Paradigms of Migration Research 2010.pdf

In: Dietrich Thränhardt, Michael Bommes (eds.) (2010): National Paradigms of Migration Research. Göttingen (V&R unipress) = IMIS Schriften 13, 187-203 Bernhard Perchinig Migration Studies in Austria – Research at the Margins ? Introduction The editors of the volume have asked the authors to concentrate on the following questions: Are there national paradigms of migration research? One or many? And are they contested or widely shared? Is migration reflected as a part of the changes in social-structural development? What is the role of the organisational and funding structure? Is there a mutual influence of research and politics? Before dwelling on these questions, I would like to add some considerations on the idea and meaning of “paradigm”. The traditional concept of “paradigm” has been shaped by Thomas Kuhn´s analysis of scientific developments, where a paradigm is seen as a shared set of concrete solutions to central problems in a specific scientific field guiding the work of the scientific community, which is committed to the paradigm because of training and institutional rules. According to Kuhn, intellectual progress is not shaped by scientific logic and advancement, but by intellectually violent revolutions leading to a paradigm shift, a new world-view on existing problems, often brought forward by academic outsiders or scientists critical to the established rules in academia (cf. Kuhn 1962). For this understanding of paradigm, the existence of an institutionalised academic discipline with a well-formulated subject, specific methods and clear demarcation lines to the outside world is a precondition. Nowhere in academia migration research has established itself as such a kind of discipline, at best the issue of migration is accepted as an important area of research for different disciplines. On the contrary, migration research often is defined as an “interdisciplinary” endeavour, which, like many interdisciplinary activities, often leads to scepticism within the academic communities of the established disciplines. Due to these considerations, I would rather prefer to analyse the situation of migration research in terms of competing narratives than of paradigms, where the concept of a narrative is characterised by an intermingling of discourses in different social fields, e.g. academia and politics. Thus we might not find one single “grand narrative”, but a layer of different (hi)stories reflecting the interaction of the academic and political development of the field. At least this is the case in Austria. One paradigm or many? 1 Given the importance of immigration to Vienna, Lower Austria and Vorarlberg in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century on the one hand and the history of emigration on the other, one could imagine that migration research should have a long academic tradition in Austria. The opposite is the case. Neither the thick history of emigration nor the more recent waves of immigration since the end of the Second World War received a lot of attention in the academic world. Only some ten years after Austria had started to recruit labour migrants under a guest worker scheme in the late sixties and early seventies, the first studies on migration were contracted. The political background of immigration policy at this time was mainly characterised by two aspects: The overwhelming influence of the social partners in the field of migration policy on the one hand and the idea of organising labour migration according to a principle of rotation on the other. Until the end of the 20th century, the elaborate system of social – partnership has been a main arena of policy making in Austria. In the areas of labour market and social policy neither the political parties in parliament nor the government, but the social partners – mainly the Chamber of Labour and the Trade Unions on the one hand and the Chamber of Commerce and the Association of Industrialists on the other – were the decisive actors. Based on personal, formal and informal linkages to the government, the parliament and the two larger parties, the social partners were able to transform their politics into parliamentary decisions. The trade unions secured their influence within the workforce by pursuing an insider-policy focusing on male workers with Austrian citizenship in stable employment, downplaying the interest of women and immigrants (cf. Talos 1993). For the government the inclusion of the social partners secured the broad acceptance of decisions in the field of economic and social policy, moderate unions and a virtually strikefree economy. In this framework, the trade unions acted as a part of the government system and not of the opposition, as in many other European countries. Ironically, a conflict about immigration of foreign labour had stood at the beginning of social partnership in the early 1960s, when the Austrian economy was struck by severe labour shortage (cf. Wollner 1996). While the Chamber of Commerce pressed for recruitment of labour from abroad, the Trade Union Federation and the Chamber of Labour strongly opposed it. Due to hardened front lines no agreement could be reached in the first instance. In this situation, the Chamber of Labour and the Unions used their bargaining power to increase their influence in the central negotiation arena within the social partnership, the “wages and prices commission” in exchange for the acceptance of a first temporary immigration agreement for 47.000 “guest workers” for the year 1961. The unions pressed for a system of rotation privileging Austrian citizens. “Guest workers”, as they were called, should