by Tony Judt
The legacy of Austria’s first, unhappy experience with democracy lay heavily on the post-war Republic. The Christian Socials, reborn as the Austrian People’s Party, boasted proudly of their opposition in 1938 to the German takeover; but they were conspicuously silent on their singular contribution to the destruction of Austrian democracy just four years earlier. The Socialists, as the Social Democrats were now known, could reasonably claim to have been the victims twice over: first of the civil war in 1934 and then at the hands of the Nazis. What this obscured, however, was their erstwhile enthusiasm for the Anschluss. Dr Karl Renner, the Socialist leader and first president of the independent Republic established by the Austrian State Treaty of 1955, had maintained his principled enthusiasm for a union of Austria and Germany as late as 1938.
Both parties thus had an interest in putting the past behind them—we have seen what became of initial attempts at de-Nazification in post-war Austria. The Socialists were the majority party in Vienna (which comprised one-quarter of the country’s population), while the People’s Party had a lock on the allegiance of voters in the countryside and small towns of the Alpine valleys. In political terms the country was divided almost exactly in half: in the elections of 1949 the People’s Party outpolled the Socialists by just 123,000 votes; in 1953 the Socialists led by 37,000; in 1956 the People’s Party again won, by 126,000 votes; in 1959 the result favored the Socialists, by 25,000 votes; and in 1962 it was reversed yet again, with the Peoples Party winning by a mere 64,000 votes in a total of over four and a quarter million.
These uniquely narrow margins recalled the similarly close elections of the inter-war Republic. Catholic Austria and Socialist Austria thus faced the renewed prospect of parliamentary politics degenerating into a cultural civil war. Even with the help of a third party—the Liberals, who depended to an embarrassing extent on the vote of ex-Nazis, and whose vote in any case fell steadily at each election—neither Austrian party could hope to form a stable government, and any controversial legislation would risk resurrecting bitter memories. The prognosis for Austrian democracy was not promising.
Yet Austria not only succeeded in avoiding a re-run of its history, but managed in a short space of time to repackage itself as a model Alpine democracy: neutral, prosperous and stable. In part this was due to the uncomfortable proximity of the Red Army, occupying Lower Austria until 1955 and thence withdrawn just a few kilometers to the east—a reminder that Austria’s neighbors now included three Communist states (Yugoslavia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia) and that the country’s vulnerable location made it prudent to pursue conciliatory and uncontentious policies at home and abroad. In addition, the Cold War assigned Austria an identity by association—as Western, free, democratic—that it might have been hard put to generate from within.
But the main source of Austria’s successful post-war political settlement lay in the widely acknowledged need to avoid ideological confrontations of the sort that had torn the country apart before the war. Since Austria had to be—there could be no question after 1945 of annexing it to its German neighbor—its political communities would have to find a way to co-exist. The solution on which the country’s leaders settled was to eliminate the very possibility of confrontation by running the country in permanent tandem. In politics, the two major parties agreed to collaborate in office: from 1947 to 1966 Austria was governed by a ‘Grand Coalition’ of Socialists and People’s Party. Ministries were carefully divided up, with the People’s Party typically providing the Prime Minister, the Socialists the Foreign Minister and so on.
In public administration—which in post-war Austria comprised all public services, most of the media and much of the economy, from banking to logging—a similar division of responsibilities was reached, known as Proporz. At almost every level jobs were filled, by agreement, with candidates proposed by one of the two dominant parties. Over time this system of ‘jobs for the boys’ reached deep into Austrian life, forming a chain of interlocking patrons and clients who settled virtually every argument either by negotiation or else through the exchange of favors and appointments. Labor disputes were handled by arbitration rather than confrontation, as the bi-cephalous state sought to head off dissent by incorporating contending parties into its shared system of benefits and rewards. The unprecedented prosperity of these years allowed the Grand Coalition to paper over disagreements or conflicts of interest and, in effect, purchase the consensus on which the country’s equilibrium rested.
Some groups in Austrian society were inevitably left out—small shopkeepers, independent artisans, isolated farmers, anyone whose work or awkward opinions placed them outside the grid of allocated benefits and positions. And in districts where one or other side had an overwhelming advantage, proportionality would sometimes be ignored in favor of a monopoly of posts and favors for members of that party. But the pressure to avoid confrontation usually triumphed over local self-interest. Just as Austria’s newfound neutrality was enthusiastically adopted as the country’s identity tag, displacing awkward memories of more contentious identities from the past—‘Habsburg’, ‘German’, ‘Socialist’, ‘Christian’—so the post-ideological (indeed post-political) implications of government-by-coalition and administration-by-Proporz came to define Austrian public life.
