Habermas on the European crisis

Binaries and boundaries

It’s worth noting at the outset that Habermas’s version of critical theory is not inherently pro-European in the conventional sense. In fact, there was a time when Habermas was quite sceptical in regard to the dominant form of European unification. Speaking in the late 1970s, he insisted: ‘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’ (Habermas, 1986: 88). This ‘Eurosceptic’ attitude stemmed from a belief that the process of European unification combined and compounded the twin evils of modern society: a deregulated market economy and a self-empowered bureaucracy. Ten years later, this early Euroscepticism gave way to increasing doubts about the ability of democratic nation-states to respond effectively to newly emerging global threats and challenges. European institutions were increasingly seen by Habermas both as bulwarks against global neoliberalism and as a means by which to regain the lost capacity of the nation-state to rectify unjust and harmful market outcomes. After the turn of the century, Habermas went even further, displaying genuine enthusiasm for the cause of the EU (Grewal, 2012: 13–14).

Habermas himself describes his essays as a blueprint for a ‘convincing new narrative’ (Habermas, 2012: 53–4). Like most political narratives, it organizes meanings by way of emotionally powerful binary oppositions: general population versus elites, transnational democracy versus the nation-state, Europe versus America. Habermas’s first move is to jettison the old geo-cultural antithesis between ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ (now perhaps ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’) which continues to dominate mainstream conservative discourse. This antithesis has deep roots in Continental philosophy. Hegel, for example, maintained that the purported dearth of navigable routes connecting Asian nations to the sea and, by contrast, the easy access of Europeans to the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean had created ‘an enduring difference between the two continents’ (Hegel, 1981: 196). ³ Habermas dispenses with this essentializing dichotomy and focuses instead on differences between political orders. He thus appears to be applying the constitutive binary of ‘insiders and outsiders’ – corresponding to the moral binary of ‘superior and inferior’ – to political positions within European member-states. The Scottish aspiration to independence, for example, is something which Habermas (albeit only in private) has vigorously opposed as a backward step (Bahners, 2014). ⁴

Until the turn of the century, Habermas talked of the need to move beyond the nation-state to ‘a federal European state’, and of the wisdom of such a step (Habermas, 2005: 88). Between Facts and Norms features a ‘Federal Republic of European States’ (1998: 500) that emulates the USA after the Civil War in its constitutional structure. The aim is to confer ‘the character of an authentic state’ (2005: 86) on the institutions of the EU, regardless of the diverse nature of the national and regional cultures of its member states. In order to become more like a state, the EU must have its own army; it must have a constitution and be able to raise its own taxes; tax rates and social policies must converge across its member states; there must be a common foreign policy and an elected president (2009: 57–8, 103). On top of all this, the European anthem should be played more often and the blue EU flag, with its circle of stars, should be given a higher profile (2009: 81). These are all indications that, until quite recently, Habermas advocated the evolution of the EU into a large-scale replica of the nation-state – minus linguistic and ethnic homogeneity.

The fact that there is no such thing as a European people, or even a common European public sphere or political culture, is not seen as an insurmountable problem: an appropriate ethical basis for the European superstate can be created ex post facto by the state itself. Habermas here reminds his readers of the history of the nation-states of Europe, in which national consciousness and civic solidarity were, he says, ‘produced only gradually with the help of national historiography, mass communication and universal conscription’. Euro-federalists thus have no cause to succumb to ‘defeatism’ (2005: 87). Clearly, at this stage, Habermas believed that German, French, and British nationals could be turned into Europeans in the same way that the French state turned ‘peasants into Frenchmen’ (Weber, 1976).

This linear conception of historical progress, which assumes that civic consciousness and solidarity can be upscaled from local to national and from national to European, is at odds with Habermas’s cosmopolitan aspirations. Why should the artificial generation of a new sense of togetherness stop at the borders of Europe? A European federal state would, in all likelihood, end up as just one more ‘particularistic’ global player in international politics, alongside the USA, China and other major powers. If the ultimate goal of history is to establish a ‘global domestic politics without a world government’ (Habermas, 2005: 88), then it is not clear how the EU, after having been transformed into a genuine state, could be a meaningful step in this direction.

