interview

Jürgen Habermas

There Are Alternatives

For the first time in the history of the Federal Republic, a Chancellor has been voted out
of office in a national election. Can we conclude that German democracy has gained in
self-confidence?

Yes, I think we can. Hitherto political parties manoeuvred to change coalition

partners during a legislature. This was the way both Ludwig Erhard and
Helmut Schmidt were forced out. Now citizens have taken it upon themselves
to reject a Chancellor. In a democracy voters must believe that their decisions
can at certain turning-points influence a self-enclosed and bureaucratized
political world. In West Germany it required several generations for this
democratic attitude really to take hold. I have the impression that this change
is now effectively sealed.1

You always felt Helmut Kohl guaranteed the Western credentials of the Federal
Republic. Will you miss him?
3
Every necessary criticism of Kohl has already been made. His histori-
cal merit was to embed German unification in a wider enterprise of
European unity. People of my age also recognize Kohl as one of their
own generation. I am thinking here of his almost bodily disavowal of
the kind of political aesthetic that elitist spirits called for, especially
after 1989. Kohl had clearly not forgotten the monstrous mises-en-
scène of Nazi rallies or the Chaplinesque antics of our fascist mounte-
banks.

Certainly we often groaned at the shapeless provincialism of Kohl’s

words and gestures. But I came to appreciate the deflation of sonorous
vacuities and banalization of public ceremonies that went with it.
There was an element of contrariness in Kohl’s style which, if it
doesn’t sound too presumptuous, my generation wanted. Maybe we
succeeded in mustering some of it against the turgid inwardness,
misprinted grandeur, and compulsion to the sublime of the airs and
graces of the German spirit.

Kohl achieved something else against his own intentions. The failure
of his original talk of a ‘spiritual-moral change’ acted as something of
a litmus test. Once Kohl in office found that he could no longer do
what he wanted at Verdun or Bitburg, or elsewhere, it was clear that
the country had become a liberal society. One of the mental fixtures of
the early Federal Republic was the suspicion, voiced by thinkers like
Carl Schmitt, of ‘internal enemies’ on the left—a deep dread of sub-
version discharged once again in the pogrom-like atmosphere of
autumn 1977. Kohl no longer drew sustenance from this kind of
emotional attitude.

There is going to be a red-green government in Germany now. Is this just a

political shift, or does it signal a change of cultural outlook?

As the unprecedented scale of the Left’s electoral majority became

clear on the evening of the poll, there were surely many people of my
age who remembered a spring in 1969. After his election as Federal
President, Gustav Heinemann spoke of a certain ‘shift in power’; soon
afterwards Willy Brandt became Chancellor with a paper-thin Social-
Liberal majority. In that conjuncture, the long delayed end of the
Adenauer epoch found a striking embodiment in the person of his
opponent Heinemann, a figure famous for his integrity. The previous
period I lived through as a time poisoned by continuities of personnel
and outlook with a fatal past. The shift of power at the turn of the six-
ties came after a decade of dogged intellectual opposition and another
decade of active political confrontation with its legacy. So the political
shift was the eventual outcome of a deeper change in the cultural cli-
mate. The present situation is quite different. For years nothing has
changed in a diffuse and paralyzing cultural climate, unaltered even
1
Interview with Gunter Hofmann and Thomas Assheuer, published in Die Zeit,
8 October 1998.

4
by the handful of jokers who tried to have fun at the interface between
a chubby neo-liberalism and a pallid post-modernism. The excitement
over such tremors of yesterday is already virtually forgotten today.

Is a ‘red-green project’ possible? Or is the space for any political action now so
reduced that there are only different versions of centre politics?

A red-green project existed up to the end of the 198os, as long as

there was a possibility of Oskar Lafontaine winning the next general
election. Since then, the constraints of ‘German unity’ and ‘the global
economy’ have watered the project down to little more than the slo-
gan of ‘modernization and social justice’—garnished with a drop of
ecologically conscious tax reform, if only for the purpose of finding
alternative financial resources. It is not so much the pragmatic sober-
ing up that disturbs me in the new stance. It is the mistaken premise
that a social and ecological transformation could be accomplished in a
national framework. The result is a largely defensive approach to the
conditions of an altered and essentially post-national constellation of
power. What worries me is the lack of any new perspective on this sit-
uation. Everyone speaks today of a ‘post-ideological age’. But this slo-
gan has time and again been invoked and discredited in the past fifty
years, at least since Daniel Bell’s book The End of Ideology—far too
often to have any credibility. In politics, nothing moves without an
‘issue’ that divides people. That is what is missing today.