At first sight this would seem to distinguish the Austrian solution to political instability from the Italian variant; after all, the major political cleavage in Italy separated Communists from Catholics, a juxtaposition that hardly suggests the description ‘post-ideological’.92 But in fact the two cases were quite similar. The singular quality of Togliatti and his party was the importance they attached, throughout the post-war decades, to political stability: to the preservation and strengthening of the institutions of democratic public life, even at a cost to the Communists’ own credibility as the revolutionary vanguard. And Italy, too, was administered through a system of favors and jobs that bore a certain resemblance to Proporz, albeit skewed heavily to the advantage of one side.
If Italy paid a price for political stability in an ultimately intolerable level of public corruption, the cost to Austrians was less tangible but just as pernicious. A Western diplomat once described post-war Austria as ‘an opera sung by the understudies’, and the point is well taken. As a result of the First World War Vienna lost its raison d’être as an imperial capital; in the course of Nazi occupation and the Second World War the city lost its Jews, a significant proportion of its most educated and cosmopolitan citizens.93 Once the Russians left in 1955, Vienna lacked even the louche appeal of divided Berlin. Indeed, the measure of Austria’s remarkable success in overcoming its troubled past was that to many visitors its most distinctive feature was its reassuringly humdrum quality.
Behind the tranquil appeal of an increasingly prosperous ‘Alpine Republic’, however, Austria too was corrupt in its own way. Like Italy, it won its newfound security at the price of a measure of national forgetting. But whereas most other European countries—Italy especially—could boast at least a myth of national resistance to the occupying Germans, Austrians could not plausibly put their wartime experience to any such service. And unlike the West Germans, they had not been constrained to acknowledge, at least in public, the crimes they had committed or allowed. In a curious way Austria resembled East Germany, and not only in the rather monotonously bureaucratic quality of its civic facilities. Both countries were arbitrary geographical expressions whose post-war public life rested on a tacit agreement to fabricate for common consumption a flattering new identity—except that the exercise proved considerably more successful in the Austrian case.
A reform-minded Christian Democrat party, a parliamentary Left, a broad consensus not to press inherited ideological or cultural divisions to the point of political polarization and destabilization, and a de-politicized citizenry; these were the distinctive traits of the post-World War Two settlement in Western Europe. In various configurations the Italian or Austrian pattern can be traced almost everywhere
. Even in Scandinavia there was a steady descent from the high point of political mobilization reached in the mid-1930s: the annual sales of May Day badges in Sweden fell consistently from 1939 to 1962 (with a brief blip at the end of the war) before rising again with the enthusiasms of a new generation.
In the Benelux countries the various constitutive communities (Catholics and Protestants in Holland, Walloons and Flemings in Belgium) had long been organized into separate community-based structures—zuilen or pillars—that encompassed most human activities. Catholics in predominantly Protestant Holland not only prayed differently and attended a different church from their Protestant fellowcitizens. They also voted differently, read a different newspaper and listened to their own radio programmes (and in later years watched different television channels). Of Dutch Catholic children in 1959, 90 percent attended Catholic elementary schools; 95 percent of Dutch Catholic farmers in that same year belonged to Catholic farmers’ unions. Catholics traveled, swam, cycled and played football in Catholic organizations; they were insured by Catholic societies, and when the time came they were of course buried separately as well.
Similar lifelong distinctions shaped the routines of Dutch-speakers in northern Belgium and marked them off absolutely from the French-speakers of Wallonia, even though in this case both communities were overwhelmingly Catholic. In Belgium, though, the pillars defined not just linguistic communities but also political ones: there were Catholic unions and Socialist unions, Catholic newspapers and Socialist newspapers, Catholic radio channels and Socialist radio channels—each in turn divided into those serving the Dutch-speaking community and those serving French-speakers. Appropriately enough, the smaller Liberal tendency in both countries was less emphatically communitarian.
The experience of war and occupation, and the memory of contentious civic divisions in earlier decades, encouraged a greater tendency towards cooperation across these communitarian divides. The more extreme movements, notably the Flemish nationalists, were discredited by their opportunistic collaboration with the Nazis; and in general the war served to diminish people’s identification with the established political parties, though not with the community services associated with them. In both Belgium and the Netherlands a Catholic Party—the Christian Social Party in Belgium, the Catholic People’s Party in the Netherlands—established itself as a fixture in government from the late 1940s until the late sixties and beyond.94
The Catholic parties of the Benelux countries were moderately reformist in rhetoric and functioned very much like Christian Democrat parties elsewhere—to protect the interests of the Catholic community, colonize government at every level from state to municipality, and make provision through the state for the needs of their broad social constituency. Except for the reference to religion this description also fits the main opposition parties—the Labour Party in the Netherlands and the Belgian Workers’ (later Socialist) Party. Both of these approximated more closely to the northern European model of a trade union-based labor movement than to the Mediterranean socialist parties with their more radicalised heritage and frequently anti-clerical rhetoric, and they evinced only limited discomfort in competing for power (and sharing its spoils) with the Catholics.
