Nationalizing Political Cultures in the First Austrian Republic and the Austrofascist State

The received wisdom on interwar Austria maintains that the Dollfuss/Schuschnigg state (1933-1938) was the product of a conservative political culture which grew up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in reaction against liberalism and socialism. Underpinning this argument is the ‘three-camp’ theory in Austrian politics: the emergence of three separate mass political movements whose roots also ostensibly lay in the late imperial period. The combination of these two orthodoxies has led to consensus that the ‘nationalist’ camp supported fascism (read National Socialism), while the ‘conservative’ camp under Chancellors Dollfuss and Schuschnigg acted as a bulwark against fascist movements in Austria. The consensus position, however, is built on a flawed determinism that seeks to explain Austria’s ‘doomed’ path from multinational empire to National Socialism. The problem of determinism might be avoided if we define fascism as a process, rather than a ‘type’ of regime or ideology, much like constructivists define national identity as a process of imagining the national community. This paper argues that fascism in Austria was a process that corresponded to the task of defining the boundaries of ‘German Austria’ during the interwar years. Two examples will illustrate the evolution of this process in interwar Austria: firstly, the debates and policies on citizenship between 1919 and 1929 and, secondly, the population policies of the ‘Austrofascist’ state during the mid-1930s, in particular the proposed population index system that was modelled on similar policies in Fascist Italy. Drawing on these examples, the paper will demonstrate that the history of interwar political movements and regimes in Central Europe needs to be located within a wider process of nation building in post-imperial states and population policies in interwar Europe more generally, rather than in ‘generic’ or ‘anatomical’ explanations of fascism.