Maybe the experience of the older projects has made people somewhat jaded
with new ones. What do you understand by a ‘project’ here?

There is a project when you address a controversial issue and propose

an analysis of it that clarifies the question at stake and makes some
political goals more plausible than others. This is not what happened
in the recent election. The social-democratic challenger eschewed any
polarization of opinion, and avoided any source of potential offence.
On election night the relaxed faces of the losers made it clear they did
not take all the talk of a ‘change of direction’ too seriously.

So there are no alternatives?

Not at all. One does not have to look far to see a burning problem
ahead for the new government. What can it do about mass unemploy-
ment? The leeway of national governments has shrunk in two critical
respects. The state is increasingly ineffective as a fiscal authority in
the domestic economy, while the familiar instruments of macro-
economic policy cease to function in an economic space that is no
longer a national unit. That is why the relationship between economics
and politics needs to be addressed in new and reflexive fashion. The
question is posed: must politics continue indefinitely to be a process
of deregulation? To simplify: does the declining efficacy of national
politics point towards an ultimate abdication of the political domain
altogether, or can the medium of political action be regenerated on
5
other levels, to keep pace with the power of transnational markets?
This is now the central issue. Can and should there be a democratically
legitimated exercise of power beyond the limits of the nation state?
The need for regulation stands before us and defines politics, as the
single European market is completed by a common monetary policy.

In your new book ‘The Post-National Constellation’ you challenge politicians

to leap over their shadows, and reconstruct the welfare state on a suprana-
tional level. Would you regard this as a yardstick for measuring Gerhard
Schröder’s potential success?

Yes, that is exactly my view. I should say that it extends beyond

Europe to the idea of an international domestic policy without a
world government. But first of all we have to decide whether we
really wish to build a Europe capable of concerted political action.
Behind Theo Waigel’s slogan that ‘the euro speaks German’ lies
merely an oath of loyalty to an apolitical institution, the European
Central Bank. Schröder knows that the introduction of the euro
makes the problem of harmonizing tax-regimes acute. He explained
this after the election with the example of petrol prices.

It seems to me that we must work towards common social and eco-

nomic policies within the European Union, if we are to avoid a com-
petitive rush for deregulation by the various member states. On the
other hand, neo-corporatist procedures have their limits. Effective
income redistribution cannot simply be settled in Brussels, but has to
be democratically legitimated. If we want to avoid a further increase
of social inequalities, and the creation and segmentation of an under-
class of the poor, do we not need an effective European-wide federal
state? That is the crux. We can already see a change of political fronts.
European marketeers happy with the euro are now joining forces with
former Eurosceptics to preserve the status quo of a Europe united
only over the establishment of markets, and nothing else.

Given that there are hardly any supranational institutions that count, would
it not be more sensible first to make use of what political possibilities exist at
the national level, rather than saying good-bye to the nation-state as such?

The nation-state is still the most important political actor, and will
continue to be such for a long time to come. It is impossible to part
with it so quickly. Anyway, it is good news that we now have a gov-
ernment that can be trusted to try everything that deserves the name
of a reform within at least the national framework. I have no doubt
that the ‘grinding of plates’ Schröder wants to effect after receiving so
many careful proposals and well-known recommendations for reform
could have some success. But it will do nothing to alter the increased
dependency of the state on economic conditions that have been fun-
damentally transformed at the global level. The question is whether
the post-national constellation does not also require different and
more effective forms of political action.
6
Is not society actually shrewder and more aware of these problems than we
think? Even the top minds of the Deutsche Bank want to tame capitalism.

I have no idea what these gentlemen think. I merely observe how eco-
nomic, political and scientific managers are responding to the immi-
nent adoption of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment—which,
as far as I can see, is more about institutionalizing markets than ‘tam-
ing capitalism’. Its aim is to assure legal security for investments
through an internationally effective equivalent of what private civil
law supplies within a national framework. It is always much easier to
create and institutionalize new markets than it is to correct them.
Difficult problems of this kind require supranational agreement over
environmental, social and economic measures.

It has taken every effort of the major European players just to agree on the
euro. What makes you so hopeful that a European project for economic develop-
ment will follow?

