Austrian Counter-Hegemony

Christian Karner (1)

1 UON - University of Nottingham, UK

This article examines select discursive contributions to Austrian civil society as counter-hegemonic forms of engagement with (trans)national structures of power and exclusion. Their ideological opposition is shown to unfold around three thematic areas: (1) conceptualizations of (ethnic) identities that subvert discourses of ethnonationalism; (2) initiatives that challenge everyday racism and asylum seekers' structural marginalization; (3) a recurring critique of neo-liberalism and economic globalization. The article also demonstrates that the political agency in question is informed by a narrative of interpretation, which partly converges with seminal contributions to the sociology of globalization and which differs radically from neo-nationalist responses to the dislocations and uncertainties of contemporary capitalism.

Mots clés: anti-racism; asylum seekers; civil society; economic globalization; ‘Fortress Europe'; ‘Fortress Europe

Christian Karner. Austrian Counter-Hegemony. Ethnicities, 2007, 7 (1), pp.82-115. ⟨10.1177/1468796806073920⟩. ⟨hal-00571866⟩