Habermas and European integration

With a new preface

Shivdeep Grewal

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526142740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie politique

German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has written extensively on the European Union. This is the only in-depth account of his project. Published now in paperback to coincide with the celebration of his ninetieth birthday, a new preface considers Habermas's writings on the eurozone and refugee crises, populism and Brexit, and the presidency of Emmanuel Macron.Placing an emphasis on the conception of the EU that informs Habermas's political prescriptions, the book is divided into two main parts. The first considers the unfolding of 'social modernity' at the level of the EU. Among the subjects covered are Habermas's concept of juridification, the latter's affinities with integration theories such as neofunctionalism, and the application of Habermas's democratic theory to the EU. The second part addresses 'cultural modernity' in Europe – 'Europessimism' is argued to be a subset of the broader cultural pessimism that assailed the project of modernity in the late twentieth century, and with renewed intensity in the years since 9/11.

PART I

Social modernity

1

Habermas on European integration

This chapter addresses two features of Habermas’s oeuvre. These form the basis for the account of social modernity that follows in chapters 2 to 4. First, there is the influence that the concept of juridification has had on Habermas’s journalistic writings. Though most evident in his reflections on the nation-state, juridification also informed Habermas’s (2001a, 2005) calls for constitutional deliberation. Reading his work in this way diverges from the more usual separation of its academic and journalistic aspects; it is the latter practice that Habermas, following Max Weber, has himself encouraged (Outhwaite, 1996: 5, 371). Habermas’s account (1996a, 1997a, 1998a) of the differentiation of knowledge into value spheres – those of science and knowledge, morality and law, and art and art criticism – also encourages a distinction of this kind; it was, after all, a defence of conceptual boundaries that prompted his well-known critique of poststructuralism (Habermas, 1998a). The case for a separation between bodies of work has perhaps been enforced further by the audiences to which they appeal: those familiar with the journalism, which often appears in the form of newspaper articles, may have only a passing acquaintance with the academic writing. The second feature of Habermas’s work examined here is the continuity within his journalism of the reflective welfare state project.

Historical events and Habermas’s scholarly writings provide a background context for the journalism survey that follows. Original, German, publication dates are used in order to situate each text accurately in time. The survey is divided into two parts. The first examines the critical and cautious attitude toward European integration exhibited by Habermas from the early 1960s. The increasingly positive attitude he has shown since the early 1990s is then considered.

However, such a neat periodisation should not obscure the continuity and recurrence of themes. Habermas’s ‘Eurosceptic’¹ phase actually coincided with a gradual rejection of the nation-state, separable into three stages. The first stage, running up to the early 1980s, saw him (Habermas, 1986a: 85) rejecting the European project out of hand. With the second, spanning the early to mid 1980s, he began to lose faith in the capacity for complex socio-economic problems to be solved within the purview of the nation-state, while retaining a critical attitude toward the European project (Habermas, 1986b, 1998b: 366–7). The third stage, coinciding with his ‘legal turn’, began in the mid to late 1980s – though retaining an emphasis on the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), Habermas now introduced the idea of ‘constitutional patriotism’, a key component of his later vision for Europe (Habermas, 1994b: 256). What of his ‘Europhile’ phase? An initially cautious (Habermas, 1992a) stance took a decade to flower into outright enthusiasm (Habermas, 2001a, 2005).

Another commonly made distinction contrasts Habermas’s earlier radical-democratic orientation with the legal-democratic one of his later work. On closer analysis, this too is brought into question. First, because Habermas (1986b: 67) had long ago rejected the idea, once common on the non-Leninist left, of a democratic ‘transformation of the capitalist economy according to models of self-management and council-based administration’. And second, because his support for the Constitution placed him at the utopian fringe of the social democratic intellectuals and politicians constituting his peer group.

Postwar scepticism

While taking inspiration from Kant, Hegel, Marx and Rawls, among others, Habermas has tried to move beyond their subject-centred modes of thought. In place of the latter, he has favoured an intersubjective approach that stresses communication between subjects. This has been a feature of his work since the early 1960s. Initially, it was given empirical expression in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). A theoretical treatment followed in the Gauss Lectures of 1971 (Habermas, 2001b).

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere takes the bourgeois ‘public sphere’ as its object of analysis. The development of this social formation, a set of interlinked fora for the open discussion of contemporary affairs and state policy among ‘informed outsiders’, is charted from the coffee houses and salons of eighteenth-century Europe to its twentieth-century decline in the face of organised interests concerned to modulate public opinion. Conceived of as a ‘higher level’ intersubjectivity (Habermas, 1994c: 67, 1998a: 359) than that of everyday discourse, the public sphere is the cornerstone of Habermas’s writings.

The Gauss Lectures saw a move from the ‘philosophy of consciousness’ to the ‘philosophy of communication’. The former concerns the subject-centred conception of cognition and rationality characteristic of early modern thought. The philosophy of communication encompasses intersubjective approaches, such as Habermas’s own, relevant to the networked, mediasaturated conditions of late modernity.