Yes, even Kohl insisted on a Europe des patries after the Cardiff
Conference. The historical commitment of the post-war generations
in Germany to overcome a murderous nationalism and achieve recon-
ciliation with France seems somehow to have been exhausted. But
Delors’s campaign for a ‘social dimension’ is borne by other and more
proximate interests. That is why in future Joschka Fischer will prove
to be the more reliable European. I know him long and well enough
to be confident that the change of guard from Kohl to Fischer will be
a happy one. It is true that voters in many European countries are
rather suspicious of a distant Brussels. This is not merely the case in
Germany. The member states have enough to worry about with their
own internal problems. Their political elites will pay no attention to
the larger European issues, unless intellectuals provoke some public
debate about them. But this they generally do not, here in Germany
even less than in France or Britain. So your scepticism is unfortu-
nately quite justified.

Assuming that some kind of political union did come about in Europe, who
should control it? Would you be satisfied with a disabled democracy—with-
out a critical public sphere?

No, I am for a European federal state, and that means a European

political constitution. Such institutions, at the moment only on the
drawing-board, could help to foster those processes without which
they would lack any infrastructure. A common political culture can-
not be conjured up ex nihilo, nor will it be spontaneously generated by
economic interaction. But we can certainly aim for a European consti-
tution, and citizens’ initiatives that transcend national boundaries. A
European-scale civil society could develop if a European public
sphere were constructed. That is the sore point. Such a project is in no
way doomed to failure by the variety of our national languages, as the
German Constitutional Court’s judgement on Maastricht thought to
7
conclude. In the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands the
school system is already creating a bilingual population. Why should
English, as the most widely shared second language in Europe, come
to grief on the narcissism of the other major nations?

You still have some illusions about our media-driven societies.

Yes indeed, media-driven societies! But the desublimation of the sub-

lime—‘a flop is a flop’—does have something refreshingly egalitarian
about it. Of course, if everything were to be transformed into a kind
of talk show, in which everyone became a compère chatting to other
compères, the world would indeed conform to Luhmann’s image of it.
I do not think I really harbour any illusions about the condition of a
public sphere in which commercialized mass media set the tone.
There are now many attempts to conceptualize this virtual reality. My
book Between Facts and Norms approaches the problem from a quite
different perspective.

From the perspective of a democratic sovereignty?

Yes. For our constitution does still express the idea of the self-deter-
mination of a democratic community. The mere proposition that the
power of the State derives from the people does not tell us very much
about actual social relations; but it does not say nothing at all. For
example, citizens would not bother to vote if they did not intuitively
cling to the idea that the ballot-box does still something to do with the
classical conception of democratic self-determination. So can we
interpret this idea in a way that safeguards it against cynical evacua-
tion, or immediate recoil from the realities of highly complex soci-
eties? In the normative picture I propose, communication in the mass
media plays an important role. A distracted public, almost no more
than electronically connected, can with minimum attention absorb
information from the mass media about all kinds of issues and inter-
ventions, in fleeting moments of everyday life, in private settings or
small circles. People can then give or withhold assent, and tacitly do
so all the time. In this way they participate, if not in the conscious
articulation, at least in the weighting of competing public opinions.
It is just because the domain of public communication functions as a
hinge between the informal shaping of opinion and the more institu-
tionalized procedures of will-formation (for example in a general elec-
tion or a cabinet meeting) that the condition—I would call it,
discursive constitution—of the public sphere matters so much.

Even public television is no longer discursive in this sense.

It is true that the political sphere forms part of a wider cultural

sphere, and today both are linked directly to the soiled channels of
private television. Public television is now competing in a race to the
bottom with the most degraded presentation and programming of
commercial television. Public broadcasting has problems of its own
8
as a form: but it rested on the correct idea that not all social functions
can calmly be left to market forces. Culture, information and criti-
cism are all dependent upon a specific form of communication all
their own. The imperative of ratings ought not to penetrate the very
pores of cultural communication. Do I need to tell you this?

What then of the future of parties in our democracy, that depend on a less
damaged public sphere? Are we not witnessing the slow death of democracy
based on political parties, as these become less and less significant for the artic-
ulation and resolution of major issues, and the social milieux which nurtured
loyalties to them disintegrate?

Political scientists have described these trends quite well. If we look

at Lazarsfield’s radio research of the early 1940s, we can see that they
are by no means all new. But it is true the personalization of political
issues by the media and the cult of immediate contact between lead-
ers and TV audiences have considerably increased the plebiscitary
dimension of politics, and reduced the importance of party organiza-
tions. Externally directed public relations come to overshadow inter-
nal communications among the party membership, as public
persuasion degenerates into market research.

