Perhaps i am confusing Joschka Fischer with Jürgen Habermas," said (then) French Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chev?ment debating European federalism with Fischer last summer. It is an understandable confusion. If Fischer, the embattled 1968-er, has an intellectual mentor it is Habermas-the heir of the Marxist Frankfurt school and one of the most revered of living philosophers.
Both men have come a long way in the past 30 years-Fischer to the German foreign minister's desk, Habermas to the unofficial role of philosopher-king to the Social Democrat/Green government in Berlin. And both men have charted, in their different spheres of influence, the left's accommodation with liberal democracy; and with the German state.
The accommodation has not all been on one side. Both men went into battle against the Nazi/authoritarian continuities in the German state and society in the 1950s and 1960s-Habermas in his academic attacks on the great conservative German philosopher Heidegger, Fischer as an agitator on the streets of Frankfurt. Both assaults were in part successful and their legacy can be seen in two dominant themes in today's politics. First, the German state, although no longer under threat from the streets, is destined to melt into a European federation of some kind thanks to the European commitment of Fischer, Habermas and a large part of the political class. Second, Otto Schily (a former colleague of Fischer's on the pragmatic "realo" wing of the Green party) has just steered through a law reforming the antique Wilhelminian citizenship law based on German "blood."
Underlying both policies is the ambition to escape from a politics based on ethnic nationalism. The idea which is often quoted as describing the alternative to ethnic nationalism is Verfassungspatriotismus or constitutional patriotism-a favourite slogan of the Berlin government. The phrase was made famous (although not coined) by Habermas in 1986 to describe a new form of "postnational" political belonging, not just for Germany but for Europe as a whole.
Fischer was never a student but he sat in on some of Habermas's lectures in the late 1960s and organised seminars with the philosopher when he was the first Green minister in Hesse in the late 1980s. He said recently of his mentor: "Habermas's main theme is the reconciliation of the German nation with the bourgeois revolution. He developed it through the concept of constitutional patriotism... We are now disposing of an ethnic concept of the nation."
German public life grants far more respect to leading academics than the Anglo-Saxon world, but it is still remarkable that a philosopher whose writings even graduate students find hard to understand has become a political institution. Habermas has always supported the Social Democrats (SPD) but is suspicious of direct political activism, and according to newspaper reports recently turned down an offer to join the Berlin government as culture minister. Nevertheless at a much publicised encounter in 1998 with Chancellor-candidate Gerhard Schr? he sketched out his ideas about "the postnational constellation," in which nation-states are increasingly weakened by globalisation but genuine supranational government has yet to emerge. And after the election Habermas seemed to endorse the government by saying that, finally, there were "alternatives to neoliberalism."
Taking the poet Heinrich Heine as his model, Habermas has argued that the intellectual should supply public debate with arguments, without pretending to possess the absolute truth and without a claim on power. For Habermas, this has meant well-timed interventions in Germany's famous set-piece intellectual debates-such as the Historikerstreit (the historians' dispute) in the mid-1980s on the connection between Nazism and Bolshevism. He scans the pages of the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper for signs of a strengthening of the forces of German nationalism. And if he finds something which offends him he will dispatch a letter to the editor or write a counter-article in a liberal publication like Die Zeit. This polemical practice has often provoked the charge that the philosopher most famous for his theory of "unconstrained communication" was, in fact, policing the boundaries of the Federal Republic's public sphere. Such suspicions came to be voiced most openly in the summer of 1999, when the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk asserted that Habermas had orchestrated a media campaign against him because of his controversial views on genetic engineering which were inspired by Heidegger and Nietzsche-two of Habermas's declared philosophical enemies. Sloterdijk alleged that Habermas had encouraged his former students working in the media to brand Sloterdijk a "fascist." Accusations of a "fatwa from Starnberg" (Habermas's home near Munich) and a Habermas-inspired Jacobin dictatorship of republican virtue were flying in the German press. Habermas has certainly ensured, where possible, that his followers occupy positions of influence in the academy. Yet are his critics right to see him as a kind of godfather of Germany's bien pensant consensus?
