The Last Old Nation: Austrian National Consciousness since 1945

Abstract

If eighteenth-century America was the first new nation, twentieth-century Austria is the last old one.'1 Common to both the preindustrial American and the postindustrial Austrian cases is a process of cognitive mobilization which resulted in the decay of an old and the development of a new national consciousness. In North America the traditional identities of those who had once thought of themselves as loyal subjects of the British Crown were replaced by their new self-perceptions as Americans. At the outset of the nineteenth century Austrian national consciousness was a mixture of supranational loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty and of subnational identification with individual provinces. The growth of a German national consciousness during the second half of the century was rapid, and German elements prevailed in Austrian national consciousness during the interwar years. In the American case a revolution in the peoples' minds preceded victory in the Revolutionary War; in the Austrian case it followed the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. The development of an Austrian national consciousness since 1945 has had an important beneficial effect on Austrian politics. The political cohesion of the Second Austrian Republic has been striking in contrast to the political divisions of the First. In their attempts to account for this change, most observers have adopted a view from the top of society, analyzing the structure and strategy of Austria's political elites.2 This account benefits by a supplementary explanation which chooses a perspective from society's base through an analysis of the effect of mass beliefs on the traditionally explosive question of Austria's national identity. Austria's new national consciousness has become one of the brackets which maintains the cohesion between the different political camps (Lager) in Austria.