Ambivalence of Identity: The Austrian Experience of Nation-Building in a Modern Society

4. The Institutional Instruments of Nation-Building

4 The Institutional Instruments of Nation-Building ver the past decades, Austrian public identity has undergone a visible transformation.1 Increasingly, the wider German senseof -self that traditionally predominated among German-speaking Austrians lost ground to an exclusively Austrian one.2 While the peaceful prosperity of the Second Republic undoubtedly supported the national reorientation, it represented only part of a more intricate process that contains important lessons about the formation of collective identities. The shift in Austrian national consciousness did not occur in a political vacuum. In and of themselves, neither abstract socioeconomic factors nor changes in historical interpretation could guarantee the success of Austrian nation-building. The new national concept had to compete with existing notions of identity, which tended to be deeply entrenched in the public imagination. A sympathetic analyst of Austrian nation-building, himself an active participant in the process, alluded somewhat cryptically to the instruments of public policy that could be employed: In Europe there are latecomers with regard to nation-building. Austria is one of them. So the interest in the instruments of nation-building assumes immediate relevance. Of central practical interest is the opportunity to shape social processes rationally and to employ institutions for the ful¤llment of goals.3 O The Institutional Instruments of Nation-Building 111 The societal instruments that helped create a distinctly Austrian national consciousness form the analytical focus of this chapter. Although these instruments were by no means solely responsible for the changing Austrian sense-of-self, they provided a crucial impetus.4 An important precondition for their successful employment—and for the success of Austrian nation-building in general—was the centralization of decision making in the hands of party elites.5 Between 1945 and 1966, the two dominant political parties, which together always captured between 82.7 and 94.38 percent of the overall vote, were united in a coalition government; after a two-decade interlude, this model of governing was reestablished in 1987.6 The high share of public employees —by the mid-1970s, almost one-third of Austria’s labor force was employed in the public sector, including Austria’s sizable nationalized industries—extended the in¶uence of the party elites into the economic sphere.7 The Austrian social partnership, although conceptually based upon extraparliamentary negotiations between the principal interest group organizations of both employers and employees, also formed an integral component of coalition politics. The Social Democratic party (SPÖ) dominated two of the member associations of the Joint Commission for Price and Wage Questions, the central body of the social partnership ; the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) dominated the remaining two.8 The presidents of the Austrian Trade Union Association and the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, the two key actors in the social partnership, have historically been leading members of their respective party organizations. As can be seen in the results of a 1983 poll (Table 12, below), the Austrian public perceives the in¶uence of the major parties to be far reaching. The high level of politicization in postwar Austrian society, in which substantial segments of public life were assigned to the two dominant political parties in an arrangement commonly termed Proporz, facilitated Austrian nation-building.9 By its very nature, the grand coalition that governed Austria for much of its postwar history was more successful at supporting elite cooperation than at providing the balancing in¶uence of vigorous parliamentary opposition. A number of Austrian scholars examined the societal implications of this centralization of authority. The Viennese political scientist Peter Ulram suggested the presence of a “pronounced political elite cartel with considerable opportunity to determine or at least in¶uence extensive sectors of economic , social, and cultural life.”10 Ulram’s prominent colleague Anton Pelinka put the postwar philosophy of government into a larger histori- 112 The Ambivalence of Identity cal context and saw it as a “continuation of Josephinismus, negotiated at the top and represented toward the lower ranks—everything for the people, but not by the people.”11 And in a comparative analysis of Austria ’s changing political systems coauthored by Pelinka and fellow political scientist Rainer Nick, the Second Republic is de¤ned as a “concordance democracy”: The combination of a fragmented society and a pronounced elite consensus that typi¤es the Second Republic can be characterized as a “concordance democracy.” The consensus essential for every stable democratic system—the agreement with regard to certain basic values...