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Defining Europe Against its Past? – Memory Politics and the Sanctions Against Austria in France and Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Stefan Seidendorf

Extract

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It seems by now an established fact that “social identity” implies a construction against an “Other”. This includes the fact that it is much easier to say who “we are not” than “who we are” (and what this means). The fact that “we Europeans” cannot say “who we are” is commonly accepted and blamed as one of the major deficits of the European Union. One possible approach to overcome this deficit might, therefore, be to say “who we are not.”

Type
Articles: Special Issue: Confronting Memories – Memory, Politics and Law
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 6 , Issue 2: Article: Special Issue - Confronting Memories: European „Bitter Experiences“ and the Constitutionalization Process , 01 February 2005 , pp. 439 - 464
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

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11 The political definition of Jörg Haider and his party changes between “national-liberalism”, “extreme right”, “populism” and “corporatist movement”. This results not least in the different national perceptions of the Haider-party throughout Europe, as this article will show. For the rest of the article, I am not so much interested in labelling the FPÖ or Haider, but in comparing the different national labels given to them. Literature on the “Haider phenomenon”: Brigitte Bailer-Galanda / Wolfgang Neugebauer, Haider und die Freiheitlichen in Österreich (1997); Wofür ich mich meinetwegen entschuldige. Haider beim Wort genommen (Hubertus Czernin, ed., 2000); Cas Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right (2000); Kurt Luther, Austria: A Democracy Under Threat From the FPÖ?, 53:3 Parliamentary Affairs, 426 (2000); Duncan Morrow, Jörg Haider and the New FPÖ: Beyond the Democratic Pale?, in: The politics of the Extreme Right. From Margins to Mainstream 33 (Paul Hainsworth, ed., 2000); Anton Pelinka / Ruth Wodak, The Haider Phenomenon in Austria (2002); Anton Pelinka / Ruth Wodak, Dreck am Stecken: Politik der Ausgrenzung (2003).Google Scholar

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13 Portuguese Secretary of State for European Affairs, Francisco Seixas de Costa, speaking for the Council Presidency, quoted in Agence Europe, 3 February 2000.Google Scholar

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16 Pelinka, 27, in: Pelinka / Hummer (note 12) denies that the sanctions “can be brought in any left-right scheme at all” (my translation).Google Scholar

17 Remember the diplomatic struggle that brought Mexican president Zedillo on the official “EU familyphoto” at the Lisbon summit in March 2000, thus changing it into a “group photograph” were the ostracised Austrian chancellor Schüssel could take part without being re-integrated into the “family” (F.A.Z. 23March 2000)?Google Scholar

18 This work is based on a qualitative discourse analysis of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (F.A.Z.), Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), Le Monde (LM) and Le Figaro (LF), taking into account articles written between 15 January 2000 and 15 October 2000. The many citations of politicians, intellectuals, etc., in the papers make sure that I do not only analyze the position of the four newspapers, but the interplay between the actors’ (politicians etc.) rhetorical action and the discursive structure, as provided by the newspapers. For a comparable enterprise of the French case, see Ulla Holm, The French Garden Is No Longer What It Used to Be, in: Reflective Approaches To European Governance 122 (Knud E. J⊘rgensen, ed., 1997).Google Scholar

19 As Le Monde is an evening-newspaper, the edition of 2 February is available as from 1 February, 1 pm.Google Scholar

20 Le Monde, 2 February 2004. “Because there are principles that cannot be negotiated, the President of the Republic proposed, on Saturday morning, several concrete measures” (my translations in all of the remaining article).Google Scholar

21 “…the importance to clearly mark out that Europe could not tolerate that its values were transgressed”.Google Scholar

22 Le Figaro, 2 February 2004. “The Union has a duty of fidelity towards the first fathers of Europe, making sure that values prevail in the face of present political temptations”.Google Scholar

23 Frank Schimmelfennig, Rhetorisches Handeln in der internationalen Politik, in: 4:2 Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen 219, 227-235 (1997); Frank Schimmelfennig, Rules and Rhetoric. The Eastern Enlargement of NATO and the European 194 (2003), establishes the concept of “rhetorical action”, the appeal to normatively loaded arguments for strategic use in a political discussion.Google Scholar

24 Le Figaro, 2 February 2004. “Schröder doesn't want ‘to have to do anything’ with Haider, despite his ‘friendship for a country after all sympathetic'.”Google Scholar

25 Le Monde, 18 April 2004.Google Scholar

26 Le Figaro, 12 April 2004. “We will not risk cutting Germany from the common values of Europe and of the Western community.”Google Scholar

27 More precisely, “public sphere” means the mass media that represent to a broad extent the power structures of a society in their way of granting access, “voice,” to their discourse or not.Google Scholar

28 “A charge against the government in Vienna is not enough. The trial has to be opened now. The spirit of the FPÖ can only be exposed through patient argumentation. The members, the financing, the office bearers of the FPÖ – all that merits intensive observation. In the last months, Europe has made important steps towards more integration. The public has not yet realized the new quality of the EU. The politics against Austria contain a chance to overcome the old demon of the extreme right in the heart of Europe and to explain at the same time power and quality of the new Europe to its citizens.”Google Scholar

