articles

Jürgen Habermas EJPT

European or German? European Journal
of Political Theory

Charles Turner University of Warwick

© SAGE Publications Ltd,
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
issn 1474-8851, 3(3) 293–314
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885104043585]

a b s t r a c t : Habermas’s recent writings on the future of Europe advocate a

European constitution as a means of consolidating the achievements of post-war
social democracy and providing European level institutions with a normative
foundation without the need to appeal to the idea of Europe as a ‘community of fate’.
This article argues that, while these aims are laudable, the terms in which Habermas
formulates them owe much both to a domestic German agenda and to his theory of
communicative rationality and the public sphere, which restricts the horizon within
which the legitimacy of a European polity might be discussed and entails premature
assumptions about what the core of a European identity consists in. It ends by
suggesting an alternative sense of the European achievement and European identity.

k e y w o r d s : constitutional patriotism, Europe, Habermas, identity, Plessner, post-national-

ity, post-traditionality

A more refined opinion and one held by educated Germans is that the true, the best
national feeling also includes the cosmopolitan ideal of a supernational humanity, that it is
‘unGerman to be merely German’. (Freidrich Meinecke)1

While patriotism exists only by a vivid attachment to the interests, the way of life, the
customs of some locality, our so-called patriots have declared war on all of these. They
have dried up this natural source of patriotism and have sought to replace it by a fictitious
passion for an abstract being, a general idea stripped of all that can engage the imagination
and speak to the memory. (Benjamin Constant)2

This great empire Charlemagne formed into a systematically organised state, and gave the
Frank dominion settled institutions adapted to impart to it strength and consistency. This
must not however be understood, as if he first introduced the constitution of his empire in
its whole extent, but as implying that institutions partly already in existence, were
developed under his guidance, and attained a more decided and unobstructed efficiency.
(G.W.F. Hegel)3

Contact address: Charles Turner, Department of Sociology,

University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
Email: D.C.S.Turner@warwick.ac.uk 293
European Journal of Political Theory 3(3)

Introduction
‘It is not difficult for me to be a “good European” ’, wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in
1888.4 A century later, were one to ask Europe’s reading public which intellectual
they thought most deserving of the title ‘Good European’, the name of Jürgen
Habermas would figure prominently. For both his detractors, who have long
regarded his discourse ethics and defence of the modern project as Eurocentric,
and for his admirers, who have welcomed his turn in the last decade towards the
question of Europe, Habermas’s European credentials are unassailable. His
recent plea for a European constitution5 within the context of what he calls the
post-national constellation continues a lifetime’s commitment to a version of
social integration based upon democracy, justice and human rights, and to the
strengthening of the western European political culture which arose from the
wreckage of the Second World War.
It also reminds us of how much that political culture needs to be strengthened,
and of the pragmatic and often technocratic character of our existing European
institutions. Habermas’s position is that these are not viable or even desirable
without secure normative foundations. But as I shall argue, the manner in which
he formulates those foundations draws heavily on the solutions he has offered in
the past to the specific problems of post-war Germany. In this of course
Habermas is not alone. The absence of a secure normative core for a European
polity has meant that those proposals which would seek to give it one are
frequently the projection onto a European canvas of a domestic national sense of
what a polity is, of the relationship between politics, economics, culture and law.
Hence the observation that the French image of Europe tends to be French, the
British British and so on. The British and the Polish misgivings about the pro-
posed European constitution are a case in point, the Poles objecting to the
absence of any mention of Christianity in a document which would mention
Europe’s Greek and Roman heritage, the British objecting, in accordance with
their own political tradition, to the very idea of a written constitution, regardless
of its content. Both in turn see the constitutional project as a French affair, and
they are not wholly wrong.
Habermas’s vision of a European political future is fruitful and important pre-
cisely because it stands above the polemical exchanges to which these problems
give rise. Nevertheless, as I shall suggest, his work is not wholly free from the logic
of projection of which those exchanges are a crude expression. More importantly,
the result is that the terms in which a European future might be imagined are
more restrictive than they need be. In particular, while Habermas’s image of
European integration is not reducible to the device for which he is best known,
‘constitutional patriotism’, his references to something more substantial, a
‘common European way of life’ or ‘shared European experiences’, are restricted
to those which arise from the memory of the Second World War, the achieve-
294 ments of the post-war welfare state and the consolidation of a legal culture
 Turner: Jürgen Habermas
centred on procedural rationality. While this vision of a common European life
arises out of a legitimate reluctance to conceptualize ‘Europe’ in a way which
makes Europe appear as a ‘community of fate’ [Schicksalsgemeinschaft], it does
perhaps avoid the question of the kinds of attachment and sense of membership
which a European polity might be entitled to demand of its members. This is a
question of legitimacy, and in the conclusion I hint at a more robust conception
of European political culture which might provide for it.

Enlightenment and Romanticism

In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in February 2001 Alain
Finkielkraut identified a paradoxical reversal in the relationship between the
dominant political philosophies in Germany and France:
Germany emerged on the basis of a volkish conception of the nation, while France was
preceded by a political definition: spirit of the people versus citizenship. That is, in the
modern conflict between enlightenment and romanticism France was the enlightenment,
Germany romanticism.

But all that is changing. With Habermas’ thought Germany takes over the torch of
enlightenment in order to provide European civilisation with a helping hand into the
post-romantic. But . . . Europe needs two heritages: that of the enlightenment and of
romanticism: otherwise you have a monster.6

