Book review, Crisis, Education and Science, EU – Baltic States, Legislation

International Internet Magazine. Baltic States news & analytics Friday, 29.03.2024, 07:36

Political management vs. Constitution for Europe: Habermas’ view on the EU crisis

Eugene Eteris, BC, Copenhagen, 01.10.2013.Print version
J.Habermas acquired most respect as a teacher and mentor for many theorists working in political sociology, social theory, and social philosophy. Since his retirement from teaching he has continued to be an active thinker and writer.

As a leading German political and legal historian, J.Habermas addressed his recent book the burning European Union issues.*) While advocating for the EU’s further expansion into a strong democratic and federal structure, Habermas, is for strengthening Europe as a political community able to hold political grip on the global economic processes that affect European people. As a “political glue” for such Europe, Habermas calls for a European constitutional patriotism based on a European constitutional project. According to Habermas, European citizens approach the EU as a political community that can permanently guarantee their fundamental social, political and civil rights in a democratic manner. 

 

*) Jürgen Habermas. The Crisis of the European Union. A Response. 2012.

English edition. Transl. – Polity Press, UK, 2012. –168 pp. 

The book was first published in German –Zur Verfassung Europas. Ein Essay, Verlag Berlin 2011.  

 

J.Habarmas sees the EU crisis through a series of essays (though in the German original it “an essay” but in the English version it’s translated as “a response”) on the constitution for Europe.

 

In this regard the first part of the book reflects author’s vision on the need of a “constitutional project” for Europe coped with vital decision “between transnational democracy and post-democratic executive federalism”, to suggestions on transformation “from the international to the cosmopolitan community”. The second part is about “the concept of human dignity and the realistic utopia of human rights”.  In the appendix (about one-third of the book!) the author provides some insights into “the Europe of the Federal Republic” as the example to emulate for the EU integration. In the concluding pages of the book, the author plainly recommends that the EU “model of politics (!?) bears a German imprint” (p.129). Besides, existing “ordinary legislative procedure – OLP” in the EU, as a main decision-making procedure with active participation of the Parliament and the Council of Ministers, is regarded by Habermas as undemocratic: “that would require a transfer of competences from the member states to the Union, and such a drastic change in the treaty seems unrealistic for the time being” (pp. 131-132). Needless to say that OLP is seen by the member states presently – almost four years after the Lisbon Treaty entered into force- as quite a feasible instrument for European integration (until the member states decide otherwise).   

 

It has to be noted that, first, the Lisbon Treaty has revised two previous treaties (TEU and EEC) and second, during 2011-13 (after the book was published) the EU and the member states have created a strong and quite efficient mechanism for perspective integration, including, for example, European Semester and Financial Stability Mechanism.           

 

Author’s “analysis” is often quite outdated: most typical is the very notion in the book’s preface: “there is a growing realization that the European treaties have to be revised; but there is a lack of clear perspective for the future” (p.VII). The book’s references confirm this thought: the book re-published Habermas’ earlier articles published in German media during 2009-10 and the articles’ titles appear in the book unchanged, this timer as book’s chapters.  


EU’s crisis elements

Hardly any prominent European scholar has not reflected on the so-called European constitutional project that was under discussion among the EU member states in 2000-04. It seems that “constitutional euphoria” made a deep impact on all spheres of social science. Although “Constitution for Europe” was rejected and the EU member states adopted an amendment path to the previous Treaties (Treaty of the European Union and the European Economic Community Treaty), some “constitutionalists” regard the failure to adopt a constitution as a crisis in European development. Jürgen Habermas is one of them; after about half a decade since the collapse of the European constitution, he wanted to revive the idea on a “humanitarian level”. Quite understanding: Habermas wants to find new forms of democratic decision-making in the EU, which can be developed only in a “post-national constellation” in restoring the balance of market and politics.

