in a process of

‘sense-making’ (for which they may switch between contradictory ‘interpretative

paradigms’) and identities as fragmented, open to contextual re-negotiation and only

contingently ‘fixed’, or defined, by existing power structures, institutions and

dominant ideologies.43 Applied to this article, discourses of national belonging

thus construct subject positions, which are negotiated by individuals and groups

whose ‘practiced’/‘experienced’ identities, we may hypothesise, frequently elude the

neatness of categories and ideological boundaries. Billig (1995, p. 138) has challenged

this by pointing out that ‘not all identities [are] equivalent and interchangeable’.

While, for example, asylum seekers constitute a daily reminder of the very real and

hardly negotiable consequence of nationality (illustrating the ‘power’ of EU

passports), there is evidence to suggest that individuals’ articulations, as well as

experiences, of (Austrian) national identity can indeed be discursively ‘fragmented’,

contextually variable and subject to contestation. Taken from different historical

contexts, the following examples also suggest that the phenomenon of identities being

contested and renegotiated predated postmodern consumerism, with which ‘unstable

selves’ are frequently associated.

Hanisch (1994, pp. 156�/161) has shown that, for much of the early twentieth

century, the ‘boundaries between German and Austrian identities were constantly

moving’ and that such shifts occurred ‘within individuals’. Summarising Austrian

attitudes and identities during the Second World War, Bukey (2000, p. xi) similarly

argues that ‘many individuals held split-minded views, looking in opposite directions

at the same time’. As a contemporary and well-documented example, it has already

been noted that Haider has distanced himself from the pan-Germanic discourse still

National Identities 423

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

occasionally invoked in the 1980s. Even more recently, due to its arguably encoded

antisemitic undertones (Pelinka, 2002; Wodak & Reisigl, 2002; Bering, 2002), a

controversial speech given in Ried on 28 February 2001 revealed noticeable discursive

manoeuvres.44 Haider’s speech targeted and criticised a range of Austrian and

European politicians, immigration policy, as well as (most infamously) the head of

the Viennese Jewish community. Alongside the undoubtedly dominant discursive

framework of the (beleaguered) Austrian nation, reflected in accusations of national

betrayal (Vernaderung) against Austrian (left-wing) critics, there were also traces of a

European(-oriented) discourse. Characteristically oppositional, Haider thus claimed

that his political mission included the transformation of a bureaucratic Europe into a

Europe of citizenship and democracy.45

Pronounced ideological oscillation occurred at local elections in Graz in January

2003, when the Communist Party (KPO) received an unprecedented 20.75 per cent of

votes, many of which were estimated to have been cast by previous FPO supporters.

While these results were widely interpreted as a symptom of political disillusionment

and testimony to the main KPO candidate’s relative popularity,46 they also question

the idea that ideological preferences invariably fix political identities over time.

Similar evidence of discursive flexibility again emerges from the realm of everyday

discourse: thus, for example, the eight participants (students, graduates and

professionals aged 23 to 32) in a discussion on ‘Austrian-ness’ treated their respective

definitions as mere hypotheses and were remarkably adaptable in embracing

alternative models of national identity and inclusion. Initial self-definitions in

opposition to EU partners, held responsible for the sanctions that had (then) only

recently been lifted, soon gave way to discussions of cultural integration and minority

relations. What appeared to become an assimilationist consensus (i.e., calling for

immigrants’ linguistic/social integration as a prerequisite for inclusion and citizen-

ship) was soon contested by one of the participant’s ‘pluralist objections’ (who had

previously been particularly vocal in his criticisms of the sanctions). Summarising a

Palestinian acquaintance’s biography, he argued that settlement in Austria had never

led to full assimilation for his friend, yet the latter rightly considered himself to be

Austrian. In this case, two identities were presented as ‘coexisting’ harmoniously, the

person’s dual identity was fully acknowledged by the rest of the group, and his

culturally syncretistic life history described as follows:

For me, he is Austrian. That means his heart is in large parts Austrian. It shouldn’tbe about passports, citizenship or residence, he loves this country, and that’s that. Iknow he also feels Palestinian of course, but I don’t see a contradiction in this.47

Such instances of discursive ‘manoeuvring’ aside, it appears as though people

seemingly committed to a particular ideology of belonging may simultaneously live

their everyday lives in the very grey area between categories that their politics seeks to

deny. This has inadvertently been demonstrated by the author Peter Turrini, who

recalls an instance where articulated identity politics and lived experience turned out

to be diametrically opposed and deeply contradictory within the same individual.