have the right to equal pay, but should only get an employment contract for one year, and each year a new contingent for immigration should be negotiated between the social partners. In the case of job-losses non-Austrian workers should be dismissed before their Austrian colleagues. In the following years, the Chamber of Labour and the trade unions used the yearly negotiations of the contingent of foreign workers as lever to increase their influence within the socialpartnership regime (Böse et al 2001, p.3). The initial social partnership-agreement of 1961 remained the determining framework for further regulations of the labour market access by immigrants until the eighties. In the seventies, Austria developed a system of restricted labour market access for immigrants, transforming them into an easily dismissible labour market reserve. The main tool of labour market-control was an elaborated system of work-permits, which made immigrants more vulnerable than other groups on the labour market, as they 2 needed at least five years of employment to receive an unrestricted labour-permit, which could be lost again in case of prolonged unemployment. The guest-worker system with its idea of “rotation” in reality never worked. Employers did not want to recruit inexperienced personnel, as long they could rely on trained staff, and most immigrants, who themselves often also planned a short period of stay, could not earn enough to start the desired business in their home country. Thus most immigrants decided to stay longer and brought their family members to Austria. Since the beginning of the seventies, family immigration surpassed new labour immigration, and Austria became a de-facto immigration country, although the authorities still denied this fact (Böse et al 2001, p.2). Despite these developments, a labour market – approach dominated migration policy until the end of the 1980s. Thus the social partners stayed the main actors and the Ministry for Social Affairs was the only responsible authority. The unions, which by inclusion into the system of social-partnership had become a part of the system of government, did not open their structures for immigrants, but instead focused their activities to workers and employees holding Austrian citizenship. They did not bother about the exclusion of non-Austrian citizens from passive voting rights at the shop floor level, so immigrants did not enter their ranks and files. Instead of opening their own political structure, the unions and the chamber concentrated on funding migrants´ sports and cultural associations (cf. Gächter 1995, p.47). One of the most pertinent effects of Austria´s “guest worker”-policy was the development of an ethnically segmented labour market with immigrants occupying the lower positions of the occupational hierarchy even in the second and third generation and the development of an immigrant underclass. In this political context, the first studies published in the early 1980s signified two opposing trends of thought still influential in this research area. Whereas Elisabeth Lichtenberger´s monograph on “Guest workers – Living in two Societies” (Lichtenberger 1984) positively echoed the guiding political principle of migration policy and focused on the socio-economic position and the assimilation of immigrants, the first study on “Foreign Labour in Austria” (Wimmer 1986), which had been commissioned in 1982 to the Austrian Institute for Economic Research and the Institute for Advanced Studies by the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Ministry of Science and Research, questioned the concept of rotation. The study explained the development and implementation of Austria´s guest worker-policy by the overwhelming influence of the social partners in that field of policy and criticised, that both social partners jointly had decided to make use of immigrants as a puffer on the labour market to reduce unemployment of the native workforce. Confronted with the results of the study, the funding ministries – headed by Social Democratic ministers - raised serious concerns about the “lack of objectivity” and even threatened to withdraw funding. This study did not only mark the beginning of migration research in Austria, but also stands for the beginning of a tradition of highly politicised research challenging governmental migration policies. Most of the researchers contributing to these studies had come from the academic left; some of them had privately been involved in action groups in favour of immigrants. Until today, there is a split in the research landscape between a more economically or demographically oriented research which tries to avoid political connotations, and research referring critically to the state of migration policy in Austria. Although the latter had gotten some hold at the universities and the Austrian Academy of Sciences in the late 1990s, most critical researchers left or were forced to leave these statefunded research institutions and either left Austria for good or left the research field in this 3 decennium. State-sponsored research institutions are now dominated by empirical research abstaining from political criticism. Are paradigms contested or widely shared? Also this question has to be answered with regard to migration policy and migration research history. Two areas of discourse, the growing influence of demographic and of normative arguments in the eighties and early nineties, have to be mentioned here. Both of them cannot be understood without a short reference to major changes in the institutional setting of immigration policy in the late eighties and early nineties. As already mentioned, until the