Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe by Daniel Levy;John C Torpey; & Max Pensky & John Torpey

Author:Daniel Levy;John C Torpey; & Max Pensky & John Torpey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)

HABERMAS HAS TOO MUCH

CONFIDENCE IN EUROPE

Joachim Starbatty

Jürgen Habermas doesn’t just want to interpret the world; he wants to change it. He has launched an initiative, and Europe’s leading intellectuals have taken up his concept in the leading newspapers of their respective countries. He has proposed that Europe must become a counterbalance to the United States. He wants to instigate discourse all over Europe that will have an impact on public consciousness and, ultimately, on state policy as well. There is a history leading up to his initiative. On April 17, he worked out analytically the causes and consequences of the Iraq war. About two years ago, he presented in Die Zeit the picture of a future Europe.1 His agenda was, appropriately enough for the subject at hand, a mixture of analytical and normative propositions. His call of May 31 is in principle a synthesis of these two texts; thus, the decisive propositions are again normative: ‘Europe must bring its weight to bear on an international level, and within the scope of the UN, in order to balance the hegemonic unilateralism of the United States.’ But the demand that Europe has to do something must be preceded by the diagnosis indicating whether or not a containment of hegemony is even necessary, and whether or not Europe can accomplish it.

In the language of the economists, we can see world peace as a collective good, from whose benefits nobody can be excluded. Yet there will always be rulers or regimes seeking national advantage through the violation of peace. In order to prevent such violations, one needs either a hegemon, which by virtue of its economic and political or military power can push for peaceful behavior and punish disruptive behavior, or a proven system of sanctions to which a group of countries agree. Sanctions are then mutually agreed upon; members can be entrusted with punitive actions. This procedure, too, assumes that there are one or more nations to which the character of a hegemon can be awarded. A group of weak countries would not be capable of making credible threats of sanctions. All participants must defer to common dicta.

Because the United States has released itself from this principle, and instituted the Iraq war without the supporting vote of the UN Security Council, Habermas sees the Council’s authority in ruins. This view is not shared in the United States; in this newspaper there have been divergent views as well. From an American point of view, it is not the United States that broke international law; it is rather the members of the Security Council, who like to play the role of the anti-hegemon, and would exploit this situation for their own purposes. From this perspective, then, it is the normative authority of the Security Council that lies in ruins. A former American soldier, Ralph Peters, expressed this opinion in this newspaper (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of May 15) in an unvarnished and provocative manner. As a consequence, he did not initiate a discussion but, instead, set

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