Finkielkraut’s plea for a European identity in which both Enlightenment and

Romanticism have their place is a familiar one. Isaiah Berlin, for example, has
argued that the period from the early 19th century to the end of the Second
World War – from Romanticism through nationalism to fascism – was governed
by a more or less wholesale abandonment of Enlightenment values, a rejection of
universal truths and the celebration of various types of particularity. The period
following the Second World War saw a return to universalism in the face of
the war’s shocking outcome, but a universalism tempered and informed by the
experience of a century and a half of particularist and irrationalist philosophy.
Post-war European universalism for Berlin is neither Christian nor secularist, but
arises out of a more basic humanist sensibility centring on the vulnerability of the
human person, the protection of whose rights remains the responsibility of that
particular entity, the nation state.7 The European Economic Community repre-
sented the triumph of liberalism in the form of an unresolved tension between
Enlightenment and Romanticism.
If we accept, for the sake of argument, Berlin’s identification of Enlightenment
with universalism and of Romanticism with an attachment to particular national
communities, then, contra Finkielkraut, Habermas may be said not simply to be
giving Europe a helping, enlightened hand into the post-Romantic. Rather,
alongside the overt political sympathies for a European state and European con-
stitution (Enlightenment) are formulations of what is at stake in the debate over 295
European Journal of Political Theory 3(3)
Europe’s future, and of the rationale for the institutional arrangements he
envisages, which owe much to a long-standing German tradition of thought.
This tradition was recalled by Karl-Heinz Bohrer in the 1990 debate with
Habermas over German reunification. In a reprise of an old argument by Thomas
Mann, Bohrer argued that the fears Habermas then expressed about the conse-
quences of reunification – an economic powerhouse with a new political identity
flexing its muscles in all directions – were themselves peculiarly German, the
product of a combination of apparently contradictory attitudes. Here, provincial-
ism – an unwillingness to be influenced by developments in the rest of the world
– combined with universalism – a playing down of one’s own identity in favour of
an orientation to universal values, human rights or humanity. Here, the peculiar-
ity of German history in the European context – the absence of nation-state
formation in the French or British sense, Germany’s burden as what Helmuth
Plessner called the ‘belated nation’8 – is turned to good account in an apparently
outward-looking, world-open attitude. Yet in place of a distinctly European
sensibility, what emerges is a universalism which is proclaimed abstractly, in the
form of statements of basic principles. This universalism was the other side of
the universalism–provincialism dichotomy which was a defining characteristic of
the post-war Bonn Republic, the preamble to whose own Basic Law refers
explicitly to a united Germany in a united Europe. The continuing enthusiasm of
German politicians for ever closer European political union is, for Bohrer, an
expression of a peculiarly German tendency to identify Germany’s problems
with those of Europe as a whole, and to do so precisely in the name of a non-
nationalist agenda. This approach was summed up by a remark made by
Germany’s former foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher: ‘the more
European our foreign policy is the more national it is’. But Habermas too, having
shifted from an explicit defence of the Bonn Republic at the time of reunification
to an acknowledgement of the inevitability of Berlin as the new German capital,
could himself state that: ‘German problems are becoming less German’.9 Bohrer’s
argument is that this, in its very universalism, is a manifestation of provincialism.
By contrast, a genuinely European sensibility would be one in which the
provincial–universalist complex was broken, in which Enlightenment consisted
not in the provision of normative blueprints for a European state but in an open-
ness to and interest in the peculiarities of distinct European national cultures and
histories and an unembarrassed embrace of one’s own.
Bohrer’s anti-provincial, anti-universalist position, formulated later in a series
of pieces for Merkur under the general heading of ‘Europaprovinzialismus’, owes
much to the kind of arguments put forward by T.S. Eliot in 1948, and it is worth
reflecting upon the kind of European sensibility such arguments recommend,
particularly in view of the fact that Habermas’s own account of European politi-
cal culture owes much to his theory of communicative action. Bohrer evokes an
image of the kind of European sensibility once borne by the experienced upper
296 bourgeois traveller, and latterly by the diplomat, well-versed in the language and
 Turner: Jürgen Habermas
culture of different countries and capable of holding his own at diplomatic
parties. It owes a good deal, too, to the time Bohrer himself spent in London
in the 1970s, and his curious admiration for British political culture, with its
apparent combination of self-criticism and love of country. And it implies that the
British Eurosceptics who reject European political union in the name of parlia-
mentary sovereignty may be among the best Europeans of all, defending an insti-
tution which more than any other helped Europe recover from the barbarism into
which it had once plunged itself. So, an insistence on and pride in the particularity
of one’s own political and cultural traditions leads not to insularity/provincialism,
but to an interest in the peculiarities of other political and cultural traditions, an
orientation to difference.10

Constitutional Patriotism and a European Nation State

From Bohrer’s perspective there is no clearer indication of post-war German
provincialism than Habermas’s constitutional patriotism. Since German reunifi-
cation Habermas has refused every temptation to formulate German national
identity in anything other than the formal terms of an attachment to the product
of a process of legal-rational abstraction, eschewing alternative sources of attach-
ment such as economic power or literary/artistic culture. Habermas’s political
philosophy here is inseparable from the political experience of the last three
generations of left-liberal western German intellectuals, whose mistrust of
nationhood set in immediately after the Second World War with the rejection of
Prussianism and the turn towards the West.11 The idea of post-national politics,
for instance, so it could be argued, has been the lifeblood of the political culture
of the Federal Republic of Germany since its inception. Nor, despite the fact that
he has made it his own, did Habermas invent the idea of constitutional patriotism,
with which he has sought to ward off calls by German conservatives for a more
self-assertive relationship between Germans and their national history. The idea
of constitutional patriotism, developed by Dolf Sternberger in the 1960s and
1970s, was tailored specifically for a divided Germany. Sternberger had argued
that ‘patriotism’ was a historical concept associated with 18th-century republi-
canism, and thus older than modern nationalism. It was possible, therefore,
through a hermeneutics of recovery, to divest it of some of its less palatable
associations, such as that of the patriotic citizen’s readiness for self-sacrifice. In
this way Sternberger had hoped to make available to western Germans a func-
tional equivalent for the kind of uncritical, unquestioned belonging which
members of any polity have to have available to them but which had to be
jettisoned after the Second World War. Constitutional patriotism was to be
consistent with a concept of the state which was decoupled from those of nation
or Volk and which therefore called into question the West German Basic Law,
with its explicitly Volkish conception of citizenship.12 Two remarks may be made
about constitutional patriotism. 297
European Journal of Political Theory 3(3)
First, in its very rejection of any reference to any non-rational, culturally
specific, ‘deep’ or ‘symbolic’ sense of political membership, loyalty or obligation,
it is tied to the peculiarities of German history like no other political concept,
which raises questions about its suitability as a normative framework for a
European political identity. For instance, it could be argued that Habermas’s
response to German reunification involves a double movement: on the one hand,
he has continued to defend constitutional patriotism as the basis for German iden-
tity; but in addition, in the face of Germany’s apparent increasing normalization,
Habermas has turned his attention increasingly to Europe, to European political
identity and to the idea of a European constitution, but done so by simply trans-
ferring the baggage of an intra-German political debate into his formulations of
what is at stake for Europe. It is as though, challenged where it once seemed most
at home, the notion of constitutional patriotism has migrated, seeking its fortune
further afield. Whether the field is too broad remains to be seen. Certainly the
observation of the distinguished German political scientist Klaus von Beyme
appears premature:

German elites may dislike it, but Maastricht clearly decouples citizenship from ethnos or
Volk. There is no European demos envisaged in terms of cultural and national
homogeneity. Citizenship in Europe is set on the road of constitutional patriotism.13

The assumption here is that what began life as a normative ideal within a specifi-
cally German context should now serve as a descriptive category for making sense
of current developments in European politics.
On the other hand, a more plausible argument for a European constitutional
patriotism is that the transplanting of constitutional patriotism from Germany to
the European level makes sense precisely because it was originally formulated
for a divided Germany. In a Europe of varying political histories and cultural
identities, the argument that the only basis for the legitimacy of European insti-
tutions is a formal, legal-rational one, appears plausible. Yet there is a tension in
Habermas’s work between the view that in a divided Europe, or one exhibiting
substantial regional and national variations in political culture, a specific set of
mechanisms needs to be put in place in order to ensure that the project of
European Union succeeds (call this the North American liberal dimension of his
work), and the view that those mechanisms are built into the evolving fabric of
European political culture itself as a yet-to-be-realized potential (call this the
European social democratic dimension).
I turn now to a more detailed examination of his proposals in order to see
whether these tensions can be resolved and whether the image of Habermas
projecting a specifically German agenda onto a European canvas is an accurate
one. In an essay from 1996 entitled ‘The European Nation-State: On the Past and
Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship’, he states that the basis for Europe’s future
political identity should be a post-national consciousness, but also acknowledges
298 that such a consciousness is a peculiarly German phenomenon:
 Turner: Jürgen Habermas
The trend towards what might be termed a ‘postnational’ self-understanding of the
political community may have been more pronounced in the former Federal Republic of
Germany than in other European states, given its peculiar situation and the fact that it had,
after all, been deprived of fundamental sovereignty rights.14

