Why the 1955 Austrian State Treaty Bans U-Boats

ABSTRACT Why the 1955 Austrian State Treaty that restored Austria’s sovereignty to its landlocked 1938 borders also bans it from deploying submarines is a foreign policy puzzle submerged in a political joke. The idea that Austria would deploy U-boats in the Danube was as preposterous in 1955 as it is today. A political joke is successful when it elicits amusement at awareness of some unrecognized or unspoken truth about power by exposing the contradiction between narratives or interpretive scripts. That Article 13 of the penultimate peace treaty of the Second World War in Europe prohibits submarines along with a list of other more plausible weapons performs the work of a political joke because further investigation reveals important material about the post-war settlement during the early Cold War. Analysis of this penultimate peace treaty of the Second World War in Europe indicates that the submarine ban was likely the product of traumatic recent historical memory, overwrought historical and geopolitical anxiety, and a determination to burden Austria with an arms limits nearly identical to those in the 1947 peace treaties with Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, even though the burden was entirely symbolic. The 1947 peace treaty with Italy included no comparable submarine ban. The drafters of the 1955 treaty appear to have been trapped, seemingly compelled by irrational motives, to include a provision that offered no additional security to the victorious powers but instead required an empty sacrifice. The irony of the submarine ban symbolically burdening Austria is it that may have been aimed indirectly at (West) Germany, whose U-boats were iconic weapons in both world wars and which deployed and exported military submarines during the Cold War. Moreover, Germany was not subjected to a submarine ban in the 1990 Final Settlement with Respect to Germany or ‘Two Plus Four’ Treaty, the final peace treaty of the Second World War.