RelationshipsBeziehungsgeschichten. Austria and the United States in the Twentieth Century by Günter Bischof

Author:Günter Bischof [Bischof, Günter]
Language: deu
Format: epub
Tags: History, Essays
ISBN: 9783706557276
Google: trt4DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: StudienVerlag
Published: 2014-04-28T02:43:21+00:00

American Public Opinion about Austria during the Early Years of the Cold War1

“Indeed it is hard for an American to distinguish between the various nations crowded in the core of Europe. But it becomes definitely confusing in the case of Germany and Austria.”2

The importance of public opinion in foreign policy decision-making is unique in a mature democracy like the United States. I grew up in Austria, a small European country with a relatively young and somewhat troubled democratic tradition. Austrian political culture by and large has been disdainful of the importance of public opinion even though the governing classes, albeit only for the sake of political survival, were always interested in the “public mood” (Stimmung). In Austria, a paternalistic state has always taken care of its subjects. In issues of foreign affairs, the public was assumed to be innocent; in the age-old Josephinian and Metternichian traditions, foreign policy decision-making therefore has been considered the preserve of a small elite circle on the venerable old Ballhausplatz, the center of Austrian government. Akin to George Kennan, the Viennese realpolitiker considered public opinion fickle and a pernicious influence on elite decision-making.3 Given such a differential in the importance of public opinion in American and Austrian democracy, my reading of Ernest R. May’s writing on the importance of American public opinion formation, particularly his American Imperialism (1968), hit me with the force of biblical revelation as a graduate student. May learned from scholarship spearheaded by Lazarsfeld that in the U.S. an “attentive public” of up to 25% was interested in foreign affairs, often following a small number of opinion leaders (government officials, editors, journalists, university professors), whereas 75% of the American public was not interested in America’s role in the world at large.4

It is one of the subtle ironies of history that Paul F. Lazarsfeld, one of the godfather’s of modern social science research based on statistics—the invention of the scientific study of mass communications, market research, and public opinion—was a Jewish émigré from Vienna.5 He hailed from a country where public officials did not welcome popular opinion in their decision-making. The classic style of Austrian governance had been the archetypical paternalism of the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II—the benign tutelage over the masses, presumed to be ignorant, by a small governing class.

Constitutional government and the ballot came late in the Habsburg Monarchy, and the paternalistic “Josephinian” system of government prevailed into the republican era of both post-World War I and II democratic Austria.6 Lazarsfeld, in fact, left for the United States not in 1938 after the Anschluss, as one might expect, but in 1933 with a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to improve his research methodology on market and public opinion research. He was looking for better opportunities to practice his model of government and for private business contracts to pay for his scientific research polls, done through private institutes loosely attached to a university. He had pioneered this model in Vienna in the early 1930s and set up the first private research institute,

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