‘More pronounced’ here raises the crucial question of how much more pro-
nounced is the trend in the Federal Republic than elsewhere. A few lines later he
suggests that the difference between Germany and other European nation states
is not significant enough to hamper a Europe-wide post-nationalism. It transpires
that a form of social integration based upon nationhood has been challenged and
effectively defeated by one based upon the achievements of the welfare state in all
western European countries. There is one world, rather than three worlds, of
welfare capitalism, which, in its transformation of education, the family, and the
justice system, has enhanced the status of the citizen ‘in his legal substance’.
Existing and contrasting national cultural traditions, and with them the idea of
the nation as a community of fate, have become largely irrelevant to the sense of
political identity experienced by post-war Europeans. As a result:
What is important in the present context is that this made the citizens themselves more
keenly aware of the priority of the issue of the implementation of basic rights – of the
priority that the real nation of citizens must maintain over the imagined ethnic-cultural
nation.15

But are these citizens more keenly aware of this, do they make such a firm dis-
tinction between ‘the real nation of citizens’ and ‘the imagined ethnic-cultural
nation’, and even if they do, do they routinely do so to the latter’s disadvantage?
Even were a reliable set of survey data available, it is doubtful whether one would
find a Europe-wide endorsement of this negative view of ‘imagined communities’.
Indeed, in Britain – admittedly the most congenitally Eurosceptical of EU
members – the contemporary discourse of multiculturalism makes explicit and
repetitive use of the language of ‘imagined community’, turning what was once
merely a category of historical analysis into one which, as the occasion arises, can
be used for both descriptive and normative purposes.16 To say this is not to
endorse it. It is however to recall that the language of community remains robust,
is not obviously destined to disappear as the language and the sensibility of
Europeans becomes infused with the importance of citizenship, and is thereby an
obstacle to the creation of a European political culture along the lines Habermas
proposes.
This is important because Habermas does not want his account of a European
state and of a European constitution to be misinterpreted as a deracinated blue-
print, a technocratic solution to the problem of European integration. On the
contrary, post-nationality, constitutional patriotism, an orientation to the
achievements which have enhanced the status of the citizen ‘in his legal substance’
and so on are embedded, according to Habermas, within the development of
western European societies as a whole. 299
European Journal of Political Theory 3(3)
The theoretical basis for his position is to be found throughout his moral and
political philosophy, notably in The Theory of Communicative Action. This is,
among other things, an attempt to develop a theory of formal rationality in which
social integration at the level of the individual’s lifeworld involvements might be
secured in the face not only of the performative imperatives of subsystemic ration-
alities centred on money and power, but also of the manifest substantive differ-
ences in cultural values and ethical beliefs. More importantly, central to the story
Habermas tells of the rationalization of European societies is the fate of law. For
the counterweights to the imperatives of money and power lie not simply in the
pre-theoretical reasoning of authentic human subjects as competent actors in a
lifeworld of face-to-face conduct, but in the argumentative capabilities of
autonomous subjects who, as a result of the rationalization of law, are able to
recognize the difference between formal-procedural and substantive norms and
hence act as members of a lifeworld which has, to be sure, been rationalized, but
not solely through the performative imperatives of money and power. The uni-
versalizing, deracinated character of power and money which is the product of the
rationalization of society is counterbalanced by an equally rootless imperative –
the rule of law and common procedural norms – itself the product of societal
rationalization but which can be made consistent with the goal of human emanci-
pation. Moreover, just as money and power can affect any level of social and
political organization, the same is true of procedural norms or standards of due
process. The public sphere which emerges when communicating subjects seek
the argumentative redemption of validity claims is not, as it was in his earlier
work, an identifiable social space: rather it emerges as a potential feature of any
form of human collective life. It is this generalizable feature of the public sphere,
or of a lifeworld recolonized by emancipatory imperatives, which makes it possi-
ble for the apparatus of discourse ethics to be applied to the discussion of a
European state, citizenship and constitution.
In a similar vein, it is argued that a European state could be the same type of
entity as the individual nation state as it has emerged during the course of the last
two centuries. Because the European nation states have thrown off the legacy of
‘imagined community’ and based themselves on ‘an abstract, legally mediated
solidarity between strangers’, the construction of a European state is merely the
extension of what has been in each European nation state the same process of
abstraction. Hence the question posed rhetorically in the essay in New Left Review:

. . . if the emergence of national consciousness involved a painful process of abstraction,

leading from local and national identities to national and democratic ones, why . . . should
this generation of a highly artificial kind of civic solidarity – a ‘solidarity among strangers’
– be doomed to come to a final halt just at the borders of our classical nation states?17

It may be true that ‘in the period of its emergence’ ‘without [a] cultural interpre-
tation of political membership rights, the nation-state . . . would scarcely have had
300 sufficient strength to establish a new, abstract level of social integration through
 Turner: Jürgen Habermas
the legal implementation of democratic citizenship’.18 But now, the maturation of
those nation states, which taken over the course of two centuries has proceeded at
more or less the same pace, means that the cultural resources upon which the
framers of any European constitution might have to rely in order that it have roots
are those embodied in a way of life which is stable and reliable, but stable and reli-
able not in opposition to rapid social and economic change, not as a compensa-
tory traditionalism, but as a rationalized lifeworld inhabited by reflexively aware
citizens, a post-traditional Sittlichkeit.
At this point it is worth recalling that for Habermas the reasons for arguing in
favour of a European constitution are themselves the product of an evolutionary-
pragmatic process. If the European Coal and Steel Community was a response to
the chaos of the immediate post-war period, a device for ensuring the European
peace – albeit with long-standing intellectual roots – the contemporary argument
for a European superstate is couched much more in terms of a response to the
challenge of globalization. In ‘The Post-National Constellation and the Future of
Democracy’, Habermas adapts the analysis set down in The Theory of Communica-
tive Action to this context, describing the development of western societies as one
of a series of problems and solutions. His concern here is whether the processes
variously described by others as disembedding or ‘liquid modernity’, and now
affecting much of the western world, are being met with responses at the level of
social integration – as opposed to the adaptive upgrading of societal subsystems –
which can ensure the preservation of ‘institutional forms which do not regress
below the legitimacy conditions for democratic self-determination’.19
The spread of exchange networks for commodities, money, persons and infor-
mation demands an explosive degree of mobility. The spatial and temporal
horizons of a lifeworld on the other hand, no matter how broadly they extend,
always form a whole that is both intuitively present but always withdrawn to an
unproblematic background; a whole which is closed in the sense that it contains
every possible interaction from the perspective of lifeworld participants.20
Given this, it is obvious that for Habermas the only possible lifeworld response
to systemic opening is a form of lifeworld closure which incorporates the ‘liberal-
izing’ consequences of market and communicative contingencies. ‘Lifeworlds
which have disintegrated under pressure of opening have to close themselves
anew – now of course with expanded horizons’.21 The political significance of this
is that the challenges of, say, multiculturalism and individualization demand ‘the
end of the symbiosis between the constitutional state and the nation as a com-
munity of descent, and a renewal of a more abstract form of civil solidarity in the
sense of a universalism sensitive to difference’.22 Put somewhat differently,
while the prophets of postmodernism offer no account of closure, and the neo-
conservatives do propose closure but do so by appealing to ‘regressive utopias’
(Leo Strauss’s classicism is the most obvious example), Habermas believes that
European humanity has achieved a level of development in which such regressive
utopias have little attraction, not because the instinct for security has been 301
European Journal of Political Theory 3(3)
destroyed by the postmodern attractions of endless risk and perpetual self-
transformation, but because of the continuing existence of mechanisms and struc-
tures of social integration which, while under considerable strain, remain the only
way in which proposals for a European constitution can become more than an
imposed abstraction and be rooted in a common political culture:
. . . the artificial conditions in which national consciousness came into existence recall the
empirical circumstances necessary for an extension of that process of identity formation
beyond national boundaries. These are: the emergence of a European civil society; the
construction of a European wide public sphere; and the shaping of a political culture that
can be shared by all European societies.23

