ABSTRACT
Many small countries share the dubious fate of being ignored or even unrecognized by much of the world. To the world at large, Austria is in fact the image of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the Trapp family, skiing and great food. Political scientists derive their interest in Austria solely from the post-1945 era, that is, from institutions of the Second Republic such as Austria’s neutrality and its corporatism. Neutrality and corporatism are currently undergoing substantial changes to the point of suffering from serious erosion, though neither is in danger of disappearing completely. The “economization” of politics constitutes one of corporatism’s defining identities. This has been the case with one of Austrian corporatism’s major ingredients, the institutionalization of “social partnership.” Corporatism, to its radical critics, was nothing less than a structural arrangement to stymie working-class power on behalf of capitalist interests.
