habermas and arnason - globalism, ideology and traditions -

GLOBALISM, IDEOLOGY ANDTRADITIONS

Interview with Jrgen Habermas

Johann P. Arnason: I would like to discuss some themes and issuesin your most recent work, with particular reference to the German back-ground. We might begin with the point that Germany is the only case of anation-state reunified after the collapse of communism and the end of theCold War. Our view of this development will, of course, depend on moregeneral assumptions about the contemporary world, with regard to the globalcontext as well as the prospects of the nation-state. On the former issue, youseem on the whole to side with those who accept a strong version ofglobalization theory and argue that a left alternative to currently dominantpolicies can only be envisaged within a global framework. There are,however, some reasons to question the conventional wisdom on globaliz-ation: as the work of critical analysts (especially David Held and his associ-ates) has made clear, the most widely accepted ideological constructsexaggerate the novelty of present trends, ignore the internal contradictionsof the global transformations in progress, and oversimplify the relationshipbetween global dynamics and the nation-state. Would it not be appropriateto see globalism as a new ideological formation particularly effective inimposing conformist premises on the critics of neoliberalism? And how farcan the traditional approach of critical theory serve to clarify the sources androles of this new ideology?

Jrgen Habermas: In many contexts, globalism functions indeed asan ideology. Never before has an epistemic community had an impact likethat of the Chicago school on policy making across the world. The neoliberalinfluence on setting the agenda for national governments is obvious. Withinthe OECD world, there is hardly any government refusing the usual mix ofderegulation, in particular deregulation of labour markets, of lowering taxes,balancing public households and trimming welfare-state regulations. Thispackage is sold to the broader public with the argument that the pressures

Thesis Eleven, Number 63, November 2000: 110SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)Copyright 2000 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Pty Ltd[0725-5136(200011)63;110;014384]

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from global competition and international financial markets do not leave anyother choice. So, the balance of power keeps shifting in one direction infavour of players participating in the global game, leaving the usual suspectson the losing side. One might call the influence of neoliberal ideas ideo-logical, in so far as the reference to the inescapability of market pressuresnot only prevents people from countervailing actions, but even discouragesattempts to maintain at least the existing capacity for political intervention.The disarming move is disguised as an appeal to emancipation the marketpromises to unleash the imagination and the initiative of the individual fromthe entanglement in all sorts of constraints.

The ideological core of neoliberalism is the tacit reduction of democraticconstitutionalism to the implementation of economic liberties. The substitutionof the private autonomy of producers and consumers for the political auton-omy of citizens proceeds in tandem with the replacement of political regu-lation by the imperatives of deregulated markets. There is not only a growingdisparity of the opportunity structures of winners and losers, but the grow-ing disparity in actual living conditions between players and those who areno longer participating in the game at all the marginalized and superfluoussections of the population.

At the same time, a new mental attitude is spreading, which is anequivalent for the kind of fatalism we know from ancient empires. The old,religiously based fatalism of the illiterate masses of peasants penetrated thewhole of a patterned life; the new, secular fatalism of the present crowd ofyoung, beaming, dynamic and well-educated rational choosers is only thereverse side of a mobile and highly individualized, yet privatistic lifestyle,bolstering a deferential attitude to the contingencies of fatefully shiftingmarket forces on which the ranges of options depend.

However, there are at least three reasons for not going ahead with areanimation of the good old critique of ideology. The present situation is, ina way, so transparent that there is, first, no need for a suspicious disclosureof concealed truths you need not even read the Financial Times or theFrankfurter Allgemeine, every middle-brow local paper contains on the frontpages the necessary information. It should be clear for everybody, that therecent or not quite so recent acceleration in transnational trade, directinvestment and flow of capital is the intended result of political agreementsthat have led via several Gatt Rounds to an economic regime which isrepresented by institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the WorldBank, the International Monetary Fund, etc. That means, secondly, that glob-alism is not only an ideology. We in fact observe a shift in the structure ofcapitalism from an international to a transnational disposition. As I read it, therecent work of David Held and his collaborators (especially the collectivework on global transformations, published last year by Polity Press) supportsthe view that we should take a variety of trends towards globalization seri-ously.