Whether or not a Europe-wide public sphere can be said to exist is an open

question. Certainly the history of attempts to launch serious European news-
papers and periodicals with a wide readership is not a happy one, and the current
ownership structures of the dominant European cable and satellite channels do
not inspire confidence. However, more important for our purposes is Habermas’s
formulation of the European identity which might be the basis for ‘a political
culture that can be shared by all European societies’:
What forms the common core of a European identity is the character of the painful
learning process it has gone through, as much as its results. It is the lasting memory of
nationalist excess and moral abyss that lends to our present commitments the quality of a
peculiar achievement.24

While this passage appears in a discussion of a possible European constitution and

is therefore not intended as a contribution to historical sociology, and while one
is perhaps not entitled to expect the account of ‘the core of a European identity’
to be as robust as Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences or Weber’s ‘Author’s
Introduction’ to his studies in the sociology of religion, it is instructive that the
image offered is so brief. Later we will see why. For now, it is sufficient to note
that the overcoming of ‘painful memories’ and ‘nationalist excess’ are seen as an
achievement, and that the whole of this development is described as a ‘learning
process’. Here, something which requires further scrutiny is taken to be a state-
ment of empirical fact, whereas even if such painful memories could be shown to
be common to the different European countries, the manner in which they are
interpreted varies so widely between the individual political cultures of Europe
that talk of a ‘core’ of European identity along these lines is unconvincing. As an
illustration, consider the meaning of these ‘painful memories’ in those eastern
European countries soon to be part of the European Union.

