Habermas's wishful thinking

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

New Left Review 19, January-February 2003

Gopal Balakrishnan on Martin Beck Matuštík, Jürgen Habermas: a 
Philosophical-Political Profile. Bends in the thought of Germany’s 
leading philosopher, and its engagement with history, across half a 
century.

GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN

OVERCOMING EMANCIPATION


What has changed in the world since Kant’s time that now warrants a less 
soberly realistic description of international affairs? Habermas claims 
that in the era of globalization, ‘“soft power” displaces “hard power” 
and robs the subjects to whom Kant’s association of free states was 
tailored of the very basis of their independence’. As a result, a global 
‘civil society’ that provides the political setting for a human-rights 
agenda has emerged. Even a world media domain divided between 
multinational giants and postmodern robber barons offers episodic 
coverage of human-rights violations, famines and other calamities of 
interest. Habermas seems to think that had Kant lived to see the 
beginning of the Second American Century, he might also have thrown 
caution to the winds and embraced a republican empire with the power to 
vault over the threshold of sovereign statehood and establish a new kind 
of world polity.

While Habermas expressed the hope that this process would unfold within 
the framework of a reformed United Nations, it was clear from the 
establishment of the Anglo-American no-fly zones over Iraq, and 
certainly from the time of the Rambouillet diktat, that the outlines of 
another world order were emerging, reducing the General Assembly to 
absolute irrelevance, and the Security Council to the undignified role 
of providing, when solicited, legal cover for the sovereign decisions of 
the White House. Habermas, like many on the European Left, has 
difficulty perceiving the United Nations as it is. But in a time of 
transition between old and new inter-state regimes, his normative 
political theory can perform an essential ideological function. It 
offers a method for bridging the interpretive no-man’s-land between the 
increasingly defunct norms of the Charter and the imputed ideal 
structure of obligations under a supposedly nascent international 
law—that is to say, a legal order that has yet to come into being, but 
whose humanitarian norms can be invoked by the most powerful state in 
the world to authorize any departure from the Charter framework. The 
incipient soft norms of human rights turn out to require an emergency 
regime of hard steel and high explosives to come into being.

Confronted with current US assertions of America’s eternal supremacy, as 
the Pentagon gears up to seize Baghdad, Habermas has not been moved to 
revise his confidence in the West’s new mission civilisatrice. While 
expressing conventional European misgivings about the dangers of 
‘unilateralism’, he has deplored Schroeder’s declaration that Germany 
would not join an invasion of Iraq, even were the Security Council to 
mandate one, as failing to display ‘unreserved respect for the authority 
of the UN’. The more loyal attitude of Foreign Minister Fischer—a 
favourite of both the State Department and the philosopher—was 
preferable. For Habermas, once again, the decisive question is the 
language to be used in justifying the latest state of exception, as if 
this is what determines the final architecture of world politics. Here 
is the distinction with which (in a recent Nation interview) he 
garlanded motives for the Balkan War:

"In Continental Europe, proponents of intervention took pains to shore 
up rather weak arguments from international law by pointing out that the 
action was intended to promote what they saw as the transition from a 
soft international law toward a fully implemented human rights regime, 
whereas both US and British advocates remained in their tradition of 
liberal nationalism. They did not appeal to ‘principles’ of a future 
cosmopolitan order but were satisfied to enforce their demand for 
international recognition of what they perceived to be the 
universalistic force of their own national ‘values’."

The shell game of principles versus values defines the parameters of the 
only debate that the later Habermas considers worthwhile. Conversations 
with Rawls and Rorty—‘the heirs of Jefferson’—boil down to justifying 
the writ of liberal democracy in different idioms. Acknowledgment that 
‘the idea of a just and peaceful cosmopolitan order lacks any historical 
and philosophical support’ does not deter Habermas from concluding that 
there is no alternative to striving for its realization, even if its 
military expressions, for all their good will, so far leave something to 
be desired. The suspicion that such wishful thinking might preclude 
historical and philosophical comprehension of the real world has been 
successfully kept at bay. Habermas recently wrote of Herbert Marcuse 
that he believed he had to introduce a vocabulary that could only open 
eyes clouded to realities that had grown invisible ‘by bathing 
apparently unfamiliar phenomena in a harsh counterlight’. But 
reconstructing this forgotten language, and learning how to speak it, is 
the sole vocation of a theory that is genuinely critical.

full: http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR25307.shtml

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