This ambitious study by Christian Karner, a sociologist who has published widely on nationalism, ethnicity, and memory studies in Europe, revisits the topic visited more often than any other in Habsburg and Austrian history: nationalism. The book weaves together a number of “macro” social scientific theories and selected snippets from historians' “micro” studies of particular nationalist contexts over 200 years. The author's approach may frustrate historians, but a patient reading yields some valuable new insights into the ways that nationalists in the Habsburg past and the Austrian present share rhetorical strategies in articulating visions of a golden past, an unjust or corrupt present, and a projected happy future for their nation. The longue durée scope helps to show continuities between post-1945 Austrian history and nationalist discourses in the longer Central European past.
The organizing theory of the work is the neo-Weberian concept of social closure as developed by sociologists Frank Parkin and Raymond Murphy, which postulates the ways that a status group secures resources, benefits, and privileges for itself at the expense of others. Depending on which group holds such privileges or seeks to gain them, closure follows a logic of “exclusion” or “usurpation” (67). In addition to the closure model, a great many other theoretical frames are introduced over the course of seven chapters. They include: recurring national (master-)topoi, deixis, “grammars of identity,” banal nationalism and its “hot” counterpoint, and Bourdieu's habitus and “universe of the undiscussed” (doxa). While there are a few too many theories in play, the author effectively returns to one theme that, to this reviewer, gives the book its greatest coherence: the “palimpsest-like re-writing of ideational and symbolic strands in new contexts” (211). Discursive borrowing and recycling is the thread that holds the study together.
Romanticism is the topic of the first chapter. Karner traces the nationalist features of German Romanticism and its transmission to the Austrian lands. With a growing consciousness of his own “German-ness” (cited, 44), Friedrich Schlegel's move to Vienna signaled “the definitive arrival of the romantic ethos in Habsburg Central Europe” (46). The next chapter tackles the whole of the nineteenth century, offering a summary of the hardening of national categories and the articulation of various identity grammars used by nationalists, including binary, encompassing, assimilationist, and the grammar of apostasy (81). Here, the author selects examples of nationally tinged moments from leading secondary works on the late Habsburg period and subjects them to the “critical discourse analysis” (CDA) of the sociologist. Next comes a chapter on the world wars and the Holocaust. While the author is to be commended for attempting to synthesize multiple, enormous fields of scholarship and apply his organizing theory to it, it is not clear that national closure or its more virulent form, “genocidal closure” (104), helps us understand something new about the period 1914–1945.
From here, the narrative shifts to the (re)construction of a distinctly Austrian “national mythscape” (142), the subterranean currents of selective remembering and forgetting of the Nazi period that bubble beneath the Second Republic, and Nazi/pan-German scandals and exposés that periodically rattle the happily neutral “Alpine Republic” of lovers of nature, skiing, music, and food. Karner is excellent on the return of the German nationalist “third camp,” the rise of Jörg Haider and his ideological U-turns, and the reshaping of the political landscape after 1989. In the final two chapters, we hear the voices of Austrian nationalists in the present, who do indeed seem to be recycling vocabulary and discursive schemes from nationalist forebears of the nineteenth century. The quotations Karner pulls from letters to the editor of the twenty-first-century Kronen Zeitung (key primary texts in the later chapters), with a few geographical and temporal adjustments, could have come from the dusty archival boxes of the Habsburg era. Swap “Slavs” or “Jews” in for “Turks,” and we could be in the nineteenth century: “The Viennese will soon be a minority, Turkish and other immigrants are assuming power in Vienna's districts. Goodbye, old, beautiful Vienna!” wrote a Kronen Zeitung reader in 2010 (179). Similarly, the schooling debates of the present, in which letters to the editor describe large numbers of non-German-speaking pupils in a classroom as a “veritable catastrophe” (179), draw on the same zero-sum logic as the nationalist rumbles on the “language frontiers” of the Habsburg Monarchy.
The book's title, which extends into the digital age, somewhat overpromises. While the study does indeed analyze Austrian politics in the past two decades, noting “especially the (New) Right's prolific use of our digital era's social media” (205), the study does not explore why the Right, and the FPÖ in particular, has had more active and successful social media outreach on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs. Karner does offer one close reading of a 2017 Heinz-Christian Strache Facebook post in which nationalist argumentative strategies (in this instance, anti-Turkish ones) are presented in an “ironic register” (209). This would be a promising lead to follow: how does the informal, irreverent, even snarky tone acceptable on social media—as compared to the traditional press—feed certain kinds of nationalist expression?
The author is speaking to (at least) two scholarly audiences: sociologists and historians. My hunch is that sociologists will find the first half of the book most useful, while historians will find the post-1945 chapters and analysis of deeper discursive roots undergirding recent Austrian electoral politics to be thought-provoking and highly informative.