On the other hand, we must remember the younger generation. The

general population is more intelligent, or at least better educated and
informed, and in many respects more interested in political issues
today. If forms of political participation change, it is not necessarily a
turn for the worse. Should parties continue to become more and more
bureaucratic and market-minded, counter-trends may arise in civil
society. The Greens have now followed the classic path from a social
movement to a political party. But that does not have to be typical.
Other initiatives remain ‘alternative’ in form and sometimes, like
Greenpeace, win a world-wide influence.

If party-political democracy is dissolving, both older and newer forms of public

sphere come under pressure. The ground is shifting under us, and we need new
rules of the game in the mass media. The ‘media democracy’ of the United
States does not exactly offer an appealing example. How might the role of the
media be redefined?

That is a very good question, for which I have no immediate answer. I

have not thought enough about the issue. In any case, in Europe we
are still a long way away from the end of party democracy. Parties
continue to select and form their own personnel, and the professional
quality of our politicians is not so bad. There must always be room for
mavericks, but God preserve us from shimmering figures like
Berlusconi or Ross Perot, emerging from nowhere.

A structurally conservative system like the Federal Republic is liable to vari-

ous kinds of blockage of impulse and outlook. Do you think this society is too
beholden to its past, and to practices of social compensation?
9
It may well be that the traumatic upheavals of German society in this
century have made the political mentality of the country a little too
conservative. But I am very wary of neo-liberal philippics against the
alleged dead-weight of our welfare state. More flexibility means—
decoded—that labour-power should be stripped of every specific or
personal quality and treated as merely a commodity like any other.
Have we not learnt from Marx that the one cannot simply be con-
verted into the other?

Of course there are genuine mental blocks, of a different kind. It was

difficult for many people to grasp, at the very moment of national
reunification, that the hour of the nation-state had already sounded.
Others repress the problem of the end of full employment and the
need to redistribute a lower volume of necessary labour. Since capital-
ism has triumphed world-wide as a form for the production of social
wealth, all the old questions of a just distribution have returned—
including the need to distribute employment.

Do you share Richard Sennett’s concern that at the end of the century a new
kind of adaptation to capitalism has emerged, as the ‘flexible individual’
becomes the figure of the age?

Sennett gives us an illuminating description of the increasing indi-

vidualization of social burdens. The ‘flexible individual’ is one upon
whose shoulders society now transfers problems it should be solving
itself and cannot address.

Currently, there are attempts to uncouple democracy from justice, by emphasiz-

ing libertarian rather than social rights. Ralf Dahrendorf, for example,
seems to argue that only ‘inclusion’ really matters, not distributive justice.
Then there are the cynics who believe the sole task of the state is to equip people
for market competence. What do you think of this new realism?

I wonder whether Dahrendorf doesn’t actually understand ‘inclusion’ to

mean an equal integration of all citizens. But otherwise you are right. A
normative brain-washing is now starting to erode the universalistic
foundations of the egalitarian self-understanding of the modern age for
the last two hundred years. In Germany, it comes more from conserva-
tive than liberal quarters. In our culture, a tradition of anthropological
pessimism was always very strong. This is an outlook that loves to cast a
wandering historical gaze back to the hierarchical society and fatalistic
mentality of ancient empires, and instruct us about the illusions of
equality of a relatively short modern epoch, which has misunderstood
human nature. This sits very well with a scepticism towards any
attempt to re-regulate markets in our time. If one thinks the world-
view of the neo-liberal entrepreneur through to its logical conclusion,
it is clear why highly mobile individuals, guided solely by personal
preferences in a value-free institutional network, should feel a certain
fatalism about society at large. This can be seen as the secularized mod-
ern equivalent of the religious fatalism of ancient civilizations.
10
Yet praise of the entrepreneurial spirit also bespeaks a certain sense of contem-
porary reality. The ‘Berlin Generation’ now stands rather tragically on its
own and feels a sense of solidarity only with itself. Perhaps it senses that after
so many incentives to individualism, there is no longer any civil society left.
‘Political existentialism’ comes to seem more attractive than democratic experi-
mentation.

