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Article published In:
Democracy and Discriminatory Strategies in Parliamentary Discourse
Edited by Karin Bischof and Cornelia Ilie
[Journal of Language and Politics 17:5] 2018
► pp. 676–695

Austrian postwar democratic consensus and anti-Semitism

Rhetorical strategies, exclusionary patterns and constructions of the “demos” in parliamentary debates

| University of Vienna

This paper explores the relation between the use of anti-Semitic rhetoric in post-war Austrian parliamentary debate and the development of the consensus-oriented, corporatist model of Austrian democracy, the “consociational model,” between 1945 and 1955. Specifically, this paper examines the anti-Semitic stereotypes found in parliament, an arena where “the sayable” of official politics is defined, and whether such anti-Semitic stereotyping serves political-strategic purposes. The predominant pattern of exclusion proves to be the attribution of ambivalence, drawing on the repertoire of nationalist anti-Semitic stereotypes, depicting “emigrants” as “cowards,” incapable of love for and defense of their countries. The analysis shows this pattern of exclusion is rooted in an ethnicized, homogeneous, and masculinist understanding of the people – recurrent in contemporary right-wing movements and parties. It follows the lines of Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political, in which the distinction of “friend” and “enemy,” and hence, the eradication of pluralism and ambivalence, is pivotal.

Keywords: Austria, transition to democracy, anti-Semitism, topos, consociational model of democracy, ambivalence, concept of “the people”, antisemitism theory, masculinism, Carl Schmitt
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology and data
  • 3.Jewish expellees and the Demos – legislative context and rhetorical constructions in parliament
    • 3.1Legislative context
    • 3.2Rhetorical constructions of expellees
    • 3.3The topos of cowardice
    • 3.4The topos of privileged status, profiteering and harmfulness
    • 3.5The notion of ambivalence
    • 3.6The strategic use of discursive constructions of Jewish expellees – “emigrants” and the Austrian consociational model
  • 4.The notion of ambivalence and the concept of friend and enemy
    • 4.1Carl Schmitt’s masculinist and anti-Semitic concepts of friend and enemy, demos, and democracy
    • 4.2Ambivalence as a threat for the binary/dichotomous order of the world
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 September 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.18033.bis
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