The ‘Fourth Way’ of the Ultra Right: Austria,Europe,and the End of Neo-Corporatism

WHEN IN EARLY FEBRUARY 2000 Austria's conservative People's Party (ÖVP) announced that it would build a coalition with the ultra-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) shockwaves spread through the media worldwide. Undoubtedly, this constituted a historic event in the European political landscape. For the first time a party of the extreme xenophobic Right was allowed to enter government and as a result, for the first time in their history, the member states of the European Union decided to put one member state under diplomatic quarantine and to reduce bi-lateral relations to a technical level.¹ Now, as the diplomatic boycott—the so-called ‘sanctions’—has been lifted it becomes clear that it has achieved the very opposite of what was intended. Contrary to widely circulated opinion, though, it was not the boycott itself which was unjustified but the lifting of the boycott. Questions of hypocrisy aside, in reality the boycott proved to be the first purely political decision taken by the EU: not the usual bureaucratic compromise solution but a decision over political principles by which a line of demarcation was drawn vis-à-vis ultra-right populism (Marchart 2000). For a few months it seemed that the EU-member states were not prepared to accept racist parties in government. Of course, this turned out to be a rather short-lived form of heroism when Austrian ministers threatened to use their power of veto at EU-conferences in order to fight the sanctions by any means.