THE STATE OF THE ART

Academic literature on Austrian identity deals mainly with historical perspectives and attempts to prove the existence of an independent Austrian nation and a national identity as well as to document, by means of empirical quantitative surveys, how this identity is rooted in the Austrian mind (for example, Bruckmüller 1996 and 1994, Haller et al. 1996, Stourzh 1990, Reiterer 1988a, Zöllner 1988, Dusek, Pelinka and Weinzierl 1988, Kreissler 1984, Heer 1981). However, because this approach has scarcely considered social history or the history of everyday life, it has largely neglected to analyse everyday political culture or to interpret national consciousness as a manifestation of political communities.

A large number of works, which concentrate mainly on the (chronological) develop ment of European nation-states, regard the French Revolution as the beginning of the modern, plebiscitarian conception of the nation and distinguish it from the concept of a nation defined by ethnic and cultural characteristics. In this view, Austria is considered a ‘belated nation’ (cf. Reiterer 1988a, p. 110), which has developed from the Habsburg Monarchy (influenced by confrontation with the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution) to the First Republic (whose viability as an independent state was widely doubted and which failed largely because of ideological conflicts between its two main political camps) to the Second Republic of Austria in which the concept of Staatsnation has gained broad acceptance.