Research
The project explores the treatment of antisemitism by Austria’s Parliament during the Second Republic and places this within the context of the development of democracy.
Austria has a long tradition of political antisemitism. Indeed, in the Parliaments of the Monarchy and First Republic, it was employed as a “general strategy”, in which the most diverse political agendas were advanced through appeals to antisemitic prejudices.[1] After the Shoah, political antisemitism seemed to be discredited. This, however, raised a new question: whether and how the use of antisemitism as a political strategy may have persisted, changed or vanished in the post-1945 Parliament.
The point of departure for our study is the hypothesis that the treatment of antisemitism in Parliament can offer insights into the development of democracy. It is generally accepted within antisemitism research that the open expression of antisemitism was increasingly tabooed in Austria after the Second World War. We have researched this development in Parliament as a place where the boundaries of publicly acceptable discourse are drawn. The concept of the “development of democracy” refers to the establishment of a political culture that affirms the existence of a modern, pluralist society. In this context, “development” does not refer to a progressive or linear progression towards more democracy. Instead, the aim has been to explore changes that we render visible through specific analyses.
In the framework of the study, we conduct analyses of key debates using the stenographic records of the plenary sessions of the two houses of the Austrian Parliament (Nationalrat and Bundesrat).
We see Parliamentary debate as a clearly defined public arena that functions as the symbolic centre of representative democracy.[2] Parliament has its own formal and informal rules that impose especially strict limits on what is publicly sayable in the plenary debates.
The focus on parliamentary rhetoric allows the analysis of negotiating processes relating to social pluralism. Through the study of parliamentary debates, we have been able to reconstruct not only struggles over the meaning of basic ideas such as democracy and demos, but also patterns of political inclusion and exclusion.
The Second Republic in Austria represented a new democratic beginning, with the parties of 1945 (ÖVP, SPÖ, KPÖ) professing unanimous support for democracy and parliamentarianism. They agreed on the reinstatement of the 1920 constitution (in its 1929 version) and were able to reach wide-ranging agreement on the formal minimum standards for democracy (rule of law, elections, parliamentarianism, etc.).[3] There was, however, far less agreement on what the new democracy should entail in qualitative terms. Disassociation from Nazism provided a substitute for this non-definition. In a nutshell: “Democracy is whatever Nazism isn’t.” At the same time antisemitism was equated with Nazism and so gradually became a marker for an inability or refusal to embrace democracy.
This fact in particular makes Austria a suitable case for the study of a post-fascist society, in which the parliamentary treatment of antisemitic rhetoric offers insights into the democratization process.
[1] Saskia Stachowitsch und Eva Kreisky (Eds.), Jüdische Identitäten und antisemitische Politiken im österreichischen Parlament 1861-1933, Böhlau, Wien. See also the pre-projects
[2] Bischof, Karin/Ilie, Cornelia (forthcoming), Editorial, in Journal of Language and Politics.
[3] Bechter, Nicolas/Bischof, Karin/Löffler, Marion (2017) ‘Kontinuitäten und Brüche zwischen Erster und Zweiter Republik’, in Saskia Stachowitsch und Eva Kreisky (Eds.), Jüdische Identitäten und antisemitische Politiken im österreichischen Parlament 1861-1933, Böhlau, Wien, 269-27, here 269f.
