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ABSTRACT
In this paper, Rheindorf and Wodak provide a discourse-historical analysis of extreme-right cultural politics in Austria, ranging from the blatant racism in the speeches of Vienna’s former Deputy Mayor Johann Gudenus (now MP in the Austrian parliament) to the construction of an idealized national body in the election campaigns of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), its programmatic agenda in handbooks and pamphlets, and the performances of far-right pop singer Andreas Gabalier. Rheindorf and Wodak argue that such cultural politics use a wide spectrum of discursive strategies both inside and outside established party politics and that the accompanying production of an ideal extreme-right subject is informed by nativist ideology. The cross-sectional analysis demonstrates that the cultural politics of the Austrian extreme right ranges from appropriated national symbols to coded National Socialist iconography. These politics pervasively construct a gendered and racialized national body, policed by a ‘strict father’ and nurtured by a ‘self-sacrificing mother’, vis-à-vis an apocalyptic threat scenario identified with migration, intellectual and political elites, cosmopolitanism and progressive gender politics.
Notes
1 Ruth Wodak, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl and Karin Liebhart, The Discursive Construction of National Identities, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2009).
2 Ibid., 30.
3 Leading members of the party have been investigated for and convicted of activities such as denying the Holocaust or violating the Verbotsgesetz or Prohibition Act of 1947, which banned the Nazi Party and aimed to suppress any potential revival of Nazism; see works such as Jakob Engel and Ruth Wodak, ‘“Calculated ambivalence” and Holocaust denial in Austria’, in Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson (eds), Analysing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (London and New York: Routledge 2013), 73–96.
4 Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl and Liebhart, The Discursive Construction of National Identities; Rudolf de Cillia and Ruth Wodak (eds), Gedenken im ‘Gedankenjahr’: Zur diskursiven Konstruktion österreichischer Identitäten im Jubiläumsjahr 2005 (Vienna: Studienverlag 2009).
5 Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: Sage 1995).
6 For a discussion of biopolitics and reproductive politics of the European far right, see Jemima Repo, ‘Thanatopolitics or biopolitics? Diagnosing the racial and sexual politics of the European far-right’, Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 15, no. 1, 2016, 110–18.
7 Andreas Musolff, Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust: The Concept of the Body Politic (London and New York: Routledge 2010); Ruth Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean (London, Thousand Oaks, CA, New Delhi and Singapore: Sage 2015).
8 Heribert Schiedel and Wolfgang Neugebauer, ‘Jörg Haider, die FPÖ und der Antisemitismus’, in Anton Pelinka and Ruth Wodak (eds), ‘Dreck am Stecken’: Politik der Ausgrenzung (Vienna: Czernin 2002), 11–31 (16). All translations from the German, unless otherwise stated, are by the authors.
9 Walter Manoschek, ‘FPÖ, ÖVP, and Austria’s Nazi past’, in Ruth Wodak and Anton Pelinka (eds), The Haider Phenomenon in Austria (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction 2009), 3–15 (5).
10 Michał Krzyżanowski and Ruth Wodak, The Politics of Exclusion: Debating Migration in Austria (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction 2009).
11 Schiedel and Neugebauer, ‘Jörg Haider, die FPÖ und der Antisemitismus’, 15.
12 Ibid., 16.
13 Manoschek, ‘FPÖ, ÖVP, and Austria’s Nazi Past’, 6–7 .
14 Schiedel and Neugebauer, ‘Jörg Haider, die FPÖ und der Antisemitismus’, 17.
15 Ruth Wodak, Johanna Pelikan, Peter Nowak, Helmut Gruber, Rudolf de Cillia and Richard Mitten, ‘Wir sind alle unschuldige Täter!’ Diskurshistorische Studien zum Nachkriegsantisemitismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1990), 290; Wodak and Richardson (eds), Analysing Fascist Discourse.
16 Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, ‘“Austria first”: a discourse-historical analysis of the Austrian “anti-foreigner petition” in 1992 and 1993’, in Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak (eds), The Semiotics of Racism: Approaches in Critical Discourse Analysis (Vienna: Passagen 2000), 269–303.
17 Wodak, The Politics of Fear.
18 Markus Rheindorf and Ruth Wodak, ‘Borders, fences, and limits—protecting Austria from refugees: metadiscursive negotiation of meaning in the current refugee crisis’, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, special issue on ‘Mediatization and Politicization of the Refugee Crisis’, vol. 16, no. 1–2, 2018, 15–38.
