Table of Contents
Laws regulating immigration and citizenship in interwar Austria were part of a European trend of population politics in fascist and authoritarian states in the 1930s. A new proposal in 1935 for a population index, including identity cards for every person residing in Austria, was modelled on Italian legislation and signalled a shift towards totalitarian models of population management. While Austria’s population index system was never implemented before Austria’s annexation to Nazi Germany in 1938, it corresponded nonetheless to a broader pattern of fascist and authoritarian population policy across Europe in the interwar era. Official and public debates about the proposed population index reveal the dual aims of Austrian policy and opinion makers: first, to facilitate greater surveillance of citizens and non-citizens; and second, to reduce the number of Jews in Austria either through restricting immigration or by precluding Jews already residing in Austria from being naturalised. This connection between racism, migration and citizenship in the Austrian case illustrates the convergence of different strands of population politics as fascist and authoritarian states attempt to forge new citizens. Moreover, the interwar Austrian case highlights the interplay between exclusionary practices of nationalism and citizenship and successive waves of mass migration during the twentieth century. [1] My article places the Austrian case within these broader processes of citizenship and state building in early twentieth-century Europe, but parallels could also be drawn with other post-imperial or post-colonial states.
Despite dozens of specialised and comparative studies and definitions of fascism, scholars have yet to reach a consensus about what fascism is, and where it took root and came to power in the years between 1918 and 1945 in Europe. [2] If scholarship on the interwar European regimes and movements still does not have a clear and comprehensive definition of fascism, it has made virtually no headway into the murky hues of ‘authoritarianism’, a category scholars use loosely to characterise a broad range of states that appear to have some similarities with the accepted fascist states—Italy and Germany—but lack the mass movement, charismatic leader and popular consent that characterise the regimes in Italy and Germany. The Austrian dictatorship under Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt von Schuschnigg (the latter took office as Chancellor after Dollfuss’ assassination by Austrian Nazis in July 1934) typically falls into this latter category of authoritarian states that also exhibit elements of fascism. Lasting approximately five years from the dissolution of parliamentary democracy in March 1933 to annexation to Nazi Germany in March 1938, the regime constitutionally known as the Ständestaat, or corporate state, had a paramilitary force (the Heimwehr or home guard), state youth groups, welfare programs promoting motherhood as a patriotic duty and a one-party organisation, the Fatherland Front, of which membership was compulsory for teachers and public servants. Historians of the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg state, seven decades after it ceased to exist, have been reluctant to move beyond the outdated and clumsy opposition of ‘fascist’ versus ‘authoritarian’ in their characterisations of the State—an approach pioneered by Hugh Seton-Watson and John Rath, notably, and modified only slightly by others such as Francis Carsten and Gerhard Botz. [3]
More recent attempts to see fascism as a trajectory of radicalising right-wing tendencies, rather than as a fixed category or ‘type’, have been more successful in shifting the debate away from a fascist-authoritarian dichotomy towards a more fluid definition emphasising processes over outcomes. [4] Scholars who follow a process-oriented approach to the Austrian state, for example, argue that the regime represents a fascistising trajectory cut short by the country’s annexation to Nazi Germany in 1938, though this is still the minority view. [5] Such a conceptual and historiographical shift in studies of fascist and authoritarian regimes in Europe also allows us to look more closely at the radicalisation of certain political, social and economic policies that seek total control of society. Historians have questioned the extent to which such policies did in fact result in conformism by the population, especially when we consider the sphere of everyday life within the constraints of official ideology: the experiences of women in particular teach us much about the limits of popular consensus as dictatorships attempted to rule over even the most private of citizens’ choices, such as whether to procreate for the State. [6] But questions remain unanswered in some respects: how did fascist and authoritarian states seek to exert control over their citizens; and how did this function to produce particular kinds of citizens or a particular notion of citizenship? This article shows the validity of the process-oriented approach to fascism for studies of population politics in the interwar period and in the Austro-fascist state. It does this, moreover, by demonstrating how fascist states sought to define the relationship between citizens and the State by ever-greater controls over citizens’ mobility and choice of residence, and by ever-closer surveillance of citizens’ recorded lives from cradle to grave. In this way, the relationship between fascism and citizenship can be seen as symbiotic processes of categorising, counting and excluding individuals in order to build and legitimise states.