 

In this sense, Habermas takes up a distinctly cosmopolitan position: he argues not for a European (or even a global) government but for a layered political system with strong supranational, transnational (and sometimes even national, as in Germany) institutions. According to him, international law is too squarely set on relations between nation-states and should be transformed into a cosmopolitan law, to which not only groups but also individuals can appeal. At least a constitutional way-out is the most promising outcome for Europe…  

 

Hence the main book’s message: the crisis of the EU is to be resolved in the light of constitualisation of international law. More generally, the book is a sort of essay’s selection on the Constitution for Europe (though the European integration is more than a constitutional project). The author’s main message: EU must decide between transnational democracy, constitutional and international law. Habermas acknowledges that experts seem to agree on “the diagnosis of the deeper reasons for the crisis, i.e. the EU lacks the competences to bring about the necessary harmonization of the national economies” (p.3).

 

Needless to note that such a “sign of crisis” is both inaccurate and outdated: since the Lisbon Treaty (entered into force in December 2009) the member states –for the first time in the history of European integration - have opted for a detailed division of competences between the states and the EU institutions.

 

The author is persistent in defending his views: even in Habermas’ latest lecture (26 April 2013, Leuven, Belgium) the German scholar describing “the roadmap that the European institutions have designed for developing a Genuine Economic and Monetary Union” underlined the probable technocratic dilemma in which EMU becomes entangled. He exposed alternative steps towards a supranational democracy in the core of Europe and the obstacles to be removed on that road. However, “the lack of solidarity among the member states” leads Habermas to the philosophical clarification of the difficult, yet genuinely political, EMU concept.


Negative features in European integration

Uncoupled from democratically enacted law and without feedback from the pressing dynamics of a mobilized political public sphere and civil society, political management lacks the impulse and the strength to contain and redirect the profit-oriented imperatives of investment capital into socially compatible channels.

 

As is seen presently in the member states, the authorities would more and more yield to the neoliberal pattern of politics. A technocracy without democratic roots would not have the motivation to accord sufficient weight to the demands of the electorate for a just distribution of income and property, for status security, public services, and collective goods when these conflicted challenges meet the systemic demands for competitiveness and economic growth.

 

At times, when Europe seems to shift between integration and fragmentation, there is a need for a clear view on European political plans, options and intentions. Thus, the EU leaders argue that present European program showed that “the political management” is much more than a semantic discussion: it is a fundamental choice to make if the European idea and the European values will succeed both within and beyond EU borders.

 

Reference: José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, Speech at the Brussels Think Tank Dialogue, SPEECH/13/346, 22 April 2013.


EU as a federation

In the State of the Union speeches in the European Parliament (2012-13), the Commission President described the need to move towards a federation of nation states. He was putting forward this idea in 2012 at a time when the EU’s political horizon needed to tackle the challenges of the future. One of the EU’s distinguished predecessors, Jacques Delors, has used the term “federation” as well, and with the same rationale behind it. The present Commission” has a consolidated doctrine on the matter”.

 

Besides, present EU development is completely out of any references to “European constitutionalism”, so detailed and eloquently described by Habermas (almost half of the book is devoted to presently quite useless “constitutional” argumentation).

 

Modern “federalist future” of European integration serves to grant a political momentum to nationalism and populism. Only by calling it by its name people could get a chance to debate the real issues, to make clear what is behind the word federalism (which a lot of people suspect and/or fear).

 

Quite notable that in the previous State of the Union address by the Commission President, by a federation was meant not a superstate, but a democratic federation of nation states that could tackle common European problems, through the sharing of sovereignty in a way that each country and each citizen is better equipped to control its own destiny.

 

Federalism sometimes is ambiguously read in different languages; hence, it implies an explicit acknowledgement that Europe can be united in “building the EU” together with the member states. That is Europe where people are proud of their nations but also proud to be European and proud of European values.  

