Research Highlights Podcast
July 31, 2024
The political power of historical narratives
Christian Ochsner discusses a campaign by Austria’s far-right populists to link historic atrocities to Muslim minorities.
Heinz-Christian Strache gives a campaign for the Freedom Party of Austria.
Source: Pressemappe, CC BY-SA 3.0
In 2005, Austria’s most prominent far-right party proclaimed a “Third Turkish Siege of Vienna.” The campaign warned voters that, like their ancestors who were almost overrun by the Ottoman Empire four centuries ago, they were being culturally invaded by Muslims. The campaigners hoped to use long-past historical events to shape the behavior and sentiments of modern-day voters. But did it work?
The strategy sparked a surge in the far-right’s vote share and a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment, according to a paper in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. The authors, Christian Ochsner and Felix Roesel, studied areas with ties to the historical trauma of the Sieges of Vienna and explained how political innovators reinvigorated latent xenophobic narratives that mobilized voters.
Ochsner recently spoke with Tyler Smith about the recent political environment in Austria, the use of historical parallels, and the impact on Muslim minorities.
The edited highlights of that conversation are below, and the full interview can be heard using the podcast player.
Tyler Smith: What has the political climate in Austria been like over the last couple of decades? What are some of the key political movements for understanding your paper?
Christian Ochsner: Historically, the Austrian political landscape has been divided into three political camps: the Catholic conservatives, which are rooted in Christianity; the Social Democrats; and the third camp, which had its origin in the pan-German awakening that wanted to form a unified German state during the period of the Habsburg Empire. Over the last 100 years, this pan-German camp has moved from a pan-German ideology to a more liberal party to a populist right-wing party, as it is today. The present-day political landscape in Austria is contentious: all three main camps have more or less the same vote shares, and it's now just a question of who will get the final margin to get the government. And this has been the case since the mid-1980s, when a well-known political entrepreneur of the far right, Jörg Haider, took over the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria and transformed it into a populist party. Since then, the party increased its vote shares from around 7 percent to 25 percent today. This is the period when we start to focus on the party and, in particular in the year 2005, when a new party leader took over the party and started with a brilliant new idea on how to do populist campaigns.
Smith: How did the right-wing party change their strategy in the early 2000s in order to appeal to voters?
Ochsner: In 2005, a new party leader took over. This was Heinz-Christian Strache, and he was based in Vienna. He started comparing present-day issues concerning Turkish and Muslim minorities to an episode back in history some 400 to 500 years in the past which had some similar features. These were the Sieges of Vienna, the period when the Ottoman Empire wanted to invade Central Europe. This was the historical analogy they started their campaign with.
Smith: Can you walk me through what happened in Austria during these sieges? Who were the actors, and why do we think they happened to begin with?
Ochsner: In the end, it was a battle between two major regional powers. After the fall of Constantinople, which is now Istanbul, the Ottoman Empire expanded their sphere of influence towards Central Europe. They managed to colonize the Balkans, and they reached further to the north. There they met the Habsburg Empire, which was one of the leading empires in Europe back then and until the early 20th century. Simply speaking, it was a battle between two major powers. But if you think in terms of cultural politics, it was a kind of “clash of civilizations,” as popularized by Samuel Huntington. One of them came from the Orient, and the other was a part of the Occident.
Smith: How did these populist campaigners tie the Sieges of Vienna to modern-day concerns?
Ochsner: In every nation-building or identity-forming process between people, you need some stories, some history, and some memories. For Austrian people—or even for the Christian world—the Sieges of Vienna were pivotal. It was the most significant historical event where one of the most important European cities was close to being overtaken by Muslim troops. This is a historical fact that people know. You know it if you are Austrian because the schoolbooks are teaching this episode. But people tend not to link what happened during the 15th and 16th centuries to today’s clashes of cultures or the discourse on how to integrate people from other cultures. The entrepreneurial idea for using this historical episode, where Christians were fighting against domination by Muslims, was to take the parallels back then to some of the debates and fears of the people in present-day Austria. Instead of just saying how bad some part of the society is, they made parallels to history. The right-wing party said that these people they do not like will probably become as bad as their ancestors. It was unique to link an event some hundreds of years ago to some stereotypes of a minority of today.
We find that some historical variation that is linked to some variation that we can observe today in our data is not per se persistence in the classical sense, but that things can show up and maybe disappear depending on the time, depending on how the narrative is used.
Christian Ochsner
Smith: How do you isolate the impact of a particular populist campaign on the feelings of these Austrian voters?
Ochsner: We started with a difference-in-differences procedure to look at how voters and anti-Muslim sentiments differ before and after the campaigning. Then we tie it to whether we find some historical episodes in places that had some link to the Turkish and Ottoman atrocities, and then see whether this leads to a higher vote share or an increase in anti-Muslim sentiments.
We also used a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach. For that, we focus on a threshold of Turkish atrocities. The Turkish army marched against the capital city of Vienna, and were accompanied by some auxiliary troops. These auxiliary troops were known to be more brutal, and they attacked areas in East Austria, while the main Turkish army more or less walked directly from what is Hungary today to the capital city. And one important feature that we found, after we digitized a lot of data and looked at church and municipal chronicles and so on, is that these auxiliary troops were stopped by the Danube River. Because there were almost no ferries and no bridges back then, they were not able to cross the river. So the Danube River acts as a threshold that predicts Turkish atrocities back in the 15th and 16th century. At the threshold, we used a two-stage least squares procedure to look at whether location with respect to the Danube river predicts pillaging and then used this prediction to look at how this is correlated with increases in vote shares before and after 2005, when the modern-day political campaigns started.
Smith: What impact did the populist campaigns have?
Ochsner: If you count the vote, one out of seven voters in formerly pillaged localities only voted for this party because the campaign linked to the local history of the place or to the local narrative or a myth of the place. We also looked at whether this campaign linked with local history turned out to shape sentiments against Muslim minorities and how these people then were affected themselves. We find a huge increase in anti-Muslim sentiments in places that had been pillaged compared to not-pillaged places. These differences in anti-Muslim sentiments were almost zero between pillaged and not-pillaged places before the start of the campaign. We also tested whether the number of Turkish people or Muslim people in those affected localities shrank, and we did find this effect on the Muslim minority in Austria today.
Smith: What historical lessons can be taken from these results?
Ochsner: It's more about how to think about history, how to think about storytelling and folklore, what people are talking about, where they're coming from, and so on. States are formed based on a myth. We show that this can materialize from time to time. But from a broader perspective, our paper is probably one of the first convincing papers that shows that historical facts do not only persist over a couple of years or decades or even centuries. It is one of the first papers that shows that history can show up and go down and show up again, and this is why we call the paper activated history. There was a historical fact; people knew it as a part of folklore, children learned it in school books, and so on. But it was never made a parallel to the present day until this political campaign. In the end, we find that some historical variation that is linked to some variation that we can observe today in our data is not per se persistence in the classical sense, but that things can show up and maybe disappear depending on the time, depending on how the narrative is used.
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“Activated History: The Case of the Turkish Sieges of Vienna” appears in the June 2024 issue of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. Music in the audio is by Podington Bear.