Again, Habermas’s older narrative of progress is open to the same kind of critique which he himself developed in relation to Charles Taylor’s concept of multiculturalism. As Taylor sees it, the defining characteristic of policies that recognize cultural minorities is that they ‘actively seek to create members of the community’ (Taylor, 1994: 58–9). It is not enough, for example, to protect a minority language; we also have to ensure that future generations are able to identify with a particular culture. In his well-known critique, Habermas misread, and rejected, this conception of minority rights as being the political equivalent of species conservation (Habermas, 2002: 220–6; for a discussion see Heins, 2016). He was essentially repeating the argument advanced by the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer who, in the period prior to the First World War, condemned orthodox Jews for setting up their own schools, and thus trying to ensure ‘the artificial preservation of their old cultural specificity’ (Bauer, 2000: 306), rather than integrating into mainstream society.

My point is that until a few years ago Habermas himself was not immune to the analogous charge of advocating the gradual imposition of a European identity through cultural engineering. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, both the European Commission and the European Parliament faced similar charges of applying the assimilationist techniques of 19th-century nationalism to the diverse populations of Europe – by commissioning uniform history textbooks, for example, or by producing identical transnational radio and television broadcasts. These rather pathetic attempts to orchestrate a common identity were, to say the least, poorly received by the public. With countries unable to agree on such matters as whether Francis Drake was a hero or a pirate or whether Kafka was a Czech or a German – not to mention other, more important matters of historical dispute – these attempts were bound to fail (Van Middelaar, 2013: 226–51).

A false alternative

Habermas’s writings take these setbacks into account. The more complex story he has been telling since the onset of the Euro crisis starts from a new pair of opposites that is no longer based on the ideal of a federal superstate and the notion of a ‘European culture’ – a term has also been eliminated from EU documents since the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty. Habermas now regards the ‘alternative between nation state and European federal state’ as false and ‘hopeless’, and the analogy between European and US constitutional history as ‘misleading’ (Habermas, 2012: ix, 40 note 63). Unlike Tocqueville, he no longer characterizes the United States as representing Europe’s future. The telos of European integration is no longer envisaged as a multinational state but as a supranational federation that ‘does not acquire a state-like character’ (2012: 29). ‘Europe’ transcends the nation-state by shedding both its national content and the state form. In Habermas’s eyes, this is possible because enactment and enforcement of European law is distributed vertically across various levels within a single system of governance currently emerging in Europe. He hopes this trend will continue with the evolution of a fully autonomous supranational complex of institutions responsible for enacting and enforcing laws and empowered to obligate the executives and judiciaries of member-states to apply those laws (2012: 24–5). ⁵

Montesquieu feared that large states tended towards strong executive power concentrated in a single locus; Habermas for his part sees the European federation as a large ‘non-state’ in which strong legislative and judicial powers are concentrated in the European Court of Justice and a reformed European Parliament, which can hold the Commission accountable. These institutions are vested with legitimate authority over member states. As Habermas sees it, the vertical dispersal of sovereignty away from the topmost levels of nation-states could even serve as a ‘model’ (2009: 92), to be emulated by other continents – and ultimately the whole world community.

As part of the same thinking, two other models of political order are rejected: first, the continental federal state and, second, ‘post-democratic executive federalism’ (Habermas, 2012) which emerged in the course of the crisis as the political and administrative elites colluded to establish an austerity regime that is largely unaccountable to the public. Executive federalism is a form of transnational exercise of power which delegitimizes democratic control by claiming that the current situation of crisis does not need politics in any but a managerial sense.

