interview Jrgen Habermas

There Are Alternatives

For the first time in the history of the Federal Republic, a Chancellor has been voted out of office in a national election. Can we conclude that German democracy has gained in self-confidence? Yes, I think we can. Hitherto political parties manoeuvred to change coalition partners during a legislature. This was the way both Ludwig Erhard and Helmut Schmidt were forced out. Now citizens have taken it upon themselves to reject a Chancellor. In a democracy voters must believe that their decisions can at certain turning-points influence a self-enclosed and bureaucratized political world. In West Germany it required several generations for this democratic attitude really to take hold. I have the impression that this change is now effectively sealed.1 You always felt Helmut Kohl guaranteed the Western credentials of the Federal Republic. Will you miss him?
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Every necessary criticism of Kohl has already been made. His historical merit was to embed German unification in a wider enterprise of European unity. People of my age also recognize Kohl as one of their own generation. I am thinking here of his almost bodily disavowal of the kind of political aesthetic that elitist spirits called for, especially after 1989. Kohl had clearly not forgotten the monstrous mises-enscne of Nazi rallies or the Chaplinesque antics of our fascist mountebanks. Certainly we often groaned at the shapeless provincialism of Kohls words and gestures. But I came to appreciate the deflation of sonorous vacuities and banalization of public ceremonies that went with it. There was an element of contrariness in Kohls style which, if it doesnt sound too presumptuous, my generation wanted. Maybe we succeeded in mustering some of it against the turgid inwardness, misprinted grandeur, and compulsion to the sublime of the airs and graces of the German spirit. Kohl achieved something else against his own intentions. The failure of his original talk of a spiritual-moral change acted as something of a litmus test. Once Kohl in office found that he could no longer do what he wanted at Verdun or Bitburg, or elsewhere, it was clear that the country had become a liberal society. One of the mental fixtures of the early Federal Republic was the suspicion, voiced by thinkers like Carl Schmitt, of internal enemies on the lefta deep dread of subversion discharged once again in the pogrom-like atmosphere of autumn 1977. Kohl no longer drew sustenance from this kind of emotional attitude. There is going to be a red-green government in Germany now. Is this just a political shift, or does it signal a change of cultural outlook? As the unprecedented scale of the Lefts electoral majority became clear on the evening of the poll, there were surely many people of my age who remembered a spring in 1969. After his election as Federal President, Gustav Heinemann spoke of a certain shift in power; soon afterwards Willy Brandt became Chancellor with a paper-thin SocialLiberal majority. In that conjuncture, the long delayed end of the Adenauer epoch found a striking embodiment in the person of his opponent Heinemann, a figure famous for his integrity. The previous period I lived through as a time poisoned by continuities of personnel and outlook with a fatal past. The shift of power at the turn of the sixties came after a decade of dogged intellectual opposition and another decade of active political confrontation with its legacy. So the political shift was the eventual outcome of a deeper change in the cultural climate. The present situation is quite different. For years nothing has changed in a diffuse and paralyzing cultural climate, unaltered even
1 Interview with Gunter Hofmann and Thomas Assheuer, published in Die Zeit, 8 October 1998.