I know what my friend Herbert Marcuse, who even in English never

lost his German accent, would have said about all this talk of the
Berlin Generation: ‘crap with liquorice’. A new generation or a new
culture, something we should certainly wish for the new capital, will
not come by announcement. A new generation is such because it pro-
duces something new—not made to design. There is no mystery
about what would be needed. Cultural criticism today lacks a fresh
idiom—a language capable of skewering the phenomena of the hour
as mercilessly as Adorno did in the early days of the Federal Republic.
The Errors of the Copyist by Botho Strauss2 merely reflects the dead-
ened self-awareness of intellectuals who drape themselves once again
in the toga of ‘the spirit’.

You mention the affective attitudes expressed in these attempts at

self-definition or self-discovery. That is very interesting. Young con-
servative sentiments regularly rose and burst like bubbles during the
post-war years, especially in biotopes like the Feuilleton of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The resentment of our foremost right-
wing intellectuals, who regarded themselves as the bearers of authen-
tic German traditions, has left an unmistakable trace in the cultural
history of the Federal Republic. These circles cultivated the view that
the country’s Western orientation after the war cut us off from the
roots of our natural heritage. This outlook became virulent after
1989, the only time when it went onto the offensive with the bid by a
‘New Right’ to restore ‘self-consciousness’ to the nation. But this
campaign failed, with the debate in 1995 over the meaning that 8
May 1945 has come to acquire for us. No doubt twisted attitudes of a
similar sort are now seeking other, less conspicuous outlets. But these
I cannot really judge.

Towards the end of his rule, Kohl gave the impression he wanted to exorcise the
spectres of a ‘Berlin Republic’ some of his keenest advisors had earlier conjured
up—as if Berlin was to remain Bonn after all. Did he take fright at his own
courage?

You should be glad that after the election Schröder also stressed the
continuity between Bonn and Berlin.

It is not so clear as that. The political fronts seem almost reversed. The SPD
has discovered ‘culture’ and now enthuses about a pace-setting Berlin which

2
Playwright and author of crypto-conservative Kulturkritik; Die Fehler des Kopisten
(Munich, 1997) offers a diagnosis of the ‘current condition’ of Germany (1997).

11
warms to the reconstruction of Hohenzollern palace and rejects a memorial to
the Holocaust. Why has culture—the cinderella of social-democratic con-
cerns—suddenly become so appealing?

It is difficult to say what the point of Schröder’s public relations move

really is. Perhaps it won’t do any harm. In periods of domestic bud-
getary stringency, policies which look attractive in the media and cost
nothing are popular. Blair discovered constitutional reform, and I fear
Schröder has discovered culture. But one can easily slip on this
ground, as your examples show. Anyway, costs persist. Do we really
wish to leave the fate of the rich cultural infrastructure of a civilized
country in the hands of commercial sponsors? A closer look at the
United States in this respect is quite sobering. So far as the represen-
tation of German—historically speaking, a strongly regional—cul-
ture abroad is concerned, the Goethe Institutes do a pretty good job.

We hear recurrent criticisms of the cultural opening of the Federal Republic.

There is a fear, for example, that in the field of philosophy, continental and
German traditions are taking a back seat to Anglo-American themes and
approaches. Can you understand this anxiety?

The very close connections of post-war German with Anglo-

American philosophy, established largely through emigration, have
been an enormous enrichment to us. As the pioneering role of my
friend Karl-Otto Apel has shown, active appropriation of analytical
philosophy and American pragmatism has given a new impetus to
philosophy here, without damaging the substance of the German tra-
dition at all. The influence works both ways. Richard Rorty’s student
Bob Brandom is cracking open the treasury of Hegel’s thought with
the methods of analytical philosophy. Rorty himself is certainly a
brilliant analytical philosopher, but he owes his international reputa-
tion to a synthetic style of developing themes and connections which
owes much to the Hegelian background of pragmatism.

What are the traditions of the Bonn Republic which you regard as indispens-
able—if you would accept the expression—for the Berlin Republic?

I believe we would all like to live in a civil country that is cosmopoli-

tan in outlook and ready to play a thoughtful, cooperative role
amongst other nations. We would all like to live amongst fellow citi-
zens who are accustomed to respecting the particularity of strangers,
the autonomy of individuals, and the plurality of regional, ethnic and
religious identities. The new republic would do well to remember the
role of Germany in the catastrophic history of the twentieth century,
but equally those rare moments of emancipation and achievement of
which we can be proud. With no claim to originality, I would also
wish to see a disposition which was suspicious of any rhetoric of the
high or the deep, which resisted any aestheticization of politics, but
also guarded against trivialization where the integrity and indepen-
dence of the life of the mind was at stake.
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