Austria

EUROPE’S youngest neutral is ten years old this month, it was on May 15, 1955, that the then Austrian Foreign Minister, Leopold Figl. stepped onto die balcony of Prince Eugene’s imperial Belvedere Palace in Vienna and held up in triumph to his cheering countrymen below the State Treaty, bound in red morocco leather, by which Austria had just regained its independence after seventeen years of foreign rule — seven under Hitlerite Germany, followed by a post-war decade of four-power occupation.

Viewed against the broad perspective of the East-West struggle, the Austrian State Treaty was, for both sides, a calculated risk. To the Russians it meant a ticket of entrance to polite international society after the self-imposed isolation of the Stalin era. It represented also a Danubian sprat to catch a fatter German mackerel. The Kremlin had insisted that as the price for its freedom Austria should declare its “perpetual neutrality,” and the detailed ban on “foreign bases and installations” imposed on Austria was widely seen at the time as the Soviet model for a neutralized Germany. The Western powers, though worried about some aspects of the Austrian settlement, hailed it on balance as a decisive break in the cold war.

Today we see that on neither side have these hopes or fears been fulfilled, though on neither side were they misplaced. The cold war is still with us. Germany is as far from unity (and neutrality) as it was ten years ago. But Austria has stayed peaceful, prosperous, and stable, though a little bored with life “a la Suisse.”

There are signs that in the decade ahead it will maintain this prosperity and will also try to cure the boredom. Its efforts in this field could influence the future shape of Europe in that critical area where the Eastern and W estern segments of the continent divide and join.

Of the gifts which came Austria’s way as a result of the treaty ten years ago. three stand out: a soundly based economy in which the minus of Soviet depredations has been outbalanced by the plus of Western and, above all, American aid; domestic peace, assured by the post-war rivals, the left-wing Socialists and the right-wing Catholics; and abroad, a certain insulation from world problems imposed by the status of neutrality and by a specific pledge never to indulge in any renewed form of ansc.hluss, or union, with Germany. The first lias flourished. The second has shakily survived. The third is cautiously eroding.

T he spread of treasure

Austria’s sound economic position and prospects today (sometimes described, condescendingly and inaccurately, as the “Austrian miracle”) surprise only those who have not examined the solid natural framework on which they rest.

Austria has almost the ideal economic balance for a small state. It possesses a wealth of raw materials and power resources of all kinds: timber reserves big enough to allow 10 million cubic meters to be felled a year; nearly 400 million tons of high-grade ore reserves, or enough to feed all its blast furnaces well into the next millennium; coal, and the even more precious “white coal” of electric power, of which Austria is now Europe’s biggest exporter; oil fields whose richness is exceeded on the continent only by those of Rumania and Russia itself; magnesite, copper, zinc bauxite; a net income from the “invisible exports” of tourism approaching $350 million a year; and, on top of all this, a soil which provides its people with nearly all the food and far more of the wine than they can consume.

This is a much broader spread of treasure than was ever possessed by its Alpine neighbor and fellow neutral, Switzerland, which for generations has been the embodiment of prosperity. It should not therefore be surprising that Austria, freed from the burdens of the arms race, should be entering its second decade of independence with one of the soundest currencies in Europe (covered 125 percent by gold and foreign-exchange reserves) and a level of industrial output that has already risen by half during its first decade of freedom.

It is the working truce between the right and left of Austrian politics — whose pre-1938 squabbles always enfeebled the country and once plunged it into civil war that has enabled this quiet exploitation of Austria’s riches to take place. But on the future domestic political scene the outlook is less cheerful.

Government 1>\ compromise

Austria’s coalition government between the conservative People’s Party and the Socialists was first formed in 1945 under the emergency of the Occupation. It is now a twenty-year-old world freak, and, like most freaks, makes a virtue out of what is essentially unnatural. The argument for extending the coalition into the era of freedom was that any other course has always been rendered impossible by the close balance between the main rivals (82 People’s Party seats to 74 Socialist in 1956; changing to 79:78 in 1959, and 81:76 in 1962, which is still the parliamentary tally today).

I The real reason for the survival of Austria’s coalition is its inborn love of compromise, coupled with the fear that pre-war political passions ‘are not really dead. How justified this fear may be is suggested by the fierce argument still raging between right and left over the proposed return of Otto von Hapsburg to his i native land — not as Pretender, not | even as Archduke, but as Herr Doktor and a private citizen, swearing allegiance to the republic that banished his father some forty-six years ago.

The Archduke took this oath two years ago in a form declared valid by the Austrian Supreme Court. His return from exile has been sponsored by the People’s Party on the plain grounds of human decency and justice. But for many of the older generation of Socialists, the very word Hapsburg still produces symptoms of hysteria; and the Socialist Minister of Interior in the coalition, setting himself above the Chancellor and the Supreme Court, has ordered his frontier officials to turn hack the luckless Hapsburg wanderer whenever and wherever he presents himself for admission to his homeland. This deadlock is still unbroken, and it represents perhaps the biggest single strain that Austrian domestic politics faces in the years immediately ahead.