424 C. Karner

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

Sitting in a Carinthian pub with a Slovenian writer and conversing in Slovenian, they

found themselves verbally attacked by a local farmer. The latter declared that this was

‘German(ic) land’ (‘ein deutsches Land ’) and that everyone had to speak German

(‘hier werde deutsch gesprochen’). To Turrini’s amusement, the farmer got so agitated

that he failed to notice that he himself was speaking (or had slipped into) Slovenian

(Turrini, 2001, p. 86). This instance serves as a telling reminder that the subject

positions constructed by a discourse may contradict (or overlook) the complexities of

social life. Thus inadvertently supporting the post-structuralist argument that

identities are never stable or unitary, Turrini’s recollections reveal a striking contrast

between the messy ambiguities of lived experience (e.g., bilingualism) and the

ideological ‘orderliness’ imposed by a particular discourse of identity (i.e., pan-

Germanism).

Conclusion

Gellner’s final contribution to the study of national identities centred on the mutually

antagonistic ideologies of ethno-nationalism and cosmopolitanism during the final

decades of the Habsburg Empire. This article, by contrast, has revisited its largely

German-speaking remnants that are contemporary Austria and demonstrated the co-

existence of three discourses of (national) identity. The wider political parameters of

these contrasting historical contexts are, of course, profoundly different. Gellner’s

study focused on the by-gone heyday of the modern nation-state. Arguably, the very

same ‘institution’ is currently being eroded by the forces of (economic) globalisation.

Some of the most seminal analysts of the contemporary world thus speak of a

‘denationalization shock’ (Beck, 2000, p. 14), of a ‘political system . . . voided of

power’ (Castells, 1998, p. 378), of nation-states reduced to ‘law and order’ policies

and rhetoric in times of widespread anxieties triggered by the dominance of

multinational, ‘nomadic’ capital capable and willing to relocate to wherever

production costs are cheapest (Bauman, 1998, 2004). It has also been observed, in

Austrian and other (European) contexts (Camus, 2002), that ‘neo-tribal’ (Bauman,

1992, p. 136), ethnic or national identities have come to constitute political, social

and psychological points of anchorage against the tide of economic globalisation.

Manuel Castells (1998, p. 357) has pointed out that European unification since the

1990s ‘has coincided with rising unemployment, widespread job insecurity, and

greater social inequality, [leading] significant sections of the European population . . .

to affirm their nations against . . . European supranationality’. Current unemploy-

ment statistics do indeed make for disconcerting reading: another 200,000 jobs were

‘lost’ in the ‘Eurozone’ alone during 2003,48 while global unemployment figures rose

to 186 million.49 At the same time (and according to a European-wide survey), 33 per

cent of EU citizens feel threatened by immigration (35 per cent fear for their jobs), 28

per cent consider European (or national) cultural and religious identities to be in

jeopardy, and 81 per cent define the ‘fight against illegal immigration’ to be of utmost

importance.50

National Identities 425

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

Such transnational/pan-European tendencies are similarly evident in contempor-

ary Austria. Unemployment is currently higher than at any point since 1953.51

According to recent surveys, 60 per cent of Austrians expect EU expansion to bring

few or no advantages for Austria, with 52 per cent anticipating living standards to

decline,52 and a mere 39 per cent approve of the country’s ‘current trajectory’.53 An

informant thus appeared to articulate widespread fears when describing the then

imminent EU enlargement as a ‘severe problem, as Slovenians will work for lower

salaries in Slovenia and in Austria’ (Interview, 28 December 2002). The year 2003 also

saw programmes of privatisation and structural reforms of the welfare state leading to

a series of strikes (NEWS , 23 December 2003) as well as the culmination of an

ongoing dispute between Vienna and Brussels over the quota of lorries (and their

environmental impact) allowed to cross Austria. When the European Parliament

eventually decided for largely unhindered Transitverkehr, the Kronen Zeitung

responded by setting out what ‘we’ might do against the ‘imminent flood of lorries’

(‘was wir gegen Lkw-Lawine tun’),54 thus positing an assumed ‘national self ’ (itself no

more unified over this issue than any others) against a perceived external

encroachment.

