“Can Austria Stay Neutral?”: Rethinking Austria’s Role Concept in European and World Politics

Kurzfassung/Abstract

In times of rising great power tensions, security issues and debates about respective national security strategies have regained prominence in political and public debates on foreign policy. For small states, the existing literature distinguishes between two ideal security policy options: neutrality or alliance. In the light of complex systems theory, however, a radical transformation from one alternative to the other in a political system is not impossible – Sweden and Finland's bid for NATO membership comes to mind – but an uncertain undertaking, even in a profoundly changed regional or global security environment.
The case of Austria shows, on the one side, how influential the decision for one of these strategic alternatives can be for a small state, especially for its conception of its role in the world and thus for its foreign policy identity constructions and behaviour. The development of the understanding of neutrality in Austrian politics, as expressed by high-ranking politicians in speeches over the past decades, illustrates the importance and potential of evolutionary changing interpretations for the foreign policy behaviour of a small state, on the other.
As a result of these seemingly contradictory findings, I will argue that Austria will most likely retain its neutral status – now largely reduced to its formal military implications – and continue to use it to maximise its foreign policy leverage under the current particularly unstable conditions of the European and global systems. While Austria's security policy will remain committed to its obligations as an EU member state, in particular to the Union's Common Security and Defence Policy, neutrality in this guise serves as a fallback option for Austrian foreign policy more widely in an uncertain world – which could also be seen as a special form of hedging in small states research.