Heil, Haider?

David Pryce-Jones

The EU finds a whipping boy

AMAN named Joerg Haider is at the center of a storm reverberating throughout Europe, an artificial storm, but dangerous all the same. He is from Austria, a country that rarely rates headlines. But who is Haider, what is he?

An unsavory piece of work, to be sure. Born in 1950, the son of minor but enthusiastic Nazi officials, he grew up in the atmosphere peculiar to postwar Austria, in which people steadfastly avoided coming to terms with the country's recent devotion to Adolf Hitler, its favorite prewar son. In a tacit conspiracy, the ruling elites in the conservative People's party and the Social Democratic party--known respectively as the Blacks and the Reds--pretended that Austria had been an innocent victim of Nazism, with nothing to atone for. The truth, of course, was that Austrians had contributed more than their fair share to the Nazi cause. Nearly fifty years were to pass before a government accepted the obligation to apologize and make restitution, by which time few of the victims were still alive to benefit. Rejection of responsibility for Nazism, coupled with at least a measure of unspoken defiance, has generated moral and intellectual evasion in the man on the Austrian street, and Haider particularly speaks for him.

As a politician, Haider rose to become leader of the Freedom party, which has neo-Nazi origins. He seemed sincere when he said that the Waffen SS deserved "honor and respect," that Hitler's employment policies had been "orderly," and that concentration camps had been "punishment camps," implying that the inmates were actually miscreants. He has since retracted all of this loudly and often, but his supporters and his opponents alike sense that such views may indeed express the inner man. For many years, Haider has advocated a nationalist policy of Austria for the Austrians, especially in controlling would-be immigrants and guest workers.

A stylish dresser, driving a Porsche, skier and sportsman, with a photograph of his friend Arnold Schwarzenegger in his office, he cuts a dashing and even charismatic figure, lord of an estate comprising the whole valley of Barenthal, in the province of Carinthia. This was the property of a Jewish family until an uncle of Haider's "acquired" it in 1941 through the usual Nazi process of theft. Token compensation was paid after the war. In Austria, war-profiteering of this kind is so normal that nobody seems to hold it against Haider, and he was elected governor of Carinthia.

But politics can be complicated, and one aspect of Haider's popularity is positive rather than creepy. For years, the Blacks and the Reds cozily contrived to govern in coalition. Voters had been unable to throw the rascals out. Between them, the Blacks and Reds put in place a system known as Proport, which divided the spoils of office proportionately between them. The civil service from the highest rank down to village postmasters; museum and opera officials; the media, the bar, schoolteachers and academics; anyone in need of a franchise or a license, down to the level of a taxicab--all were subject to Proport. My turn, your turn. This surreptitious but institutionalized sweetheart dealing corrupted the entire society. Scandal continuously blistered Austrian public life. Needless to say, Blacks and Reds ensured that their own did not end up disgraced or imprisoned.

Haider upset that arrangement. In the general election last fall, his Freedom party received 27 percent of the vote, too small to form a government, but large enough to push its way into a new coalition. After a period of to-ing and fro-ing, the Freedom party and the Blacks agreed to a coalition government, without the Reds. Refusing a post in it, Haider himself remained governor of Carinthia. The election and the coalition-forming conformed in every respect to law and due procedure. Voters had broken the Black-Red cartel; it was their decision; and it might be supposed that nothing more remains to be said.

How very wrong. Austria is one of the 15 members of the European Union, and in a unanimous roar of rage the leaders of the other 14 propose to boycott and ostracize it, in effect repudiating democracy because they dislike its outcome. The several European treaties do not provide even the semblance of a right to adopt such a threatening and authoritarian position. Interference like this is unprecedented in the dealings of democratic states with one another.