This article has analysed the discourses (and their histories) that go into the

continuous construction, reproduction and contestation of national identities in

contemporary Austria. While the discursive framework of pan-Germanism has been

of well-documented historical significance, it today finds itself confined to a margin

of illegality/illegitimacy and is ideologically compelling to but a tiny minority

(Hanisch, 1994, p. 164). The second ‘interpretative paradigm’ analysed, on the other

hand, constitutes the hegemonic discourse of identity based on the Austrian national

community ‘imagined’ since 1945. As has been argued, however, this discursive

framework of ‘Austrian-ness’ contains a wide range of competing ideological

positions concerning, for example, citizenship, neutrality, and ‘minority rights and

integration’. Most political debates thus occur within a framework whose lowest

common denominator is the institutional and discursive reproduction of the

Austrian nation. The third discursive formation contains forms of counter-hegemony

ranging from assertions of pan-European identity, critical commentaries on Austrian

politics (past and present) as well as constructions of a ‘post-national self ’. I have also

drawn attention to social actors’ ongoing engagement with such discourses in ways

that often defy the neatness of political ideologies and categories. Therein lies one of

the main challenges for the future study of national identities (in any geographical

and historical context): to investigate the ways in which individuals and groups*/in

their everyday lives as much as in public debate*/appropriate, negotiate and contest

discourses of identity. A contemporary form of ‘the Habsburg dilemma’ involves the

co-existing and competing discursive frameworks analysed above as well as their

negotiation in historical conditions significantly shaped by the various forces of

economic globalisation, European integration and national re-assertion.

426 C. Karner

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the Leverhulme Trust for a Special Research

Fellowship that made the research underlying this article possible. I would also like to

thank Alan Aldridge and the anonymous referees of an earlier version of this article

for their helpful and thought-provoking comments.

Notes

[1] For an analysis of the FPO’s political rhetoric (and its ‘calculated ambivalence’), see Reisigl

(2002).

[2] Austria’s controversial government collapsed in the late summer of 2002 following the

resignation of a number of high-ranking FPO ministers including the now former Austrian

Vice-Chancellor Riess-Passer. These resignations were the result of a power struggle within

the FPO, to which Haider had contributed. The subsequent general elections in November

2002 resulted in a landslide victory for the OVP, very significant losses for the FPO, and an

eventual renewal of their of previous coalition government. Most recent developments in the

spring of 2005 have included an intra-FPO schism leading to a novel political configuration:

the Bundnis Zukunft Osterreich (BZO), currently headed by Haider.

[3] As such, this article may be seen to complement (both empirically and conceptually) recent

work in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Vienna, which has

analysed Austrian national identities from a theoretical perspective known as the ‘discourse

historical approach’ (a form of CDA) (see, e.g., De Cillia et al., 1999).

[4] For my present purposes, I am not concerned with the demographic/quantitative spread of

the competing discourses of Austrian identity analysed nor with their relative prominence in

the country’s different*/and ideologically very differently positioned*/newspapers. Instead,

I propose a qualitative discussion of three distinguishable, historically grounded, socially

constructed, more or less widely shared, yet contested, definitions of the national ‘self ’. For a

relevant discussion of the media as one of the main realms in which the national community

is ‘imagined’, see Yadgar (2002).

[5] See Spillman (1997) for a discussion of ‘international recognition’ and ‘internal integration’

as core components in most national imaginings.

[6] This emphasis on ‘the statement’ and its ‘enunciation’ echoes Michel Foucault’s (1989

[1969]) preoccupation with the ‘rules of formation’ governing ‘discursive formation’ in one

of the founding texts of discourse analysis. My use of a broad range of ‘sources’, on the other

hand, is inadvertently justified by Terry Eagleton’s (1996, p. 183) observation that all

‘signifying practices . . . from film and television to fiction and the languages of natural

science, produce effects, shape forms of consciousness and unconsciousness . . . related to . . .our existing system of power’.

