Memory and Globalization: Austria's Recycling of the Nazi Past and Its European Echoes

Abstract

Not since the Waldheim affair in the 1980s, which brought the former UN Secretary General and Austrian Minister for Foreign Affairs under the critical observation of the Western powers because of his doubtful role as a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer during the Nazi occupation of Greece, has Austria, the small central European country with less than eight million inhabitants, been as present in international media as with the recent participation of JOrg Haider's Freedom Party in the new government. The major papers in Europe Le Monde, The Guardian, El Pais, Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and in the United States The New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today and many regional dailies have devoted much attention to the rise to power of an accused right-wing populist party in one of the European Union member states. A wave of international criticism condensed in articles