A simple binary of opposites is thus replaced with a constellation that can be depicted as a ‘semiotic square’. The classic semiotic square, as devised by A. J. Greimas, first establishes an axis between contrary terms such as ‘male’ and ‘female’. When the contraries of the opposing terms in the primary relation – ‘not (really) male’ or ‘female’, for example – are added to the group, the result is a square. In similar fashion, the meaning of ‘Europe’ is defined by its position in a configuration of cultural units that express, in the words of Greimas, the ‘personal and social phobias and euphorias’ (Greimas and Rastier, 1968: 86) of a given group of people or a society. In our case, the primary relation is that between the transnational democracy of an ideal European Union and the anachronistic but real nation-state. These terms are contrary because they are set against one another but at the same time presuppose one another – occasionally to the point of overlapping. Both terms are, in their turn, negated by bureaucratic executive federalism and by the federal state (and many other political orders). Executive federalism negates the democratic component of the nation-state by empowering a transnational coalition of the willing made up of politicians and other crisis managers recruited from what are now the empty shells of sovereign states. The federal state, for its part, is able, in principle, to be free and democratic but at the same time negates the transnational and supranational quality of Habermas’s ideal order (see Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Habermas’s European narrative.

At first sight, this reformulation of the European ideal is attractive because it seems to reconcile highly disparate alternatives such as, on the one hand, the idea of a transnational democratic federation and, on the other, the nation-state. This distinguishes it from, say, Ulrich Beck’s uncompromising plea for a European federal state in which all those who oppose the idea are dismissed as nationalistic backwoodsmen (Beck, 2013). By contrast, Habermas does accord the nation-state a place in his political narrative, even if only at the periphery rather than at the core. Anyone who seeks to solve the often wicked problems of the present age, from market turbulence to information explosion and global cultural conflicts, solely through improved intergovernmental cooperation between nation-states is excluded from the in-group of trusty supranational Europeans, as envisaged in the implicit viewpoint of the narrative voice. At the same time, defenders of the nation-state are included insofar as they remain within the ambit of political progress. The nation-state can be redeemed, if it is tamed and submits to the will of supranational makers and dispensers of the law. Habermas is particularly keen to make the point that

the citizens of the Union have a justified interest in their respective nation states continuing to perform their proven role as guarantors of law and freedom also in their role as member states. The nation states are more than just embodiments of national cultures worthy of preservation; they vouch for a level of justice and freedom which citizens rightly want to see preserved. (Habermas, 2012: 41; emphasis in the original)

Thus, what is rejected is not the nation-state in its entirety but only the executive federalism of Eurozone governments. The utopians still dreaming of a United States of Europe are no longer taken seriously. Habermas’s European narrative remains fairly flexible, resisting solidification into a narrational cocoon impervious to the buffets of recent EU history. It offers links to a variety of perceptions and interpretations in the public sphere. The master plot of an ascending movement towards a unified Europe contains ambiguities and margins of interpretation intended to appeal to the defenders of the nation-state.

At this point, we can draw two preliminary conclusions. First, Habermas’s assertion that the constitutional path followed by Europe simply provides less developed parts of the world with a vision of their own future probably makes him the last international thinker of unabashedly Eurocentric bent. Not only does he ignore other, less centralized forms of transnational governance; he completely disregards the evidence which suggests that European unification, far from being an expression of a Hegelian world spirit who began his work through history in European capitals after the Second World War, is a deeply particular, context-specific experiment that is unlikely to be replicated in other parts of the world (Parsons, 2003). Second, Habermas fails to distinguish clearly between his earlier sympathy for the idea of a European federal state and his more recent calls for the formation of a transnational federation that is a political entity but not a state.

Although advocating a ‘non-state’, Habermas wants future institutions of a democratized European Union to have the power to overrule subordinate jurisdictions on a number of matters including taxation and welfare. He also wants these institutions to be able to raise and spend money independently, without having to consult national parliaments. Against Habermas’s breathtaking faith in the power of definition, which equates the existence of supranational law with the absence of state power, I would argue that any entity that acquires the power to issue binding rules and collect revenue is a state in the making, even if it does not enjoy a complete monopoly over subordinate rule-making institutions. Yet Habermas thinks otherwise and insists that his ideal transnational democracy would not be a state, even though he wants the European Commission to become a democratically controlled ‘government’ (Habermas, 2014a: 185). In terms of states and non-states, it has been noted that the EU already has a degree of control over the legitimate use of force, which makes it increasingly state-like: the existence of institutions such as the Frontex border police, European military battle groups, and the European arrest warrant are proof that a European superstate is already with us in rudimentary form (Scheuerman, 2011: 121–5). Instead of attempting to dispel popular fears about a European superstate, Habermas chooses to gloss over its embryonic existence and present his preference for the constitutional entrenchment of the EU’s partial sovereignty over its member states in the guise of an innocuous thought experiment about ‘post-sovereign’ governance.

