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

5. Measuring Identity: Austrian National Consciousness in the Mirror of Public Opinion

5 Measuring Identity Austrian National Consciousness in the Mirror of Public Opinion he preceding two chapters focused on the main pillars of postwar Austrian nation-building. A new national imagery began to dominate the public debate, supported by social and political instruments of nation-building. At the level of of¤cial discourse and policy, a fairly clear picture has emerged. What remains to be examined is the actual impact of these elite-based representations on notions of identity at a popular level. The importance of elites in the creation of national consciousness has been described in important works of scholarship. Eugen Weber argued that governmental nationalization policies in late nineteenthcentury rural France had turned “peasants into Frenchmen.”1 Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer viewed English state formation as a cultural revolution that in the course of centuries transformed public consciousness .2 It is easy to ¤nd parallels between these Western European cases and the postwar Austrian national environment. In some fundamental respects, however, the Austrian situation differs from such long-term processes of identity formation, which had turned prenational populations into nations. Austrian nation-building involved a modern population that had already undergone a process of identity formation; it did not transform a premodern parochial society into a national mass society. In addition, Austrian nation formation focused almost exclusively on questions of consciousness. The economic T 162 The Ambivalence of Identity and communicational links between Austria and Germany actually increased, and, due to the postwar explosion in cross-border tourism, personal contacts between Austrians and West Germans became more extensive than ever before.3 Austrian identity formation did not center primarily on empirical social changes, but on the developing self-image of the Austrians as a distinct nation. Due to this focus on consciousness, and particularly on its public expression, the processes guiding Austrian nation-building display more similarities with the crystallization of political opinions than with long-term cultural transformations. Looking at the development of Austrian nationhood from the angle of opinion making and opinion formation, one cannot but notice the uneven presence of Austrianist and Germanist discourse in the public arena. Asymmetric structures of Öffentlichkeit direct attention to sociopsychological models that interpret public response to wider climates of opinion. The in¶uence of—actual or perceived—public opinion on individual opinion takes different forms. One of the better known concepts of positive reinforcement is the so-called bandwagon effect, which has become a standard image in the discussion of electoral politics; it denotes a widespread human desire to “join the winning team.”4 Whereas there has been little compelling evidence that this psychological phenomenon is strong enough to change voting behavior, its subtle presence has been demonstrated in postelection surveys, in which the share of respondents who report having supported the winner tends to be larger than warranted by the election results.5 Even more interesting for the question of Austrian nation-building, however, are the conceptual counterparts of the bandwagon effect, which focus on the negative reinforcements contained in societal opinion formation. As early as the 1950s, the social psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated the power of majority opinion and fear of isolation in a small-group environment. In a series of psychological experiments, test persons were asked to determine which of three lines of comparison best matched the standard line given, as in the graph shown in Table 13. The test persons made their individual decisions in a group setting of eight to ten members. Unbeknown to the sole actual test subject, the remaining group members had been coached to agree unanimously on objectively wrong assessments, leaving the test individual isolated with the correct judgment. The results were striking: a substantial number of test persons began to err in agreement with the majority. Whereas the Measuring Identity 163 overwhelming majority of control group members misjudged the length of line in one of seven instances or never at all and no control group member misjudged it more than twice, a considerable segment within the experimental group repeatedly subscribed to the transparently wrong majority opinion. Two of the thirty-one test persons even erred in all seven cases. Allowing for one error as a legitimate mistake that could also be found in a sizable portion of the control group, slightly more than half of the test persons were in¶uenced by their environment . Asch was able to demonstrate that a substantial segment of test persons could surrender...