The View from Eastern Europe

If there is an idea which, when it appears in discussions of this sort, bears traces of
a domestic German agenda rather than a European one, it is that of history as a
302 ‘learning process’. Here, rather than buy in to the standard liberal doctrines,
 Turner: Jürgen Habermas
always suspected of elevating science to the level of highest form of human
achievement and being an apologia for the liberal democratic state, one is invited
to see history as a process of development in which ‘maturity’ arises not through
a concerted act of will, but through the long-term emergence of structures of
consciousness and ego development. And in the specifically German context,
‘learning’ processes result in a kind of constant vigilance in the face of authori-
tarian political potential. Be that as it may, it should be pointed out that
Habermas’s first essay on the subject of a European constitution, in which refer-
ence is made to our current commitments having the quality of a peculiar
achievement, an achievement which consists in having learnt from history, was
written as Yugoslavia was about to plunge into civil war, watched over and to some
extent abetted by western European politicians,25 including Germany’s then
foreign minister. Today Habermas’s proposals for a European constitution
appear in the context of imminent EU enlargement.
Many of the inhabitants of the EU candidate countries would be surprised to
learn that the common cultural basis for their EU membership was a ‘learning
process’, not least because for 40 years the communist regimes told their subjects
that their societies were engaged in a learning process of their own whose end
would be definitive rather than provisional: only socialism could eliminate the
fascistic potential from European societies for good, a potential which continued
to haunt the increasingly decadent capitalist West. The lesson which many
eastern European dissidents drew from this was scepticism towards the idea that
history had any lessons to teach, and an awareness that the combination of dem-
ocracy, welfare and human freedom which western Europe promised, far from
being the culmination of a developmental process, was a prize to be struggled for.
When it finally arrived it did so without warning, a frail child in need of constant
attention.26
Moreover, the idea that a common European identity might be based on
‘painful experiences’ in common is hampered by the fact that many in eastern
Europe perceive the states of western Europe and those of NATO as having
accepted Europe’s post-war division, and more specifically the occupation of
europe’s Eastern half by the colonizing power of the Soviet Union. The process
undergone by countries such as Poland was painful, but the source of the pain was
not ‘nationalist excess’ alone, but rather six years of Nazi occupation, followed by
40 years of Soviet domination, during the first years of which those who had
fought hardest against Nazism found themselves rounded up and either shot or
deported to Siberia, never to be seen again. The lesson of this particular painful
process is that one ought to be suspicious of the motives of those who proclaim
themselves one’s allies. The wound inflicted more than half a century ago at Yalta
is still felt and will never fully heal. The lesson of history here is not one in which
the mistakes of the past are corrected, but one in which the past continues to
haunt the present, is ready to return unbidden, in which events which happened a
century ago can be narrated as though what happened still causes a personal 303
European Journal of Political Theory 3(3)
offence to the narrator, though he be born decades later. This is why, when Poles
say that they wish to live in ‘a normal country’ they tend to separate the arrange-
ments through which normality might be sustained from the suffering and failure
to which history has subjected them, why they are ready to embrace ahistorical
America as readily as historical old Europe. ‘History’ here is central to political
and cultural identity, but it is not a history which is developmental or progressive
or evolutionary or which can be interpreted as such. It is not a history which
necessarily embeds or carries forward the moral resources or the social and
political consciousness which Habermas’s normative project for Europe would
require.
All this makes one wonder why Habermas gives the idea of a ‘learning process’
the emphasis he does. One possibility is contained in an argument by Hermann
Lübbe, that while every gymnasium type of school in every European country
could educate its pupils in a common European culture, with its classical and
Judaeo-Christian heritage, it would provide them with an account of cultural
origins alone. And while these origins may well exist, they provide for relationships
of the most varied types between the nations which share them: ‘it is not obvious
how, out of the recollection of such extended family relationships, an impulse
could emerge among the members of that family to bind themselves as members
of a smaller one’.27 In fact, he argues, the political identities of the modern
European states were grounded in their capacity to face the future rather than in
a shared sense of ‘origins’, be those origins the elevated ones of classical or Judaeo-
Christian culture or a shared history of suffering, so that a ‘common European
culture’ grounded in common cultural origins might well exist but cannot be the
basis of European political identity. As he puts it, experiences of political belong-
ing cannot be found in museums, but are forged in relation to questions of
welfare, standards of living and the like. Therefore, those who would seek to
enliven the current European debate by arguing that there is more to be said than
simply trying to decide whether constitutional patriotism or civic nationalism is
the more attractive option for a future European polity are missing the point.
European cultural identity and European political identity are separate topics,
they say: the one is based in a shared heritage, a common legacy which may well
act as a common background but which will be interpreted differently by differ-
ent states; the other is grounded in an image of the future and the tasks which the
future places before us, and is necessarily pragmatic and utilitarian.
The problem with this view, however, and one which alerts us to the fact that
Habermas’s formalism has a substantive dimension, is that in many parts of
Europe, particularly in the EU candidate countries, political identity and cultural
identity are not so easily separated. There, experiences of political belonging can
be found precisely in the museums Lübbe dismisses, and in the activity of refram-
ing the accounts of what is in them after half a century of Soviet occupation. It is
true that the framework for public policy in many of these countries since 1989
304 has been driven by a pragmatic, technocratic agenda oriented towards economic
 Turner: Jürgen Habermas
development and the country’s future prospects. Nevertheless, the role played
here by questions of recovered cultural identity and the setting straight of the
historical record is palpable, and gives rise to a quite different conception of what
political identity consists in. The result is what writers such as Ernest Gellner or
Jenö Szücs – one a Czech, the other a Hungarian – have referred to as Europe’s
different historical or time zones, major political, economic and cultural fault lines
which continue to present a serious obstacle to European unity.28
The virtual absence in Habermas’s writings on Europe of themes drawn from
cultural history and historical sociology is doubtless the product of a healthy
suspicion towards any attempt to formulate a European identity along substantive
lines, and an awareness that the more notable theorizations of ‘Europe’ or the
European legacy, in which Europe appears as a repository of cultural resources at
varying depths below the surface of political life, converge on the image of Europe
as a Schicksalsgemeinschaft, a community of fate, a fatherland writ large.29 However
much this fatherland is a byword for diversity, variation and a complex combina-
tion of forms of hierarchy, modes of social organization and levels of decision-
making, Habermas assumes that the European demos which makes it up is bound
to be conceived of as culturally homogeneous vis-à-vis its external others. In Carl
Schmitt’s terms, for instance, in the absence of a fully fledged European state with
the full trappings of sovereignty, including the capacity to ensure its security and
that of its members by making a clear distinction between friend and enemy,
Habermas’s constitutional patriotism can at best have legality, but not the legiti-
macy which would make it genuinely political rather than technocratic. From a
Schmittian point of view, constitutional patriotism cannot establish ‘concrete
order’, rather it presupposes such order.30 Schmitt’s vision of a European
Grossraum is just one of a number of visions of European unity which move
beyond Habermas’s legalistic framework: one thinks here of the Catholicism of
Christopher Dawson or Max Scheler; Eric Voegelin’s distinction between ele-
mental representation – constitutions, democratic procedures and so on – and
existential representation – with its more basic symbolism of order; the pan-
European movement of the interwar years. Today’s versions of an ideology of
Europe tend to be culturally and philosophically flabbier than these, all of which
were grounded in a robustly anti-modern sensibility, and all of which are inter-
pretable as authoritarian, anti-democratic, Romantic or a gemeinschaftlich combi-
nation of all three. This no doubt explains the attention which Habermas’s
anti-gemeinschaftlich version of Europe can command among left-liberal intellec-
tuals. For better or worse, the technocrats and bureaucrats of the European Union
have saved Europe from itself, and if Habermas’s constitutional patriotism is the
best counterweight we have to the twin logics of European bureaucracy on the
one hand – power – and the market on the other – money – then even if it is a
defence mechanism through which the social democratic achievements of the
previous 40 years can be defended rather than cast aside, so be it. Better this than
the reactionary efforts to identify Europe’s political foundations either with its 305
European Journal of Political Theory 3(3)
cultural origins, or with its political self-assertion, efforts which are sure to be
internally or externally divisive.
Yet this understandable refusal of Gemeinschaft on Habermas’s part has two
consequences: first, it results in a distinctive and not wholly unproblematic con-
ception of what kind of association a European state might be; and, second,
Habermas himself acknowledges at various points that constitutional patriotism
alone cannot gain a foothold in the collective consciousness of contemporary
Europeans without some appeal to the idea of a common European life. But
because he is less than committed to spelling out what this common life might
amount to beyond the painful experiences to which he alludes, the result is a fore-
shortened view of peculiarly European culture and cultural achievement.
‘Economic justifications must at the very least be combined with ideas of a differ-
ent kind – let us say, an interest in the affective attachment to a particular ethos:
in other words, the attraction of a specific way of life’; ‘the economic advantages
of European unification are valid as arguments for further construction of the EU
only if they can appeal to a cultural power of attraction extending far beyond
material gains alone’.31 Yet the ‘cultural power of attraction’ which Habermas has
in mind does not go as ‘far beyond’ material gains as it might. In particular, while
referring to a ‘way of life’ it eschews all reference to the idea of a distinct European
habitus, set of manners or even belief system.32 The effect of this is a somewhat
arbitrary claim that politics cannot be divorced from morality – a European
polity requires a normative foundation in the priority accorded to certain forms
of argumentative reasoning – but that politics must be divorced from culture – a
European polity grounded in a set of substantive values or ideals is a recipe for the
type of ‘closure’ which Habermas rejects, it would recommend a regression
behind the post-traditionality to which modern democracies have attained. Here
is how Habermas expressed the idea of post-traditionality as early as 1976:

Individuals no longer encounter their collective identity as the content of a tradition in

which individual identity could find a fixed, objective representation; rather they
themselves participate in the cultural and will-formation processes of an identity that is still
to be sketched in common.33