[7] For a discussion of power/ideology underlying everyday practices (or ‘mediated discourse

analysis’), see Scollon (2003).

[8] See Hanisch (1994, pp. 126�/127). The prominence of the pan-Germanic discourse among

German-speakers in the Habsburg monarchy can be traced to 1848 (and beyond) and the

enthusiastic support among the liberal bourgeoisie for ‘the efforts of the Frankfurt

Parliament to unify Germany into a nation-state’ (Bukey, 2000, p. 6). Thaler (2001, p. 68)

has argued that Austria’s defeat at the hands of Bismarck’s Prussia in 1866 and her

subsequent expulsion from German political affairs ‘led to the intensification of [many

Austro-Germans’] until then largely self-evident but not necessarily urgent sense of German

identity’. The arguably most radical version of the deutschnational discourse in the late

nineteenth century was articulated by Georg Ritter von Schonerer who synthesised pan-

National Identities 427

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

Germanism and an opposition to the Habsburg monarchy (and the Catholic clergy) with

rabid antisemitism (see, e.g., Schiedel & Neugebauer, 2002).

[9] There is, of course, a vast literature on the First Austrian Republic. For useful and

comprehensive ‘summaries’, see, e.g., Kleindel (1984) or Hanisch (1994, pp. 263�/333).

[10] See Bukey (2000) for a discussion of various realms of, for example, parts of the (lower)

Catholic clergy and the rural population, political ‘underground’ activity, regional aloofness

to Nazism particularly in Tyrol, and motivations, for example, Viennese anti-Prussian

sentiments, a persisting ‘economic gap’ between the Ostmark and the Altreich , food and coal

shortages, war casualties and later allied aerial bombardment) underlying anti-German/

Austrian patriotic sentiments between 1938 and 1945.

[11] Thus, for example, recent convictions for nationalsozialistische Wiederbetatigung (loosely

translated as ‘revival and articulation of Nazi ideology’) were passed against five young men

in Innsbruck on 19 January 2004 (http://tirol.ORF.at, 20 January 2004).

[12] The Dokumentationsarchiv des Osterreichischen Widerstandes (DOW, or ‘documentary

archive of Austrian resistance’) reported an increase in the number of such publications,

demonstrations and contacts between German and Austrian extremists in 2002 (www.orf.at,

13 June 2003).

[13] Organised by the Hamburger Institut fur Sozialforschung , the exhibition toured 13 (German

and Austrian) cities between 2001 and 2004, attracting some 400,000 visitors (www.orf.at, 29

January 2004).

[14] For earlier, pre-1986 instances of self-critical engagement with Austria’s Second World War

history, see Adunka (2002, pp. 19, 32�/33).

[15] It has been argued that the sanctions were imposed in part because of a shared commitment

to EU norms, but also for reasons of domestic (particularly French and Belgian) political

expediency (see Merlingen, Mudde & Sedelmeier, 2001).

[16] Recent developments show a reversal of political fortunes: while the 2002 elections resulted

in a landslide victory for the OVP (42.27 per cent) and a meagre 10.16 per cent for the FPO

(compared to 27.2 per cent in 1999), more recent opinion polls suggest that the majority of

Austrians would now favour a coalition between the SPO and the Greens (e.g., http://

derStandard, 23 November 2003).

[17] See Menasse (2000). Amesberger and Halbmayr (2002, p. 237) provide a summary of the

FPO’s demographically complex electoral support base in 1999, including its noticeable

appeal to (particularly male) voters under the age of 30, the unemployed and female

pensioners.

[18] See Kleindel (1984) or Hanisch (1994, p. 272) for summaries of the armed territorial

struggles in Carinthia in the aftermath of the First World War.

[19] Haider accused Adamovich of concealing the contents of a conversation with the Slovenian

Prime Minister Milan Kucan, which Adamovich strongly denied (Die Presse , 20 December

2001).

[20] Two years later, the Austrian Greens criticised the government for further delays in

implementing this (www.orf.at, 15 December 2003).