It was this distinctive post-war mix of self-sustaining cultural communities and reformist parties of the left- and right-center that established political equilibrium in the Low Countries. It had not always been thus. Belgium especially had seen serious political violence in the 1930s when the Flemish separatists and Léon Degrelle’s Fascist Rexistes had between them threatened the parliamentary regime, and the country would experience a new and even more disruptive bout of inter-community strife beginning in the 1960s. But the old political and administrative elites (and local Catholic hierarchy), whose rule had been briefly threatened in 1945, regained their power while allowing considerable latitude for welfare and other reforms. The pillars thus survived into the 1960s—anachronistic echoes of a pre-political age that lasted just long enough to serve as cultural and institutional stabilizers during a period of hectic economic transformation.
The most dramatic instance of political stabilization in post-war Europe, and certainly the most important, is also in retrospect the least surprising. By the time it joined NATO in 1955, the Federal Republic of [West] Germany was already well on the way to the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) for which it liked to be known. But the Bonn Republic was even more noteworthy for its success in wrong-footing the many observers in both camps who had anticipated the worst. Under Konrad Adenauer’s direction West Germany had navigated safely between the Scylla of neo-Nazism and the Charybdis of philo-Soviet neutralism, and was anchored securely within the Western alliance, despite the misgivings of critics at home and abroad.
The institutions of post-war Germany were deliberately shaped so as to minimize the risk of a re-run of Weimar. Government was decentralized: primary responsibility for administration and the provision of services was devolved upon the Länder, the regional units into which the country was divided. Some of these, like Bavaria or Schleswig-Holstein, corresponded to once-independent German states that had been absorbed into Imperial Germany in the course of the nineteenth century. Others, like Rhineland-Westphalia in the north-west, were administrative conveniences that combined or bisected older territorial units.
West Berlin became a Land in 1955 and was duly represented in the Bundesrat, the Upper House where the regions’ delegates sat (although its deputies in the directly elected Lower House, the Bundestag, could not vote in plenary sessions). The powers of the central government were on the one hand considerably restricted when compared to those of its predecessors—the Western Allies blamed the rise of Hitler upon the Prussian tradition of authoritarian government and set out to prevent any recurrence. On the other hand, the Bundestag could not casually unseat a Chancellor and his government once elected; to do so they were obliged to have ready in advance a candidate for the succession with sufficient parliamentary votes to assure his success. The purpose of this constraint was to prevent the kind of serial political instability and weak government that had characterized the Weimar Republic’s last years; but it also contributed to the longevity and authority of strong Chancellors like Konrad Adenauer, and after him Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl.
This concern to deflect or contain conflict shaped the whole public culture of the Bonn Republic. ‘Social market’ legislation was aimed at reducing the risk of labor conflicts or the politicization of economic disputes. Under a Co-Determination Law of 1951, large firms in the heavy industries of coal, steel and iron were obliged to include employee representatives on their supervisory boards, a practice that was later extended to other sectors and smaller businesses. The Federal Government and the Länder were active in many economic sectors; and, despite objecting in principle to nationalized monopolies, the Christian Democratic-run state of the fifties owned or controlled 40 percent of all coal and iron production, two-thirds of electricity-generating plants, three quarters of aluminium manufacturing and, crucially, a majority of German banks.
The decentralization of power, in other words, did not mean hands-off government. By maintaining an active economic presence either directly or indirectly (through holding companies), West German regional and national governments were in a position to encourage policies and practices conducive to social peace as well as private profit. Banks, acting as intermediaries between government and the businesses on whose boards bankers typically sat, played a crucial role. Older German economic practices returned, notably price-setting and consensual market-sharing. At the local level especially there had been very little stripping out of Nazi-era bureaucrats, businessmen or bankers, and by the later 1950s much of the West German economy was run in a manner that would have been familiar to the giant trusts and cartels of earlier decades.
This de facto corporatism was not perhaps what its American overseers had in mind for the new German republic—trusts and their powers were widely believed to ha
ve contributed to the rise of Hitler and were anyway inimical to the free market. Had the economist Ludwig Erhard—Adenauer’s longtime minister of economic affairs—got his way, the West German economy and with it West German social relations might have looked quite different. But regulated markets and close government-business relations sat comfortably in the Christian Democratic schema, both on general social principles and from pragmatic calculation. Trade unions and business groups cooperated for the most part—the economic cake grew fast enough in these years for most demands to be accommodated without conflict.
The Christian Democrat Union ruled without interruption from the first FRG elections in 1949 until 1966; until Konrad Adenauer resigned in 1963 at the age of 87, he had unbroken charge of the affairs of the Bonn Republic. There were various reasons why the CDU, with Adenauer as Chancellor, enjoyed such a long period of continuous power. One was the strong position of the Catholic Church in post-war West Germany: with the predominantly Protestant regions of Brandenburg, Prussia and Saxony now in Communist hands, Catholics represented just over half the West German population. In Bavaria, where conservative Catholics constituted the overwhelming majority of the voters, the local Christian Social Union had an impregnable power base and used it to secure for itself a permanent place as junior coalition partner in the Adenauer governments.
