The press has noted that Haiderism has a deeply xenophobic character. It
feeds on racial hatred and resentment toward immigrants, in this particular
instance some tens of thousands of people fleeing the civil wars in former
Yugoslavia.
from today's L.A. TIMES, op-ed:
The Pots Are Calling the Kettle Names
Europe Much of Haider's anti-foreigner rhetoric is not that
different from the positions held by some EU member states.
By DOUGLAS KLUSMEYER
In reacting so strongly to the Freedom Party's admission into the
Austrian government, European Union political leaders are jumping
at their own shadows. Do they truly find the Freedom Party's
anti-immigrant stance so morally reprehensible that Austria must
now be punished with sanctions and high-minded rebukes? Or
could it be that much of the anti-foreigner rhetoric of the Freedom
Party's leader, Joerg Haider, is not that different from the positions
that some EU member states have used to justify their own
grudging policies toward immigrants?
By linking anti-foreigner appeals with sympathetic gestures
toward the Nazi past, Haider has broken an unofficial code in
Euro-speak, a code that permits leaders to treat the cultural
diversity of immigrants as a threat to the fundamental cohesion of
their societies while defending the sanctity of universal human rights
and democratic values.
Surely, many of the positions that Haider has advocated cannot
have struck EU leaders as falling far outside established policy.
Over the past 15 years, the number of foreign residents in Austria
has risen dramatically. In the name of preserving Austrian identity
and cultural heritage, Haider has called for a constitutional
amendment declaring Austria to be "not a country of immigration."
He has advocated stiffer controls on illegal immigration and a
crackdown on foreigner crime. He has opposed granting municipal
voting rights to foreign residents and supported restrictive rules
governing naturalization.
Haider does not have to reach deep into a fascist past to find
ample precedent to legitimate his calls as a stronger version of
policies practiced elsewhere in Europe. He needs merely to point
across Austria's border at the example of the Federal Republic of
Germany.
Faced with a growing population of foreign residents in the
1980s and 1990s, the Federal Republic--in flagrant denial of the
demographic facts--clung to the official fiction that it was not a
country of immigration. Today, despite a rising number of
second-generation children of these residents, the Federal Republic
has only just begun the reform required to facilitate citizenship.
Germany's Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social
Union--the conservative sister parties of Austria's People's Party,
which brought Haider's Freedom Party into its new governing
coalition--have successfully challenged in court the extension of
municipal voting rights to local foreign residents.
<ellipsis>
for the rest, see http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20000221/t000016886.html before tomorrow.
The author is with the Carnegie endowment.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
