Article published in:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 17:3 (2018) ► pp. 428–446

International high finance against the nation?

Antisemitism and nationalism in Austrian print media debates on the economic crisis

| University of Vienna
| University of Vienna
This article analyses antisemitic elements in the Austrian print media discourse about the 2008–2010 economic crisis. The relevant discursive statements are examined in the light of a theoretical understanding of antisemitic discursive threads as found in the prevalent modes of presentation of the economic and financial crisis in the media. The first main finding is the broad avoidance of openly antisemitic stereotypes, with the exception of the Neue Kronen Zeitung. The second main finding is that structurally antisemitic discursive elements appear above all where (a) specific groups (“high finance”, “financial sharks”, “speculators”) are singled out as the main culprits, (b) these are opposed to a homogeneously constructed “us” (the “Volk”), and (c) where the formers’ greed is stressed and where they are accused of harming the people. Here we find nationalistic and latent antisemitic discourses, the stereotypical contrasting of finance and production, conspiracy theories and anti-Americanism closely interwoven.
Keywords: antisemitism, nationalism, national identity, Austria, anti-Americanism, economic crisis, print media
Published online: 20 July 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.16040.sto
Bibliography

Bibliography

Altheide, David L.
1996 Qualitative Media Analysis, Qualitative Research Methods Series, vol. 38. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bischof, Karin
2015 Global player EU? Eine ideologiekritische Metaphernanalyse. Bielefeld: transcript. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2017a “ ‘Emigranten’ und die Konstruktion des österreichischen Demos in Parlamentsdebatten nach 1945”. In Bilderbuch-Heimkehr? Remigration im Kontext, ed. by Katharina Prager and Wolfgang Straub, 191–202. Wuppertal: Arco.Google Scholar
2017b “Juden und Jüdinnen als Teil des österreichischen Demos”. In Jüdische Identitäten und antisemitische Politiken im österreichischen Parlament 1961–1933, ed. by Saskia Stachowitsch and Eva Kreisky, 293–322. Wien: Böhlau.Google Scholar
Claussen, Detlev
1994 Grenzen der Aufklärung. Die gesellschaftliche Genese des modernen Antisemitismus. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer.Google Scholar
Diner, Dan
2002 Feindbild Amerika. Über die Beständigkeit eines Ressentiments. München: Propyläen Verlag.Google Scholar
Engel, Jakob, and Ruth Wodak
2013 “ ‘Calculated Ambivalence’ and Holocaust denial in Austria.” In Analysing Fascist Discourse. European Fascism in Talk and Text, ed. by Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson, 73–96. New York/London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fleck, Christian, and Albert Müller
1994 “Zum nachnazistischen Antisemitismus in Österreich. Vorderbühne versus Hinterbühne”. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 5/1994, 481–515.Google Scholar
Gottschlich, Maximilian
2012 Die große Abneigung. Wie antisemitisch ist Österreich? Kritische Befunde zu einer sozialen Krankheit. Wien: Czernin.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen
1987 Eine Art Schadensabwicklung. Kleine Politische Schriften VI. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
Haury, Thomas
2005 “’…ziehen die Fäden im Hintergrund’. No-Globals, Antisemitismus und Antiamerikanismus.” In Gerüchte über die Juden. Antisemitismus, Philosemitismus und aktuelle Verschwörungstheorien, ed. by Hanno Loewy, 69–99. Essen: Klartext.Google Scholar
Hay, Colin
2013 “Treating the Symptom Not the Condition: Crisis Definition, Deficit Reduction and the Search for a New British Growth Model”. In British Journal of Politics and International Relations 15: 23–37. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Holz, Klaus
2001 Nationaler Antisemitismus. Wissenssoziologie einer Weltanschauung. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition.Google Scholar
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno
2002 Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid-Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Kutter, Amelie, and Bob Jessop
2014 “Culture as discursive practice: combining cultural political economy and discursive political studies in investigations of the financial crisis”. In Financial Cultures and Crisis Dynamics, ed. by Bob Jessop, Brigitte Young, Christoph Scherrer, 64–82. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jessop, Bob
2013 “Recovered imaginaries, imagined recoveries: a cultural political economy of crisis construals and crisis-management in the North Atlantic Financial Crisis”. In Before and Beyond the Global Economic Crisis: Economics and Politics for a Post-Crisis Settlement, 234–54. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Judt, Tony
1992 The Past is Another County: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe. Daedalus 121 (4): 83–118.Google Scholar
