Modern Austrian Discourse of Neutrality as Contrhegemonic Discourse

The research under consideration represents the analysis of modern Austrian discourse about the neutrality cancellation which shows its discursive practices and implied meaning and values to understand modern Austrian political identity. The study was conducted in the settings of the post-structural theory of E.Laclau and Sh.Mouffe utilizing the six-steps methodology of S.Walton and B.Boon and small corpus discourse analysis methods. The main corpus consists from 133 texts classified into different genres: articles, essay, interview dated 2001-2015. The criterion for the text search was mentioning just Austrian neutrality (wordforms: Österreichs/che/chen Neutralität, Neutralität + Österreich). The selection of the study material took place on web-sites of such Austrian newspapers as diePresse, derStandard, KronenZeitung (Krone) and magazine profil. In the antagonistic discourse of Austrian neutrality the floating signifier is concept of security, while the empty signifier is neutrality per se. As results of the quantity and statistics analysis of the Austrian newspaper-magazine corpus it was discovered that the key signifiers (nodal points) for the hegemonic articulation of the Austrian neutrality discourse are sovereignty, mandatory conscription and controversial in terms of the economic prosperity EU’s membership, in other words, euroscepticism; for the counterhegemonic articulation against neutrality there exists professional army, membership in EU and potential membership in NATO. The studies about the security concept in European countries of L.Hansen and O.Wæver helped to investigate the cases of the key signifiers fixation in the process of linking and differentiation for Austrian political identity in connection with the neutrality discourse. Moreover, they were applied for making conclusions about the reasons for the counterhegemonic discourse not being supported by the majority of Austrian citizens because of the values it appeals to.