Idealism and realism

Because of its relative openness to experiences of crisis, Habermas’s approach to transnational democracy cannot simply be dismissed as ‘irredeemably idealistic’ (Cook, 2001: 135). Rather, Habermas here demonstrates his Kantian discipleship, in the sense that his post-national democracy, like Kant’s international federation, is the result of an odd combination of idealism and realism. On a number of occasions in his writings, Kant argues that the harsh experiences which people inevitably go through as a result of their natural selfishness pave the way for the perpetual peace that will characterize the international federation of the future. Reason offers a path to this future, but humankind will make its own way there on the well-worn track of experience:

Wars, tense and unremitting military preparations, and the resultant distress which every state must eventually feel within itself, even in the midst of peace – these are the means by which nature drives nations to make initially imperfect attempts, but finally, after many devastations, upheavals and even complete inner exhaustion of their powers, to take the step which reason could have suggested to them even without so many sad experiences – that of abandoning a lawless state of savagery and entering a federation of peoples. (Kant, 1991 [1784]: 47)

This last point merits more detailed scrutiny, given that Habermas, again like Kant, does not expect transnational European democracy to emerge without a ‘moral politician’ (Kant, 1991 [1795]: 118) who will provide the initial impetus and the necessary rhetorical power. A new leadership is needed, one that will seize the historical moment, convince the public of the exceptional nature of the times we live in, and precipitate a breakthrough:

The economically generated apprehensions are inspiring a more acute popular awareness of the problems besetting Europe and are lending them greater existential significance than ever before. The political elites should embrace this unusual boost in public prominence of the issues as an opportunity and also regard it as a reflection of the extraordinary nature of the current situation. But the politicians have also long since become a functional elite. They are no longer prepared for a situation in which the established boundaries have shifted, one which cannot be mastered by the established administrative mechanisms and opinion polls but instead calls for a new mode of politics capable of transforming mentalities. (Habermas, 2012: x)

A failing narrative

Habermas’s narrative is based on a theoretically informed political vision. This vision is not shared by and does not resonate with the public in Germany or elsewhere in Europe. There are three reasons for this. The first is the contradiction between the sought-after democratization of the Union and the transfer of more and more responsibilities to the European level, to the detriment of the nation-states; the second is the detachment of the narrative from the motives and interests of the population; and the third is the peculiar emptiness of Habermas’s vision, which is unable to explain the actual purpose of any further deepening of European integration.

On the first point: Habermas’s vision consists of two components that don’t mix well. On the one hand, he defends the existing institutions of the EU, including the currency union, and limits his criticisms to suggesting ways in which the relationship between the European Parliament, Commission, and Council, might be rebalanced. In addition, he calls for substantially more money and power to be allocated to the EU’s as yet embryonic system of governance and proposes developing the currency union into a fiscal union and working towards full political union. Ranged against this, we have an equally uncompromising call for a change in the mode of politics practised in the EU, with a move from elite to democratic government. Habermas calls, for example, for the use of referenda. He even has some surprisingly sympathetic things to say about the protest voiced by right-wing populist parties and about their entry into the European Parliament:

I think it’s good that the opponents of Europe have found a forum in which they can show the political elites in a very graphic way that they need at long last to include the actual populations in the unification process. Right-wing populism is forcing a shift away from the prevailing elite mode, towards citizen participation. That can only do good for the European Parliament and European lawmaking. (Habermas, 2014b)

Second, despite his schadenfreude at the triumph of right-wing populist parties, Habermas fails to structure his narrative in a way that speaks to the real interests and motives of European citizens. To be successful in communicative terms, every narrative has to have a hero with whom listeners can identify and who does not just march through the story but overcomes a series of obstacles and survives various adventures – or else is tragically defeated in the quest at hand. In Habermas’s story, there are no heroes of any kind – only villains and lukewarm observers. The populace is apathetic, anxious, and occasionally even separatist in inclination; the politicians are without vision or courage; Germany is now regrettably ‘a normal nation-state’ (Habermas, 2014b) without the purported moral drive of the old Federal Republic. Often it is not the citizens but the governments and elites that are held to be responsible for the European crisis. More recently, however, both the general population and elites have come in for blame. What is needed now is a new elite that will induce a Euro-friendly mind change in the citizenry and initiate a series of learning processes. That such a narrative which ultimately lacks ‘moral agonism’ (Alexander, 2004: 552) fails to find favour either with the public or with politicians – who are dismissed as mere functionaries – is hardly surprising.