Many studies of population politics under fascist and authoritarian regimes have explored the eugenics and pro-natalist policies of the regimes, [7] but so far another area of population management—migration and citizenship—has received little attention. This oversight is surprising since arguably this aspect of population control reinforces the regimes’ eugenics and pro-natalist programs. Carl Ipsen has argued that fascist population politics in Italy were characterised by a range of measures spanning nuptiality, fertility, mortality, emigration and internal migration: the Italian Fascist Deputy, Gaetano Zingali, explicitly referred to ‘this famous demographic quintet’ in a 1929 speech to Parliament. [8] By exploring these multiple fronts of Mussolini’s ‘demographic battle’, Ipsen extends the debate beyond Mussolini’s ‘battle for births’ to include a spectrum of policies that the regime itself saw as part of a larger battle to create ‘a new Fascist society’. [9]
Ipsen’s analysis of fascist population policy in Italy merits further exploration here because of his emphasis on policies of migration and colonisation. Moreover, Italy makes for a particularly relevant comparative case study with the Austrian case because of a number of ‘relational’ elements between the two cases, as we will see below. [10] Finally, although fascist population policy in Italy, unlike in Austria, did not seek to control immigration into the country, but rather to restrict emigration from Italy and regulate internal migration, the Italian case nevertheless highlights the interacting processes of citizenship practices, migration and other radicalised notions of population management under fascist governments.
[1] I use citizenship and nationalism in the ‘constructivist’ sense of practices and processes, rather than the outcome-oriented and ‘stages’ approach of scholars such as Ernst Gellner and others, who explain divergences between ethnic-based and civic-based nationalism (and one could add citizenship) according to the various stages of industrialisation and cultural advancement of historically distinct groups of peoples and territories. Benedict Anderson’s 1983 model of an imagined community is the best-known constructivist approach to nationalism, but see also Rogers Brubaker (2004, Ethnicity Without Groups, Harvard University Press, New York), which defines nationalism as ‘a category of practice’.
[2] For some of the more well-known attempts at synthesis and definition, see Payne, Stanley 1995, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945, UCL Press, London; Griffin, Roger (ed.) 1995, Fascism, Oxford University Press, Oxford; and Paxton, Robert 2004, The Anatomy of Fascism, Knopf, New York.
[3] See Seton-Watson, Hugh 1966, ‘Fascism, right and left’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 183–97; Rath, John and Schum, Carolyn W. 1980, ‘The Dollfuss-Schuschnigg regime: fascist or authoritarian?’, in Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet and Jan Petter Myklebust (eds), Who Were the Fascists?: Social roots of European fascism, Universitetsforlaget, Bergen. See also Rath’s essays in Volumes 27–30 and 32 of Austrian History Yearbook (1996–99, 2001). Francis Carsten, the most eminent scholar of fascism in Austria, pioneered the two-pronged approach to fascism in Austria—that is, the view that the Heimwehr and the Nazi Party were two distinct fascist movements even if the regime itself was not fascist. See Carsten, F. L. 1977, Fascist Movements in Austria: From Schönerer to Hitler, Sage, London; and 1980, The Rise of Fascism, Second edition, Methuen, London. Gerhard Botz has also defined the Nazis and the Heimwehr as two ‘brands’ of fascism in Austria: the Nazis, representing ‘national fascism’ akin to German Nazism, and the Heimwehr, along with its close sibling, the Frontkämpfervereinigung (Front Veterans’ Association), representing ‘Heimwehr fascism’. The Christian Social Party and the Fatherland Front fall outside of the Austrian family of fascism in Botz’s assessment and, after the Heimwehr wasabsorbed into the Fatherland Front in 1936, he concludes that the Heimwehr also ceased to be fascist.See Botz, Gerhard 1980, ‘Varieties of fascism in Austria: introduction’, in Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet and Jan Petter Myklebust (eds), Who Were the Fascists?: Social roots of European fascism, Universitetsforlaget, Bergen.
