Et Tu, Felix Austria, VETO!

Make no mistake. The Austrian veto against Romania's and Bulgaria's full Schengen membership is not about preventing Romanian / Bulgarian Gastarbeiter--people who try to support their families back home by moving, for work, to western Europe--from being able to work in Austria or the rest of the Schengen area. That is already happening, big time, a presence that goes back to a centuries-old, perfectly well known pattern of labor mobility in central Europe. The Romanian / Bulgarian guestworker presence may even pick up, for all we know. It is about preventing Romanian and Bulgarian citizens from acquiring full rights in Schengen; i.e., the idea is pushing Romanian and Bulgarian migrant labor, people who are already in Schengenland, more deeply into, or keeping them in, informality, i.e., decreasing the cost of that labor even further, deep into the future. This is a very petty bourgeois, unbearably gemütlich, Austrian road to reducing labor costs, improving what economists refer to as "profitability" for capital. As if Austria's per capita GDP (in 2018, according to Maddison's data set, 42,988, no less than 2.26 times the world mean) were not "enough." So much about the so called corporate welfare state, labor peace and co-determination, Austria's famous non-confrontational economic management model.

By the way, there is nothing particularly new about this as a pattern world-wide. . . that is kind of the whole reason why certain segments of capital are so interested in BOTH

1. maintaining a "healthy" degree of the influx of migrant labor, while
2. fighting against its full legalization and, hence, protection.

This is pretty well known from the critical economic sociology of migration. (Even Alejandro Portes, my erstwhile academic advisor and I wrote about it, a whopping 33 years ago in English, re-published, several times, in English, as well as in Spanish and Magyar.) This needs to be mentioned in European politics because the European political elites, not to mention the publics at large, use their impressive levels of overall literacy and access to the rest of the world not to read at all, or read almost exclusively neoliberal falsehood and Eurocentric Kitsch. That's what pleases them, apparently. Least of all will they learn from scholarship, or from the experiences of societies in other parts of the world.

There is something special about the case of the Austrian veto specifically against Romania, though--having to do with the fact that a large part of what is Romania today had been an important part of Austrian imperial "possessions," hence a significant source for Austrian accumulation, for centuries.

The Austro-Romanian nexus strongly resembles the relationship between west European colonizers and the societies they had once colonized. The essence of that nexus is influence and dependency without rights. A useful definition of dependency, as I have argued repeatedly, is that it is a pairwise network link between two actors that is considerably more significant for one actor than the other. Our world is, to a large extent, made up by a vast number of such pairwise linkage structures. The relationship between the EU and its non-EU-member "neighborhood" (that is how hilariously official EU parlance refers to the non-EU-member states on their borders), EU and its poorer member states, the Schengen-members and the non-Schengen-members of the EU, clearly presents a picture of a huge number of such pairwise nexuses of dependency.

The history of west European erstwhile-colonizer states is marked, among other things, by coming to terms with the morally problematic side of imperial legacy. Debates over the colonial past have made it at least possible for some segments of the public cultures of the colonial "west" to experience genuine remorse over colonial crimes and sins. It is still not the dominant position, but it is possible to argue that--not the least because of the presence of sizable minorities in those societies with roots in the erstwhile colonized parts of the world.

This is the point where Austria is different from its more "successful," erstwhile-colonizer counterparts. For, under no circumstances will the Austrian public accept the contemporary consequences of historical responsibility for its imperial past. In other words, the collective effervescence, guilt and reckoning over imperial brutality that some erstwhile colonizer societies in western Europe might have gone through, even if in conflict-ridden, partial and self-contradictory ways, is not happening in the Austria, even though--as a very superficial stroll through any of its cities will show you if you care to see--that country is truly, deeply a product of the legacy of contiguous empire. For better or worse.

Having vetoed Romania's and Bulgaria's Schengen membership, Austria is also showing a finger (well, a relatively small and insignificant finger, but still, a finger) to Nato (both Bulgarian and Romania are full members of Nato, and key actors in the war effort in Ukraine). As you will recall, Austria is not a member of Nato, it is constitutionally prevented from it, and Austria's relationship to Nato, and particularly Big Daddy whose tool Nato is, is quite complicated, especially so in the context of Finland and Sweden, arguably two of the, till now, non-militarily-allied, states of Europe having recently very decisively abandoned their non-Nato stances, leaving Austria and Switzerland as a somewhat odd outliers in the otherwise contiguous map of Nato.

Austria will use peace to gain the same unfair privileges that other west Europeans did through violence. The often quoted Austrian "national" slogan "Et tu, Felix Austria, nube"--was a reference to the 16th century wars with the Ottoman Empire, extolling the virtues of the Habsburg strategies of gaining empire through imperial "marriage" rather than war. I quoted that topos as a motto to chapter 4, titled "The Elasticity of Weight--The EU As A Geopolitical Animal" of my book on the longue-durée historical sociology of European statehood and its implications for the EU that the latter is a semi-continent-wide extension of that idea. The current veto of two already EU-member states to join the Schengen system is a brilliant example of that. Tiny and--when it comes to push and shove in the military sense, truly insignificant Austria is using the power of its veto a tail that wags the EU, a half-continent-size extension of its old empire, which has been gone for more than a century now.

Austria's pigheaded veto is a historically deeply coded act of "peaceful" violence. Just like brexit, it is all about an imperial history that refuses go away, a neocolonial policy enacted by a political system that is muted, ideologically censored from the middle-right all the way to the left.

It is, of course, also many other things, including a peculiar kind of "intra-Austrian" and "intra-Schengen" class politics, privileging the anti-immigration political forces--a curious and depressing coalition between the entrenched and protected, "White" and locally national segments of the local working classes, the ever so vocal, arch-conservative, indeed "fascist-curious" parts of the local middle classes, with those segments of capital that rely most on undocumented, therefore underprivileged and underpaid, labor. Put differently, the process of importing and keeping undocumented large numbers of post-imperial labor is a powerful subsidy to all those groups, creating an unholy, de facto alliance among them, along textbook fascist lines.

On the immediate short run, if things remain as they are now, there will be a significant increase in demand for Schengen passports in Romania--ethnic Hungarians and Germans having special access to that, if they so wish, having already resulted in an explosion of the numbers of migrant workers from Romania in the Schengen area--with "false flag" passports. The same goes for Bulgarians.

As this is the total refusal of the key "European policy" objectives of both the Romanian and the Bulgarian political systems, those countries' domestic politics will be stirred and imbalanced for a while because of this. A lot of symbolic politics will follow. I find it difficult to imagine that there would be any, particularly meaningful "anti-Austrian" agitation, for the simple reason that that the object of that hatred is so petty.

One can only hope this will not lead to even less solidarity, at least in Hungary--whose society could teach the world a few things about the complex, kinky sorta kindness of imperial, khm, "relations" with Felix Austria--and not exacerbate the Schengen-envy of those with Schengen passports and a particularly powerful overall inferiority complex.