Habermas has taken part in almost every big academic-cum-political debate since the early 1960s, and his intellectual curriculum vitae has paralleled the development of post-war Germany. He was born in 1929 and grew up in Gummersbach near Cologne, a town dominated by traditions of German pietism and spiritual inwardness. His father was head of the local chamber of commerce and Habermas himself has always retained an unashamedly bourgeois manner and bearing.
Like G?ter Grass and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Habermas belongs to a generation of intellectuals born at the end of the 1920s or the early 1930s-old enough to have been part of the Hitler Youth or even the Wehrmacht, but too young to be implicated in Nazi crimes. This sceptical generation, which experienced early disillusionment with nationalism, has generally belonged to the liberal left and has dominated German public debate for 50 years.
Habermas himself was part of the Hitler Youth, served as a field nurse toward the end of the war and, with others of his age, experienced the shock of the end of the war and an adolescent identity crisis at the same time. "If you were aged 15 or 16 in summer 1945, and saw the films of heaps of skeletons and saw that these people were still alive... everybody of my generation had to react to that," he says.
Even in his most leftist period, Habermas always stressed that the Federal Republic had been a real historical achievement, despite misgivings about the daily reality of West German democracy. He proudly called himself a "product of re-education," and argued that after 1945 "we have learned that the bourgeois constitutional state in its French, American or British version is a positive historical achievement."
Habermas's intellectual baptism-and one of the reasons he is the philosopher of the 1968 generation-came through his recognition of the persistent Nazi influence in post-war German academic life. Many of his own teachers in G?ngen and Bonn had a brown past and the intellectual life of 1950s West Germany was still dominated by German idealism, Heidegger and a conservative cultural pessimism-from which, initially, Habermas himself was not immune. A cathartic moment came in 1953, however, when Habermas discovered that Heidegger had republished his lectures from the 1930s - including his remarks about the "greatness of the movement" - without a word of apology or explanation. Habermas penned one of his first polemical reviews (for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, with which he has been engaged in a life-long tussle). His deep attachment to the philosophy of Heidegger was thus transformed into enduring opposition. Habermas subsequently made it his task to detect, and denounce, such Nazi continuities wherever he found them. He targeted not only Heidegger, but the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, the writer Ernst J?ger and the conservative philosopher Arnold Gehlen. In the 1950s these leading right-wing intellectuals were all perceived as dangers to Germany's shallow democracy.
Habermas found an ideological antidote in a mixture of Marxism and an idealised version of British and US democracy. As a teenager he had been a regular customer of the communist bookshop in Gummersbach where he made his first acquaintance with Marxism through cheap brochures of Marx's writings printed in East Berlin. Like Adenauer in politics, he performed his own philosophical "opening towards the west." And like many other young German intellectuals he looked to Oxford and the LSE, and even more to the US, for untainted thought. Indeed, Habermas and his followers made the westernisation of German intellectual life their explicit goal.
It was while writing for the arts pages of the German business paper Handelsblatt that Habermas, by chance, met Theodor Adorno, a founder of the Marxist Frankfurt school, who invited the young philosopher to join the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt in 1956. After their return from American exile, the doyens of "critical theory" were eager to tone down their own Marxism and adapt to the conservative climate of the Federal Republic. In their wartime writings Adorno and Max Horkheimer had outlined a bleak vision of modernity in which an all-pervasive capitalist and bureaucratic rationality had tipped over into barbarity and irrationalism. By contrast they now acted as pro-American, democratic adult educators. Habermas later recalled that the radical work of the 1930s had been safely stored in a box in the basement of the institute, which the younger researchers were not supposed to open. Horkheimer, the institute director, prohibited any political activity against German rearmament. Habermas, however, delivered one of his first public speeches in front of more than 1,000 students in Frankfurt in May 1958, arguing that "speaking up was a citizen's first duty."