end of the 1980s immigration policy was a part of labour market policy with the social partners and the Ministry for Social Affairs as the main actors. Following the epochal changes in the political setting of Europe in the beginning of the 1990s and the huge influx of refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Ministry of the Interior approached the scene and became a proactive player, defining immigration as a problem of internal security (Sohler 1999). This view was fostered by the largest influx of immigrants Austria had experienced ever since: Between 1987 and 1994 the resident immigrant population more than doubled, from 326.000 to 713.000 (Böse et al 2001, p.5). The prevailing system of migration control by way of labour market regulation was unable to cope with this new situation. Even more important than the shift of actors were the dramatic changes the established “two and a half”-party system with its strong linkage to the system of social-partnership was undergoing. Two parties never had been a part of the informal elite-cooperation in the system of social partnership: The Freedom Party (FPÖ), in the early 1980s a far right-wing, German nationalistic party with an electorate of around 6% on the one hand, and the newly formed Green party, which in its early years comprised activists from the ecological movement, human rights activists and disappointed former left-wing Social Democrats and activists from the radical academic leftist groups. When in 1986 the late Jörg Haider was elected head of the FPÖ, he started to transform the former elitist party to a right-wing populist party with a mainly male working class electorate of up to 30%. The former all-German tendency of the FPÖ, which presented Austria as a part of the larger German nation and was strongly opposing minority rights for the ethnic groups traditionally settling in Austria, was replaced by an Austrian nationalism and a strict antiimmigrant position. On the other hand the Green party sharpened her profile in human rights, particularly with regard to immigrant integration. Thus migration issues, which formerly were regulated in the closed political framework of elite co-operation of the social partners, entered the parliamentary arena from the fringes: The transformed FPÖ and the newly founded Greens gained political profile by focusing on an issue neglected by the two large mass parties dominating the parliament, the conservative ÖVP and the Social Democrats, and transformed migration policies to a central parliamentary issue in the 1980s. Both parties never had been a part of the social-partnership elite-consesus and did not feel bound by the traditional interests shaping migration policy. So they were free to use the issue to sharpen their political profile. Migration policy, which before had been decided behind the 4 closed doors of the social partners, was transferred into the parliamentary arena and became a major public issue in the 1990s. The shift of migration policy into the parliamentary arena led to a short phase of open scientific and political discussion on the future of Austria’s migration policy. Between 1989 and 1992, the Ministry of the Interior together with the Chancellery initiated several dialogue groups including civil servants, migration researchers and intellectuals. One outcome of the dialogue was a draft of an “immigration law” suggesting a system of immigration control instead of the existing labour-market regime and an equalisation of the legal status of immigrants and natives after a few years. The break-up of Yugoslavia and the huge influx of refugees from Bosnia stopped this short phase of rational discourse. Now the risk of mass immigration from Eastern Europe became a central issue, and the Freedom Party gained considerable support for its anti-immigration policies. As well trade unions, and all parliamentary parties except of the Greens defined control of immigration, and not integration, as their major goal. At the end of the 1980s a new subject entered the arena: The ageing of society. A study commissioned by the City of Vienna, which at that time was envisaging a continuous decline of population, was the first to use demographic arguments in favour for controlled immigration (Anatalovsky 1990). Known demographers like Heinz Fassmann and Rainer Münz argued to accept the reality and try to develop a quota-system for immigration aimed at compensating the foreseeable loss of population with its dramatic consequences on the pension and the health system (Fassmann/Münz 1995, p.10). The idea of migration as a means of demographic planning found acceptance among the government, which had realised that the existing mode of migration management via control of the labour market was inefficient. The discussion led to the implementation of a new immigration control regime based on yearly set immigration quotas, but without improvements of the legal status of immigrants. Already in 1987 the existing labour market regime was amended introducing a percentage quota to control access to the labour market. The maximum percentage of employment of foreign citizens was set at 10% (later lowered to 8%), with a complicated procedure for overdrawing the quota. Between 1991 and 1993 a comprehensive reform of the existing legal migration regime entered into force. The idea behind the reforms was to prevent the use of the asylum procedure as a door to immigration and to regulate new immigration not via the labour market, but via a quota regime, which should be adapted yearly. Contrary to immigration countries employing quota regimes, the right to residence was not connected with the right to