Third, the narrative fails because it offers no satisfactory answer to the question of what purpose any future political union might serve. The opportunity of exerting a mobilizing influence on the public, of fostering solidarity and instilling a sense of community is thus lost. In the past, the question of the purpose of European unification was answered in two ways. In the first, maintenance of peace was cited as the main motivating force, in the tradition of Rousseau and Kant. As things currently stand, however, such a motive can no longer serve as a rationale for further integration and, indeed, with tensions growing inside the EU, tends – conversely – to be advanced as an argument against deeper integration.

The second way of answering the question was to justify further integration as part of an overall design to create a new global power bloc. But few Europeans have any appetite for this kind of endeavour. The European narrative thus lacks the affective elements that might reach beyond the limits of particular groups and milieus and generate a feeling of purposefulness and community. Historical examples of affects conveyed in this way through narrative are the feeling of shared subjection to collective wrong, the belief in a civilizing mission, and fear in the face of threats to one’s existence.

Moving beyond the idea of Europe as a peace project and Europe as a power project, Habermas offers us a third attempt at meaning-making: the realization of full political union ‘is necessary if the national diversity and the incomparable cultural wealth of the biotope “old Europe” are to enjoy any protection against becoming levelled in the midst of rapidly progressing globalization’ (Habermas, 2012: 53). This curious analogy with nature conservation brings back to mind the criticism which Habermas himself directed at Taylor’s multiculturalism: it was an approach, he said, which looked to governments to guarantee the survival of endangered ways of life rather than allowing all citizens to learn from other traditions and expand their horizons. A more serious problem, however, is that Habermas here invokes an emotional register that is unlikely to work to positive effect when it comes to further enhancing the powers of Europe’s institutions. Meanwhile, those who seek to protect old Europe and its cultural diversity will be inclined to take charge of this task themselves rather than leaving it to – of all entities – the EU.

The trouble with soft revolutionism

Habermas equates the European project with the institutionalization of cosmopolitan and hence universally valid claims. ‘Europe’ as modelled in the Lisbon Treaty, the Euro and the growing reach of supranational institutions is the object of a reified moral standpoint which is not open to a process of dialogue or contestation. Rather, the emphasis is on how to ensure that citizens, governments and restive nations comply with already defined ‘European’ norms. ⁷ Instead of opening up space for deliberation, particular institutional arrangements, norms and ways of life are reified as universal, and much rhetorical energy is invested to convince the public of the value of those norms and institutions.

Any democratic opening-up of the European narrative that hopes also to increase its chances of projecting cultural meaning and allowing psychological identification must begin by overcoming the tendency to reify the ‘European’ moral standpoint and to depict the European institutions as precursors of eternal peace and justice on earth. Like all soft revolutionists, Habermas is concerned to bridge the gap between ideal norms and actual human behaviour. But this gap is itself the product of a particular perspective on international society and politics that abstracts from the motives and interests of real people. Martin Wight sums this up succinctly:

The central problem of Revolutionism, the great crux, is the disharmony or gap between Revolutionist prescription and the actual state of international relations … International society remains intractably various and heterogeneous, and this is the Revolutionist’s problem. For him, mankind is naturally good and destined for salvation, but it is empirically divided between those who accept the Revolutionist blueprint and those who are recalcitrant (always the majority). (Wight, 1991: 46)

In particular, Habermas shows little interest in the social bases of European integration. More specifically, he tends to underestimate the depth of the divide between citizens and elites in regard to economic and political globalization. We know from empirical studies that while most European elites are broadly in favour of the EU project, large sections of the general public continue to regard it with scepticism (Teney and Helbling, 2014). Habermas downplays this as nothing more than ‘mental blocks’ that need to be removed from the public mind, or as due to the lack of backbone on the part of politicians, who lack the ‘necessary courage’ (Habermas, 2012: x, 4) to put his revolutionist blueprint into practice.