Habermas's time with the "unholy family of critical theory," as Ralf Dahrendorf once put it, was fruitful, but unhappy. Dahrendorf himself, on arrival for a brief stint as Horkheimer's assistant, was told by Adorno about Habermas that "he has a hare lip and therefore can't teach. He's only good for research." Horkheimer rejected Habermas's Habilitation, the second doctorate German academics have to hand in to gain the right to become professors, because it was too left-wing. Thus Habermas became the lost son of critical theory and left for Marburg where he worked with Wolfgang Abendroth, the only openly socialist professor in West Germany at that time.
Habermas's first major work, published in 1962, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, already contained his master idea - the connection between undistorted, domination-free communication and democracy. The ideal of rational, informed discussion of public policy runs through all his work, hence his abiding interest in public debates. Habermas has always dreamed of an idealised Enlightenment world in which policy would be debated and criticised by a disinterested public. This is the only way, he believes, of guaranteeing that policy serves not private or sectional interests, but the public good. He also rejects the view-associated with positivists - that reason cannot serve as a guide to life, but only help achieve ends independent of reason itself (this is known as instrumental or "means-ends" reason).
In The Structural Transformation he described (in unusually clear prose) the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere of salons and coffee houses in 18th-century Britain, in which a literate, middle-class public discussed, scrutinised and criticised government policy, in the name of the public good.?This, however, disappeared with the rise of big business and mass democracy. In 20th-century liberal societies, involved citizens have given way to private?workers and consumers, with little interest in or control over public debate. "Whereas the press could previously merely mediate the reasoning process of private people who had come together in public, this reasoning is now only formed by the mass media," he wrote. Public opinion no longer monitors and supervises politics, instead it is shaped or manipulated by it. (Doubtless the young Habermas would find the situation in contemporary Britain, where the press is largely owned by a small group of rich, foreign, right-wing businessmen, confirmation of his argument.)
The book struck a chord in early 1960s Germany where left-liberal intellectuals were trying to develop a critical public sphere in the late-night radio programmes and highbrow journals, as well as the now famous meetings of the literary Gruppe 47. At these meetings, writers had 15 minutes to sit on the "electric chair" and read from their works, which were then judged by fellow writers and critics. There was a premium on non-polemical and non-personal exchange based on what some considered an "Anglo-Saxon" model of debate-as opposed to a German tendency to turn debate into a matter of mutual moral destruction.
Habermas's criticisms of the way that free debate was distorted by sectional interests was taken up by the student radicals of the 1960s-often to his own dismay. He was sympathetic to the student revolt yet he also warned the rebels against "left-wing fascism"-the belief that social change could only be achieved through violence. He sided with his old teacher Adorno (whose picture he always kept in his office) when Adorno called in the police to evict students who occupied the Institute of Social Research in 1969.
But in other respects Habermas, who had succeeded Horkheimer as professor of philosophy in Frankfurt, was distancing himself from critical theory's bleak account of "one-dimensional man"-the triumph of instrumental reason in advanced capitalist societies. He started to draw on the work of Heidegger's pupil Hans-Georg Gadamer, on Wittgenstein and on American pragmatism, which had been anathema to the anti-American German mandarins.
One of Habermas's abiding talents as a thinker is his ability to assimilate other theories into his own work. Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) was one result of this assimilation. It caused great excitement on both sides of the Atlantic by re-establishing a connection between social science and the goal of human emancipation. Habermas also proposed a distinction between labour on the one hand and human interaction on the other. Against Marx, he argued that communication was as vital as labour to social reproduction and evolution. It seemed that German philosophy had finally rediscovered an authentic, socially progressive voice.
After the tumultuous events of 1968, Habermas became co-director of a research institute in Starnberg near Munich. Liberated from teaching duties, he used his time for what friend and foe acknowledge as enormous feats of theoretical assimilation. He made critical theory absorb the "linguistic turn" in philosophy, and synthesised huge areas of contemporary thought: in the process his work became even harder to understand. (This impenetrability has repelled many but also attracted some. It was around this time, for example, after the failure of the new left, that Habermas began to acquire a cult status among academic Marxists in US universities. To this day all his work is translated into English and is published in one form or another in the US.)