Lenk, Kurt
1994 Rechts, wo die Mitte ist. Studien zur Ideologie: Rechtsextremismus, Nationalsozialismus, Konservatismus. Baden-Baden: Nomos.Google Scholar
Marin, Bernd
2000 Antisemitismus ohne Antisemiten. Autoritäre Vorurteile und Feindbilder. Frankfurt a. M./New York: Campus.Google Scholar
Markovits, Andrei
2007 Uncouth Nation: Why Europe dislikes America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Massing, Paul
1949 Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany. New York, NY: Harper and Brothers.Google Scholar
Mayring, Philipp
2000 Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse. Grundlagen und Techniken. Weinheim: Dt. Studienverlag.Google Scholar
Pelinka, Anton, and Ruth Wodak
2002 ‘Dreck am Stecken’: Politik der Ausgrenzung. Wien: Czernin.Google Scholar
Postone, Moishe
1986 “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism.” In Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, edited by A. Rabinbach and J. Zipes. New York: Holmes and Meier.Google Scholar
Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak
2001 Discourse and Discrimination. Rhetorics of racism and antisemitism. London, New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Reisigl, Martin
2007 “Projektbericht: Der Wiener Ansatz der Kritischen Diskursanalyse”. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung, 8(2), http://​www​.qualitative​-research​.net​/index​.php​/fqs​/article​/viewArticle​/270​/591, Accessed 6.12.2015.
Rensmann, Lars
2005 Demokratie und Judenbild. Antisemitismus in der politischen Kultur der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.Google Scholar
Sartre, Jean-Paul
1995 Anti-Semite and Jew. An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. New York: Schocken Books.Google Scholar
Stoegner, Karin, and Ruth Wodak
2016 “The man who hated Britain – the discursive construction of national unity in the Daily Mail.” Critical Discourse Studies 13 (2): 193–209. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Stoegner, Karin
2016a “ ‘We are the new Jews!’ and ‘The Jewish Lobby’ – antisemitism and the construction of a national identity by the Austrian Freedom Party.” Nations and Nationalism 22(3): 484–504. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2016b “Secondary Antisemitism, the Economic Crisis and the Construction of National Identity in the Austrian Print Media.” Critical Sociology, online first Crossref. First Published August 7 2016.Google Scholar
Strauss, Anselm, and Juliet M. Corbin
1998 Basics of Qualitative Research. Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Tajfel, Henri, and John C. Turner
1979 “An integrative theory of intergroup conflict.” In The social psychology of intergroup relations, ed. by William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel, 33–47. Monterey, CA: Brooks & Cole.Google Scholar
Uhl, Heidemarie
2016 Transformationen der österreichischen Identität im 20. Jahrhundert. In Geschichtsbuch Mitteleuropa. Vom Fin de Siècle bis zur Gegenwart, ed. by Anton Pelinka, Karin Bischof, Walter Fend, Karin Stögner, and Thomas Köhler, 358–394. Wien: new academic press.Google Scholar
Wistrich, Robert
2005 European Anti-Semitism Reinvents Itself. New York: The American Jewish Committee.Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth
2011 “Suppression of the Nazi Past, Coded Languages, and Discourses of Silence: Applying the Discourse-Historical Approach to Post-War Anti-Semitism in Austria”. In Political Languages in the Age of Extremes, ed. by Willibald Steinmetz, 351–379. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2014 “The strategy of discursive provocation: A discourse-historical analysis of the FPÖ’s discriminatory rhetoric.” In Doublespeak. The Rhetoric of the Far Right since 1945, ed. by Matthew Feldman and Paul Jackson, 101–119. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag.Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, and Gilbert Weiss
2004 “Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Diskursanalyse: Konstruktionen europäischer Identitäten.” In Text und Kontext. Theoriemodelle und methodische Verfahren im transdisziplinären Vergleich, ed. by Oswald Panagl and Ruth Wodak, 67–85. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, Rudolph de Cillia and Martin Reisigl
2009 The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, Peter Nowak, Johanna Pelikan, Helmut Gruber, Rudolf de Cillia, and Richard Mitten
1990 “Wir sind alle unschuldige Täter!” Diskurshistorische Studien zum Nachkriegsantisemitismus. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Lockwood, Erin
2021. The Antisemitic Backlash to Financial Power: Conspiracy Theory as a Response to Financial Complexity and Crisis. New Political Economy 26:2 ► pp. 261 ff. Crossref logo
Moradi-Joz, Rasool, Saeed Ketabi & Mansoor Tavakoli
2019. On conductive argumentation. Journal of Language and Politics 18:1 ► pp. 83 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 april 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.