access to the labour market, and the existing labour-market quota system only underwent minimal reforms. Thus legally resident immigrants – especially young people, women and self-employed - often were not allowed to work. Beyond that, the new law stipulated new income and housing thresholds as preconditions for residence. In contrast to official declarations, the new acts also applied to legal residents in the country without giving any credit to that fact. Bad housing, long-term unemployment or the omission to apply for the prolongation of an existing residence permit in time often lead to the loss of one’s residence rights and the need to apply for a residence permit anew and from the country of origin (Bauböck 1997, p. 686). The drastic consequences of the new laws did not only raise protest among human rights organisations, but also lead to a new interest in the field of migration and integration in research. It might not be by chance, that in the beginning of the 1990s legal scholars and political scientists started to compare the Austrian legislation with international norms and developments in other European countries and connected themselves with centres of legal 5 research in the Netherlands and in Germany. On the other hand, the strong legal division between natives and foreigners in Austria also aroused growing interest in the then developing discussion about theories of citizenship. In the early nineties the Department of Political Science at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna became a focal point of citizenship studies in Austria. Rainer Bauböck´s “Transnational Citizenship” (1994) was the first in a series of publications in the area of comparative citizenship-studies financed by the ministry of science and directed by Rainer Bauböck, which involved former scholars of the department and actively reached out to the international scientific community by organising of conferences - and by publishing in English. Two theoretical strands received growing attention: Citizenship studies in the tradition of Thomas H. Marshall (1965) and Tomas Hammar (1990), and theories of racism in the tradition of British cultural studies. During the early 1990s, also a reorientation of the reception of theory took place: Whereas German research had been the main reference point in the books and papers written in the seventies and eighties, now the Anglo-Saxon discussion became much more influential. This was partly a result of the fact, that several researchers had got grants for British universities and partly due to a re-import of British cultural studies through the German publishing house “Argument-Verlag”. Moreover, the normative focus on theories of citizenship shifted the discussion about the integration of immigrants from the older labour-market paradigm to a more political paradigm, questioning the adequacy of nation state citizenship as a solution to integration and served as a new framework for the academic discourse. “Citizenship” may be the only uncontested research paradigm among migration researchers, and there might even be a normative consensus about the need to enlarge citizenship rights to immigrants within the research community. Citizenship studies also formed a major part of the research-program on “xenophobia” of the Ministry of Science from 1996 – 2001. As this programme also included regular lectures of renowned British scholars, like Robert Miles and Stuart Hall, the prevailing orientation on research in the German speaking world was replaced by a growing interest in the British and American tradition of theory-building. A second large research programme of the Ministry of Science on “Cultural Studies” with a strong focus on British and American theory-building reinforced this reorientation. The high degree of involvement of researchers into human rights´ NCOs and the significant growth of right-wing-extremism and xenophobia in Austria in the 1990s as well as the development of new forms of self-organisation of immigrants from Africa and Asia were reflected by the reception of the international debate about the concept of “racism”, especially among younger scholars and students. Whereas the term “racism” in social science had only been used in the context of the national-socialist regime in the 1970s and 1980s, in the midst of the 1990s the concept of “cultural racism” entered the discussion. Further to the research programmes of the Ministry of Science, the focus of the European Union on antidiscrimination policies and the funding of antiracist networks and research were a highly influential factor in developing a “migration research community” in Austria. In this area, mostly young researchers at extra-university institutes, which are often also activists of the European Network against Racism or other policy-oriented NCOs, were developing a new area of discourse strongly linked with the reception of cultural theory and postcolonial approaches (cf. Görg/Pühretmeyer 2000). 