In ‘Conservatism and capitalist crisis’, written in 1978, Habermas looked to contemporary concerns (1986b). The article examined the challenges to the welfare state posed by advanced capitalism at the time of the energy crisis. It also touched on the radical political currents of the period, to which Habermas would return throughout the 1980s. Written just prior to Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s election victories, the article displayed considerable prescience in relation to the monetarist New Right. In terms of New Social Movements (NSMs), Habermas placed particular hope in feminism, due to its fidelity to the universalist aspirations of previous bourgeois emancipation movements. The Greens, on the other hand, were identified with a more varied, even antimodern, set of views. Their choice, Habermas later argued, was whether to mount a critique of productivism comparable with those of romantic social movements of the early industrial era or to develop a pragmatic approach. Tension between the two orientations has characterised the history of the German Green party, though the leadership of Joshcka Fischer shifted the balance in favour of its Realo wing. This tension has also been a theme of Habermas’s social theory, which makes the distinction between traditional ways of life, whose disruption is viewed by him as acceptable, if traumatic, and those post-traditional alternatives that are themselves the fruits of modernity. The cultivation and protection of the latter has been among the roles attributed by him to NSMs.

‘Conservatism and capitalist crisis’ reflected Habermas’s concern with a ‘modernisation’ of Marxist theory. This effort had spanned the 1970s, with the publication of Legitimation Crisis in 1973 and TCA in 1981. The former considered classical Marxism’s base-superstructure model, and the accounts of capitalist crisis associated with it. In their place was offered a conception of advanced capitalism that showed how crisis phenomena could be displaced onto non-economic spheres of life, ‘giving rise to more diffuse crises of legitimation and motivation’ (Outhwaite, 1996: 17). The varieties of cultural and psychological pathology caused by incursions into the lifeworld of market and administrative imperatives would be explored at length in TCA.

A remark in ‘Political experience and the renewal of Marxist theory’, first published in 1979, encapsulated Habermas’s early scepticism toward the European project. Yet there was also a note of ambivalence, a hope for the gradual attenuation of nationalism: ‘I’ve never been a fan of the idea of a “unified Europe”, even when it was fashionable, and I’m still not one today. But one does have to be glad to see a certain growing integration of the European nations’ (Habermas, 1986a: 85).

The first half of the 1980s would see the publication of two of Habermas’s major works, prior to his explorations of democracy and law in the late eighties and early nineties. These were, of course, TCA (volumes I and II), published in 1981, and PDM, which followed in 1985. PDM showed how continental thought since Hegel had either remained with the philosophy of the subject, and the account of reason tied to it, or, a trajectory beginning with Nietzsche, rejected subject-centred rationality entirely. Only by embracing an intersubjective perspective, it was argued, could the aporia of the subject be overcome without an abandonment of reason. The appearance of TCA and PDM coincided with a rightward shift in German politics, the election of Helmut Kohl in 1982 inaugurating sixteen years of Christian Democratic government. As previously, it was in Habermas’s journalism that theoretical concerns were made relevant to contemporary affairs.

‘Conservative politics, work, socialism and Utopia today’ (Habermas, 1986d), an article from 1984, continued to chart the fortunes of the welfare state. Yet along with the rise of the New Right, Habermas argued that this bureaucratic structure was threatened by its inability to solve by mere financial means the increasingly subtle ways in which economic and administrative systems, including the welfare state itself, were affecting the lives of its clients. Such deformations of the lifeworld could, he suggested, be better diagnosed and resisted by NSMs such as the Greens. The welfare state’s limitations stemmed from the productivist ethos underpinning it, a belief that production and labour are the primary forces shaping social life, and that it is exclusively in terms of compensation for lost work that individuals can be protected from the side-effects of the market and administrative systems.

Ideas from TCA continued to surface in The New Conservatism (1985), yet this selection of political essays also hinted at the legal-democratic turn that Habermas’s thought would take as the 1980s drew to a close. The call for a more reflective version of the welfare state project was again heard. This required NSMs and the public sphere to act on the welfare state administration in much the same way as the latter had ‘domesticated’ the market. It would be futile to create a further bureaucratic authority to ‘police’ the welfare state from the outside: this would simply intensify lifeworld colonisation. The only option was continually to ‘police the boundary’ between the subsystems of market and state, on the one hand, and the lives of citizens, on the other. An intersubjective public sphere capable of resisting system complexity in this way constituted for Habermas the final decoupling of ‘utopian’ aspirations from the productivist paradigm, their traditional basis among movements of the left. Sociological research seemed at the time to encourage this move beyond productivism. In a speech given to the Spanish parliament in 1984, Habermas (1994c: 53–60) drew on Claus Offe’s argument to the effect that work was now less of an influence on the evolution of society than had previously been the case.

PDM featured a questioning of the nation-state, though not, as yet, the suggestion of an alternative. The nation-state had proved uniquely capable of balancing universalist principles with the particularisms of the cultures in which they had arisen, while other institutions – the Communist Party, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), European Community (EC), etc. – had not (Habermas, 1998a: 366–7). In the absence of a viable alternative to the nation-state, a network of deracinated market and administrative systems might take over the task of governance, a future intimated by the continental economies of the EC and USA. Only Europe’s modernist and Enlightenment traditions – as yet lacking an institutional vehicle for their realisation – offered alternatives to the social Darwinism of the latter.

With the ‘Law and morality’ lectures delivered in 1986, Habermas embarked on an avenue of research that would culminate with the publication of BFN in 1992. Of particular importance was his use, in 1987, of Dolf Sternberger’s term ‘constitutional patriotism’ (Habermas, 1994d: 256). This would become synonymous with Habermas’s legal-democratic theory in the years to come....