The outcome of Habermas's work in the 1970s was the monumental Theory of Communicative Action (1981), which offered a new interpretation of modernity. Rather than reducing modernity to the triumph of instrumental reason, as Horkheimer and Adorno had done, Habermas attempted to offer a more differentiated picture, in which both strategic and what he called "communicative" rationality found their place.
Habermas argued that the ground rules for most meaningful verbal communication imply a mutual commitment to reason and truth. Speakers will generally try to communicate the truth to listeners, and there will usually be an agreement on how to challenge the truthfulness of statements. Of course one can use language to deceive or manipulate, but such "strategic" uses go against the spirit of language - they are parasitic on its ethical, honest, open use. Habermas argued that democracy involves the realisation of the values to which all language users in fact commit themselves. We have to listen to the other side, weigh arguments objectively, view our own ends and interests from an impersonal point of view. But only too often debate about public policy is controlled and inhibited by the rich and the powerful.
Yet there seems to remain a gulf between Habermas's theory - animated by a desire for successful interaction, even reconciliation - and his own polemical practice. Habermas, or so his critics claim, falls short of his own standards for open discourse in that he rarely assumes the sincerity of his opponents, instead seeing their arguments as purely strategic and power-oriented. But defenders of the man who used to play table tennis with his great opponent, the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, have argued that beneath Habermas's polemics, there is always the concern not just with day-to-day combat with conservatism, but also with protecting Germany's democratic public sphere.
In the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute), for instance, Habermas took on the role of Germany's democratic conscience, fiercely opposing what he saw as an attempt to "sanitise" German identity and relativise the Holocaust. The conservative historian Ernst Nolte had opened the debate by arguing that Nazism was a response to Bolshevism, that Auschwitz grew out of the gulag. Habermas, however, was generally credited with having won the dispute, not least because of his forceful defence of what he called a "post-conventional" and "postnational" identity based on constitutional patriotism. Citizens with postnational identities are those who critically reflect upon and then transcend their particular national traditions in favour of universal values. Such post-conventional identities are most likely to emerge in places like Germany where national traditions are questioned, and historical discontinuities are most strongly felt.
Habermas's idea has been attacked as too abstract and rationalist both outside and inside Germany, where, most famously, writer Martin Walser called it a form of "political masturbation" to relieve the pain of the division of Germany. Jean-Pierre Chev?ment in his debate with Fischer, had this to say: "Habermas's concept of constitutional patriotism is too superficial... We cannot distinguish so clearly between the abstract idea of a community of citizens and the idea of an actual historical community. In real nation states, the two are mixed up."
Paradoxically, the more that Habermas has pushed in the direction of liberal universalism, the more of a Kantian, German intellectual he seems to have become-the concept of constitutional patriotism is, after all, based on Germany's particular historical experience. Germans had an opportunity to "learn something special" from the catastrophe of Nazism, as Habermas's friend Karl-Otto Apel put it. In Habermas's view, globalisation is also forcing other countries in the direction of universalism. But it is Germany, having been politically "purified" through the Holocaust, which is likely to emerge as the first postnational, multicultural, state-nation.
This has led Habermas, and many of his 1968-er followers including Fischer, to embrace a radically federal notion of European integration. Although Fischer the politician pays due deference to the continuing importance of the nation state, both men keenly embrace the idea of a European constitution and regret the EU's "democratic deficit."
