The Politics of Guilt: Austria's Bigot, Europe's Burden

Andrew Nagorski

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2000

Article preview: first 500 of 1,721 words total.

Summary:  Austria's elevation of the bigoted Jörg Haider has the rest of Europe fuming. But before rushing to judgment, the continent should review its own record of past wrongs.

Andrew Nagorski, Senior Editor at Newsweek International, was Newsweek's Berlin Bureau Chief from 1996 to 1999.

The uproar surrounding the entrance of Jörg Haider's right-wing Freedom Party into Austria's coalition government illustrates how a discredited past can prove an erroneous guide to present political behavior. In Haider's case, the politics of guilt -- portraying his popularity as the result of his appeal to neo-Nazi sentiments -- obscures the real reasons for his rise. Whatever Haider's supporters may feel about his much-publicized 1991 comment praising Third Reich labor policies -- which he subsequently disavowed and apologized for -- and however crude his anti-immigrant rhetoric, Haider owes much of his success to the widespread disillusionment with the Austrian political establishment. Austria's two major parties, the Socialists and the People's Party, ruled in a "grand coalition" from 1945 to 1966 and again from 1986 to 1999, shamelessly dividing the spoils of jobs and contracts in a still heavily state-dominated economy.

Imagine if U.S. Democrats and Republicans decided to share power -- with one party's leader as president, the other's as vice president, and a completely mixed cabinet -- and then resisted all demands for reform. In such a scenario, a resentment-fueled third-party challenger, a self-described reformer, might shoot up in the polls. This is precisely what happened in Austria.

The European Union has failed to acknowledge that Haider skillfully plays on legitimate discontent, along with xenophobia. This has allowed the EU's 14 other governments to claim the moral high ground as they cut off high-level contacts with Austria. Austria's neighbors have remained unrelenting, even after Haider resigned as the leader of his party. They object to the Freedom Party's participation in the Austrian government, regardless of Haider's title (he remains governor of Carinthia). The EU's rationale is that it must send a clear signal to far-right parties that they have no place in member governments. But even if one accepts this logic, the organization's actions remain highly problematic. There is no indication that the EU has considered what will happen if it fails to achieve the all-or-nothing goal of bringing down the current Austrian government. And it seems far from ready to concede that it has caricatured the real origins of Austria's political crisis.

This reckless oversimplification is a common feature of today's politics of guilt. In the current debates about what obligations the past imposes on the present, speakers have a tendency to distinguish only between "good guys" who use reassuringly familiar terms about the need for atonement and "bad guys" who raise troubling questions. Recent "bad guy" candidates have included German novelist Martin Walser and Berlin's Mayor Eberhard Diepgen. In 1998, Walser sparked a furious debate by questioning "the ritualized way" in which Germans speak about their past, denouncing the use of the Holocaust as "a moral cudgel" in political discussions, and calling the planned Berlin Holocaust memorial a "football field-sized nightmare." Diepgen, usually a bland politician, suddenly found himself cast in the same light as Walser when he refused to attend last January's ceremony dedicating the Holocaust memorial site. Before any rush to judgment of ...

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