Moreover, Habermas overestimates the extent to which people build transnational identities and no longer rely on local or national networks and resources. There are numerous empirical indications that the increased mobility of the middle classes goes hand-in-hand with very strong local bonds. Even urban residents and members of the so-called cosmopolitan mobile elites are more rooted in their local neighbourhoods than theorists of globalization have often assumed (Andreotti et al., 2013). In terms of Habermas’s approach, this implies that the expansion of civic solidarity across geographical and cultural scales and boundaries should not be conceived of as happening at the expense of more localized or ethno-cultural loyalties. In his enthusiasm for centralization and ‘harmonization’, Habermas thinks of national, ethno-cultural or other particularistic identifications as something to be overcome in a linear process of abstraction and purification, whereas it might be more appropriate to see them as possible counterweights against the power wielded by the state and unaccountable international officials.

The combination of these sociological facts and the case law built up by the European Court of Justice has resulted in a situation where the legal rights of EU citizens are undergoing greater horizontal equalization across member states but this is not being translated into increased vertical identification of citizens with European institutions. To put it another way: when it comes to civil rights, it is becoming increasingly easy to turn Frenchmen into Germans, or Germans into Britons, but no more possible to turn either of these – or any other national – into a European. The gap between horizontal equalization and vertical identification has been successfully closed in Switzerland and the United States but apparently not in the EU, mostly because of the lack of geographical mobility and the persistence of national cultures (Schönberger, 2005: 519–21). ⁸ This being so, there would seem to be a case for abandoning the attempt to get European citizens to identify enthusiastically with European institutions. By the same token, expectations of normative unity on the European stage should perhaps also be lowered. Even if Europe’s institutions manage, in the near future, to accumulate sufficient power to endow them with most of the attributes of a government, they are unlikely to succeed in imposing their will on recalcitrant European societies.

A further conclusion concerns the analogy between the EU and American federalism. Contrary to what Habermas believes, the early history of the American constitution does indeed provide a useful heuristic counter-example to the assumption that the legislative powers of Europe’s institutions should gradually be extended ‘to all areas of policy’ (Habermas, 2014a: 185; emphasis added). Hamilton in particular understood very well that the success and legitimacy of governmental models depended on ‘the nature of the objects to which the attention of the State administrations would be directed’ (Hamilton et al., 1982: no. 17: 96; emphasis added). The German philosopher is correct when he writes at one point that confining the competences of supranational institutions to specific matters that are generally agreed to be of an urgent nature leads to a ‘deflation of the demands on legitimation’ (Habermas, 2012: 65). This being so, the task of European and global reformers is first to identify those matters which really cannot be managed at local or national level and then to work out a system for dividing the labour up between various vertically configured institutions. This point was already made by Hamilton who, unlike Habermas, was a famously ‘fact-minded thinker’ (Shklar, 1998: 97): citizens feel closer to their families than to their neighbours, closer to their neighbours than to the local government and closer to the local government than to central government – unless the central government can prove itself by providing real solutions to problems which, as a result of a culturally effective narrative, are jointly recognized as affecting all (see Hamilton et al., 1982: no. 17: 96).

Habermas’s European narrative gives the nation-state both too much and too little importance and credit. This is in line with the muddled and conflict-ridden division of competences between the national and the supranational level characterizing the EU. In particular, Habermas offers no good reason for claiming that the nation-states of Europe (or elsewhere) will continue indefinitely to be ‘guarantors of law and freedom’ (Habermas, 2012: 41). Rather, it is well possible that one day it will be the federal centre of a more democratic EU that guarantees justice and freedom in its member states – and no longer just the member states themselves. Conversely, there is no reason to delegitimize every popular demand for stripping the federal centre of some of its prerogatives, for example in the field of regulatory and distributive policies, in favour of lower-level instantiations of the European multitude and its representative bodies.