first review www.theglobalsite.ac.uk 2001

Beate Jahn

Habermas' political essays

The Postnational Constellation. Political Essays by Jürgen Habermas, translated, edited and with an introduction by Max Pensky, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. xix + 190, index, 0-7456-2351-4 hardback £45.00, 0-7456-2352-2 paperback £13.99.

Beate Jahn lectures in international relations at Sussex University; b.jahn@sussex.ac.uk

In this collection of essays on contemporary political issues one can see almost all the core elements of Jürgen Habermas’ thought. The starting point for his intellectual and political engagement lies in 20th century German history. From this experience of nationalism and the Holocaust Habermas draws, firstly, the conclusion that any form of cultural particularism - such as that of the ‘Germanists’ in the 19th century which he analyzes in the first essay - is dangerous and needs to be replaced by universal liberal categories.

His defense of Daniel Goldhagen’s hotly debated book Hitler’s Willing Executioners in the next essay is based on the second core principle of his ethico-political belief; namely that only an open public debate - which Goldhagen’s book has triggered - provides the possibility of assessing and potentially revising a political culture which made the Holocaust possible.

A third principle underlies the central role which Habermas gives to communication and public debate; the possibility and normative requirement of ‘learning from history’ which, in the third essay, he extends to the wider European history of the 20th century. Arguing against a wide range of accounts which emphasize the barbaric features of the 20th century as a whole, Habermas holds that 1945 symbolizes a watershed after which positive developments such as the introduction of the welfare state, decolonization, and the Cold War understood as ‘self-domestication of nuclear powers’ took place. Under the impact of globalization, these positive achievements are now endangered. Globalization has led to a ‘postnational constellation’, as the center piece of this collection of articles is called, a condition which Habermas defines as the relative inability of the nation state to control the globalized economy. While politicians such as Blair and Clinton have essentially become managers for business, nationalist protests may lead to a regression into the barbaric first part of the 20th century. The traditional link between republicanism and nationalism must therefore be broken; republicanism must be based on constitutional patriotism and extended to institutions like the European Union or even, as he argues in ‘learning from history’, to the development of some form of cosmopolitan solidarity.

In an essay on ‘Two Conceptions of Modernity’, Habermas presents a more philosophical argument for his belief in the progressive potential of communication. Against either the uncritical assumption of an inherent rationality (in rational choice theory and systems theory) or the critical postmodernist assumptions of an ‘other’ to reason, Habermas posits his own intersubjective model which assumes a circular exchange between life worlds and systems resulting in a growing capacity for learning. Through communication, he argues, individuals discover new sources of solidarity even while the old ones are being destroyed.

Given Habermas’s strong belief in, and passionate practice of, the engagement of intellectuals in public political debate - for which he praises Herbert Marcuse (chapter 7) - one could almost argue that this collection of essays is more representative of the essence and meaning of his work than his philosophical writings; hence, that its easy accessibility for a wide readership is not just a positive side effect but ultimately the goal of his life’s work. However, Max Pensky’s excellent introduction together with the sequencing of these essays will raise crucial questions in the reader’s mind: How ‘postnational’ and globally applicable can the principles be which Habermas draws exclusively from the particular ‘national’ experience of Germany? Will the British people, for instance, consider themselves as ‘the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of a barbaric nationalism’ (103) which according to Habermas provides a common ground on which Europeans can develop a postnational social integration? And why does the technological and political development of modernity itself demand the Western conception of human rights, precluding alternative ‘Asian values’ (chapter 5), when the technological and political implications of human cloning do not appear to call for an adjustment of traditional liberal principles (chapter 8)? Whatever the answers to these questions, it is an exemplary achievement of Habermas and the editor to have raised them in such a clear and succinct manner.