Abstract
The Austrian chapter by Birgit Sauer emphasizes the electoral successes of the radical right, which since the 1990s have triggered the formation of civil society organizations that oppose the mobilization of hate against immigrants. It shows the weakness of Austrian civil society organizations in forging alliances and shifting their activities towards solidarity with other activists, common strategic framing, and transversal politics. It refers to some alliances that go beyond identity issues, but emphasizes that transversal framings of racism that actively include feminism, gender, sexuality, and class are overall missing. Only some civil society organizations explicitly link the issue of voting preferences for the radical right to neoliberal transformations of work and family and thus connect anti-racism to issues of social inequality and marginalization at the intersection of gender and race.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Karner (2007), who analyzes the “counter-hegemonic regional press” in Austria.
- 2.
The empirical work for this paper has been conducted in the context of two EU-funded projects, eEAV and RAGE. I thank Edma Ajanovic, who did the empirical study in the RAGE project, and Stefanie Mayer, who conducted research in the eEAV project, for their work.
- 3.
Until 1971, homosexuality was criminalized in Austria.
- 4.
The largest concentration camp on Austrian territory was located in the city of Mauthausen.
- 5.
The MKÖ is the successor organization of the Austrian Concentration Camp Community Mauthausen, whose founders were camp survivors.
- 6.
The DÖW was established in 1963 by former resistance fighters, concentration camp prisoners, persons returning from exile, and academics.
- 7.
Founded in 1997.
- 8.
We selected the most publicly visible and the most diverse civil society organizations. We did not take into account organizations such as Amnesty International, Caritas, the Austrian Red Cross, and Volkshilfe, which also help migrants and asylum seekers by providing mentorships or “integration buddy programs” and by raising awareness about discriminative issues in this field.
- 9.
After WWII, right-wing dueling fraternities (Burschenschaften) gathered on 8 May at the Heldenplatz to remember the fallen Austrian Wehrmacht comrades and to grieve the end of the Nazi regime. Until 2013, only small (left-wing) groups demonstrated against this event, but since 2013, the Celebration of Joy has recoded this public space in the city center on 8 May to commemorate the liberation from National Socialism.
- 10.
In March 2017, SOS Mitmensch launched the campaign “Populistenpause”, which called for a break in public and media reporting on the radical right.
- 11.
It seems to be much easier for MiGaY to cooperate with political parties’ homosexual caucuses.
- 12.
Another example of the mainstreaming of the radical right is that both ÖVP and SPÖ before the latest elections sounded out possible coalitions with the FPÖ.
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Sauer, B. (2019). The (Im)Possibility of Creating Counter-Hegemony Against the Radical Right: The Case of Austria. In: Siim, B., Krasteva, A., Saarinen, A. (eds) Citizens’ Activism and Solidarity Movements. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76183-1_5
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