Part 1

In 1946 Austria’s all party government celbrated »950 years of Austria«. Referencing the first recorded mentioning of the name »Ostarrichi« in a document issued by the then emperor of the HRR, Otto II, in the year 996 A.D. this event marks a rather significant change in the national discourse of Austria: Proclaiming the existence of an Austrian nation ranging as far back in time as to outdate even the Habsburg monarchy, was a significant development in the post-war rise of Austrian nationalism and national identity. The first ever such celebration of an Austrian nation – not to be confused with the rule of the House of Habsburg over certain hereditary lands – was one of the first significant measures of a campaign of nation building in Austria following the Second World War. Only then and through such and similar measures of nation building did emerge the national identity and nationalism of Austria, which still remains the at-large consensus in Austrian political and social discourse up until today: That, in contradiction to the at-large social consensus in the time of the advent of nationalism in Europe in the second half of the 19th century or even in the First Republic from 1918 to 1933, Austria was not to be part of a larger German nation due to its population being German in the national sense but was and remains its own culture, nation, and political entity due to its history, its culture, and rise of nationhood independent from the various political incarnations of Germany. The Austrian case stands out when considering it within the larger context of the history of the rise of the ideology of nationalism in Europe as well as the context of the theoretical debates on nation, nationalism, and nationhood. The comparatively late emergence of a socially consensual understanding of the political entity Austria as a nation combined with its process of nation-building that constituted the immense shift from the popular understanding of Austria as not being able to »survive on its own« and the deep sense of needing to be part of a larger German nation to the idea of an Austrian nation independent from Germany owes largely to the need for a new national narrative post 1945, which allowed Austria the ethical advantage of distancing itself from Nazi crimes as well as the specific formative experience of the national entrepreneurs of having experienced persecution of the Nazi regime.

In short, I will examine the history of nationalism in Austria and emphasize the development post 1945 when the Austrian nation was invented and its ideology was spread through a variety of measures and by a certain group of national entrepreneurs. I aim to show that the Austrian case is a prime example for modernist theories of nationalism, especially those of Roger Smith, which view nationalism and the nation being something »invented« in accordance to certain historical, political, social, and economic factors.

“Austria has no idea”: German nationalism in the Habsburg empire

Eric Hobsbawm describes “the nation as [an] invented tradition” . “The ‘nation’, with its associated phenomena: nationalism, the nation-state, national symbols, histories, and all the rest. All these rest on exercises in social engineering.” Concepts such as the nation, a standard language, citizenship connected with certain rights and associated with certain character traits have to be invented and spread; they have to be made accepted by a populous through a “suitably tailored discourse” in order to serve a specific political purpose, such as justifying the rule of certain political and social elites and/or systems of governance as well as political, social, and economic institutions, e.g. the modern state.

The process Hobsbawm describes was in full swing in Europe in the second half of the 19th century, essentially because Absolutism and its model of divinely justified rule had come under attack by enlightenment ideas and political movements following the French revolution. Absolutism had lost its “persuasive story” . Roger M. Smith when analyzing the formation of identities in the modern age coined this concept. He states that membership in a political community, “a “political” people” is contingent on two fundamental factors: “coercive force and persuasive stories” . Narratives of peoplehood are what win allegiance to a political order. Smith goes into detail, describing three independent yet intertwined types of stories that inspire persons to embrace membership in a political group: Economic stories that offer material benefits for membership; political power stories that offer security and participation in greater collective power; and – the most powerful of all – ethnically constitutive stories, which suggest that “membership in a particular community is somehow intrinsic to who its members are, in ways that are ethically valuable.”

This concept is highly valuable in explaining the upsurge of nationalism in Europe in the second half of the 19th century. The newly created nation-state offered material benefit through market capitalism and its associated laws and guarantees; political power through its administration, its standing military, and participation in it through its constitutional guarantees; and ethical value through loyalty to an idea much greater than one dynastic house – that of a national identity.

In the course of this process, the Habsburg monarchy unsurprisingly given its multi-lingual and historically diverse population became a hot-spot for newly emerging nationalist aspirations. Anthony D. Smith defines nationalism as the ideology concerned with “national autonomy, national unity and national identity” . And while Hungarian as well as Slav national entrepreneurs in the Habsburg monarchy were able to develop persuasive stories and political programs concerned with autonomy, unity and identity, the ruling class was unable to develop a counter-program, which could create a raison d’etre for the Habsburg state beyond its dynastic ties. Nineteenth-century ideologist and German national theorist Paul de Lagarde writes in his Deutsche Schriften: “Prussia has not a sufficient body for its soul while Austria has no soul for its more than sufficient body. Austria lived from the beginning for its duty to be Germany’s protection against the Hungarians, later on to be its rampart against the Turks; what for does it live now? (…) Austria has no idea that keeps it together.” Writing these words in 1878 it is not difficult to understand where Lagarde is coming from given that in 1848 the banner of German unity flew over the Stephansdom; that in 1866 when Bismarck’s »kleindeutsch« Empire began to emerge Grillparzer wrote: “Als Deutscher bin ich geboren – Bin ich noch einer?” ; that in 1882 some of the most prominent Habsburg Austrian political figures published a call for unity with German, the Linzer Program. The Linzer Program is one of the pivotal documents for understanding German nationalism in the Habsburg monarchy. It was originally drafted by the left wing of the Deutschliberal Partei, which was the most prominent force in cisleithanian politics following the Ausgleich in 1867. It’s most prominent authors included Georg Schönerer, leader of the German nationalists in Austria, later the Alldeutsche Movement and due to his virulent anti-Semitic stance a known influence on the young Adolf Hitler and Viktor Adler, at that time active member of the Deutschnationale movement who later founded the Social-democratic Party and became one of its ideologically influential members. The program called for a separation of the crown lands that had been part of the German Bund from those that had not been (e.g. Galicia or Dalmatia) and de-facto political unity of the former with Germany through a customs union a customs union and a state treaty. Furthermore, it pressed for the introduction of democratic reforms and for embracing German as the new official national language. While some like Frantisek Palacky, Friedrich Schlegel or Hugo von Hoffmannstahl tried in their writing to an Austrian idea or counter narrative to documents like the Linzer Program, due to a ruling class unable to see the signs of the time and too timid to take necessary steps in order to accommodate the non-German speaking population of its empire, the lack of a transnational raison d’etre over and above the dynastic bond became more and more apparent in the Habsburg empire.

And with the lack of a counter narrative, it is hardly surprising that a large part of an important segment of the German speaking population – educational elites, students, young academics and emerging parts of the bureaucracy – turned to »Deutschnationalismus«, which understood Austria (as in the German speaking parts of the empire) as belonging culturally and nationally to the unified German empire rather than the fledging multi-language Habsburg one. A trend only to become stronger once the Habsburg Empire was abandoned and the First Republic emerged.