The Fragility of the EU as a ‘Community of Values’: Lessons from the Haider Affair

Abstract

Unprecedented in the history of European integration, the sanctions against an Austrian government that included the far right Austrian Freedom Party in January 2000 clearly exposed the necessity to guarantee a minimum level of normative homogeneity in the European Union. However, as the hasty lifting of the sanctions a few months later showed, EU leaders proved both unable and unwilling to defend a durable, common and coherent position on this issue. Classic intergovernmental theories, which predict that the unification process cannot go beyond a certain threshold of politically acceptable integration without coming up against deep national divisions and sharpening tensions between the Union and domestic societies, only partly explain this rapid erosion of the European consensus against the FPÖ. The article argues that the breakdown of this ‘cordon sanitaire’ is also largely due to the reluctance of domestic political elites to institutionalise a principle which might backfire against their own countries and ultimately implies a far-reaching Europeanisation of domestic politics and party strategies.

Notes

Statement from the Portuguese presidency of the EU on behalf of XIV member states, Lisbon, 31 January 2000. The ‘bilateral measures’ included the freezing of any bilateral contact with Austrian government officials, the withdrawal of EU support for Austrians applying for senior positions in international organisations and the absence of contacts with Austrian ambassadors, except at a ‘technical’ level.

On 3 February 2000, the European Parliament adopted a resolution expressing its concern about the building of the ÖVP/FPÖ government coalition, which was supported by the leaders of all major parliamentary groups (the EPP-ED, the Socialists, the Liberals and the Greens). On 16 February 2000, the Committee of the Regions expressed similar views.

In Northern Italy, the region of Friaul Venetia passed a motion expressing its support for the Austrian government. In Southern Germany, the Minister-Presidents of Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg expressed their opposition to the sanctions by inviting Austrian President Thomas Klestil (from the ÖVP) and Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel on ‘state’ visits.

In the EU, mobilisations against the sanctions were especially strong in some of the smaller member states and in Germany, where the CDU-CSU and the FDP strongly criticised the Schröder government for supporting this policy. Outside the EU, the sanctions were most contested in Switzerland and Hungary. Among the candidate countries, only the Czech government implemented the sanctions.

This is the result of 30 interviews conducted by the author with party leaders and diplomats from five EU countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy).

Quoted in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2 February 2000.

Article 6 of the Amsterdam Treaty stipulates that the Union is based on the principles of ‘freedom, democracy, human rights, fundamental liberties and the rule of law’.

Taking up the example of slavery in nineteenth century America, Deutsch (1957: 47) reminds the reader that it was regarded as an internal matter of the Southern states, before becoming a national issue during the Civil War.

The founding Treaties of the European Communities included no references to democracy or human rights.

In a directive proposal presented on 21 September 2000, the Commission asks from the member states that they handle asylum seekers' files in a limited amount of time.

In a directive proposal presented on 1 December 1999, the Commission considers granting an automatic right to family grouping for third-country nationals having legally resided in the EU for at least one year.

In April 2004, the Commission adopted plans defining EU-wide safeguards for defendants in criminal proceedings; European Voice, 29 April–5 May 2004, 6.

On 30 March 2004, the citizens' rights committee of the European Parliament adopted a report criticising the European Commission for failing to act against Silvio Berlusconi's control over the Italian media, despite the existence of a legal basis in EU law to do so; European Voice, 1–14 April 2004, 4.

Consider, for example, Haider's statement that ‘humanity has no future if politics is not based on ethnical principles anymore’; ‘Volkgsgemeinschaft. Jörg Haider sucht die “Dritte Republik”’, Die Zeit, 10 February 2000.

Programm der FPÖ, Kapitel III, Punkte 2 und 3 (see Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs 1997).

So does Haider when he asks that fundamental rights be applied ‘in priority to natives’; quoted in Bailer and Neugebauer (1996:.410).

According to Betz and Immerfall (1998: 2), this is the main difference between the radical right of the 1930s and the ‘new’ radical right of the end of the twentieth century.

Quoted in Schedler (1996: 303).

Polls by the institutes Fonte (2001) and Ispo (1998).

