With its ambiguous mix of weak federalist and strong centralist elements, the Austrian constitutional architecture has been subject to conflicting interpretations and claims from its very beginning. The written 1920 constitution has been paralleled by informal rules and forces making up for the imbalance of power between national and subnational authorities. Understanding these inherent weaknesses, virtually all political actors involved are well aware that reforming the allocation of rights and duties between the different levels in the federal state is urgently needed. In recent years, several initiatives of recalibrating the system of power-sharing between the different levels of government have been initiated. So far progress has been modest, yet the reform process is still underway. The contributions to this volume shine a light on history, presence, and future aspects of the Austrian federal system from historical, juridical, economic, and political science perspective. The volume is also the first book in English ever devoted to the Austrian version of federalism.
Im Dezember 2005 wurde der Zukunftsfonds der Republik Österreich per Bundesgesetz mit einem Etat von 20 Millionen Euro errichtet. In den zehn Jahren seines Bestehens förderte der ÖZF rund 1.370 Projekte, die sich vor allem auch der Erforschung totalitärer Systeme im 20. Jahrhundert widmen. Mit dem expliziten Ziel des „Niemals wieder!“ avancierte der Zukunftsfonds zu einer nationalen Institution, deren zentrale Aufgabe in der Förderung einer nachhaltigen und zukunftsorientierten Erinnerungskultur sowie des demokratiepolitischen und menschenrechtlichen Engagements liegt. Das Buch präsentiert die wichtigsten Etappen der Entstehung und Tätigkeit des Zukunftsfonds. Neben einer Dokumentation seiner Wirkungsweisen analysiert es die Bedeutung des ÖZF für Forschung und Gesellschaft. Auf der Grundlage von Interviews kommen Persönlichkeiten zu Wort, die an der Entwicklung des Zukunftsfonds maßgeblich beteiligt waren. Exemplarisch dargestellte Projekte und deren vollständige Liste geben einen Einblick in die Vielfalt seiner Fördertätigkeit.
After the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Austria transformed itself from an empire to a small Central European country. Formerly an important player in international affairs, the new republic was quickly sidelined by the European concert of powers. The enormous losses of territory and population in Austria's post-Habsburg state of existence, however, did not result in a political, economic, cultural, and intellectual black hole. The essays in the twentieth anniversary volume of Contemporary Austrian Studies argue that the small Austrian nation found its place in the global arena of the twentieth century and made a mark both on Europe and the world. Be it Freudian psychoanalysis, the “fin-de-siècle” Vienna culture of modernism, Austro-Marxist thought, or the Austrian School of Economics, Austrian hinkers and ideas were still wielding a notable impact on the world. Alongside these cultural and intellectual dimensions, Vienna remained the Austrian capital and reasserted its strong position in Central European and international business and finance. Innovative Austrian companies are operating all over the globe. This volume also examines how the globalizing world of the twentieth century has impacted Austrian demography, society, and political life. Austria's place in the contemporary world is increasingly determined by the forces of the European integration process. European Union membership brings about convergence and a regional orientation with ramifications for Austria's global role. Austria emerges in the essays of this volume as a highly globalized country with an economy, society, and political culture deeply grounded in Europe. The globalization of Austria, it appears, turns out to be in many instances an “Europeanization”.
The interdisciplinary volume offers methodologically innovative approaches to Austria's coping with issues of migration past and present. These essays show Austria's long history as a migration country. Austrians themselves have been on the move for the past 150 years to find new homes and build better lives. After the World War II the economy improved and prosperity set in, so Austrians tended to stay at home. Austria's growing prosperity made the country attractive to immigrants. After the war, tens of thousands of "ethnic Germans" expelled from Eastern Europe settled in Austria. Starting in the 1950s "victims of the Cold War" (Hungary, Czechs and Slovaks) began looking for political asylum in Austria. Since the 1960s Austria has been recruiting a growing number of "guest workers" from Turkey and Yugoslavia to make up the labor missing in the industrial and service economies. Recently, refugees from the arc of crisis from Afghanistan to Syria to Somalia have braved perilous journeys to build new lives in a more peaceful and prosperous Europe.
The contributions in this volume, written by historians, political scientists and linguists, shed new light on the political development of the nationality question in Europe during the First World War and its aftermath, covering theoretical developments and debates, social mobilization and cultural perspectives.
This is the second of five ambitious volumes theorizing the structure of governance above and below the central state. This book is written for those interested in the character, causes, and consequences of governance within the state. The book argues that jurisdictional design is shaped by the functional pressures that arise from the logic of scale in providing public goods and by the preferences that people have regarding self-government. The first has to do with the character of the public goods provided by government: their scale economies, externalities, and informational asymmetries. The second has to do with how people conceive and construct the groups to which they feel themselves belonging. In this book, the authors demonstrate that scale and community are principles that can help explain some basic features of governance, including the growth of multiple tiers over the past six decades, how jurisdictions are designed, why governance within the state has become differentiated, and the extent to which regions exert authority. The authors propose a postfunctionalist theory which rejects the notion that form follows function, and argue that whilst functional pressures are enduring, one must engage human passions regarding self-rule to explain variation in the structures of rule over time and around the world. Transformations in Governance is a major new academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states up to supranational institutions, down to subnational governments, and side-ways to public-private networks. It brings together work that significantly advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series targets mainly single-authored or co-authored work, but it is pluralistic in terms of disciplinary specialization, research design, method, and geographical scope. Case studies as well as comparative studies, historical as well as contemporary studies, and studies with a national, regional, or international focus are all central to its aims. Authors use qualitative, quantitative, formal modeling, or mixed methods. A trade mark of the books is that they combine scholarly rigour with readable prose and an attractive production style. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the VU Amsterdam, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.
This book provides a detailed introduction to how the Lander (the 16 states of Germany) function not only within the country itself but also within the wider context of European political affairs. Some knowledge of the role of the Lander is essential to an understanding of the political system as well as of German federalism. This book traces the origin of the Lander. It looks at their place in the constitutional order of the country and the political and administrative system. Their organization and administration are fully covered, as is their financing. Parties and elections in the Lander and the controversial roles of parliaments and deputies are also examined.