 

Hence, European Union has a number of undeniably federative elements: a supranational European Commission with a mandate to promote the general European interest, a directly elected European Parliament, an independent European Central Bank and a European Court of Justice based on a unique system of EU law (acquis), the primacy of which is recognised over national law. All these EU institutions have supranational powers which increased over time.

 

This division of power between the European central level and the component states is never set in stone and will always be disputable and disputed. Even in established federal states, from the US to Germany, there is an ongoing debate about subsidiarity, about what the federal government can and must do, and about where its power ends, and should end. All these are integral parts of federal democracy too.

 

However, Habermas is still an ardent supporter of Kant’s cosmopolitarism and former German’s idea of “global” domestic politics.

 

Conclusion. Thus, for the next decades, the European Union will be more forward looking and more outward looking. It will be a powerful instrument for European citizens and member states to unite their efforts in shaping globalisation and in defending European common values.

 

The world is changing very fast and, together, the European member states can play a fundamental role. Only united and with stronger common institutions, will they be able to tackle the challenges of economic and financial crises, of resource scarcity and climate change, of the situation in the world about poverty and underdevelopment.

 

And, together, they will also create better conditions to protect European shared values and to keep, while reforming, European social model, its social market economy and the most important features of the European way of life.

 

Original German version of “an essay” was published in 2011; it means that most of the book’s materials were completed somewhere around 2010, the year when the new “revolutionary” Lisbon Treaty came into effect. This fact makes the book quite outdated, with fruitless argumentation of the EU “legal inability” to streamline European integration.


Short CV

Present CV is made for better understanding Jürgen Habermas as a great public intellectual, as a distinguished political and legal historian. His views on the perspectives and European democratic future are widely published in Germany, in Europe and around the world.

Jürgen Habermas (1929-   ) was born in Düsseldorf, Germany.

 

Habermas' entrance onto the intellectual scene began in the 1950's with an influential critique of Martin Heidegger's philosophy. He studied philosophy at Universities in Göttingen and Bonn, which he followed with studies in philosophy and sociology at the Institute for Social Research under Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. In the 1960's and 70's he taught at the University of Heidelberg and Frankfurt am Main. He then accepted a directorship at the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg (1971). In 1980 he won the Adorno Prize, and two years later he took a professorship at the University of Frankfurt, remaining there until his retirement in 1994.

 

As a renowned German philosopher and sociologist, he is perhaps best known for his Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981). In this work, he argues that language is the necessary social glue of every human society. He postulates that human environment is based on norms and beliefs over which there exists implicit agreement, which steer our actions and interactions.


Habermas explicitly distances himself from Marxism; at the same time, he acknowledges that this irreplaceable system is characterised by a different and unique rationality – focused on effectiveness – which can conflict with the communicative environment of man.

 

As early as 1962, in his renowned work on the Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, he analyses the history and structure of the public space as a place where people are able to come together in a free way to enter into discussion with one another about any and all societal issues. In his important work on political and legal philosophy, Faktizität und Geltung (1991), he integrates his earlier analysis of the public sphere with his later work on communicative action. In doing so, he defends a presently preeminent model of deliberative democracy. The basic idea here is that the struggle between environment and system plays out through the democratic process and through the medium of law. Only a strong parliamentary democracy, where decisions taken in parliament are linked to an open and fair debate in the public sphere, is capable, with the help of the law, of guaranteeing the integrity of the human environment and ensuring that the economy and the bureaucracy serve the people, and not vice versa.


Democracy in a globalised world‬

In more recent work, such as Die Postnationale Konstellation (1998) and Der gespaltene Westen (2004), Habermas analyses the impact of economic globalisation on the political order and on democracy. Deregulation and globalsation have given a new impetus to capitalism but have also undermined the steering effect of nation-states. The question thus becomes how new forms of democratic decision-making can be developed in such a 'post-national constellation' to restore the balance of market and politics.