29 Clearly, the SZ and sanction-supporters would argue: because of international awareness, the Austrian government didn't dare to show its “real face”.Google Scholar

30 “A melange of reactionary Catholicism and not re-crafted parts of national-socialist mentality.”Google Scholar

31 “Fascists are always the others, that is an Austrian mechanism of self-excuse in the Haider-debate. It can even be found in social-democratic circles: ‘We are not a Nazi-country.’ The left populist and former social-democrat mayor of Vienna, Helmut Zilk, shouts it in the faces of the boycotters of Austria, as a courageous patriot that he is: ‘This total condemnation, ostracism, arrogance – that is fascist.’ This is not far away from the language and the metaphors of Haider himself, from the paranoid reversal of perpetrators and victims.”Google Scholar

32 “From purity to barbarism”: “White like snow, we re-start.”Google Scholar

33 “Extermination is the ultimate and fundamental content of the neo-Nazi unconscious.”Google Scholar

34 Historian, studied at the École Normale Supérieure of Rue d'Ulm, publisher of Courrier Internationale, one of the most esteemed French press publications: Its weekly format consists of a press review with French reprints of articles of the world's most renowned press organs.Google Scholar

35 “Jörg Haider's European project.”Google Scholar

36 “The battle re-starts were we left it at the end of the thirties…” – “And then, let's not be frightened of boxing: let's remember that, after all, the great Ray Sugar Robinson, in the third round, sent this beautiful perfect Aryan that was Max Schmeling, to the floor, to the greatest furiousness of Hitler. Come on, we may surely find a new Republican and European hero, perhaps one of these Frenchmen that the Führer rightly qualified as negronized ([…]), to reify the portray of Jörg Haider…”Google Scholar

37 “One could also speak of the attempt to establish an ideological foundation of Europe, that can no longer be understood in a Christian way, nor in an anti-communist sense and that now – in a very broad, not classical left sense – is to be defined in an ‘antifascist’ way. Haider seems to represent all that Europe, in the will of its political class, shall not stand for.”Google Scholar

38 “The more interesting aspect is an ideological one. It has to do with the attempt of a re-definition of the European left and with the only vaguely discernable project of creating a European identity beyond Christian Abendland [Western Europe] and anti-communism. The left […] is integrating Europe. The Holocaust and the “never again” become ciphers of the founding myths of a European nation, where only ‘domestic politics’ exist. […] If the Left in this sense tries to establish Europe as a moral great power, than this fills also an ideological vacuum of the Left itself. […] The Left has arrived in reality.”Google Scholar

39 See Anton Pelinka in Hummer / Pelinka (note 12) on the different strategies of “relativisation” of NS: On the left, NS = fascism, on the right: NS = totalitarianism.Google Scholar

40 Establishing the sanctions “were for us the fortunate discovering of this hidden conscience that many thought lost. It looks as if political Europe is currently coming into being. […] For the first time, Europe defines its own political identity in a concrete act – and thus gives to this identity a clearly supranational value.”Google Scholar

41 Publisher of “MicroMega“, is considered a “theoretical leader” of the Italian left.Google Scholar

42 “Words are deeds” – “…the fundamental norm […], on which the legitimacy of all juridical orders, that is of the states of Europe, is funded, is the victory over Nazi fascism. This means the defeat of Nazi fascism, that was brought to him by the allied armies and the resistance. That is the fundamental DNA of the European democracies, from the end of war up to nowadays.” … “On the other side, on the level of historical legitimisation of the current European democracies, only anti-fascism constitutes their DNA and fundamental norm, because the communists were a solid part of the military alliance (and of the resistenza), that build up the democracies in which we are living.”Google Scholar

43 “…Levy's text itself becomes the document of a perception that obviously seems to guide French politics in Europe and against Austria.”Google Scholar

44 This shows again: Fear of Germany is not a partisan argument, but has its place in the conservative and the liberal-left newspaper.Google Scholar

45 “Austria's confuse identity”.Google Scholar

46 Francis Fukuyama, The end of history and the last man (1992).Google Scholar

47 “If this was the case [general support for radical change], shouldn't one fear the kick-off effect that this phenomenon could have elsewhere, and to start with in Germany, where the terrible Kohl scandal has left the voters of the right stunned?”Google Scholar

48 To underpin the actor's “rhetorical weight”, LF presents these sad facts abundantly when introducing Pächt.Google Scholar

49 “Today, the danger is also coming from Bavaria, where the Anschluß has left some bad souvenirs. The failing of the CDU in Germany could have serious reverberations in Bavaria, where nationalist hypotheses always find a certain echo.”Google Scholar

50 “The long march of Haider towards Berlin is currently on the way.”Google Scholar

51 “…asking for nothing else than to enlarge itself progressively towards Antwerp, Dresden and Berlin.”Google Scholar

52 See, on this subject, Michael Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde. Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und Selbstverständnis in Deutschland und Frankreich 1792 – 1918 (1992).Google Scholar

