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Austria Austria's Integration with the West
Early Soviet expectations for domination of Austria were
pinned on a serious misreading of the KPÖ's electoral strength,
and reality forced the Austrian Communists and their Soviet
backers to turn to extraparliamentary means. With the Soviet
Union occupying Austria's industrial heartland, the KPÖ hoped
first to gain control of the labor movement and then to exploit
popular discontent with the difficult postwar economic situation
to bring mass pressure to bear on the government. As part of its
overall strategy, the KPÖ sought to weaken the SPÖ by encouraging
party factionalism and to undermine the cooperation between the
two major parties. Similar tactics successfully brought
Communists to power in neighboring East European countries in the
late 1940s. But in Austria, Socialists united around Renner's
social democratic approach and managed to outflank the Communists
for worker support, as they had done after World War I.
In 1947 and 1948, the Soviet Union attempted to block
Austria's participation in United States-sponsored aid programs,
including the European Recovery Program (known as the Marshall
Plan), and in the fall of 1947 the KPÖ pulled out of the
coalition government over this issue. Ironically, the provisions
that the Soviet Union itself had sought in the 1946 Control
Agreement enabled Austria to freely sign the aid agreements and
join the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC),
the body charged with planning how to use the Marshall Plan.
Membership in the OEEC facilitated Austria's economic integration
with the West and provided the economic basis for a stable
parliamentary democracy in the postwar period.
Data as of December 1993
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