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This thematic issue,
"Right-wing Populism and National Identity," marks the first
appearance of the journal conflict & communication online,
whose chosen goal is to bring together and integrate theories, methodological
approaches and empirical research under a peace science perspective.
A peace science perspective whose goal is the prevention and reduction
of violence by non-violent means has to integrate findings of a variety
of different disciplines which study conflict and/or communication. This
requires, in our opinion, not only applied research on current and topical
fields of conflict, but at the same time also the furthering of trans-disciplinary
basic research which, on the one side, will seek generalizable results
pointing beyond concrete case studies, and, on the other hand, can be
validated on the basis of their linkage to praxis only. The spectrum of
topics which will be presented in conflict & communication online
consequently includes theoretical contributions, empirical studies and
methodological discussions, as well as reflections on practical issues.
It ranges from social-psychological small-group research to the study
of both intra- and inter-state wars, from the analysis of interpersonal
communication to mass communication research and from conflict management
to journalism and new information technologies.
Right-wing populism and national identity are addressed in the present
issue using the example of Austria, which provoked international headlines
about two years ago when the FPÖ entered the government and drew
sharp negative reactions from other EU countries. Even though relations
between Austria and its EU partners have normalized in the meantime, the
FPÖ government participation is not an issue that can simply be filed
away and forgotten, in view of the unconcealed NS sympathies of its intellectual
leader, Jörg Haider, and the party's openly xenophobic campaign in
the National Assembly elections of October 1999. To the contrary, precisely
the return to the European agenda poses the question of what sort of Europe
we are actually steering toward. This is all the more the case since with
Berlusconi's electoral victory a right-wing populist party has also achieved
power in Italy, and populism represents a political style which has in
the meantime begun to spread far beyond the right-wing parties. In Great
Britain and Germany it has begun to appear typical of the governmental
policies of Tony Blair's New Labour and Gerhard Schröder's SPD: Thus
we can expect to be confronted with the topic more often in the future.
In this issue we deal first of all with the FPÖ and view it from
three perspectives: In a political-science analysis, Anton Pelinka analyzes
the FPÖ electoral victory under the framework conditions of the Austrian
political system and Austrian society. By means of a content analytical
study on the construction of national identity in Austrian print media
from 1945 to 1995, Wilhelm Kempf shows how the Austrian press contributed
to the intellectual climate which made possible the political rise of
Haider; and on the basis of a discourse analysis of Erich Böhme's
Haider talk show, Kerstin Stettner and Franz Januschek support the thesis
that even the exposure of a (right-wing) populist is a component of populist
discourse and not necessarily a means of fighting it.
Beyond this, this issue contains two free contributions whose topical
focus is indirectly related: In a longitudinal study of the relationship
between traditional differences and new demarcating identities in the
Berlin linguistic community of the 90s, Irena Regener studies some socio-linguistic
indicators of East-West German identities, and Ilhan Kizilhan researches,
using the example of solidarity groups in East Anatolia, the dynamics
of conflicts and conflict solutions in patriarchal communities.
Konstanz
- Berlin - Toronto
January 2002
Wilhelm
Kempf
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