The Austrian Identitarians’ Long-Term Effort to Shift Public Discourse

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Judith Goetz, whose focus is on the Austrian Identitarian movement. This movement has been an effort to restore far-right language and and ideas into German-language discourse, not least by exploiting certain weaknesses and opportunities in centre-right discourses. This has pushed the boundaries of what can be said with impunity further and further to the right, and has established far-right views in the mainstream media and everyday life.

The Identitarians are a typical example of these developments, and Judith has analysed their discourses by drawing on the material published on their own Website. They are part of a culture war of they right, attempting to encourage a cultural revolution of the right and transform societal thinking in the long run. This focusses especially on concepts like ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’, attempting to shift political hegemonies.

Such efforts draw on a new range of terms that replace older language that is tainted by its use in first-wave fascism; these are concealment terms and methods that facilitate the pretence of distancing the Identitarian’s views from right-wing extremism. This attempt to establish a ‘new language’ has been explicitly acknowledged by Identitarian activists.

The use of the term ‘remigration’ as an alternative to ‘deportation’ is an example for this. The term ‘remigration’ has originally been employed to describe the voluntary return of those who had fled the Nazi regime to their home countries after the downfall of the fascist regime; its use in a new context turns this meaning on its head and compares two incomparable situations. This makes the new sound familiar and thus more credible, and it has now been widely and uncritically adopted in Austrian political debate. This redefinition of terms is indeed already a trait of first-wave fascism.

The use of the term ‘Great Replacement’ by the Identitarians is another such example. The term has been subsequently adopted by all daily papers in Austria, and reproduced without comment; this is precisely in line with the Identitarians’ stated aims. In this case, older and problematic terms are replaced by new language that comes without such baggage while still claiming the existence of a major threat to the nation. The term is now globally used by far-right activists and their supporters.

Having identified these discursive strategies, there is now an urgent need to develop meaningful countermeasures against this infiltration of mainstream discourse by fascist terminology and thought.