“Der Balkan” in der Krone: Austria between “frontier Orientalism” and amnesiac nationalism

Abstract

This article traces the “silent inscription” of (former) colonial relations in the European integration project to their re-inflection in an EU-sceptical medium. To do so, this contribution draws on a corpus of data comprising news-coverage, commentaries and readers' letters published in Austria's largest newspaper, the Kronen Zeitung, whose reach, influence and leanings are well known. The analysis considers the Krone's representations of, and discursive references to, “the Balkans” during the crises-littered period between 2009 and 2017. For analytical purposes this discussion focuses on a sub-sample of invocations of “the Balkans” in the Krone, which have appeared with growing frequency since 2015. Conceptually, the discourse-analytical notion of the topos, or argumentative structure, and anthropological literature on “identity grammars” inform the analysis. The discussion reveals continuities with Austria's historically long-established representational regimes of South-Eastern Europe and novel discursive features. A contemporary paternalism is shown to re-appropriate the nineteenth-century topos of Austria's alleged “civilizing mission” and what André Gingrich (2005) has described as Central Europe's “frontier Orientalism”. Furthermore, preoccupations with “the Balkan-route” and its closure articulate a topos of external threats tied to recent migration flows. The article reflects on an “amnesiac nationalism” and its post-imperial entanglements, which are currently re-shaping the European Union.

Keywords:

• Amnesiac nationalism
• Austria
• Balkans
• banal nationalism
• European Union
• frontier Orientalism
• Kronen Zeitung

Notes

1 The most crucial parts of this history stretched from the nineteenth-century “nationalization” of the region, which included the politicization of the Habsburg Empire’s internal “language frontiers” (Judson 2006; King 2002; Reutner 2009), to the later impact of fascism and national socialism on inter-ethnic relations in the region (Pirker 2017; Promitzer 2003; Priestly 1996).

2 This builds on discussions of the construction of “urgency” in media, social media and political responses to the “refugee crisis” of 2015 (Krzyżanowski, Triandafyillidou, and Wodak 2018).

3 All translations from German are the author’s.

4 Thanks are due to Stuart Moran and the University of Nottingham’s Digital Research Team for financial and practical support in digitalizing the media archive and enabling its systematic analysis.

5 There are limitations to this strategy: the geographical–cultural inexactness of the search term “Balkan” entails diverse delineations and associations in the enunciations employing the term; alternative search terms – such as particular countries commonly subsumed under “the Balkans” – would generate different hits and reveal interpretive–argumentative positions that only partly overlap with what is presented here. For example, although the Greek debt crisis or the EU’s negotiations of Turkey’s possible future accession feature in the data examined, the terms “Greece”, “debt” or “Turkey” would have generated different, considerably larger sub-sets for analysis. Also, it must of course be remembered that different countries commonly associated with “the Balkans” occupy very different positions and recent histories vis-à-vis the EU: Greece joined in 1981, Slovenia in 2004, Romania and Bulgaria in 2007, Croatia in 2013; Serbia and Montenegro are now in accession negotiations, but those with Turkey have stalled; Albania and North Macedonia are candidates, Bosnia a potential candidate.

6 This is a clumsy English rendering of the German “inhaltsbezogene Schlussfolgerungsregeln” (Wodak 2016, 68). While topoi sometimes follow an “if–then” pattern of argumentation, I here use their broader definition as “warrants … where evidence is not provided or where appeals to presupposed common sense are made” (Wodak, Kwon, and Clarke 2011, 606, 614).

7 Also relevant here are Reisigl and Wodak’s (2001, 15) observations of the “colonial paradigm”: they discuss this as an example of how critical discourse analysis may be productively applied to the study of racism, as a political phenomenon with context-specific, historical conditions of possibility.

8 To simplify Baumann and Gingrich: orientalist grammars construct mutually exclusive categories of “self” and “other” as inverse mirror images (i.e., “we” see ourselves as rational, “they” are non-rational, emotional, spiritual, etc.); segmentation works with sliding scales of inclusion/exclusion, whereby local opponents become allies when faced by a common enemy; encompassment imposes an overarching category of (all-)inclusion that is structured along hierarchies of relative (dis)similarity to a dominant center.

9 See also Wodak’s (2016, 39) reflections on Topoi der Geschichte.

10 This decision continued to shape Austrian politics until the 2017 parliamentary elections, from which Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) would emerge as the country’s new Chancellor.

11 The longer history of such fears also includes Austria’s Cold War experience and widespread self-understanding at the time as a last bastion, then bordered by the Iron Curtain to the East, against atheistic communism (Forlenza 2017).