MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"

AUSTRIA

by Kevin Carey

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KEVIN CAREY examines the background to the new Austrian coalition and urges governments to take tough action against it.

Just as there is a never-ending, quasi-ideological, dispute as to the relative importance of nature and nurture in the life chances of an individual, so there is an identical debate, though at a much more submerged level, in the matter of whole peoples and nations. How far do migrated races retain the characteristics of their ancestors in a new environment and how far does the physical environment affect the way people behave?

The answer to the second question is easier than the first: people who live near water tend to fish, people who live on barren mountainsides tend not to attempt sedentary agriculture; and what people do to stay alive affects their outlook on life. There is, then, a sociological, crypto-Darwinian response to the initial hypotheses of Bodin and Montesquieu that geography and climate affect people. For practical purposes this nurture argument is so relatively powerful that it obscures the effect of environmentally influenced genetic evolution.

This might seem to be a somewhat rarefied manner in which to begin a discussion of current affairs but these questions are pertinent to any consideration of a country's behaviour, particularly when the country is geographically small, relatively provincial, as this provides near-laboratory conditions for examining racial intolerance.

To put the question bluntly, how far can we base any analysis of Austria's current political and social behaviour on its conduct in 1938?

Let us briefly recall Austria¼s 20th Century. Ensnared in a now familiar pattern of de-colonising turmoil - in this case in Central Europe and the Balkans - it triggered and disastrously lost the First World War. The prior resentment of its elite of the immigrants which Empire had facilitated and even encouraged, was palpable; it is, for instance, inconceivable that Mahler would have been treated as badly in Berlin before 1914 as in Vienna.

When Hitler completed the Anschluss the Viennese did not cower in their homes, nor even sullenly assent; they threw flowers at the Nazi storm troopers. The core of the country's Jewish intelligentsia knew its fate earlier and more completely than did German Jews.

When the War ended Austria benefited enormously from the technological accident of the Cold War, the last European refuge of the stolen art treasure and the war criminal, protected by its neutrality from the incessant churning of modern politics and business: institutions ossified; management and labour, Left and Right, had to carve the cake consensually, one might say conspiratorially, in a manner savagely but elegantly lampooned by Carl Krauss. Yet contrary to our popular image of gateau gemutlichkeit, Austria was and still is, a country in a state of political and intellectual decline, Britain writ small, which, in turn, affects its own self-esteem.

So what should we think now?

First, Austria has tried, and to a great extent has succeeded, in pretending that it was a victim, like Poland or Belgium, of a hostile Nazi invasion and, secondly, the Waldheim episode was at least an indicator that anti-Semitism is still as respectable as a Strauss waltz.

We might balance against this the perfectly plausible observation that Jorg Heider's enterprise has depended upon the accidents of his undoubted physical charms and the crass ineptitude of the Social Democrats which won a plurality at the last election but let the parties in second and third place form a coalition. We might also view current developments as part of Austria's struggle to wrench itself from late Habsburg complacency to face the new millennium of cut-throat competition.

All the same, it is best to stick to the cautionary principle. If we are to make a mistake it is better, as a matter of political pragmatism rather than ethical consistency, to offend the innocent than condone the guilty. In this particular case, even if he is a totally reformed character, Heider can hardly complain if we are sceptical about his conversion to liberalism from fascism and if he is so reformed he won't mind paying a small price in personal humility for his previous bombast.

Equally pragmatically, this situation provides a golden opportunity to send signals to putative European Union Members with racist tendencies; a short, sharp, concrete example is worth a thousand grandiose declarations.

We can, too, dispose of the fiction that countries should not become involved in each other's internal affairs - indeed, it is not clear whether there are any affairs of any sort that can, in the context of globalism, be considered hermetically sealed inside a nation state - and you can be sure, vide China, that any defensive pronouncement on sovereignty simply hides defensiveness on some other count.

There will be pleas for moderation but it is best remembered that you can never appease a fascist; concessions are simply notches of a ratchetary process. Next, there will be the posture of victim-hood but that is a give-away sign; the more extreme the whining the more extreme the position. Political snivelling is a symptom of social autism.

This crisis has broken at a singularly unfortunate moment in Western affairs: Germany is reeling from a corruption scandal which owes much to the secret and consensual covenant which has hollowed out Austria and the French are inexorably being dragged in; the European Union Presidency is in the hands of Portugal, worthy but relatively unskilled; and the world's only superpower is being suffocated in the platitudes of an election year.

At a less precise level of political activity, there is a pervasive xenophobia in the face of global capitalism and increased migration whose front-line victims are political exiles and economic immigrants which makes Heider's stance much less egregious than it would have been two decades ago. One would not blame him for not taking us seriously; an excessive reaction to his rise is the price he and we must pay for our selfishness. We would all be in a much stronger position to condemn mildly and be taken seriously if we had conducted ourselves according to the exhortation on the Statue of Liberty.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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