Habermas recently told the Italian journal Reset: "The EU should no longer be based on a series of treaties. It needs a new political foundation endorsed by citizens in a referendum on a European constitution." That constitution, he hopes, will decide the respective areas of responsibility of Brussels, the nation states and the regions. He wants substantial power to reside at the transnational level in order to promote a "European party system, civil society and public opinion," thereby equipping Europe to combat the global trend towards neo-liberal economics. "Do we really want a neo-liberal Europe of growing inequality and exploitation?... Europe is not just economics, we have a form of life to defend," he told Reset. The first step towards a European public opinion is not to try to establish a European media but to encourage more openness in the existing national medias. "The reporting of the Nice summit in La Rep?a, Le Monde, the FAZ and El Pais, was an example. When the citizens of different states are arguing over the same themes at the same time one gradually builds a European public space," he says.
As many other Europeans have pointed out, and not just Eurosceptics, this strong federal view of Europe is less postnational than it seems-indeed, it has grown out of the German experience in the last century, in its existing federal structures and even in Kant's liberal universalism. But what suits Germany's post-Holocaust psychology may not be appropriate for Swedes or Hungarians. And is Habermas not guilty of seeking to call into being a European polity by manipulating the masses-just what he complains about in The Structural Transformation. Last summer, Habermas argued in the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia that neither Catalans nor Basques had a right to political self-determination. But if Europeans are to follow the lead of the philosopher of unconstrained speech, they will have to speak up for themselves in all their messy particularity.
His vision of a postnational European Union is perhaps the last residue of Habermas's radicalism. In other respects Habermas's long leave-taking from the Marxist dreams of the 1950s has been, at least for liberals, an exemplary public learning process. Radical democrats, on the other hand, lament what they see as his gradual accommodation to the status quo. This impression was strengthened during the 1990s, when he appeared to abandon any theoretical criticism of capitalism, instead focusing on the importance of law in modern societies, and on the relationship between liberalism and democracy. While his early writings were driven by a desire to democratise the economy, public administration and political parties, by the 1980s Habermas claimed that in modern, complex societies, integration was accomplished through a mixture of power, money and solidarity, and that one needed a proper balance of all three, rather than just a radical democratisation of all of them. Only the "life-world"-by which he means civil society and the family-was the proper realm for communicative rationality and the generation of solidarity.
So has Habermas become a mainstream figure? He always rejected the "total critique" of the left intellectuals in the Weimar period which helped to undermine democracy. And contrary to what critics on the left say he was always primarily interested in democracy, not distribution. His defence of equality was about ensuring the preconditions of rational political debate-not social equality as such. It is quite in keeping with his intellectual evolution that he should, unlike G?ter Grass, accept German unification and the Berlin republic. That does not make him an Anglo-Saxon liberal; politics, for Habermas, still has a transformative, redemptive quality. To many he remains a model of the engaged, critical intellectual (even though he never appears on television).
None the less, there is a legitimate debate among philosophers about whether Habermas represents the continuation or abandonment of critical theory. Certainly, it is hard to see how his theory of communication challenges the status quo. Similarly, there is plenty of anguished debate on the German left about whether Fischer as foreign minister represents a capitulation to the US global system or the injection of 1968-er radicalism into the citadels of power.
Against the left in most of Europe, Fischer defended the Nato bombing of Serbia (as did Habermas in a more qualified way) on the grounds that it was a German duty to prevent ethnic cleansing. And even Fischer's federalist stance on the EU is likely to disappoint true believers. (Asked in London recently whether he would support an EU-wide election for the president of the EU commission as part of the 2004 constitutional settlement, Fischer said no.) By the same token, the frequent references to Habermas in Fischer speeches functions both as a signal of his radicalism to the Greens and a reassurance to others of his commitment to the west.
It is possible that Fischer could yet show a more radical face, in the National Missile Defence debate for example. But surely the Habermas/Fischer story is substantially about making peace with Germany's liberal democracy. Habermas's constitutional patriotism has helped the radical 1968-ers-mostly no more than liberal social democrats today - to come to terms with their country, to have the old Bundesrepublik without the nightmare of Deutschland. For anyone who recalls the tension of the terrorism-ridden 1970s that is no small thing. And for that alone Habermas should be regarded as a great democratic intellectual and a German national treasure.