6 Are there blind spots in migration research? Autochthonous and immigrant minorities in Austria face a completely different legal and social framework with regard to their cultural rights than immigrant minorities. The legal term used for autochthonous ethnic groups is Volksgruppe. Whereas the 1976 Ethnic Groups Act (Volksgruppengesetz BGBl. [Federal Law Gazette] 396/1976) and other legal provisions guarantee a set of cultural rights to the autochthonous minorities, there are no such rights for immigrant ethnic groups. On the contrary, the legal provisions governing naturalisation and the right of residence directly and indirectly demand assimilation to the “Austrian way of life”. The Ethnic Groups Act does not apply to immigrant minorities (cf. Baumgartner/Perchinig 1995). The Ethnic Groups Act guarantees the preservation of the ethnic groups (Volksgruppen) and stipulates, that their language and national characteristics (Volkstum) should be respected. An ethnic group (Volksgruppe) is defined as those groups of Austrian citizens traditionally residing (“wohnhaft und beheimatet”) in parts of the Austrian state territory who speak a nonGerman mother tongue and have own national characteristics (Volkstum). The federal state recognises its obligation to subsidise measures that safeguard the existence of the ethnic groups and their national characteristics (Volkstum). Members of the minority groups have the right to use their mother tongue before the authorities in the areas where they live, and education in their mother tongue – bilingual schooling – is granted in certain areas. Special advisory bodies comprising representatives of the different ethnic minorities the Volksgruppenbeiräte were set up at the Chancellor’s office to advise the federal government on minority policies and the distribution of subsidies for the organisations of the representative ethnic minorities the Volksgruppenförderung. This body is intended to safeguard the cultural, social and economic interests of the ethnic groups and is composed of representatives of the minorities, political parties and the religious groups. The implementation of these rights often is prevented by reluctance of politicians and/or, as in the case of the Carinthian Slovenes, a strong nationalist climate with organisations like the “Kärntner Heimatdienst”, acting as vociferous and influential anti-minority pressure groups, but nevertheless the importance of group-rights for the autochthonous minorities is an accepted fact, at least at the level of the federal government (cf. Baumgartner/Ellmeier/Perchinig 2001). There are no similar legal provisions safeguarding the cultural rights of immigrant ethnic groups. On the contrary, the naturalisation law and Austrian residence law implicitly favour assimilation. According to the 1988 Naturalisation Act (BGBl. 124/1998), the “integration of the applicant” is the most important criterion for the granting of naturalisation. According to the internal regulations of the provincial government of Vienna, “complete integration” is understood as fluent knowledge of German, a sound professional education and proven activities for the coexistence of the indigenous and immigrant population in Vienna (Wiener Integrationsfonds 1999, p.43). Until 1998, the naturalisation law demanded “assimilation to the Austrian way of life” as a precondition for naturalisation. How can this different treatment of diversity and pluralism be explained? Here a look at the “grand narratives” of Austrian nation-building might be helpful. The first narrative concerns the destruction of the First Austrian Republic by civil war in 1933, leading to the Austro-fascist regime and the “consenting occupation” by Nazi Germany in 1938. Here 7 the narrative tells a story of society sharply divided by class, region and religion, where both the Social democratic and the Conservative “camp” were unable to solve conflicts of interest in the parliamentary arena and instead resorted to violence leading to civil war. This incapability to forge a consensus on the future of Austria, so the narrative goes, was the base for the high level of support for the NSDAP in Austria and later allowed Nazi Germany to consentingly occupy the country. This division, so the foundation narrative continues, was overcome in the national-socialist concentration camps, where Conservatives as well as Social Democrats were jailed and decided to build a new state after liberation based on cooperation and peaceful conflictresolution overcoming the old cleavages. Cleavages, which, after all, had not only been defined in political, but also in cultural terms by both “camps”. The Social Democratic Party of the First Republic (1918 – 1938) always had understood herself as a political as well as a cultural movement shaping a new way of life ranging from housing styles to clothing and greeting-modes confronting the majoritarian Catholic culture, whereas the Conservatives had a strong leaning towards political Catholicism fostering a catholic and rural lifestyle associated with folk customs and traditions and a patriarchal family. In the 1920s and 1930s, nearly all areas of life were pillarised according to these two camps, and until the 1980s a “learned Austrian” could tell from the name of the insurance company of a car, to which political camp the owner was aligned. And even today, greeting with the traditionally conservative “Grüß Gott”1 ( in the (Social democratic) Viennese City Hall and the traditionally liberal or Social Democrat “Guten Tag”2 in the (conservative) Chamber of Commerce may lead to a penetrating glance. The reduction of the differences between the two camps was one of the major political successes of the late chancellor Bruno Kreisky, who together with the then archbishop Franz König forged a new understanding between the Catholic Church and the Social Democratic Party, the narrative continues. Thus in the 1970s and 1980s, integration mainly meant overcoming the political and lifestyle difference between the two former camps by opening up access to education, raising mass incomes and mass consumption. The institution of “social partnership” was seen as a major tool to accomplish this appeasement. Homogeneity in everyday culture should help to overcome the traditional conflicts between the two competing camps and lifestyles. Cultural pluralism