Fritz Scharpf, ‘Legitimate Diversity : the Challenge of European Integration’, available at http://www.mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de, 18–22.

per cent of the voters of the Left and 42 per cent of the Right and the Liberals considered the FPÖ to be a threat to democracy. As for the sanctions, 52 per cent of the former and 37 per cent of the latter supported this policy; poll conducted by Ipsos for Le Monde, 15–26 February 2000.

A relative majority of 38 per cent; poll by the Demoskopisches Institut, Allenbasch, March 2000.

Fessel-GFK Institut, Wien, ‘EU-Sanktionen, FPÖ-Politik’, 2.

Fessel-GFK Institut, Wien, ‘Agreement with the sanctions imposed by the EU on Austria’.

See the minutes of the European Parliament; session from 3 February 2000.

Interviews conducted by the author with the leader of the EPP-ED group in the European Parliament, Hans-Gerd Pöttering, 25 February 2002 and with Jean-Louis Bourlanges, MEP of the French UDF, 21 March 2002.

During interviews conducted by the author in Austria, only the Green MEP Johannes Voggenhuber defined the FPÖ as ‘right-extremist’. However, this definition is contested even among the Green Party, whose leader refers to the FPÖ as a ‘populist party of the radical right’.

In 1999, 47 per cent of FPÖ voters mentioned anti-immigration feelings as the first motive of their vote; during the 2002 presidential election in France, 60 per cent of FN voters considered stopping immigration as a top priority; polls quoted in Müller (2000: 198) and Perrineau (2002: 9).

It was largely held among German party officials that by sanctioning the Austrian conservatives, French officials were actually sending an indirect message to the German CDU-CSU (see CDU-CSU Gruppe im Europääischen Parlament 2000). At the time of the Haider affair, the CDU-CSU was in a state of disarray following the scandals of the Kohl era and some observers feared it might adopt a strategy similar to that of the Austrian conservatives.

This rapprochement also took place at group level; for instance, since 1992, the British Tories sit with the EPP-ED group, without being a member of the EPP party federation.

Fessel-GFK Institut, Wien, ‘Agreement with the sanctions imposed by the EU on Austria’, 4.

See the minutes of the session on the sanctions in the regional parliament (Bayerischer Landtag) from 25 February 2000.

In the 1970s, Ronald Inglehart had already noticed this correlation at the individual level (Inglehart 1977).

The sanctions' procedure was first included in the Treaty as article F1 of the Amsterdam Treaty and later reformed at the Nice IGC, when it became known as Article 7 of the Nice Treaty.

See polls by the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Europapolitik, Wien, Umfrage, 17–25 March 2000.

Fessel-GFK Institut, Wien, ‘Agreement with the sanctions imposed by the EU on Austria’, 6.

In an interview published in Die Zeit, 17 February 2000.

Quoted in Bering (2000: 66).

‘Polémique entre Rome et Berlin à propos de l'extrême droite’, Le Monde, 19 February 2000.

Interview conducted by the author with Hans-Carl von Werthern, advisor on European affairs for the FDP parliamentary group, 19 February 2002.

Parliament of Ireland, Joint Committee on European Affairs ,‘ Question of Mr. G. Mitchell to the Foreign Minister concerning diplomatic contacts with Austria’; http://www.irlgov.ie/committees-01/c-europeanaffairs/defaults.htm.

The contestation of these agreements by FPÖ representatives in the Austrian parliament was not mentioned by the report. In November 2000, Chancellor Schüssel had for his part defended the controversial thesis of ‘Austrians as first victims of Nazism’ in an interview with the Jerusalem Post; Die Presse, 10 November 2000.

During the crisis, some ÖVP officials wanted to stage a referendum on the sanctions with anti-EU overtones.

Former advocates of the sanctions (such as former French minister for European affairs Pierre Moscovici, MEP Jean-Louis Bourlanges) and opponents of the sanctions (MEPs of the ÖVP like Reinhard Rack) alike agree on this point; interviews with the author, 28 January 2003, 25 February 2002, 29 June 2001.

Former social democratic chancellor Viktor Klima is believed to have made a case for a European condemnation of an ÖVP/FPÖ coalition at the International Forum on the Holocaust in Stockholm on 26–28 January 2000.

‘Autriche: les socialistes se divisent après un pacte conclu avec Jörg Haider’; Le Monde, March 2004.