Playing with the truth, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany trumpets, "If we make it clear that we want nothing to do with politicians like Haider, that is not interfering in another country's affairs." Belgium is a country with a Proport of its own, between Flemings and Walloons; it is a world champion in corruption; but its foreign minister now advocates throwing Austria right out of the EU. Even Britain has joined the pack baying for sanctions. The Prince of Wales has been obliged to cancel an engagement to attend a trade fair in Vienna. Non-European Israel withdrew its ambassador, although the veteran Viennese anti-Nazi Simon Wiesenthal has affirmed that Haider is a radical, not a neo-Nazi, and has never expressed any anti-Semitic opinion. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright conceded with comic graciousness that Austrians had the right to choose their own government, but advised them not to do so. The American ambassador to Vienna has been recalled.

Television channels throughout Europe have been spin-doctoring for their governments by running clips of 1938 newsreel, showing Hitler and the Wehrmacht triumphantly entering Vienna. Newspaper reports and cartoons by the hundred also try to establish equivalence between Hitler and Haider. To compare the two is an insult to history, but it serves to illustrate the manipulation of mass emotion by the unscrupulous that George Orwell immortalized as the Two Minute Hate. A sarcastic joke is doing the rounds in Vienna: "When is NATO going to begin bombing our coffeehouses?"

Haider has indeed struck a nerve with the issue of immigration, but this is a troubling matter for the entire continent, not just Austria. Immigrants from all over the world are seeking legal and illegal entry everywhere in Europe. The result is tension and discrimination, race riots and murders here and there, and a hardening of public opinion to which all the European governments have responded. A variety of quotas and controls, subtle and not so subtle, are in place. Britain, to give an extreme example, seems set to require visitors from India and Pakistan to deposit 10,000 [pounds sterling] per person as a surety that they will leave. European countries together busily deport every year hundreds of thousands of unwanted immigrants, most of them from the Middle East and Africa. The human cost is immense and the dilemma seemingly insoluble, but to single out Austria for racism and xenophobia is outright hypocrisy.

Nor are complaints about Haider's alleged totalitarian mindset convincing when they come from the French government, which contains ministers proud to call themselves orthodox Communists, or from the Italian government, whose prime minister, Massimo D'Alema, remained a Communist and a Soviet supporter until 1991, and to this day boasts of it. The previous Berlusconi government contained no fewer than five neo-Fascist ministers. Rifondazione, the successor to the Italian Communist party, and the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the German Communist party, occupy seats in their respective parliaments, but nobody proposes boycott and ostracism on account of these openly anti-democratic elements. In the case of Ulster, Prime Minister Tony Blair has strained to install in government IRA terrorists for whom fascist is the most fitting description.

The Socialist International, the elite Left that rules Europe, appears to have gone berserk, but there is a logic to its behavior. The European Union now taking shape is evidently a centralized and corporatist project of the type that defines socialism. Stealthy measure by stealthy measure, each of the 15 nations involved is surrendering its sovereignty and historic identity to a supranational entity. The project is driven from above. European leaders, of course, know that if the masses were ever allowed to give their opinion freely and fairly, they would overwhelmingly reject the political future planned for them.

One day, and perhaps soon, politicians will articulate their peoples' profound aspiration to national sovereignty and identity. The present hysterics of the ruling Euro-Left stem from the fear that Haider is the first such politician. It is a gift to them that he is tainted by association with neo-Nazism. But their focus on this particular (and odious) aspect of his rise is firing the very backlash of nationalism that the EU supposedly exists to extinguish. A recent precedent ought to offer a caution: The Soviet Union also claimed to have eliminated nationalism; instead, it eliminated the Soviet Union.

Revolted by the contempt the EU shows for fair play and democracy, Austrians are rallying to Haider. The Freedom party is fast becoming popular enough to win an election outright. Such a reaction against EU authoritarianism seems destined to spread from one country to the next, ultimately condemning the project to the limbo where the ghost of the USSR wanders. Seeds of division and violence are sprouting. Who knows? They may begin bombing the coffeehouses after all.

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