‘An identity still to be sketched in common’: it would be hard to imagine a more

attractive description of the spirit in which the debate over the emerging
European polity should take place. Habermas himself is a participant in that
debate, and Finkielkraut seems to believe that his approach to it does not accord
as closely as it might with the spirit of post-traditional ethics. I think Finkiel-
kraut’s misgivings exaggerated. Nevertheless, there remains something to say
about Habermas’s readiness to endorse models for Europe which were designed
for Germany. Constitutional patriotism is one such model, as we have seen, a
model theorized at the level of philosophical principles but then given sociologi-
cal backing by the claim that it is rooted in the social and political consciousness
306 of contemporary Europeans. It is this – and not the idea itself 34 – which produces
 Turner: Jürgen Habermas
the tension referred to earlier, between its universal appeal and the suspicion that
it may be more firmly rooted in some particular political and cultural traditions
than others.
Similar observations may be made about Habermas’s less extensive remarks on
federalism. Clearly federalism is not peculiarly German in the way that constitu-
tional patriotism is. Nevertheless, the terms in which he endorses it are instruc-
tive. At the end of his reply to Dieter Grimm on the question of a European con-
stitution, he writes: ‘European identity can . . . mean nothing other than unity in
national diversity; and perhaps German federalism, as it developed after Prussia
was shattered and the confessional division overcome, might not be the worst
model’.35 This passage, in which Germany is suggested as a model for Europe, is
oddly reminiscent of one to be found in the work of an unlikely bedfellow.
Writing during the First World War, Max Scheler offered a vision of the future
community of Europe based on Christian love, but also defined by a particular
shape:
In our federal form of political articulation, which for a long time has withdrawn from the
state the property of sovereignty, we Germans and the Swiss have, constitutionally
speaking, at least the beginnings of a great example showing how the genuine freedom of
smaller historical regional and political units can in all things co-exist with the centralising,
technical necessities of modern industry . . . Let us hope that this kind of community
affiliation will become a model for Christian Europe in the coming age! For . . . it is in the
constitution of a federal state that the Christian idea of community is most present today
. . . The new federal body politic, presenting a materially greater, stronger, and more
centralised front to the outside world, but internally, spiritually, more decentralised, might
also be legitimately imagined as a historical reconnection to the forces and ideas which
sustained the medieval German empire; it would sound a recall to Germany’s vocation at
the heart of Europe . . . which is to mediate, in the formation of supranational political
organisations, between the idea and reality of Christian Europe . . . and the self-seeking
reality of peripheral European states and nations.36

Although by Germany Scheler means a Germany which has overcome its domi-
nation by Prussia, one would imagine that today, almost a century later, and after
the painful experiences which Europeans underwent as a result of the attempt to
put into practice a version of ‘Germany at the heart of Europe’, that this passage
would appear to be a challenge which is easily dismissed – Germany has no more
of a vocation to be at the heart of Europe than any other nation state.
This of course is not Habermas’s argument, but it does prompt us to consider
whether German federalism as a possible model for Europe follows from his
account of the (singular!) ‘painful process of abstraction’ which generated the
modern nation state and which, he claims, ought to be ‘continued’ in the form of
a European state with a European constitution. Is it the necessary outcome of the
‘learning processes’ and ‘painful experiences of nationalist excess’ which make
constitutional patriotism so important? Is federalism rooted in the emerging and
developing consciousness which Europeans have of their ‘legal substance’? If the
answer is no, then federalism is an arbitrary conclusion, prompting the question 307
European Journal of Political Theory 3(3)
of why the product of these developments should be something akin to Germany’s
present arrangements any more than a larger version of the centralized French or
British states or of the lopsidedly decentralized Spanish state. French-style cen-
tralism is a non-starter for most participants in the current debate about Europe,
but it is, as much as German federalism, the product of the painful process of
abstraction which Habermas invokes. It may in fact be argued that of all the
individual nation states which make up the European Union Germany is the least
equipped to serve as a model because, regional cultural differences aside, the
internal political structures and arrangements of its constituent states are similar
to one another. By contrast, while each of the member states of the EU is a
democracy, not all are republics, not all those which are republics have the same
relationship between president and parliament, or between Church and State, and
the internal political cultures of these states vary institutionally, constitutionally
and in terms of the manner in which political membership and belonging are per-
ceived by their citizens.37
Against this, it may be argued that Habermas’s option for federalism is a prag-
matic alternative to proposals for a substantive political-cultural basis for a
European level social integration. The contemporary challenges of diversity and
intercultural communication are too great to allow such a resolution, and in cast-
ing around for possible models Habermas has fastened not on the resurrected
form of the Holy Roman Empire, but on the European country whose great post-
war achievement has been the consolidation of a stable and – in the best sense of
the word – uninteresting political culture, and to have forged an exemplary com-
bination of peace, welfare, justice, human rights and prosperity. If, as Habermas
claims, it is this kind of post-ideological, post-national political culture which has
now matured in each of the member states of the EU, Germany’s being a model
for Europe would be less a case of hegemony than a comforting story of the bland
leading the bland, in which the concrete referents of the European citizen’s ‘legal
substance’ would be personal security, democracy, high welfare standards, decent
housing and so on. And in invoking such achievements, and advocating federal-
ism and constitutional patriotism, Habermas may be said to be doing no more
than participating, in a post-traditional fashion, in a process of will-formation of
an identity ‘still to be sketched in common’.
But if that is the case, it is also an invitation to give an alternative sketch of what
Europe’s achievements are which are worth defending and enshrining institu-
tionally. I end, therefore, with some hints about an alternative to the story
Habermas tells.