was associated with the traditional pillarisation of the society and assessed as a threat and not an asset. But this story carries a hidden subtext: In the 1920s, as well the Conservatives as well as the developing German-nationalist camp were united by antisemitism, which both used to campaign again the Social Democratic government in Vienna, denouncing “red Vienna” as dominated by Jewish influence. After the liberation from Nazism in 1945 the consecutive Conservative-Social Democratic coalition governments jointly decided to block restitution as far as possible and soon began to compete for the support of former Nazis, whereas no move was made do invite the survivors of the Holocaust back to Austria. Instead, the definition of Austria as the first victim of Nazi Germany became the second “grand narrative” of Austrian nation building after 1945. In this context, a reference to “cultural pluralism” was a hidden reference to the destroyed Jewish tradition of Vienna, and the agreement to overcome the traditional cleavages by fostering (class)cultural homogeneity also included an hidden agreement not to touch on Austria’s involvement into the Holocaust. So the founding myth of the reconciliation of the two camps of the interwar period merged with the myth of Austria as the first victim of Nazi Germany and effectively silenced further public discussion on this 1 2 There is no literal English translation for this formula. “Greetings and God Bless You” might come closest. Good day, How are you? , 8 topic. In this context, conflicts involving the autochthonous minorities were mainly seen as destabilising the newly reached societal consensus. Within the academic left, which, although critical, nevertheless supported Kreisky´s government, the leading discourse was not a discourse on cultural pluralism, but, following the reception of Gramsci, on cultural predominance. “Cultural pluralism” and “multiculturalism” as political concepts entered the arena of discourse only in the early 1980s, at a time, when most politicians still had been socialised in a tradition emphasising the risks of cultural pluralism. But in the 1960s and 1970s the narrative of a new Austria did not go uncontested by the former predominant narrative of Austria as a part of the “German nation”, which was strongly associated with NS-ideology. The right-wing Freedom Party, the incorporated student leagues at the Universities and right-wing newspapers depicted Austria as a part of the “German cultural nation” (“deutsche Kulturnation”) and were united in their opposition against granting cultural group rights to the Carinthian Slovenes and the Croats in the Burgenland as guaranteed in the Austrian State Treaty of 1955. The passing of the “Ethnic Groups Act” in 1976 can be seen as the culmination point of the fight between these two competing narratives leading to the inclusion of the autochthonous ethnic groups into the prevailing narrative of a new Austrian nation. Linguistic rights for both the Carinthian Slovenes and the Croats of the Burgenland had been guaranteed in Article 7 of the Austrian State Treaty of 1955, which constituted an independent Austrian State. Their implementation into the State Treaty had been a result of the strong involvement of Carinthian Slovene fighters in the Yugoslav Partisan resistance against NaziGermany, whereas a majority of the German speaking Carinthian population did not oppose or even supported the Nazi-regime. In the negotiations of the State-Treaty Yugoslavia, supported by the then Soviet-Union, demanded to grant linguistic rights to the Carinthian and Styrian Slovenes and the Croats in the Burgenland (Stourzh 1975, 76ff.). After the end of the war, Yugoslavia had demanded parts of the province of Carinthia as their territory, and had withdrawn these demands after an agreement of linguistic rights for ethnic minorities in Austria was reached. The implementation of these rights had been neglected by the government until midth of the seventies, when the then chancellor Bruno Kreisky ordered to implement the provision for bilingual street signs in Southern Carinthia in 1972. These signs were demounted in a mass turmoil organised by the “Kärntner Heimatdienst”, a right wing German-nationalist antiminority pressure group with strong historical connections to the NSDAP (cf. Perchinig 1989, p. 131ff.). Violent blast- and arson attacks against memorials and offices of both sides characterised the following years. To appease the conflict, chancellor Kreisky installed an expert-commission, which called for a “special census” defining the number of minority members and drafted the “Ethnic Groups Act”, granting group-rights to autochthonous ethnic minorities in Austria, which was passed by all parliamentary parties, including the Freedom Party (FPÖ). But the conflict could not be held into the parliamentary arena any more. Socialised in the end of the 1960s, younger activists began to forge a coalition of Catholic, Protestant and left-wing youth and students´ organisations and the left wing of the Socialdemocrats. Their arguments focused on the strong links between the organisations opposed to minorities with the far right wing and the roots of their thinking in National Socialism. Commitment for minority rights became a decisive political issue not only for the left, but also for Catholic organisations, who 9 met in the “solidarity committees” for the Slovene minority and formed a new kind of social movement. One of the reasons for the success for this emerging new social movement was the strong link of the conflict with history. On the one hand, the “Kärnter Heimatdienst” and other organisations campaigning