[21] A derogatory Austrian term for Germans.

[22] Bukey (2000, p. 227) comments: ‘128,000 Jews banished from their home and country;

32,000 outcasts and dissenters driven to death in Gestapo jails or concentration camps;

65,459 remaining Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust, 2,700 patriots executed for resistance.’

[23] For a detailed discussion of the Besatzungszeit , see Portisch and Riff (1986).

[24] Hanisch (1994, p. 480), to name but one example, documents a pronounced silence on

Nazism particularly during the 1950s (‘das Schweigen der 1950er Jahre uber den

Nationalsozialismus ’).

[25] E.g., Pelinka & Weinzierl, 1987; Rauscher, 2002. According to a recent comparative study, the

prosecution of Nazi war criminals was, between 1945 and 1955, more rigorous in Austria

428 C. Karner

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

than in Germany; however, this trend was markedly reversed after 1955 (http://

derStandard.at, 2 December 2003).

[26] For a discussion of football as an arena conducive to national imaginings, of ‘supporters

across the globe collectively construct[ing] national identities, to which they attach

emotions’, see Stroeken (2002, p. 9).

[27] www.orf.at (website of the Austrian Broadcasting Network), 26 October 2001.

[28] www.orf.at, 17 February 2002. According to a recent report, during the first year of the

Integrationsvertrag , only 951 people completed the language course, whereas more than

75,000 successfully claimed exemption (www.orf.at, 26 January 2004).

[29] See Stiegnitz (2000, p. 14). This argument seems to ignore some profound ethical and logical

dilemmas, not least how*/and by whom*/integration is to be assessed.

[30] www.orf.at, 17 December 2003. Public debates in France concerning assimilationism,

secularism and cultural pluralism were already raging months before Chirac’s controversial

announcement (see, e.g., Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 May 2003).

[31] Naturalisation is currently possible after ten years of legal residence in the country. The year

2003 saw ‘record numbers’, with 18,420 ‘new’ Austrian citizens in Vienna alone (http://

wien.ORF.at, 28 January 2004).

[32] http://derStandard.at, 21 November 2003.

[33] http://derStandard.at, 29 October 2003.

[34] http://dieStandard.at [sic], 29 October 2003.

[35] With an estimated 40 to 45 per cent of Austrians reading the Kronen Zeitung (Thaler, 2001,

p. 39), it has been termed ‘Reichweitenweltmeister ’, or ‘world champion in circulation’

(Mappes-Niedek, 2002, p. 167).

[36] See Anderson (1983). As has been widely acknowledged, ‘imagined’ does certainly not mean

‘imaginary’, but refers to the social construction of all national identities in (or out of)

particular historical, political, economic and technological contexts.

[37] A useful (and firsthand) sense of the four main parties’ various notions of national inclusion/

exclusion and their sometimes radically different stances on Austria’s past, present, and

future can be gleaned from their respective websites (www.fpoe.at, www.gruene.at,

www.oevp.at, www.spoe.at).

[38] Like all ideal types, this typology is intended for analytical purposes only and involves a fully

acknowledged abstraction from empirical complexities. Thus, for example, several SPO and

‘Green’ politicians have articulated the counter-hegemonic discourses reviewed in this

section and/or participated in some of the protests mentioned. The ‘introduction’ of a

separate section is largely intended to do justice to the self-perception of many of the people

and initiatives summarised as part of a critical arena independent of party politics.

[39] Sully (1990, p. 114) has interpreted a speech given by Franz Vranitzky (Austrian Chancellor

at the time) in 1988 as an important watershed insofar as it officially acknowledged Austria’s

‘dual role’*/as both perpetrator and victim*/in the Second World War.

[40] http://derStandard.at, 19 December 2003.

[41] http://derStandard.at, 9 October 2003; www.fraubock.at.

[42] One public version of central European identity was recently articulated in a (pre-EU-

enlargement) season of performances and exhibitions of Hungarian, Czech, Slovak and

Slovenian art in Vienna (www.orf.at, 18 November 2003).