[4] See, notably, Kallis, Aristotle A. 2003, ‘“Fascism”, “para-fascism” and “fascistization”: on the similarities of three conceptual categories’, European History Quarterly, vol.33, no. 2, pp. 219–49; and Mann, Michael 2004, Fascists, Cambridge University Press, New York.
[5] For the ‘Austro-fascist’ school of historians, see Tálos, Emmerich and Neugebauer, Wolfgang (eds) 2005, ‘Austrofaschismus’: Beiträge über Politik, Ökonomie und Kultur 1934–1938, Fifth edition, Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, Vienna; and Lewis, Jill 1990, ‘Conservatives and fascists in Austria, 1918–34’, inMartin Blinkhorn (ed.), Fascists and Conservatives: The radical right and the establishment in twentieth-century Europe, Unwin Hyman, London, pp. 98–117; and 1991, Fascism and the Working Class in Austria, 1918–1934: The failure of labour in the First Republic , Berg, New York. More recently, Tim Kirk has argued that the conditions under which Austro-fascism came to power in the early 1930s were the same as in Germany and Italy. See Kirk, Tim 1996, Nazism and the Working Class in Austria: Industrial unrest and political dissent in the ‘national community’, Cambridge University Press, New York; and his article, ‘Fascism and Austro-fascism’, (2003, Contemporary Austrian Studies, vol. 11, pp. 10–31).
[6] The trend since the 1980s emerging from the ‘everyday life’ school of West German historians (Alltagsgeschichte) has been to challenge to various degrees the thesis of top-down rule in the dictatorships of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Stalin’s Russia. Some, like Victoria de Grazia in The Culture of Consent: Mass organization of leisure in fascist Italy (1981, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) and How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (1992, University of California Press, Berkeley), and, more recently, R. J. B. Bosworth in Mussolini’s Italy: Life under the dictatorship (2005, Penguin, London), have questioned the limits of consensus in daily life under the dictatorship. For most Italians, as Bosworth writes, ‘everyday Mussolinism’ did not equate with ‘Fascist totalitarianism’. For others, notably Sheila Fitzpatrick, who coined the phrase ‘everyday Stalinism’ in her book Everyday Stalinism—Ordinary lives in extraordinary times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (1999, Oxford University Press, New York), men, women and families lived their lives daily within a Stalinist orbit or ‘habitat’ so much so that Stalin’s Great Turn was less a ‘revolution from above’ than it was a ‘revolution from below’. A new generation of historians schooled in these earlier approaches has begun to write the ‘second chapter’ of Alltagsgeschichte in the face of its seeming irrelevance to the new cultural history. See Steege, Paul, Bergerson, Andrew Stuart, Healy, Maureen and Swett, Pamela E. 2008, ‘The history of everyday life: a second chapter’, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 80, no. 2, pp. 358–78.
[7] Studies of European population policies have focused mostly on Western Europe. See, for example, Quine, Maria Sophia 1996, Population Politics in Twentieth Century Europe: Fascist dictatorships and liberal democracies, Routledge, London. More recently, scholarship has also branched out to include Central and Eastern European regimes. See Turda, Marius and Weindling, Paul J. (eds) 2007, ‘Blood and Homeland’: Eugenics and racial nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940, CEU Press, Budapest.
[8] Cited in Ipsen, Carl 1996, Dictating Demography, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 88.
[9] See Ipsen’s review of his own book in ‘Population policy in the age of fascism: observations on recent literature’ (1998, Population and Development Review, vol. 24, no. 3, p. 591).
[10] On the value of ‘relational’ comparisons in European history—that is, historical comparisons that seek to use transnational approaches to explore the interactions and mutual influences between compared case studies—see Ther, Philipp 2003, ‘Beyond the nation: the relational basis of a comparative history of Germany and Europe’, Central European History, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 45–73.