The market and the nation: Austrian (dis)agreements

This article relates contemporary Austria's much-discussed and internally contested identity politics to transnational socio-economic transformations and their far-reaching local/national effects. A qualitative analysis of (wide-ranging contributions to) current debates on the environment, food production, climate change, social inequality and welfare, higher education, art, migration, and unemployment reveals a recurring pre-occupation with expanding/encroaching markets, their advocated limits, assumed costs or promises. The negotiation of national identities is shown to unfold in relation to three inter-related phenomena: first, widening commodification; second, what Karl Polanyi termed the ‘double-movement’ between ‘dis-embedded’ economics and political counter-assertions; third, competing ideological visions of the relationship between economic activity/market forces and social order, group boundaries, solidarities and hence exclusions/inclusions.