2 Thesis Eleven (Number 63 2000)


In connection with rather optimistic perceptions of that transformation,a new mentality emerged, now spilling over even into normative politicaltheory. This is my third reservation: the normative standards of old-styleideology-critique are no longer taken for granted. The kind of egalitarian uni-versalism that expressed the moral and practical self-understanding of theWest since the late 18th century is under attack from postmodern liberals andold conservatives alike. Instead of more critical deconstruction, we ratherneed constructive efforts for which the Left if there is anything left is notvery well prepared. This is not a plea for straight normative political theory.I am pleading for a mix of political economy and political theory opening aperspective from which we not only learn how to adapt to, but also how tocope with the undesired consequences of globalization processes. There issomething to Hobsbawms diagnosis of the Golden Age. During a briefsocial democratic period, following World War II, a precarious balancebetween the media of political power, money and solidarity has been estab-lished only of course within the favoured region of the happy few nations.How is it possible to reestablish a similar balance beyond the nation-state ona transnational scale without running too quick too far ahead towards tooabstract an idea of global democracy? In The Postnational Constellation, Ihave argued for such a research perspective.

Johann P. Arnason: As for the nation and the nation-state, your pos-ition seems based on a strong version and an evolutionist reading of the dis-tinction between ethnic and civic nationhood: the symbiosis of theconstitutional state with the nation as a hereditary community was a tran-sitional phase that can and should be overcome, and in the German context,constitutional patriotism would be the only adequate response to post-unification problems. Here it is tempting to suggest that a closer look at theongoing debate on nationalism might complicate the picture. The massivegrowth of theoretical and historical scholarship on nationalism in the 1990shas in many ways modified earlier approaches to the field. The stark con-trast between civic and ethnic images of the nation has been called into ques-tion: the contextual and often unacknowledged aspects of civic models, aswell as the complex relationship between ethnic origins and historical pro-cesses of nation formation, make it difficult to defend a polarizing model (beit in the sense of geocultural alternatives or evolutionary phases). At the sametime, the contested character of the national community the strugglebetween rival images and interpretations has been highlighted, and theadaptability of nationalist attitudes to changing ideological and political pat-terns is now more widely understood. In light of these results, should we notallow for the possibility that German nationalism might reassert itself in waysthat would differ from both constitutional patriotism and the uncompromis-ing particularisms of the past? Some observers outside Germany have spec-ulated on the idea of a green nationalism: do you see this as a serioussuggestion? When a Green foreign minister invokes Stresemann as a partial

Habermas: Interview 3


role model, is it inconceivable that the European corrective could in the longrun turn out to be a detour towards a more considered affirmation of thenation-state?

Jrgen Habermas: Maybe I am just too old. But from reading therecent literature on liberal nationalism I havent got the impression that thereis so much new to learn. Of course, within different national contexts, andon different historical paths, the interaction of state and nation building tookdifferent courses, producing different patterns for the mix of ethnic and civicelements. But from a normative point of political theory, and that was myviewpoint in Inclusion of the Other, the stark contrast between civic andethnic images of the nation is simply a matter of conceptual clarity.Nationalist reactions to the decomposition of the Soviet Empire, as well asdisastrous religious and ethnic conflicts in other parts of the world certainlyneed explanations, yet in most cases the familiar types of explanation willwork. On the other hand, the ubiquitous trend towards heterogeneity in theethnic and religious composition of national populations, the trend towardspluralism in modes of life, ethical orientations and world views constitutea challenge for both the post-secular culture and the politics of consti-tutional states.

Traditional religions undergo a transformation into what Rawls callsreasonable comprehensive doctrines while reasonable means that theymust provide, from an internal perspective of the believer, sufficient concep-tual space for a self-reflexive relation of ones own belief to competingreligious as well as to secular knowledge claims. And democratic govern-ments are pressed to adopt a politics of recognition including some con-stitutional patriotism. This is just another term for the common core of aliberal political culture that has become decoupled from the majority cultureas far as it is necessary for allowing all citizens equally to identify each otheras members of the same political community. Constitutional patriotism is notexhausted by a rational agreement on a set of abstract principles: it alsorequires an emotional identification with the spectrum of competing interpre-tations of constitutional principles from within the thick context of the historyof ones own nation. The American, French or German kinds of patriotismdo not differ in the core of principles, but in the content of the narratives forwhich these principles provide the points of reference.