against minority rights had strong links to a Nazi past and to right wing extremism, whereas many Carinthian Slovenes had actively fought in the Yugoslav Partisan Army and were politically supported by Yugoslavia, than a model of a “human kind” of socialism, well respected among the academic left. At the same time the influence of the students´ revolution lead to a growing interest in the role of Austrians in the Nazi-regime, and many students questioned their parents about their past. As many Slovenes had been involved into the fight against the Nazis, their narrative could serve as a model for identification with a “better part” of Austria – and for many also a as a model for a “better father” than the own, who had not opposed or even supported the Naziregime. This new coalition organised a boycott of the planned special census leading to the result that more Slovenes would live in Vienna than in Carinthia. This symbolic victory laid the foundation for a gradual shift in the public understanding of the role of ethnic groups: Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s the majority of Austrians stressed the “German” character of Austria, a positive esteem of the existence of traditional, autochthonous minorities began to characterise the discourse on Austrian “national identity” in the 1980s and 1990s. A positive view of the traditional minorities went well together with the growing interest in the multinational Habsburg Empire, as depicted in the books of Claudio Magris, which were bestsellers in Austria. So Austrian national identity was reconnected with its Habsburg past, and this discourse also helped to downgrade Austria’s involvement into National Socialism. Now the narrative of the “Deutsche Kulturnation” was not convenient for Austria´s image anymore, an image, which now relied on the more fashionable notion of a long lasting tradition of cultural diversity. Even within the Freedom Party, references to the “Austrian nation” gradually began to replace the traditional “German” orientation. Under the heading “Österreich zuerst” (priority for Austria), this “Austrian nationalism” was made instrumental in a major anti-immigrant campaign of the FPÖ arguing in favour for a reduction of rights for immigrants, whereas at the same time the FPÖ tried to improve its relations to the “autochthonous” minorities. As Carinthian governor, the late Jörg Haider was the first provincial governor to install an “ethnic minorities office” within the provincial administration and to found a “Carinthian Institute for Ethnic Studies”, which should present Carinthia as a model for ethnic relations in Central Europe, but was closed down in the late 1990s. This switch of narratives was also reflected in scientific research. During the 1980s, a huge of variety of critical studies on the situation of the autochthonous ethnic groups were published. In this context, Peter Gstettner and Dietmar Larcher of the Institute of Pedagogics at the University of Klagenfurt, the capital of Carinthia, developed a research-focus on bilingual education and intercultural pedagogics, but without reference to immigration. Intercultural pedagogies also had become a focus of research at the “Pedagogical Institute” of the City of Vienna, where teachers and teacher-trainers were discussing alternatives to the existing framework of “Ausländerpädagogik” (“foreigners´pedagogy”). Seizing a window of opportunity, they succeeded in influencing the ministry of education to introduce intercultural education as an educational principle and to install team-teaching in many Viennese schools. 10 Although these two institutions were working in a comparative field, they had little contact until the beginning of the 1990s. It was only then, when some researchers working on the “autochthonous” minorities became aware of the issue of immigration and started to question their theoretical concepts, which often were based on the tradition of “völkisch” thinking around the late Theodor Veiter, who held a professorship of international law in Innsbruck. Until today, there is only a weak link between the research community working on autochthonous groups and migration researchers, and often the concept of ethnicity applied are quite different, with a focus on sociological concepts in the field of migration research and a dominance of legal research and primordial concepts of ethnicity in the research on “autochthonous” minorities. The institutional framework As already mentioned, the development of migration research in Austria strongly depended on a few researchers, most of them political scientists and sociologists, who started work in the field in the early 1980s. Until now, migration research is not well established in the academic world. There exists one institute devoted to migration policy (ICMPD), which is organised as an intergovernmental organisation and concentrates on consultancy to governments and international bodies, but also hosts a small research unit. In the academic area, neither an institute nor a specific journal for migration research exists. The Austrian Academy of Science has established a Commission on Migration and Integration Research with the aim to coordinate academic research in the field of migration and integration at the institutes of the Academy, but is itself not engaged in research. The only activity of the Commission is to organise public lectures on migration issues, and it acted as organisational platform for the editing of the “2nd Austrian Migration and Integration Report 2007” (Fassmann 2007). Basic and applied research on migration and integration is more or less regularly pursued at a few extra-university