19 Ruth Wodak, ‘Political discourse analysis—distinguishing frontstage and backstage contexts: a discourse-historical approach’, in John Flowerdew (ed.), Discourse in Context, Contemporary Applied Linguistics, vol. 3 (London and New York: Bloomsbury 2014), 321–45.
20 Leaflet by the FPÖ’s youth organization, Ring Freiheitlicher Jugend, under the chairmanship of Johann Gudenus.
21 Johann Gudenus at a rally in 2011 (reported in the FPÖ newspaper Neue Freie Zeitung, 27 October 2011).
22 ‘FP-Gudenus: “Stadt der Menschenrechte”—nicht mehr als ein schönes Schlagwort’, press release by Johann Gudenus, 19 December 2014, available on the APA-OTS website at www.ots.at/presseaussendung/OTS_20141219_OTS0076 (viewed 20 May 2019).
23 Speech by Johann Gudenus, Moscow, 11 September 2014.
24 Michael Howanietz, Für ein freies Österreich: Souveränität als Zukunftsmodell, ed. Norbert Hofer (Vienna: Freiheitlicher Parlamentsklub 2013).
25 Handbuch freiheitlicher Politik, 4th edn (Vienna: FPÖ-Bildungsinstitut 2013).
26 Heinz-Christian Strache, ‘Vorwort’, in ibid., 6.
27 Ibid., 7.
28 Ibid.
29 Howanietz, Für ein freies Österreich, 15.
30 Ibid., 77.
31 Ibid., 141.
32 Ibid., 137.
33 Ibid., 19–20.
34 Ibid., 21.
35 Thilo Sarrazin, Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 2010).
36 Howanietz, Für ein freies Österreich, 20.
37 Handbuch freiheitlicher Politik, 4th edn (Vienna: FPÖ-Bildungsinstitut 2013), 160.
38 § 97 of the Strafgesetzbuch (StGB, Austrian Criminal Code), available on jusline.at at www.jusline.at/gesetz/stgb/paragraf/97; see also Christian Fiala, ‘Abbruch in Österreich: Schwangerschaftsabbruch in Theorie und Praxis’, available on abtreibung.at at http://abtreibung.at/fur-fachkrafte/hintergrundinformationen/abbruch-in-osterreich (both viewed 17 May 2019).
39 Howanietz, Für ein freies Österreich, 30–1; ‘Ehre’ and ‘Treue’, the two concepts the book praises in this context, formed the core of the SS motto ‘Meine Ehre heißt Treue’, which is banned under the Austrian law.
40 Ibid., 31.
41 Ibid., 32.
42 Ibid., 34.
43 Ibid., 118 and 110–12.
44 Ibid., 119.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., 35.
47 Cornelia Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1998), 327. For the current use of the notion, see Wolfgang Frindte and Nico Dietrich (eds), Muslime, Flüchtlinge und Pegida: Sozialpsychologische und Kommunikationswissenschaftliche Studien in Zeiten globaler Bedrohungen (Wiesbaden: Springer VS 2017).
48 Howanietz, Für ein freies Österreich, 117.
49 Ibid., 121.
50 Ibid., 133.
51 Ibid., 134.
52 Billig, Banal Nationalism.
53 and are stills from ‘Immer wieder Österreich–Flagge zeigen’ (Time and Again Austria–Show Your Colours), FPÖ TV presidential election campaign video featuring FPÖ anthem, 8 October 2016, available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcV6aUw4xhU (viewed 5 May 2019).
54 Ruth Wodak, ‘Integration and culture: from “communicative competence” to “competence in plurality”’, in Rainer Bauböck and Milena Tripkovic (eds), The Integration of Migrants and Refugees: An EUI Forum on Migration, Citizenship and Demography (Florence: European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies 2017), 116–37; Wodak, The Politics of Fear, 125–90.
55 A recontextualization of an infamous Swiss People’s Party poster; see Hans-Georg Betz, ‘Mosques, minarets, burqas and other essential threats: the populist right’s campaign against Islam in Western Europe’, in Ruth Wodak, Majid KhosraviNik and Brigitte Mral (eds), Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse (London and New York: Bloomsbury 2013), 71–88; and Aristotle Kallis, ‘Breaking taboos and “mainstreaming the extreme”: the debates on restricting Islamic symbols in contemporary Europe’, in Wodak, KhosraviNik and Mral (eds), Right-Wing Populism in Europe, 55–70.