As for the German case why should we opt for an alternative to thekind of unexcited constitutional patriotism that fortunately has been develop-ing in the end, at least in the old Bundesrepublik up to 198990? This yearmarks a threshold, indeed, and not only for Germany. There was a discon-tinuation of political traditions also in the West, which has led 10 years laterto the rather artificial attempt of proclaiming a Berlin Republic or a BerlinGeneration. But this was no more than a short-lived media strategy of someadvisors for the newly elected RedGreen government. Joschka Fisher, thepresent minister for foreign affairs, is immune against nationalist temptations



and knows very well that our national self-understanding should not leadback to the Bismarck Reich, as some sentimental intellectuals of the NewRight advocate without much resonance. He knows that we can gain nationalself-confidence only by looking forward to deeper connections with anemerging European identity. Stresemann, who supported the Vlkerbund, isa good model for that and not for the roving national emotions of somenuts.

Johann P. Arnason: The historical varieties and vicissitudes ofnationalism are linked to changes in other dimensions of modernity.Growing awareness of diversity within the modern world has led someauthors to speak of multiple modernities or varieties of modernity. In thisregard, the implications of the eastern European transformation are ambigu-ous: on the one hand, the demise of the Soviet model has put an end to therivalry of two alternative global modernities; but on the other hand, thewidely varying paths of post-communist development have drawn attentionto the importance of different historical legacies. In your Theory of Com-municative Action, you developed a model of two main patterns ofmodernization, but the comments on deviations from each of them couldperhaps be seen as an opening towards a more pluralistic approach. Doesyour present agenda include a reexamination of this problematic? Onceagain it might be seen as particularly relevant to the German situation: noother country is faced with the problem of integrating the legacies of twofundamentally different patterns of modernity, one of them defunct and theother undergoing a difficult process of adaptation to changing global con-ditions, with the disastrous experience of a third abortive one still loominglarge in collective memory.

Jrgen Habermas: The idea of multiple modernities does have anappeal, if we look at striking cultural variations of social modernization pro-cesses. It always depends on the level of abstraction whether you perceivemore shared or more dividing features. In general, I suppose, we can expectmore convergence in some dimensions of social development than in cul-tural domains. Since after World War II we observe, particularly in westernsocieties, a convergence on similar infrastructures in trade and production,traffic and communication, mass education, urbanization, etc. Even thetransformation of class and family structures follow the same pattern. Butwith their expressive features national societies have at the same time pre-served their own unmistakable physiognomy. The modes of life and thementalities reveal now as obvious as before the imprint of national history,specific language and tradition. Cultural pluralism is not only a surfacephenomenon, it also shapes and colours the institutional framework of anation in general.

A new approach in political economy exemplified by the impressivecollection Contemporary Capitalism, edited a few years ago by J. R.Hollingsworth and R. Boyer concentrates on the varieties of domestic



arrangements for the economy. Globalization notwithstanding, national tra-ditions and constellations seem still to have a heavy impact on the organiz-ation of firms, on labour institutions, forms of competition, monetary regimes,etc. The model of our Rhenan Capitalism which recently has come undersevere pressure is just one example of regional differences in the mode ofinstitutionalizing markets an example of differences only within the Westernparadigm of capitalism. The differences between cultures are even more strik-ing. The comparison between the embedding contexts of the economies inthe US and Japan was the beginning of a type of comparative interculturalresearch that has rapidly extended onto other regions.

Your own studies have contributed to a field that has made us moresensitive to the phenomena of multiple modernities. But the horizontal differ-ences between cultures should not detract us from equally important differ-ences in the vertical dimension of developmental stages. Comparisons in bothdimensions must be combined if we study, for example, the great divide wein Europe face between Russia and the West a West including the central-eastern European countries that are candidates for inclusion in the EU.

You remind me of the theory that I published in the early 1980s. There,in TCA, I mentioned two patterns of modernization prevailing at the time,one of which is now defunct. Isnt the deeper problem that once lay behindthe Cold War competition between those two socioeconomic regimes still anopen problem for the surviving turbo-capitalism? I see the limitations of thebook elsewhere: it was still guided by the implicit assumption that nationalsocieties, societies framed by a nation-state, provide the model for societiesin general. That view has rightly been challenged. The relevance of the post-national constellation is especially clear in view of the German situation. Thepressing problems arise not from internal, but from external challenges, theadaptation to changing global conditions and the Europeanization of the poli-tics of national governments. How we solve these problems will decide thecourse of alternative futures. Whether you regret it or not, the transformationof the society of the former GDR followed the path of a forced assimilationto the economic, social and political patterns of the Bundesrepublik, a paththat did not leave any space for an integration of two legacies.