Europe as Gemeinschaft and Europe as Geselleschaft

Habermas is proposing a European polity which does not require ‘spiritual’
foundations, since the ‘commitments’ it requires of its members are commitments
308 to nothing more substantive, deep or thick than a common framework of legal
 Turner: Jürgen Habermas
procedure and universally definable standards of human rights, personal security
and democratic participation. The danger to human freedom lies not in the social
democratic welfare state model but in the model of Europe as a Gemeinschaft, a
community, since the latter is bound to entail the search for a substantive,
pre-political or apolitical foundation or centre which in today’s complex and reli-
giously/ethnically divided modern states would be a recipe for imposed internal
European homogeneity and a foreign policy based upon ‘fortress Europe’, recall-
ing the very pre-political or anti-political structures of thinking which gave rise to
the disastrous events of the first half of the 20th century. Yet the doubts expressed
by Finkielkraut remain: ‘Europe needs two heritages: that of the enlightenment
and of romanticism: otherwise you have a monster’. Put differently, and ignoring
the question of whether the concepts of Enlightenment or Romanticism are doing
much work here, can we conceptualize ‘Europe’ in such a way that the European
achievement whose preservation is the point of having a European constitution in
the first place could be defined in such a way as to incorporate both? In other
words, where is the dignified part of a European constitution, the spirit of the
European laws?
Habermas’s answer would run something like this: if a European constitutional
patriotism represents a renewed closure of European humanity ‘within an
expanded horizon’; if a European state would be an ‘artificial’ construction but no
more so than the artificial constructions which are the individual European nation
states; if the opportunity for a European constitution arises within the context of
a ‘post-national constellation’ and the possible emergence of a European ‘public
sphere’, then, taken together, these institutional arrangements with their atten-
dant rationales are a vindication of European modernity, a modernity in which
communicative rationality can hold its own against the strategic instrumentalities
of money and power. By contrast, I want to finish with a brief suggestion about
how to describe the intellectual/spiritual achievement of European modernity
without harnessing it either to a Eurocentric doctrine of a progressive expansion
of the scope of rationality, or equally Eurocentric appeal to a substantive concept
of community, each of which invites anti-European counterpositions.38 The
resources for such a description are somewhat meagre, to be sure, and if I fasten
upon the work of Helmuth Plessner it is merely to provide the starting point for
a discussion which must take place if the mutual misunderstandings and cross-
purposes of the European debate of the last two decades are to be overcome. The
point here is not to invoke Plessner ‘against’ Habermas, but to suggest that in
Plessner the openness to the contingencies of human affairs, which is the hallmark
of post-traditionality, results in an image of human communication which may
have a broader scope than the one which emerges in Habermas’s Theory of
Communicative Action.
In a remarkable series of writings in the 1920s and 1930s39 Plessner elaborated
a philosophical anthropology at the heart of which is a theory of the human being
which has universal, biological underpinnings but whose full consequences are to 309
European Journal of Political Theory 3(3)
be drawn only in a modern European context. Lest this be taken for a piece of
Eurocentrism, the distinctive achievement of European humanity turns out for
Plessner to consist not in the victory of humanism over religious obscurantism, or
of the universality of reason over the particularity of determinate community, but
in an openness to the fact that the victory of the former over the latter is always
contingent, provisional, never definitively accomplished. The triumph of Euro-
pean humanity, that which might provide modern Europeans with a source of
common attachment, consists in its capacity to become aware of this, to relativize
its very achievement, not for the sake of a radical scepticism, or through a prag-
matic attitude of learning from its past mistakes, but through an openness to the
provisionality which is the human condition. Plessner believed that the possibility
of such openness had been obscured both by late 19th-century liberal theories of
progress, and by the anti-liberal communitarian social radicalism – of the right
and left – of the 1920s, both of which were premised, dogmatically, upon a denial
or domestication of contingency.
Plessner’s account of the contingency of human affairs is distinct from those to
be found in, for example, Rorty or Oakeshott, in that he offers a robust account
of both the grounds of human contingency and of the kinds of institutional
arrangements consistent with an acceptance of such contingency. The grounds
are the human being’s biological distinctiveness, which consists in the fact of our
having no natural environment, no niche, no place in which to be at home. What
makes us human is that we are ‘positional’, eccentric, what nature makes of us is a
being who unceasingly faces the question of what to make of himself, of how to
lead his life. The human being is not ‘constitutionally’ world-open, positional
and eccentric, rather his positionality, eccentricity and world-openness place him
squarely before the task of constituting himself. Plessner believed that the dis-
tinctiveness of European culture was to have made possible a breakthrough to
this, the fundamental groundlessness of human existence, the ‘natural artificiality’
of man, which culminates in the view of man as a historical and political animal:
‘The principle of the binding character of ungroundedness is both the theoretical
and practical understanding of man as a historical and thereby political being’.40
But Europe obscured its own achievement when it gave birth to the philosophies
of progress which domesticate contingency and groundlessness through the
device of what came to be called 20 years ago a grand narrative (liberalism) and to
irrationalist philosophies of community, which domesticate contingency through
the principle of blood (Nazism) or the cause (Marxism).41
Contingency undomesticated, by contrast, is contingency which takes on a
public face. The European achievement is the emergence of this public sphere
(Öffentlichkeit). But here the public sphere implies not ‘closure within an expanded
horizon’ or the argumentative redemption of validity claims in a post-traditional
framework of procedural norms, but contingency which exists beyond the limits
of community, not in another social space, but in the never-ending task and
310 accomplishment of our human constitution, in the universality of the political. In
 Turner: Jürgen Habermas
The Limits of Community Plessner characterizes philosophies of community as
premised upon enthusiasm and lack of reserve, upon a need for direct human con-
nection and firm foundations, and he opposed to it a principle of Gesellschaft as a
principle of everyday social relations grounded in ‘the unity of intercourse of an
indeterminately large number of people who, through lack of opportunity, time
and mutual interest are capable of being at most acquaintances’.42 A society of
strangers in other words. This recalls Habermas’s own references to a solidarity
of strangers, but we may suggest that Plessner pushes the contingent, post-
traditional character of a society of strangers further, so that the solidarity of
which they are capable is a solidarity maintained not by determinate principles or
rational foundations or normative commitments which could be specified as such,
but by those forms of sociality which make our biological eccentricity, our
natural artificiality, bearable but in such a way that it is not denied. The linea-
ments of a public sphere in Plessner’s sense are not only communicative rational-
ity or argumentation or the triumph of the best argument, but also ceremony and
prestige, tact and diplomacy, exhibited by distance-preserving and distance-
maintaining beings who expose themselves to the risks and threats of their
groundlessness yet have ways of living with it and as it. It is a society closer to the
world of Erving Goffman than to the Theory of Communicative Action.
For Habermas the problems of Europe’s political future are to be solved by a
set of institutional arrangements defined organizationally and secured legally
within the framework of a European polity, by a set of devices which emerged
only in Europe but which are now exportable to any part of the earth. From a
Plessnerian point of view, one might say that while Habermas’s own philosophy
rightly rejects the language and the sensibility of Gemeinschaft, its advocacy of
post-traditional modes of communication nonetheless domesticates contingency
in its own way, in a mild version of the liberal philosophy of progress. Here, the
post-traditional openness to contingency is achieved, but at the price of playing
down or marginalizing those forms of anti-communitarian communication which
remain traditional: irony, playfulness, circumlocution, gesture, posture, not
always meaning what one says, a variety of modes of address and response which
are not easily confined to the ‘expressive symbolism’ box of Habermas’s diagrams,
but which, in many European political cultures, particularly those of the new EU
members, are part of the very fabric of the way in which truth, justice, welfare and
security are negotiated and revealed. To be sure, some of these modes sit uneasily
with the norms of procedural democracy. But because they, as much as the
achievements of social democracy, are part of the inherited fabric of political and
social awareness in an expanded European Union, they are not easily willed away.
If Europe as a set of concrete political institutions is to have a spiritual ground,
and if that spiritual ground is not to appear to make Europe a community of fate
bearing a permanently antagonistic relationship to the rest of the world, we might
do worse than to revisit the philosophical anthropological account of what the
European achievement consists in. And if we do, we might find that the polemi- 311
European Journal of Political Theory 3(3)
cal question of ‘European or German’, with which we began, can be transcended.
As Golo Mann put it soon after the Second World War:
The question, what is Germany and what it should become was unavoidable a century ago.
But the effects of time have worked more quickly than at any point in human history. In
the future the question will not be what a German is and what he might become. Not will
it be above all or exclusively, what a European is and what he might become. The
European nation cannot be a substitute for the German nation, the politics of the
European states cannot be repeated on a world scale. What is man, and what will become
of man: that is the question of the future.43

Notes
For comments on an earlier version of this article I would like to thank Jürgen Habermas,
Peter Poellner and one anonymous reviewer.

