`It is not the job of an Austrian government to clear up historical questions," according to Jorg Haider. He was speaking in Vienna at the press conference to announce the contents of the coalition agreement with the conservative People's Party, the basis for the new Austrian government installed yesterday.

But it is precisely those questions that worry so many Austrians and other Europeans. They are confronted with what the German Defence Minister, Rudolf Scharping, yesterday described as a historic mistake in legitimising far-right involvement in European governance.

Haider did promise "a lot of initiatives to show that we have learnt to move on from the dark part of history in which Austria was involved". The coalition is committed to do so by virtue of the remarkable joint declaration signed by him and the People's Party leader, Wolfgang Schussel.

Drafted by the Austrian President, Thomas Klestil, as the price of his reluctant acceptance that they are democratically entitled to form a government, it commits them "to a self-critical scrutiny of the National Socialist past. It will ensure unreserved clarification, exposure to the structures of injustice, and the transmission of this knowledge to coming generations as a warning to the future".

The declaration says Austria "accepts her responsibility arising out of the tragic history of the 20th century and the horrendous crimes of the National Socialist regime. Our country is facing up to the light and dark sides of its past and to the deeds of all Austrians, good and evil, as its responsibility. Nationalism, dictatorship and intolerance brought war, xenophobia, bondage, racism and mass murder."

President Klestil has played a significant role in enlarging the boundaries of official Austria's historical memory by confronting these realities. They are peculiarly important because of the way its national identity was constructed after the second World War.

Two historical myths were involved: that Austria was "a nation of victims", and that its sovereignty was guaranteed by permanent neutrality as written into the 1955 State Treaty which restored its independence.

The culture of victimhood allowed responsibility for the Nazi atrocities to be externalised because of its military occupation by National Socialist Germany from 1938 to 1945. That cue was taken from the Moscow Declaration of 1943 but, as Anton Pelinka of the University of Innsbruck points out, the other part of the declaration held Austria responsible, too, for National Socialism and its crimes.

The systematic overlooking of this meant that "the Second Austrian Republic is built on a one-sided, and therefore distorted, view of historical reality". It has taken the dedicated work of a younger generation of historians to uncover the reality, exemplified in essays contained in a recent volume of revisionist research.*

Their work makes it plain how political a task this is and why that history has loomed so large as an issue in the formation of the coalition. As Pelinka says, the value of the joint responsibility concept is its insistence on remembrance. It asks Austrians to remember there were about 600,000 members of the German National Socialist Party in Austria. There was wide acceptance of the Anschluss and remarkably little resistance to it (although 70,000 people were arrested and detained in a continuation of the civil war of 1933-1934 and the authoritarian Dollfuss government that followed it).

A remarkably high proportion of Austrians were among the direct participants in the Nazis' machinery of destruction,

as was partially revealed and grudgingly accepted during the Waldheim affair in the 1980s. Of the 200,000 Jews in Austria in 1938 128,000 were forced into exile and 65,000 murdered, many of them in the Mauthausen concentration camp near Vienna. Forty-four thousand apartments in Vienna were seized from their Jewish owners in an Aryanisation programme.

After the war the externalisation of these realities through blaming Germany denied compensation to

most of the victims of Nazism. It enabled some million Nazi collaborators and their families to be reabsorbed into mainstream Austrian life. An extraordinary system of power-sharing government between the two main blocs in Austrian politics, the reds and blacks, extended into every nook and cranny of the society.

The resulting democratic corporatism was dominated by the socialists; it brought stability and prosperity but at the price of extensive bureaucracy and an elite consensus that suffocated alternative voices. The country's political identity was then defined officially by the State Treaty of 1955 which inscribed permanent neutrality within Cold War Europe.

Haider's party has thrived on opportunist criticism of that cosy consensus for over a decade. He has a large personal following and a dictatorial style.

His own background is instructive. His father was an active Nazi, while the large estate he owns in Carinthia came into his family after it was confiscated from its Jewish owners.

The favourable references to Nazi policies which have made him notorious must be seen clearly in this context. Because the historical record has never been confronted properly their banal and sentimental populism has an alarmingly ready response among many of those who support him.

But although his party absorbed small neo-fascist currents its mass appeal is much wider than that. It attracted support in the last election from a majority of older working-class voters, fearful of job losses through globalisation and EU enlargement and drawn to promises of welfare hand-outs.

It secured 35 per cent of the 19- to 29-year-old voters compared to 25 per cent for the socialists; many of them are heartily fed up with corporatism and its petty corruptions and back the Freedom Party as the only way to break it up. His virulent opposition to foreigners must be seen against the fact that Austria has successfully absorbed some 500,000 refugees, many from the Balkan conflict, in recent years.

Typically, Haider attacks these targets opportunistically and advocates policies already in place, as with immigration controls. The coalition programme accepts EU enlargement but advocates longer transitional controls on labour mobility. It promises deregulation and privatisations which will be even more destabilising for its working-class supporters but attractive to big business.

In these circumstances a number of Austrian commentators say it will take a Haider-led or -influenced government to convince Austrians that he is not the answer. He is adept at manipulative opposition and well able to exploit the easy targets presented by such a long period of corporatism.

The combination of international and domestic pressure will certainly realign that political system. It will also ensure that its historical taboos are finally confronted.

* Gunter Bischof & Anton Pelinka eds, Austrian Historical Memory and National Identity, Contemporary Austrian Studies, vol 5, London 1997.