Haider

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon Feb 21 08:57:57 PST 2000


Los Angeles Times - Monday, February 21, 2000

The Pots Are Calling the Kettle Names

Europe: Much of Haider's anti-foreigner rhetoric is not that different from the positions held by some EU member states.

By DOUGLAS KLUSMEYER

In reacting so strongly to the Freedom Party's admission into the Austrian government, European Union political leaders are jumping at their own shadows. Do they truly find the Freedom Party's anti-immigrant stance so morally reprehensible that Austria must now be punished with sanctions and high-minded rebukes? Or could it be that much of the anti-foreigner rhetoric of the Freedom Party's leader, Joerg Haider, is not that different from the positions that some EU member states have used to justify their own grudging policies toward immigrants?

By linking anti-foreigner appeals with sympathetic gestures toward the Nazi past, Haider has broken an unofficial code in Euro-speak, a code that permits leaders to treat the cultural diversity of immigrants as a threat to the fundamental cohesion of their societies while defending the sanctity of universal human rights and democratic values.

Surely, many of the positions that Haider has advocated cannot have struck EU leaders as falling far outside established policy. Over the past 15 years, the number of foreign residents in Austria has risen dramatically. In the name of preserving Austrian identity and cultural heritage, Haider has called for a constitutional amendment declaring Austria to be "not a country of immigration." He has advocated stiffer controls on illegal immigration and a crackdown on foreigner crime. He has opposed granting municipal voting rights to foreign residents and supported restrictive rules governing naturalization.

Haider does not have to reach deep into a fascist past to find ample precedent to legitimate his calls as a stronger version of policies practiced elsewhere in Europe. He needs merely to point across Austria's border at the example of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Faced with a growing population of foreign residents in the 1980s and 1990s, the Federal Republic--in flagrant denial of the demographic facts--clung to the official fiction that it was not a country of immigration. Today, despite a rising number of second-generation children of these residents, the Federal Republic has only just begun the reform required to facilitate citizenship. Germany's Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union--the conservative sister parties of Austria's People's Party, which brought Haider's Freedom Party into its new governing coalition--have successfully challenged in court the extension of municipal voting rights to local foreign residents.

Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, Germany and other EU member state governments have tightened border controls against illegal immigrants and restricted access to asylum. Against the perceived threat of new waves of migrants, they have given concrete reality to a "Fortress Europe" mentality.

Against this background, the EU response to the Austrian Freedom Party's accession to power must seem perplexing to many Austrians. Haider gave voice to fears and sentiments that leaders across Europe habitually have been prone to play upon for narrow partisan advantage. Yet now the EU leadership rises as one to tell the Austrians that their democratically elected government is morally unacceptable.

Of course, EU leaders had their own agendas too. Some saw an opportunity to embarrass conservatives by emphasizing Haider's reputation for extremism. Some feared that Haider would use his new influence in the Austrian government to obstruct further EU expansion.

Although the EU leadership's collective affirmation of universal human rights and its denouncement of xenophobia is welcome and appropriate, it is difficult to see much courage in addressing this message to a small state that occupies a modest place in the EU. It seems fair to ask: What domestic interests of their own do European leaders risk when they symbolically reduce bilateral contacts with Austria? Not much.

When rallying to the defense of the collective values of their community, European leaders may do well to ponder the reluctance that their own governments have displayed toward embracing cultural diversity.

So long as immigration is publicly treated as an unpleasant reality--or, worse, a menacing threat--the contributions that immigrants make to their host societies will never be recognized. But perhaps it is more convenient for EU countries to stick to the high ground of moral indignation when it comes to Austria, while ignoring the dark currents in their own societies.

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Douglas Klusmeyer Is an Associate With the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's International Migration Policy Program



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