1. Friedrich Meinecke (1962) Werke, vol. 5, p. 24. Munich: Oldenbourg.

2. Benjamin Constant (1988) ‘The Spirit of Conquest’, in B. Fontana (ed.) Constant: Political
Writings, pp. 73–4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. G.W.F. Hegel (1956) The Philosophy of History, p. 362. New York: Dover.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche (1967) On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, p. 225. New York:
Vintage.
5. Jürgen Habermas (2001) ‘Why Europe Needs a Constitution’, New Left Review (2nd ser.)
11.
6. Alain Finkielkraut (2001) ‘Nachhilfeunterricht in Post-Romantik’, Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung (14 Feb.). I have quoted this passage less because of Finkielkraut’s use of the
terms Enlightenment and Romanticism, terms which I make use of here more as
heuristic devices than as categories in the history of ideas, than as an indication of the
sensitivities which continue to animate the discussions of European intellectuals.
Finkielkraut’s outburst is instructive because his own humanist liberal political
philosophy is far closer to that of Habermas himself than it is to the French epigones of
German Romanticism.
7. Isaiah Berlin ‘European Unity and its Vicissitudes’, in (1990) The Crooked Timber of
Humanity. London: John Murray. See also Alan Milward (1992) The European Rescue of
the Nation-State. London: Routledge.
8. See Helmuth Plessner (1985) ‘Die Verspätete Nation’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6.
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
9. Jurgen Habermas (1994) The Past as Future, p. 73. Cambridge: Polity Press.
10. This position was first formulated by Bohrer in his article ‘Why we are Not a Nation and
Why we should Become one’, to which Habermas replied. (See New German Critique 52,
Winter 1991.) See now Karl-Heinz Bohrer (2000) ‘Die europäische Differenz’, Merkur
54 (Sept./Oct.). For Thomas Mann’s earlier formulation of the
provincialism–universalism link, see Thomas Mann (1965) ‘Deutschland und die
Deutschen’, in Reden und Aufsätze, vol. 2. Stockholm: Stockholmer Gesamtausgabe der
Werke von Thomas Mann, Fischer.
11. It is easy to forget the extent to which pre-war German intellectuals of all persuasions
thought of themselves as belonging to the non-western part of Europe. Here is Thomas
Mann in 1922, formulating the distinctive character of the Weimar Republic:
. . . But what is German is the instinct for a state-building individualism, the idea of
312 community in the recognition of the human being of each one of its members, the idea
 Turner: Jürgen Habermas
of humanity, which we called at once human and political, aristocratic and social and
which is as far from the political mysticism of slavism as it is from the radical
individualism of the West: the union of freedom and equality, ‘genuine harmony’, in a
word: the republic. (Ibid. p. 35.)
12. Dolf Sternberger (1982) Verfassungspatriotismus. Hanover: Niedersächsische
Landeszentrale für politische Bildung. Habermas himself invokes the idea of ‘an
enlightenment culture whose normative core consists in the abolition of a publicly
demanded sacrificium as an element of morality’. Jürgen Habermas (2001) The Postnational
Constellation, p. 101. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
13. Klaus von Beyme (2001) ‘Citizenship in the EU’, in K. Eder and B. Giesen (eds)
European Citizenship between National Legacies and Postnational Projects, p. 74. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
14. Jürgen Habermas (1998) The Inclusion of the Other, p. 119. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
15. Ibid. pp. 119–20.
16. For the multiculturalist argument which depends most explicitly on the reversal of
Habermas’s priorities, so much so that it describes Britain as a ‘community of
communities’, see B. Parekh (ed.) (2000) The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. London:
Profile Books. It is worth noting that this document is no mere academic treatise, but
rather a commissioned report replete with policy ‘recommendations’, many of which
imply an abandonment of the kind of public sphere which has been the practical upshot
of most of Habermas’s thinking.
17. Habermas (n. 5), p. 8.
18. Habermas (n. 14), p. 113.
19. Habermas (n. 12), p. 84.
20. Ibid. p. 82.
21. Ibid. p. 83.
22. Ibid. p. 84.
23. Habermas (n. 5), p. 16.
24. Ibid. p. 21.
25. See Brendan Simms (2002) Unfinest Hour. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
26. When Adam Michnik states that the last decade has been the best in Poland’s history, he
remains fully aware that his country’s remarkable transformation may still end in
economic collapse, political reaction and social despair. That it may do so, however, has
nothing to do with the inherent tendencies of ‘capitalism’, but everything to do with the
vicissitudes of Polish (and every other) history.
27. Hermann Lübbe (1994) Abschied vom Superstaat, p. 108. Berlin: Siedler.
28. See Ernest Gellner (1994) Conditions of Liberty. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jenö Szücs
(1987) ‘Three Historical Regions of Europe’, in J. Keane (ed.) Civil Society and the State.
London: Verso.
29. See Remi Brague and Peter Koslowski (1997) Vaterland Europa. Passagen Verlag. Now
Remi Brague (2002) Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilisation. South Bend, IN: St
Augustine’s Press.
30. Carl Schmitt (1950) Der Nomos der Erde, p. 120. Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt.
31. Habermas (n. 5), p. 9.
32. The classic account of a European political sensibility which includes religion, law and
manners is Edmund Burke’s description of ‘the commonwealth of Europe’, a
commonwealth of which republicanism in general and the French revolution in
particular, with its abstract rules and principles, was seen as the destruction. See ‘Letters
on a Regicide Peace’, in I. Kramnick (ed.) (1999) The Portable Edmund Burke.
Harmondsworth: Penguin. 313
European Journal of Political Theory 3(3)
33. Jürgen Habermas (1982) ‘Können komplexe Gesellschaften eine vernünftige Identität
ausbilden?’, in Zur Rekonstruktion der Historischen Materialismus, p. 107. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
34. The argument about universalism and particularism here is distinct from the
reductionism of arguments that, say, Kant’s metaphysics of morals is really the
philosophy of the late 18th-century bourgeoisie or that his moral universalism is a display
of ‘masculinist’ reason. The tension arises in Habermas’s work precisely because he
argues sociologically and historically as well as philosophically.
35. Jürgen Habermas (1997) ‘Reply to Grimm’, in P. Anderson and P. Gowan (eds) The
Question of Europe, p. 264. London: Verso. Later Habermas dropped this approach. ‘Of
course, a constitution for a multinational state on the scale of the European union cannot
simply adopt the model of constitutions of national federations such as the Federal
Republic of Germany’, Habermas (n. 12) p. 99.
36. Max Scheler (1930) On the Eternal in Man, p. 386. London: SCM Press.
37. Habermas is making assumptions about the character of a modern European state and of
a future state of Europe, and about the ways in which its members would be associated.
For an alternative, see Michael Oakeshott (1975) On Human Conduct. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
38. These were brilliantly set out in Finkielkraut’s account of the trial of Klaus Barbie, at the
centre of which lie the efforts of Klaus Barbie’s non-European lawyers to mobilize post-
colonial anti-Europeanism and dismiss the destruction of European Jews as the internal
affair of a European colonial power. See Alain Finkielkraut (1992) Remembering in Vain.
New York: Columbia University Press.
39. Most notably ‘Grenzen der Gemeinschaft’ (tr. Andrew Wallace as (1998) The Limits of
Community. New York: Humanity Books). ‘Die Stufen des Organischen und des
Menschen’ and ‘Macht und menschliche Natur’, all in Helmuth Plessner (1985)
Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
40. Helmuth Plessner (1985) Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, p. 195. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
41. Plessner (n. 40), pp. 42–57.
42. Plessner (n. 40), p. 80.
43. Golo Mann (1958) Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, p. 963. Frankfurt.

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