Johann P. Arnason: The problem of totalitarianism the concept andthe phenomenon is one of the questions reopened by the debate on mul-tiple modernities. At the same time, global circumstances have changed andour knowledge of intellectual history grown in ways conducive to more bal-anced discussion. The two types of regimes in question have both run theircourse and can therefore more easily be compared than when one of themseemed to be a going concern; reconstructions of prewar debates have madeit clear that the idea of totalitarian domination as a new kind of dictatorshipemerged, first and foremost, among the German Left in exile, and that themain aim of those who pioneered the new approach was to develop aninterpretive framework that would allow an unprejudiced comparative



analysis of Nazism and Stalinism (cf. especially William D. Jones, The LostDebate). The dominant postwar theories of totalitarianism were based onlimited knowledge and one-sided use of these prior efforts. You have in thepast been consistently critical of all theories of totalitarianism; do you now in light of changing perspectives and the present see any need to recon-sider the issue? Given the twofold German background (direct experienceof two dictatorships, admittedly very different in both strength and kind, aswell as an early and decisive contribution to critical reflection), this ques-tion seems likely to be of interest to German theorists and historians forsome time to come.

Jrgen Habermas: I do not know the book you mention. The termtotalitarianism has fascist origins; in the early 1930s Ernst Forsthoff forexample made an affirmative use of it in his dissertation on the totalitarianstate. Soon afterwards Herbert Marcuse published a critical review of thatwhole literature in one of the first issues of the Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung.It is no surprise then that German scholars in exile developed a theory oftotalitarianism the Dialectics of Enlightenment is only a philosophical versionof it. I am telling you. But I would not regard the main authors of thoseapproaches that later on became most influential in the field as belonging tothe German Left neither Morgenthau, nor Friedrich or Hannah Arendt.

As for my own position, I am not hostile to the theory of totalitarian-ism across the board. I have in fact participated in the discussion on how tocome to terms with our double past (in A Berlin Republic). In these two essaysyou will discover that I use the concept of totalitarianism equally for bothsides. What I am resisting is the oversimplified version of a Totalitarismus-theorie that in an overly abstract fashion classifies political systemsaccording to four or five institutional criteria. As a student in the early 1950s,I first became familiar with that version as an integral part of Cold Warrhetoric. At that time, the advocates of an antitotalitarian consensus simplymeant anticommunism. In the context of postwar Germany this term neveracquired the symmetric meaning it claims. I had not read Hannah Arendtbefore I started writing Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Buther analysis of totalitarian regimes in terms of the peculiar deformation ofcommunication structures has left visible traces in my own work. But it is notuntil recently that I have seen beyond Furet the beginnings of an instruc-tive, more or less unbiased comparison between Nazism and Stalinism, e.g.by Ulrich Herbert (the Freiburg historian who has written a famous study onWerner Best).

Johann P. Arnason: Although your work after 1989 has not returnedto the question of alternative modernities, it reflects the post-communist con-dition in other ways. Your reflections on political theory and the philosophyof law, emphasizing the consubstantiality of human and civic rights anddefending a vision of radical democracy as the inbuilt telos of the Rechtsstaat,are obviously inspired by a wish to vindicate the self-reforming capacities of



Western societies, against those who draw conservative or regressive lessonsfrom the apparent triumph of the West. It might be suggested that thisapproach reflects a broader redefinition of the divide between left and right.On the one hand, streamlined neoliberal images of the victorious West havegained a global ideological ascendancy and been exported to the post-com-munist world, often with disastrous results. On the other hand, reorientationon the left often leads to a new understanding of possibilities of reform orresistance, built into the institutional framework of the really existing West(as distinct from its neoliberal projections). This rethinking may focus on theunrealized potential of democracy, of European integration, or of the nation-state as an indispensable counterweight to global transformations. In a sense,this trend continues an older tradition of leftist critique from Franz Borke-nau to Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort turning against the mythsand mirages which had paralysed a large part of the Left, and towards a rein-terpretation of the Western trajectory, with a view to rescuing its unfulfilledpromises from oblivion. Such reflections seem to presuppose a civilizationalperspective, whether explicit or not: the questions of the uniqueness, self-transcending potential and internal pluralism of the West or of successiveWestern constellations reappear on the agenda. Do you see a need to relateyour work more explicitly to this context and perhaps to take issue withthose who have tried to revive civilizational theory as a framework for socio-logical analysis?

Jrgen Habermas: I could not do better than you in describing myidea of radical reformism. This is exactly the orientation of a left social demo-crat of one more often than not to the left of the social democratic partyitself that I have had since many decades. I tend to see more of a conti-nuity than you seem to imply.

