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User:Kramler/Kurz is not the 25th chancellor

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A handful of articles currently assign numbers to Austrian chancellors and presidents. The article on Sebastian Kurz, for example, claims that Kurz is "is the 25th chancellor;" the article on Alexander Van der Bellen describes him as "the 12th" Austrian head of state. These statements are obviously inspired by the US practice of numbering US presidents, but the trope makes no sense in the Austrian context.

Austria does not number politicians

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Austrians do not think of Ignaz Seipel as "the 6th chancellor" the way Americans think of John Quincy Adams as "the 6th president." You cannot use "25" (or whatever) as shorthand for "Kurz" in Austria the way you can use "45" as shorthand for "Trump" in the US. The Austrian Samuel L. Jackson back in 1995 would never have guessed that the answer to What is 10 out of 20? was a dead head of government, and the Austrian Jeremy Irons would never have asked this particular question in the first place. Austrian children do not memorize lists of chancellors and presidents in school. Lists of chancellors and presidents printed in books or hosted on government web sites are not numbered.

Assigning numbers to Austrian chancellors and presidents implies that these numbers play a certain role in Austrian political or historical discourse. They don't. The numbering ascribes a feature to Austrian collective thought that simply is not there. Elizabeth II is the 12th British monarch as a matter of unambiguous fact, but it's a fact that is almost never specifically mentioned by anybody, so her article does not draw inapposite attention to it.

There is no consensus on what anybody's number really is

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One reason Austrians do not talk about leaders in terms of their numbers is that it never occurred to them; another reason is that they basically can't: there is no canonical numbered list of Austrian chancellors the way there is a canonical numbered list of e.g. US presidents. For one thing, there is no consensus on who to include:

  • Walter Breisky was a caretaker chancellor appointed by the president rather than elected by the National Council, as would have been the norm at the time. He served for a single day and was succeeded by his own predecessor – whose resignation had either been a feint, a practical joke, or a bone he felt he had to throw to a bunch of angry nationalists, depending on which biographer you choose to believe. The Austrian parliament omits Breisky from its list of chancellors.[1] The Austria Forum and most historians include him in theirs.[2]
  • Arthur Seyss-Inquart was a appointed by a president who practically had a gun to his head at the time. The German army had firmly promised invasion and was four hours away from actually crossing the border. Local Nazi thugs had already taken over much of Vienna, including the chancellery. The appointment was clearly made under duress and was a farce in other respects as well. The Austrian parliament, the Austria Forum, and at least two influential historians, Weissensteiner and Weinzierl,[3] omit Seyss-Inquart from their lists. Plenty of others include him: standard law school textbooks,[4][5] legal historians,[6] experts on Seyss-Inquart and his era,[7] journalist-historians working for Austria's public broadcaster,[8] independent foreign journalist-historians.[9]
  • Some sources omit Karl Renner because he was technically Staatskanzler and not Bundeskanzler. Most sources include him because it's a distinction without difference.

For another thing, there is no consensus on how to count:

  • Many chancellors have served multiple terms. Sometimes not all of these terms were consecutive. Does a two-term chancellor appear once, like on the List of Chancellors of Austria? Does he appear twice, like on the equivalent page on the German Wikipedia? Does he appear once if his terms were consecutive and twice if they were not because that's what Americans do with their presidents and therefore what Wikipedia defaults to more generally?
  • In 1945, do you keep counting where you left off in 1938 or do you reset? The answer to this question implies an answer to the question whether the Anschluss was an annexation or an occupation. The chain of logic here is somewhat long and has at least one weak link, but a decision to keep counting can be read as agreeing with the theory that Austria was coercively subjugated by military force – which is not what historians would tell you actually happened.

Depending on who you choose to include and how you choose to count, Johannes Schober for example was either the 3rd chancellor or the 3rd and 8th. Or maybe he was the 3rd, 5th, and 10th, although the case can be made that he was really the 6th, 8th, and 16th. There is a total of ten distinct options. Ernst Streeruwitz can end up anywhere from 4th to 9th or anywhere from 13th to 15th. The current incumbent, who is 25th according to us, is 29th according to the other place. (His actual article over there mercifully omits the number.)

There is no canonical numbered list of Austrian presidents either, for similar reasons.

No possible numbering is supported by reliable sources

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Why didn't Austrians ever settle these questions and hammer out some sort of consensus over the decades? Because nobody cares. The questions aren't settled because the debate is still raging; the questions aren't settled because the debate never happened. Nobody has ever even tried to establish any canon.

There are no explicit lists of Austrian chancellors or presidents in any printed book or paper I'm aware of. There is, in fact, no complete list of Austrian chancellors on the chancellery web site. The chancellery only lists what it thinks are the chancellors of the Second Republic. It fails to include Reinhold Mitterlehner, a nine-day interim chancellor but a chancellor nonetheless, which probably means the list is not meant to be authoritative.[10] Weissensteiner and Weinzierl provide an implicit list of chancellors in the form of their table of contents, but the authors never claim that their selection of chancellors is the only one that's tenable. In particular, the book omits Seyss-Inquart, but it is clear from both tone and publishing context that this is a comment on Seyss-Inquart's political allegiance and not on his constitutional legitimacy. Significantly, the chapters are not numbered. The chancellery list is not numbered either.

At this point, none of the various possible numbering schemes has any solid support from reliable sources. It's not just that no particular variant can be shown from reliable sources to be more widely accepted than others, it's that no particular variant can really be shown to exist in the literature. Any number you assign to any chancellor or president is effectively original research.

References

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  1. ^ Bundesregierungen seit 1918
  2. ^ Bundesregierung
  3. ^ Weissensteiner, Friedrich; Weinzierl, Erika, eds. (1983). Die österreichischen Bundeskanzler. Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag. ISBN 3-215-04669-5.
  4. ^ Adamovich, Ludwig; et al. (2011). Österreichisches Staatsrecht. Band 1: Grundlagen (2nd ed.). Vienna: Springer. p. 88. ISBN 978-3-211-89396-8.
  5. ^ Brauneder, Wilhelm (2009). Österreichische Verfassungsgeschichte (11th ed.). Vienna: Manzsche Verlags- und Universitätsbuchhandlung. p. 248. ISBN 978-3-214-14876-8.
  6. ^ Hoke, Rudolf (1996). Österreichische und deutsche Rechtsgeschichte (2nd ed.). Vienna: Böhlau Studienbücher. p. 495. ISBN 3-205-98179-0.
  7. ^ Botz, Gerhard (1976). Die Eingliederung Österreichs in das Deutsche Reich (2nd ed.). Vienna: Europaverlag. p. 30. ISBN 3-203-50627-0.
  8. ^ Portisch, Hugo (1989). Österreich I: Band 2: Abschied von Österreich. Vienna: Kremayr & Scheriau. p. 300. ISBN 3-453-07946-9.
  9. ^ Weyr, Thomas (2005). The Setting of the Pearl. Vienna under Hitler. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-514679-0.
  10. ^ Bundeskanzler seit 1945


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