53 “The third point of the Germanic triangle, that also constitutes its third force, […] is represented by the urban Catholicism of the Rhineland, turned towards France…” “…This Germany of the liberal cities, catholic, protestant, and, at the time, Jewish, very shortly had the occasion to raise its voice in March 1848 in Frankfurt, but we had to wait for 1945 to see, in a more limited space, without Prussia, nor Austria, its triumph with the Rhenish Catholics Adenauer and Kohl, with the hanseatic Protestants Brandt and Schmidt.”Google Scholar

54 “…the force that is asked to re-enter the ring to fight at least without sidestepping, but, this time, at the level of the whole continental Europe, this force is quite simply the defeated coalition of Weimar, this accumulation of social-democrats, Rhenish Catholics, liberal industrials and bourgeois intellectuals, allied to republican France, precursors of Keynes…” .Google Scholar

55 “This time, there is no other solution than proving that we are stronger – and first of all on an intellectual and moral level, what excludes the solution to leave this combat […] to an extreme left inapt, that in its whole history has never understood what the European fascism really was…”Google Scholar

56 “Without doubt, the Fourteen have sinned out of misunderstanding of the Austrian realities. Without doubt, especially France was wrong when it was torn by Jörg Haider into the exaggeration of passional oversupply. Without doubt, it was wrong to consider a German speaking party of the extreme right necessarily as the re-incarnation of the Nazi menace, even if Jörg Haider did everything to arouse this suspicion.”Google Scholar

57 “…here [in France], the PCF [French Communist Party] is the ‘party of the executed’ that has paid the price of blood for the liberation of France”, whereas in Austria, “…the soviet soldier never has been a liberator, but a moujik in uniform, violating women unpunished and trafficking stolen watches. And the uncle that died in the hell of Stalingrad equates, in the incalculable addition of human pain, the exneighbour gazed in Auschwitz.”Google Scholar

58 “We must hope that the installation in power of the populist right, that will have problems to contain its anti-European passions, will not counter this evolution.”Google Scholar

59 “Perplexity in facing the Haider phenomenon – Little knowledge in France on Austria.”Google Scholar

60 “The grotesque over-reaction on Haider gives an idea of the arguments and the historical analogies that would have come up if the ‘Germanic block’ had stood against the rest of the EU. The hard punishment of Austria makes us suspicious that this spectre is still haunting the nightly calm of this or that European.”Google Scholar

61 Professor (ret.) of German literature in Bielefeld, guest professor in Stanford 1998, Gadamer-professor in Heidelberg 2001. Studied history, philosophy, German literature und sociology. Publishes the “Merkur”, “German journal for European thought”, lives in Paris.Google Scholar

62 “The French challenge – Paris cannot believe the appeasing reactions of German conservatives in the face of Haider.”Google Scholar

63 Meaning “far away from reality” or led by intellectuals always ready to raise moral claims, but of few concrete impact on French politics.Google Scholar

64 “The President and the intellectual express a very firm, commonly accepted French position that carries out an extensive analysis of the Austrian domestic affairs – contrary to the German disinterest in broader information.”Google Scholar

65 “Faced with this firm position, that understands Haider-liberalism as a fascist corporatism, German appeasement or even polemics is objectively misplaced, in our own interest.”Google Scholar

66 “Because a compromise between the two conservative parties of the two successor-states of the Third Reich would be understood by France as a point against the West, and it would be avenged: a confidence that was built over 30 years would vanish over night. One has to know what one wants: domestic harmony with the Bavarian minister president, or external solidarity with the French Republic. Both together are impossible at the moment.”Google Scholar

67 “…in its obvious ignorance on what is rightly called ‘extreme right'. From Paris, this looks so: It is revealing if one is fooled by Haider's trivialization of Nazism and subsequently does not understand that this trivialization corresponds to the banal appearance of neo-Nazism as such.”Google Scholar

68 “…that French refusal of compromise is not political ‘theatre’ to gain profile, but a core element of the French post-war Republic.”Google Scholar

69 “…an alliance of the two Germanys with a fascist past. To neglect the seriousness of this French standpoint as a principle, and to confuse it with power-political finesse or hysterical reactions, is the error that itself stems from the trivializing explanation of the Austrian right.”Google Scholar

70 Expert of demographic election studies at Institut national d'Études Démographiques. Studied at Institut d'Études Politiques, holds a PhD in history of Cambridge University.Google Scholar

71 “The German question is open again.”Google Scholar

72 “It is a shock. The country that gave Hitler to the world presents a government to the world that includes extreme right ministers. This event puts everything I said to far on the sovereignty of nations into question.”Google Scholar

73 “Concerning Haider, Austria acts as irresponsible as Germany 70 years ago. […] The new government in Vienna is an affront – a racist act against all those countries that were occupied by Hitler. I fear especially the impact on Germany. For me it's clear: The German nations do not have the right, because of their history, to form extreme right governments. In this situation, the Europeans are obliged to testify their absolute disapproval.”Google Scholar

74 Although Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson visited Austria on 28 April 2000, he refrained from meeting any member of the government.Google Scholar

75 Diez 1999.Google Scholar