|
Austria SOCIAL STRUCTURE
Austrian society was traditionally stratified and had a low
degree of social mobility. As a result, social distinctions were
clear. Social relations between aristocrats and commoners,
masters and servants, large landowners and peasant-farmers, and
employers and employees were hierarchical and well defined, and
the use of titles as a reflection of rank or social status was
important. Austrians born into specific social groups or classes
had few opportunities to improve their social and economic
standing and identified themselves strongly with their inherited
social positions, which were reinforced by education (or the lack
thereof), attitudes toward religion, and political convictions.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the three
predominant social classes in Austria were aristocrats;
"citizens" or burghers in towns and cities, who had special
charters of rights and privileges; and peasants-farmer--"free
farmers" in western Austria who owned and tilled their own land
and peasant-serfs in eastern Austria. Reforms had been introduced
during the last decades of the eighteenth century to bring about
a greater degree of social equality, but legal equality was not
established in the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary until the
constitution of 1867 was promulgated. Even at the beginning of
the twentieth century, society still consisted of a very small
upper class composed of an old aristocracy of "blue bloods" and a
recently ennobled and new aristocracy of wealth, a small middle
and entrepreneurial class (approximately 15 percent), a growing
working class (approximately 25 percent), and a class of peasantfarmers (approximately 55 to 60 percent).
During the troubled interwar period, a time of political
unrest and economic hardship for most Austrians, the country's
main social groups remained rigidly segregated and there was a
high degree of identification of specific classes with
corresponding political ideologies and worldviews. The resulting
"Lager," or "camp," mentality was seen in the embrace of
the urban working class of social democracy while the rest of the
country became proponents of conservative Roman Catholic
Christian politics or, to a much lesser degree, European-style
liberalism
(see Political Dynamics
, ch. 4).
After World War II, however, the structure of Austrian
society changed substantially. The white-collar middle class
expanded greatly during four decades of unprecedented prosperity.
The number of farmers and workers declined as they or their
children were able to benefit from the postwar era's social
mobility and find better employment. Many low-status jobs were
taken by foreign workers from southeastern Europe. An
increasingly white-collar service economy reduced the previous
social inequalities and blurred traditional class distinctions.
Education became the most important vehicle of upward social
mobility, and a more open education system made it more available
than ever before. Attitudinal barriers to social mobility did not
disappear to a corresponding extent, however. Coming from an
"established" or older family still played an important role in
the social position Austrians were able to assume in society.
The long period of prosperity and social mobility weakened
the Lager mentality that had characterized the interwar
period. Beginning in the 1980s, electoral patterns indicated that
the traditional political allegiances of specific classes to
corresponding political parties and ideologies had deteriorated.
This relaxation of political ties permitted the formation of new
political parties that profited from a growing pool of "floating
votes."
Data as of December 1993
|