Now, whether I should turn to a more explicit civilizational perspec-tive depends on what you mean by the term. Theory of CommunicativeAction provides at least the conceptual space for it. There I have introducedculture on a par with society and personality structure as the constitutiveelements of the lifeworld. But your suggestion is right. The problematicfuture of the European Union, the lack of a European public sphere and thequestion of a common political culture or European identity push me muchmore in the direction of an historically informed study of the culturalresources and, maybe, unique potentials for a self-transformation that Euro-pean countries now jointly face as their challenge. The confessional splitresulting from the Reformation has been a goad to mental developments andpolitical innovations, for new modes of reflexivity, which now gain anexemplary value for post-secular societies for modern societies wherereligion does not go away and where Weltanschauungspluralismus ingeneral has become a persisting feature. Well, this might be one reason forwhat I plan to do returning to a comparison of world religions.

Johann P. Arnason: Your work on modernity has been accompanied



by critical reconstruction of philosophical and sociological traditions. A recenttext, summarizing earlier discussions, seems to place a particularly strongemphasis on the internal logic of the German tradition, from Kant and Hegelthrough Weber and Weberian Marxism to Heidegger. Webers starting pointis explicitly compared to Hegels: both are concerned with the loss ofmeaning brought about by the dissolution of traditional world views, butinstead of the Hegelian quest for reconciliation through reintegration, Weberopted for a radicalization of Kantian perspectives. This led him to thematizethe conflicts and paradoxes which Marxists drawing on his work first hopedto overcome (Lukcs) and then reinterpreted in a more extreme vein (Adornoand Horkheimer). Heideggers radical detranscendentalizing turn, resulting inthe absorption of reason by its other, appears as an offshoot of the same tra-dition (later revived by the postmodernists). The whole narrative centres ona progressively discovered, repeatedly misconstrued but potentially self-correcting dialectic of the Enlightenment. Would it add something to the story or make it significantly different if we were to think of it as an ongoingbut fragmented dialogue between Enlightenment and Romanticism? A well-known line of interpretation suggests that Kants third critique could be seenas an opening move onto the terrain later explored by the Romantics; anearly reception of Romantic themes was crucial to the intellectual develop-ment of both Hegel and Marx; and is not the peculiarly aporetic and incon-clusive character of Webers work in part due to an ambitious but incompleteengagement with Romantic countercurrents?

Jrgen Habermas: For me, the powerful ideas of early romanticismare a complement of, rather than an opposite to, the main current of theEnlightenment or the dominant tradition of German Idealism from Kant andHegel to Marx. What Axel Honneth has described as an heritage of Leben-sphilosophie in Adornos work goes in fact back to motives of the Frhro-mantik. I do not think that Adorno ever looked at my PhD thesis, but heknew of it and was pleased by the fact that I had been working on Schelling.Adorno liked to trace his own idea of an Eingedenken der Natur back toSchelling. By the way, I think that Schelling is closest to the revolutionarypotential of romanticism neither in his early philosophy of nature nor in hislater philosophy of mythology, but during the intermediary phase especi-ally at two points. In his System des transzendentalen Idealismus from 1800,Schelling explains the cognitive role of the work of art, as the organon of anintuitive grasp of the absolute, with the help of the conception of the uncon-scious long before Freud. While our dreams express unconscious contentsof the human soul, works of art articulate a kind of higher unconscious towhich we submit in contemplation. And 10 years later, 1810, is the only timethat Schelling develops, in his Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen, a radical, almostanarchistic view of the state as a repressive agency that is to be overcome.

With regard to that heritage I am, however, more in agreement withAdorno than with Benjamin. You can see in their correspondence during the



1930s, how Adorno again and again points out to Benjamin the ambivalenceof those romantic motives, the reverse side of which reminded him of Klagesand other counter-enlightenment thinkers. I am fascinated by this dialogue.To some people I appear as a pale rationalist and a bloodless neo-Kantian problematic clichs anyway. You do not share this distorted image, but youwill perhaps need a piece of reassuring evidence. For this purpose I wouldlike to refer you to the last sentences of an article that I wrote in 1988 inview of the coming bicentennial of the French Revolution:

Another kind of transcendence is preserved in the unfulfilled promise disclosedby the critical appropriation of identity-forming religious traditions, and stillanother in the negativity of modern art. The trivial and everyday must be opento the shock of what is absolutely strange, cryptic, or uncanny. Though these(experiences) no longer provide a cover for privileges, they refuse to be assim-ilated by pregiven categories. (Between Facts and Norms, p. 490)



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