[43] See, e.g., Laclau and Mouffe (1985). Also see Hall’s (1996) seminal definition of

identification as ‘a process never completed’, identities as ‘never unified’ and as dealing

with ‘routes’ of ‘becoming’ rather than with ‘roots’ or ‘being’. Identities, Hall argues, are

merely temporary points of suture , at which the subject is ‘hailed into place’ or articulated by

a particular discursive practice.

[44] While many such manoeuvres (the present examples included) may be explicable by broadly

defined notions of self-interest, the latter cannot account for every individual’s ideological

National Identities 429

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

articulations all the time. Instead, discourse analysis should allow for psychologically

complex social actors and their context-specific uses of different frameworks of meaning not

always and inevitably for reasons of economic rationality and political expediency.

[45] ‘dass dieses Europa der Burokraten und Fehlentwicklungen . . . zu einem Europa der Burger

und der Demokratie umgewandelt wird’ (quoted in Pelinka & Wodak, 2002, p. 229).

[46] www.orf.at, 27 January 2003.

[47] ‘Fur mich ist er Osterreicher. Des heisst, dass sein Herz zu am Großteil osterreischisch is. Da

sollt’s net um Pass, Staatsburgerschaft oder Wohnort gehen, er mag des Land wahnsinnig

gern, und das reicht. Ich weiss schon, dass er sich auch als Palestinanser sieht, aber i seh da

keinen Widerspruch’ (26 December 2002).

[48] www.diepresse.at, 29 October 2003.

[49] www.orf.at, 23 January 2004.

[50] www.diepresse.at, 8 October 2003.

[51] http://derStandard.at, 6 January 2004.

[52] www.market.co.at, 3 December 2003.

[53] http://derStandard.at, 4 November 2003.

[54] www.krone.at, 27 November 2003.

References

Adunka, E. (2002). Antisemitismus in der Zweiten Republik. Ein Uberblick anhand einiger

ausgewahlter Beispiele. In H. P. Wassermann (Ed.), Antisemitismus in Osterreich nach 1945

(pp. 12�/65). Innsbruck: Studienverlag.

Amesberger, H. & Halbmayr, B. (2002). Frauen und Rechtsextreme Parteien. In W. Eismann (Ed.),

Rechtspopulismus: Osterreichische Krankheit oder Europaische Normalitat (pp. 223�/242).

Wien: Czernin Verlag.

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities . London: Verso.

Auinger, H. (2000). Nachrede auf einen burgerlichen Politiker. Wien: Promedia.

Bauman, Z. (1992). Intimations of postmodernity. London: Routledge.

Bauman, Z. (1998). Globalization: The human consequences . Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2004). Wasted lives . Cambridge: Polity.

Baumann, G. (1999). The multicultural riddle . London: Routledge.

Beck, U. (2000). What is globalization? . Cambridge: Polity.

Bering, D. (2002). Gutachten uber den antisemitischen Charakter einer namenpolemischen Passage

aus der Rede Jorg Haiders vom 28. Februar 2001. In A. Pelinka & R. Wodak (Eds), ‘Dreck am

Stecken’: Politik der Ausgrenzung (pp. 173�/186). Wien: Czernin.

Bernhard, T. (1988). Heldenplatz . Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism . London: Sage.

Brook-Shepherd, G. (1997). The Austrians . London: HarperCollins.

Brubaker, R. (2001). The return of assimilation? Changing perspectives on immigration and its

sequels in France, Germany and the United States. Ethnic and Racial Studies , 24(4), 531�/548.

Bukey, E. (2000). Hitler’s Austria . Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Camus, J.-V. (2002). Die radikale Rechte in Westeuropa. In W. Eismann (Ed.), Rechtspopulismus:

Osterreichische Krankheit oder Europaische Normalitat (pp. 40�/55). Wien: Czernin Verlag.

Castells, M. (1998). The information age. Vol. III: End of millennium . Oxford: Blackwell.

Chalmers, M. (Ed.) (2002). Beneath black stars: Contemporary Austrian fiction . London: Serpent’s

Tail.

Chouliaraki, L. & Fairclough, N. (1999). Discourse in late modernity: Rethinking critical discourse

analysis . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

De Cillia, R., Reisigl, M. & Wodak, R. (1999). The discursive construction of national identities.

