Austria

VIENNA – Five years ago there was a headline in the International Herald Tribune, “Austria to Start Returning Artwork Looted by the Nazis”. The article beneath, reporting on a promise made by the Austrian government in a statement to parliament, came exactly 53 years and 7 months after the defeat of the Nazi Reich. But today, 58 years on, the change at best can be said to have been incremental. Much of Austria still buries its head in the sand, convinced to its bone that it was a “victim” of Hitler, not in fact a co-conspirator as the rest of the world knows it was, and most of the art and other looted artifacts and wealth remains unreturned. In 1999 the distinguished Austrian writer, Hubertus Czernin, whose previous work had exposed the unsavory war record of Kurt Waldheim, who had been both UN secretary general and president of Austria, and the...

The Break Away of a Former Non-Aligned and Neutral Country in the Light of the Developing CESDP By Dr. Georg Schöfbänkerschoefbaenker@magnet.atDirector, Austrian Information-Center for Security Policy and Arms Control, Linz. Since end of Feb. 2000 a new Austrian government came to office including an extreme right-wing party, the Freedom Party (FPÖ). Since then, the new Austrian government is isolated within EU and most of the world, as no other national government of an EU-member state has ever been in history. Despite this domestic and home grown isolation caused by the fact that the FPÖ constantly has conducted a racist, exclusionary, and jingoistic policy in a style which is exceptionally repugnant, the security concept of the new Austrian government is in some way completely ad odds with ESDI and ESDP as outlined at the EU-summits from Cologne to Helsinki in 1999. The new governmental agreement between the Peoples Party and the...