institutes, their research efforts depend on project funding by the ministries and research programmes. In total, there might be at most some 10 – 15 persons earning their living from migration research, with some more doing research on migration issues from time to time. As a matter of fact, there is a high amount of fluctuation and emigration out of academia or to universities to research centres abroad. At the end of the 1990s, the relationship between the academic world and policy makers has been described as characterised by mutual distrust (ICMPD 1998). The study reported that many researchers feared that their work would be misused by the government, while governmental officials often suspected researchers to be keen on attacking migration policy decisions. This precarious relationship has somehow been improved since. With the growing importance and accessibility of EU funding, the research world has developed into a bifucurated structure: Most research funded by Austrian authorities is devoted to a governmental research perspective (e.g. immigration – control, labour-market integration, housing and social questions), and focuses on applied research. As freedom of access to information is not regulated by law in Austria, the funding authorities often prevent the publication of undesired results or put pressure on the scientists to reformulate their reports. This is not the case with research programmes funded by the Ministry of Science and Research and the Funds for the Advancement of Scientific Research, the main Austrian research funding agency, and with EU-funding, which is largely independent from political interference (see below), but funding possibilities from these sources are scarce. 11 This divide between academic and applied research is further exacerbated by the move of the Ministry of the Interior to develop in-house research facilities at its Police Academy, with a dominant focus on security issues. Together with the Austrian Fund of Integration, a foundation dependent on the Ministry of the Interior, an internal research and documentation infrastructure now is in the making. This development has raised fears within the research community that access to data will be restricted further and governmental funding for research will be redirected to state-controlled bodies. Nevertheless, migration researchers have gained growing public recognition in the last few years. This development does not only reflect the growing importance of the field in politics, but also is an effect of continuous research and publication activities and international academic networking. In 2003 the first Austrian report on migration and integration, involving all relevant researchers, was published by the ICMPD (Fassmann/Stacher 2003), which was followed by a second report published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2007 (Fassmann 2007). Both reports were well received by the public and serve as a source of information for researchers, students, administrators and NGOs. As a result of the research programme on xenophobia administered by the Ministry of Science and Research between 1997 and 2001, a series of seven books presenting all research results was published by the publishing house Drava between 1998 and 2002, which also helped to establish the field in the academic world. In the early 2000s, several networks at the European level came into existence involving Austrian researchers, like e.g. the European Migration Dialogue with its regular reports on migration politics (König/Perchinig 2003, König/Perchinig 2005) or the EU-funded European Migration Network, which regularly published comparative reports on migratin issues (e.g. IOM 2004). Austria´s migration research community also has been able to link rather well with the European research infrastructure in this field. Austrian researchers are involved in the EUfunded “Network of Excellence” IMISCOE (Immigration and Social Cohesion in Europe, www.imiscoe.org) and have secured several research projects under the diverse EU-funding schemes and published widely in the IMSICOE publication series (Bauböck 2006, Bauböck et al 2006, Bauböck/Perchinig/Sievers 2007, Fassmann/Reeger/Sievers 2008, Jandl 2007, Jandl et al 2008). EU-funding also has helped to liberate academic researchers from the political pressures of applied research described above and to develop to a critical mass of competence. As two recent evaluations have shown (FAS-Research 2008, Kozeluh 2008), migration research is one of the fields of proven competence of social sciences in Austria and has produced a high output, particularly due to involvement into European projects. Both evaluations pointed at the negative consequences of fragmentation and disastrous effects of the lack of stable funding. This positive development is not adequately reflected by funding or within the traditional academic institutions. When the programs of the Ministry of Sciences expired in the early 2000s, only a few researchers could secure their involvement in this field through more action-oriented programs like the EU-funded EQUAL-initiative, and only a few got some temporarily funded positions at state funded institutions. In the last few years a number of researchers either left the research area or left Austria; and with cutting research budgets also the few temporarily funded positions in state institutions are currently being closed down. In particular researchers publicly critical towards Austria´s migration and integration policies have been forced out or are currently forced out of state funded academic institutions. 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