Discourse and Society, 10 (2), 149�/173.

430 C. Karner

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

Eagleton, T. (1996). Literary theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

Edensor, T. (2002). National identity, popular culture and everyday life . Oxford: Berg.

Essed, P. (1991). Understanding everyday racism . London: Sage.

Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. London: Longman.

Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change . Cambridge: Polity.

Fitzmaurice, J. (1991). Austrian politics and society today. London: Macmillan.

Fliedl, K. (Ed.) (1998). Das andere Osterreich . Munchen: dtv.

Foucault, M. (1989 [1969]). The archaeology of knowledge . London: Routledge.

Fowler, R. (1991). Language in the news . London: Routledge.

Gellner, E. (1998). Language and solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg dilemma .

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gnam, P. (2002). ‘Kernenergie’ ist das Unwort des Jahres! Kronen Zeitung , 9 January, pp. 2�/3.

Hall, S. (1996). Who needs identity? In S. Hall & P. du Gay (Eds), Questions of cultural identity

(pp. 5�/17). London: Sage.

Hanisch, E. (1994). Der Lange Schatten des Staates: Osterreichische Gesellschaftsgeschichte im 20.

Jahrhundert . Wien: Ueberreuter.

Hansen, T. (1999). The saffron wave . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Haslinger, J. (1995). Politik der Gefuhle . Frankfurt: Fischer.

Ingrao, C. (2001). Foreword. In P. Thaler (Ed.), The ambivalence of identity: The Austrian experience

of nation-building in a modern society (pp. vii�/ix). West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University

Press.

Karner, C. (2002). Austro-Pop since the 1980s: Two case studies of cultural critique and counter-

hegemonic resistance. Sociological Research Online , 6(4). Available online at: www.socres

online.org/6/4/karner.html.

Kleindel, W. (1984). Die Chronik Osterreichs . Dortmund: Chronik Verlag.

Kosta, B. (2003). Murderous boundaries: Nation, memory and Austria’s fascist past in Elfriede

Jelinek’s Stecken, Stab und Stangl . In B. Kosta & H. Kraft (Eds), Writing against boundaries:

Nationality, ethnicity and gender in the German-speaking context (pp. 81�/98). Amsterdam:

Rodopi.

Laclau, E. & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and socialist strategy. London: Verso.

Lukes, S. (1998). Foreword. In E. Gellner (Ed.), Language and solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and

the Habsburg dilemma (pp. viii�/xix). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McCrone, D. (1998). The sociology of nationalism . London: Routledge.

Mappes-Niedik, N. (2002). Osterreich fur Deutsche . Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag.

Marshall, H. (1994). Discourse analysis in an occupational context. In C. Cassell & G. Symon (Eds),

Qualitative methods in organizational research (pp. 91�/106). London: Sage.

Menasse, R. (2000). Erklar mir Osterreich . Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Merlingen, M., Mudde, C. & Sedelmeier, U. (2001). The Right and the righteous? European norms,

domestic politics and the sanctions against Austria. Journal of Common Market Studies ,

39 (1), 59�/77.

Mitten, R. (1992). The politics of antisemitic prejudice . Oxford: Westview Press.

Morrow, D. (2000). Jorg Haider and the new FPO. In P. Hainsworth (Ed.), The politics of the extreme

right: From the margins to the mainstream (pp. 33�/63). London: Pinter.

Obid, V., Messner, M. & Leben, A. (2002). Haiders Exerzierfeld: Karntens SlowenInnen in der

deutschen Volksgemeinschaft . Wien: Promedia.

Pelinka, A. (2000). Die rechte Versuchung. In H.-H. Scharsach (Ed.), Haider: Osterreich und die

rechte Versuchung (pp. 46�/66). Reinbek: Rowohlt.

Pelinka, A. (2002). Struktur und Funktion der ‘Aschermittwochrede’ Jorg Haiders. In A. Pelinka &

R. Wodak (Eds), ‘Dreck am Stecken’: Politik der Ausgrenzung (pp. 61�/74). Wien: Czernin.

Pelinka, A. & Weinzierl, E. (Eds.), (1987). Das Grosse Tabu . Wien: Osterreichische Staatsdruckerei,

edition S.