 

In this sense, Habermas takes up a distinctly cosmopolitan position. He argues not for a world government but for a layered political system with strong supranational, transnational and national institutions. According to him, international law is too squarely set on relations between nation-states and should be transformed into a cosmopolitan law, to which not only groups but also individuals can appeal.

 

It is in this context that the European Union must take on an exemplary role, says Habermas. For a long time – and also more recently in his book Zur Verfassung Europas (2011), which is presently reviewed– he has advocated for the further expansion of the European Union into a strong democratic and federal structure. According to Habermas, the strengthening of Europe is of utmost importance because only a political community is able to hold political grip on the global economic processes. Hence, Habermas’ call for a European constitutional patriotism based on a European constitutional project. European citizens must see the European Union as the political community that can permanently guarantee their fundamental social, political and civil rights in a democratic manner. 

 

Habermas embraced the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, a position that views contemporary Western society as maintaining a problematic conception of rationality inherently destructive in its impulse toward domination. He cited the domination over nature by science and technology as exemplary in this regard. And though the Frankfurt School included the 18th century Enlightenment in its evaluation of problematic rationalities, Habermas sought to defend aspects of the Enlightenment that he believed to be constructive and even emancipatory.

 

In his work, Towards Reconstructing Historical Materialism, Habermas laid out his primary differences with Marx. He viewed Marx' assessment of human evolution as simply an economic progression as too narrow a definition that leaves out any sense of individual freedom, a critique that Habermas held of modern society as a whole. Habermas divided this notion of economic progression, an evolution of societies, from the process of learning that is assumed by Historical Materialism. Marx viewed progress as linear and deterministic, whereas Habermas argues that the process of learning is dynamic and unpredictable from one epoch to another.

 

Habermas' primary contribution to philosophy is his development of a theory of rationality. An ongoing element throughout his work is a critique of industrial democracies in the West for the equating humanity with economic efficiency. For Habermas the ability to use logic and analysis, rationality, goes beyond the strategic calculation of how to achieve a chosen goal. There exists a possibility for community, through communicative action that strives for agreement between others, i.e. rationality itself. Habermas thus stressed the importance for having an "ideal speech situation" in which citizens are able to raise moral and political concerns and defend them by rationality alone.

 

In 1981 Habermas published The Theory of Communicative Action, in which he develops on the concept of an ideal speech situation and an accompanying ethics of discourse. Working with Frankfurt School colleague Karl-Otto Apel, he proposes a model of communicative rationality that takes into account the effect power has upon the situation of discourse and opposes the traditional idea of an objective and functionalist reason. Within societal interactions is the performance of subjective and inter-subjective duties that are determined by other capacities of reasoning. The theory is developed into comprehensive social theory from which an ethics of discourse is derived. As a furthering of the speech-act philosophy of J.L. Austin, along with theories of child development as envisioned by Jean Piaget, Habermas and Apel sought to construct a non-oppressive, inclusive and universalist moral framework for discourse, based on the inherent desire in all speech acts for a mutual understanding.

 

Habermas applied the theory of communicative action to politics and law, advocating a "deliberative democracy" in which governmental institutions and laws would be open to free reflection and discussion by the public. A key obstacle to the institutions of this forum of open policy making is the legitimacy of private property, as it divides interests and makes unequal the position of individuals. Habermas believes that within this form of democracy, people are becoming aware of their interest in self-governance and responsibility; they would seek to adhere only to the most rational arguments.

 

Habermas' gained most respect as a teacher and mentor for many theorists working in political sociology, social theory, and social philosophy. Since his retirement from teaching he has continued to be an active thinker and writer.

 

The model of so-called “communicative reason” that Habermas laid out in mature form in 1981 in his two-volume work “The Theory of Communicative Action” looks like an attempt to salvage for modern democracy a post-metaphysical conception of reason. 


Habermas as a public intellectual and Habermas as a philosopher may be inseparable, but there are perhaps more subtle­ ways of establishing the inter-connections.






Search site