Link with the Common Market

What is the future likely to be?

hat role can neutral Austria play — this plump pigeon squatting on the Vienna perch of the great double-headed eagle — in a world whose ideological conflicts were once fought out over its prostrate body?

It lias taken Austria some time to summon up the necessary courage to strike out in the direction indicated. But the broad outlines of Austria’s policy for the years ahead are now emerging. As befits any country that has sat for a thousand years at Europe’s crossroads, this policy will concentrate on clearing the paths to all points of the geographical and political compass around it. The two priorities are, first, linking up with the Common Market in the West without provoking Russian ire in the East, and second, expanding economic and cultural relations with Eastern Europe without arousing suspicions of “selling out to Communism” iu the West.

’kite arguments for establishing some sort of link with the Common Market arc both urgent and convincing. During the first nine months of 1964, the latest period for which complete statistics are available, 59 percent of all Austria’s imports came from the Six and 48 percent of all its exports went out to the Six. Austria joined the Britishsponsored “outer ring” of the Seven, the European Free Trade Association, only in the hope that it would prove a stepping-stone to a fused Western Europe of the Thirteen, or more. When De Gaulle dashed this hope by vetoing Britain’s candidacy for the Common Market two years ago, Austria had to try to devise some stepping-stone of its own.

The problem has been to find a link that will give Austria the economic benefits of trading with the Six without the political implications and responsibilities of full membership, or even association. The Kremlin has repeatedly warned Vienna that any such formal tie would be regarded in Moscow as a violation both of the neutrality undertaking and of the no-anschiuss pledge, for at the heart of the Common Market arc the West Germans, “Bonn revanchists,” in Soviet parlance. The Austrian government is thus toying with three possible types of modified link with the Six - - a Customs Union, an Economic Union, or a mutual Free Trade Zone arrangement. The last is the current favorite in Vienna, but it still has to be accepted by the Common Market partners in Brussels.

There are many in the West (including, during the Kennedy era, the crusaders for De Gaulle’s Grand Alliance) who have argued that the pure anti-Communist wine of the Six should not be watered down by neutralism, whether of the Austrian. Swiss, or Swedish brand. This reluctance to create the far-reaching precedent of making any special exceptions is still marked in Brussels. The Austrian philosophy is that the Six can serve Europe as a whole only by creating such precedents, for only thus can they expand their own horizons.

Here, Austria’s material selfinterest and its genuine spiritual Europeanness march hand in hand. The People’s Party Chancellor, Dr. Josef Klaus, put it in these words in his appeal to the Council ol Europe at Strasbourg on January 26: “Strive for a European formula that is not too narrow . . . for one that has no exclusiveness about it.” And in a later passage: “East Europe is Europe as well. We Austrians would regard the European house ol the future as an unfinished building if it consisted only of a western and central tract, with the Eastern wing left unconstructed.” This comes very close to an architectural simile for De Gaulle’s one Europe from the Atlantic to the LYals. Significantly, France has become the most active sponsor within the Six lor opening separate negotiations with Vienna.

Vision of United Europe

Austria’s unique role in world affairs does, of course, still rest in its special relationship with those countries to the East over which, for centuries, the Hapsburgs ruled. No one in his senses talks in Vienna today of an Austrian mission in terms of political power, such as the rolling back of Communism’s frontiers. This “mission” was always part faith and part fact, part ambition and part accident of life.

Austria is still physically tied to the Danube Basin by a twisting graygreen cord 1800 miles long, the Danube itself. It is tied mentally by literally millions of blood relationships and thousands of symbols: the roads leading to Vienna from Prague and Budapest carry, for example, the old route sign “I.” even after twenty years of orientation to Moscow. Some 15 percent of Austrian trade lies with the Communist East, and the trend is upward.

There is evidence that in the decade ahead Austria will seek to make more of these openings created by geography and tradition. The old nervousness to take no initiative that might offend Moscow is fading as Russia itself changes and the “satellites” begin to belie their name. The Austrian Socialist Foreign Minister. Dr. Bruno Kreisky, recently described his country’s future in these terms:

“Our position in the world will depend on how large our contribution is to the peace and stability of the region in which we arc geographically placed.” He singled out the expansion of Danube traffic and the creation of a Rhine-Main-OderDanube canal network as the most obvious physical steps ahead. But he stressed that Austria’s role in Eastern Europe could be effective only when exerted as “a policy of our democratic presence in this part ofThe continent.”

Such is the Viennese vision for the 1970s, as neutral Austria gives thanks i for its first ten years of freedom with bell-ringing in its churches, bonfires on its mountain peaks, and champagne receptions in its baroque palaces. It is in essence a unitedEurope vision, coming from the same capital where forty years ago the original pan-European movement was launched. Both elements of Austrian policy —the broadening of the Common Market in the West and the lowering of the Iron Curtain i to the East — serve this aim.