National Identities 431

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014

Pelinka, A. & Wodak, R. (Eds.), (2002). ‘Dreck am Stecken’: Politik der Ausgrenzung . Wien: Czernin.

Pick, H. (2000). Guilty victim: Austria from the Holocaust to Haider. London: I.B. Tauris.

Portisch, H. (1996). Jahre des Aufbruchs, Jahre des Umbruchs . Wien: Kremayr & Scheriau.

Portisch, H. & Riff, S. (1986). Der lange Weg zur Freiheit . Wien: Kremayr & Scheriau.

Potter, J. & Wetherell, M. (1998). Social representations, discourse analysis and racism. In U. Flick

(Ed.), The psychology of the social (pp. 138�/155). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rauscher, H. (2002). Eine geschlossene Verdrangungskette. In H.-H. Scharsach (Ed.), Haider:

Osterreich und die rechte Versuchung (pp. 22�/45). Reinbek: Rohwolt.

Reisigl, M. (2002). Dem Volk aufs Maul schauen, nach dem Mund reden und Angst und Bange

machen. In W. Eismann (Ed.), Rechtspopulismus: Osterreichische Krankheit oder Europaische

Normalitat (pp. 170�/174). Wien: Czernin Verlag.

Reiterer, A. (1988). Nation und Nationalbewusstsein in Osterreich . Wien: Verband der wissenschaf-

tlichen Gesellschaften Osterreichs.

Roth, G. (1996). Das doppelkopfige Osterreich . Frankfurt: Fischer.

Saville, M. (1999). ‘Das geliebte, genauso gehasste Osterreich’: The theme of Austria in the plays of

Thomas Bernhard . Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Nottingham.

Schiedel, H. & Neugebauer, W. (2002). Jorg Haider, die FPO und der Antisemitismus. In A. Pelinka

& R. Wodak (Eds), ‘Dreck am Stecken’: Politik der Ausgrenzung (pp. 11�/31). Wien: Czernin.

Scollon, S. (2003). Political and somatic alignment: Habitus, ideology and social practice. In

G. Weiss & R. Wodak (Eds), Critical discourse analysis: Theory and interdisciplinarity

(pp. 167�/196). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Spillman, L. (1997). Nation and commemoration . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stiegnitz, P. (2000). Heimat zum Nulltarif . Wien: edition va bene.

Stroeken, K. (2002). Why the world loves watching football. Anthropology Today, 18 (3), 9�/13.

Sully, M. (1990). A contemporary history of Austria . London: Routledge.

Thaler, P. (2001). The ambivalence of identity: The Austrian experience of nation-building in a modern

society. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

Turrini, P. (2001). Ich liebe dieses Land . Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Ulram, P. & Tributsch, S. (2004). Kleine Nation mit Eigenschaften . Wien: Molden Verlag.

Wassermann, H. (Ed.) (2002). Antisemitismus in Osterreich nach 1945 . Innsbruck: Studienverlag.

Weiss, G. & Wodak, R. (2003). Introduction: Theory, interdisciplinarity and critical discourse

analysis. In G. Weiss & R. Wodak (Eds), Critical discourse analysis: Theory and

interdisciplinarity (pp. 1�/32). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wodak, R. (2000). Echt, anstandig und ordentlich. In H.-H. Scharsach (Ed.), Haider: Osterreich und

die rechte Versuchung (pp. 180�/187). Reinbek: Rowohlt.

Wodak, R., de Cillia, R., Reisigl, M. & Liebhart, K. (1999). The discursive construction of National

Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Wodak, R. & Reisigl, M. (2002). Wenn einer Ariel heisst . . .. In A. Pelinka & R. Wodak (Eds), ‘Dreck

am Stecken’: Politik der Ausgrenzung (pp. 134�/172). Wien: Czernin.

Yadgar, Y. (2002). From the particularistic to the universalistic: National narratives in Israel’s

mainstream press, 1967�/1997. Nations and Nationalism , 8 (1), 58�/72.

Zinggl, W. (2002). Was ist eine Kulturnation? Der Standard , 13 April.

432 C. Karner

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

29 2

0 N

ovem

ber

2014