56 Reproduced from the Austrian daily newspaper Kurier, 27 July 2015, available on the Kurier website at https://kurier.at/chronik/wien/staatsanwalt-ermittelt-gegen-rechtspopulist-geert-wilders/143.733.765 (viewed 8 May 2019).
57 Katharina Köhler and Ruth Wodak, ‘Mitbürger, Fremde und “echte Wiener”—Ein- und Ausgrenzungen über Sprache: Diskursive Konstruktion von Macht und Ungleichheit am Beispiel des Wiener Wahlkampfes 2010’, Deutschunterricht, vol. 63, no. 6, 2011, 64–74; Wodak, The Politics of Fear.
58 Karin Stögner, ‘Secondary antisemitism, the economic crisis and the construction of national identity in the Austrian print media’, Critical Sociology, vol. 44, no. 4–5, 2018, 719–32.
59 Wodak, The Politics of Fear.
60 Engel and Wodak, ‘“Calculated ambivalence” and Holocaust denial in Austria’.
61 Barbara Rosenkranz, MenschInnen: Gender Mainstreaming—Auf dem Weg zum geschlechtslosen Menschen (Graz: Ares 2008).
62 Television debate hosted by the Austrian television channel ATV, 8 May 2016.
63 Ibid.
64 Musolff, Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust; John E. Richardson, ‘Fascist discourse’, in John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (London and New York: Routledge 2018), 447–61.
65 David Machin and John E. Richardson, ‘Discourses of unity and purpose in the sounds of fascist music: a multimodal approach’, Critical Discourse Studies, vol. 9, no. 4, 2012, 329–45.
66 Anton Shekhovstov, ‘European far-right music and its enemies’, in Wodak and Richardson (eds), Analysing Fascist Discourse, 277–96.
67 Gabalier has denied such allusions and describes himself as the victim of a defamation campaign by the left. He has recently sued the director of the Viennese Konzerthaus (concert hall) for publicly stating that he would not allow Gabalier to perform at the venue due to the ideology he represents.
68 Andreas Gabalier, ‘Biker’, in Andreas Gabalier, Herzwerk (Koch Universal Music 2010).
69 Andreas Gabalier, ‘Mein Bergkamerad’, in Andreas Gabalier, Herzwerk (Koch Universal Music 2010). The Iron Cross was a military decoration in the Kingdom of Prussia and later, with a swastika added at its centre, in Nazi Germany.
70 Andreas Gabalier, ‘Königin der Alpen’, in Andreas Gabalier, Mountain Man (Koch Universal Music 2015).
71 Rudolf de Cillia and Ruth Wodak, Ist Österreich ein ‘deutsches’ Land? Sprachenpolitik und Identität in der Zweiten Republik (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag 2006).
72 Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism (London and New York: Routledge 2001).
73 Andreas Gabalier, ‘Meine Heimat’, in Andreas Gabalier, Da komm’ ich her (Koch Universal Music 2009).
74 Andreas Gabalier, ‘Bergbauernbuam’, in Andreas Gabalier, Herzwerk (Koch Universal Music 2010).
75 Andreas Gabalier, ‘Mei Großvater hat gesagt’, in Andreas Gabalier, Mountain Man (Koch Universal Music 2015).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Markus Rheindorf
Markus Rheindorf is currently a senior postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Vienna. He has held fellowships at the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies in Vienna and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, and completed his Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics in 2006. His research interests include critical discourse studies, corpus linguistics, multimodality, genre analysis and argumentation theory. His recent publications (both with Ruth Wodak) include ‘“It was a long hard road”: a longitudinal perspective on discourses of commemoration in Austria’ (10plus1 2017) and ‘Borders, fences, and limits—protecting Austria from refugees: metadiscursive negotiation of meaning in the current refugee crisis’ (Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 2018). His forthcoming book, Revisiting the Toolbox of Discourse Studies (Palgrave 2019) addresses recent methodological innovations and challenges in discourse analysis. Email: [email protected]
Ruth Wodak
Ruth Wodak is Emerita Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University, and affiliated to the University of Vienna. Besides other prizes, she was awarded the Austrian Wittgenstein Prize and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Örebro. In 2017 she held the Willy Brandt Chair at Malmö University. Currently, she is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna. She is co-editor of the journals Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies and Language and Politics. Her research interests focus on discourse studies, gender studies, language and/in politics, prejudice and discrimination, and ethnographic methods of linguistic fieldwork. Her recent book publications include (edited with Bernard Forchtner) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics (2018) and The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean (Sage 2015). Email: [email protected]