by the handful of jokers who tried to have fun at the interface between a chubby neo-liberalism and a pallid post-modernism. The excitement over such tremors of yesterday is already virtually forgotten today. Is a red-green project possible? Or is the space for any political action now so reduced that there are only different versions of centre politics? A red-green project existed up to the end of the 198os, as long as there was a possibility of Oskar Lafontaine winning the next general election. Since then, the constraints of German unity and the global economy have watered the project down to little more than the slogan of modernization and social justicegarnished with a drop of ecologically conscious tax reform, if only for the purpose of finding alternative financial resources. It is not so much the pragmatic sobering up that disturbs me in the new stance. It is the mistaken premise that a social and ecological transformation could be accomplished in a national framework. The result is a largely defensive approach to the conditions of an altered and essentially post-national constellation of power. What worries me is the lack of any new perspective on this situation. Everyone speaks today of a post-ideological age. But this slogan has time and again been invoked and discredited in the past fifty years, at least since Daniel Bells book The End of Ideologyfar too often to have any credibility. In politics, nothing moves without an issue that divides people. That is what is missing today. Maybe the experience of the older projects has made people somewhat jaded with new ones. What do you understand by a project here? There is a project when you address a controversial issue and propose an analysis of it that clarifies the question at stake and makes some political goals more plausible than others. This is not what happened in the recent election. The social-democratic challenger eschewed any polarization of opinion, and avoided any source of potential offence. On election night the relaxed faces of the losers made it clear they did not take all the talk of a change of direction too seriously. So there are no alternatives? Not at all. One does not have to look far to see a burning problem ahead for the new government. What can it do about mass unemployment? The leeway of national governments has shrunk in two critical respects. The state is increasingly ineffective as a fiscal authority in the domestic economy, while the familiar instruments of macroeconomic policy cease to function in an economic space that is no longer a national unit. That is why the relationship between economics and politics needs to be addressed in new and reflexive fashion. The question is posed: must politics continue indefinitely to be a process of deregulation? To simplify: does the declining efficacy of national politics point towards an ultimate abdication of the political domain altogether, or can the medium of political action be regenerated on
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other levels, to keep pace with the power of transnational markets? This is now the central issue. Can and should there be a democratically legitimated exercise of power beyond the limits of the nation state? The need for regulation stands before us and defines politics, as the single European market is completed by a common monetary policy. In your new book The Post-National Constellation you challenge politicians to leap over their shadows, and reconstruct the welfare state on a supranational level. Would you regard this as a yardstick for measuring Gerhard Schrders potential success? Yes, that is exactly my view. I should say that it extends beyond Europe to the idea of an international domestic policy without a world government. But first of all we have to decide whether we really wish to build a Europe capable of concerted political action. Behind Theo Waigels slogan that the euro speaks German lies merely an oath of loyalty to an apolitical institution, the European Central Bank. Schrder knows that the introduction of the euro makes the problem of harmonizing tax-regimes acute. He explained this after the election with the example of petrol prices. It seems to me that we must work towards common social and economic policies within the European Union, if we are to avoid a competitive rush for deregulation by the various member states. On the other hand, neo-corporatist procedures have their limits. Effective income redistribution cannot simply be settled in Brussels, but has to be democratically legitimated. If we want to avoid a further increase of social inequalities, and the creation and segmentation of an underclass of the poor, do we not need an effective European-wide federal state? That is the crux. We can already see a change of political fronts. European marketeers happy with the euro are now joining forces with former Eurosceptics to preserve the status quo of a Europe united only over the establishment of markets, and nothing else. Given that there are hardly any supranational institutions that count, would it not be more sensible first to make use of what political possibilities exist at the national level, rather than saying good-bye to the nation-state as such? The nation-state is still the most important political actor, and will continue to be such for a long time to come. It is impossible to part with it so quickly. Anyway, it is good news that we now have a government that can be trusted to try everything that deserves the name of a reform within at least the national framework. I have no doubt that the grinding of plates Schrder wants to effect after receiving so many careful proposals and well-known recommendations for reform could have some success. But it will do nothing to alter the increased dependency of the state on economic conditions that have been fundamentally transformed at the global level. The question is whether the post-national constellation does not also require different and more effective forms of political action.
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Is not society actually shrewder and more aware of these problems than we think? Even the top minds of the Deutsche Bank want to tame capitalism. I have no idea what these gentlemen think. I merely observe how economic, political and scientific managers are responding to the imminent adoption of the Multilateral Agreement on Investmentwhich, as far as I can see, is more about institutionalizing markets than taming capitalism. Its aim is to assure legal security for investments through an internationally effective equivalent of what private civil law supplies within a national framework. It is always much easier to create and institutionalize new markets than it is to correct them. Difficult problems of this kind require supranational agreement over environmental, social and economic measures. It has taken every effort of the major European players just to agree on the euro. What makes you so hopeful that a European project for economic development will follow? Yes, even Kohl insisted on a Europe des patries after the Cardiff Conference. The historical commitment of the post-war generations in Germany to overcome a murderous nationalism and achieve reconciliation with France seems somehow to have been exhausted. But Delorss campaign for a social dimension is borne by other and more proximate interests. That is why in future Joschka Fischer will prove to be the more reliable European. I know him long and well enough to be confident that the change of guard from Kohl to Fischer will be a happy one. It is true that voters in many European countries are rather suspicious of a distant Brussels. This is not merely the case in Germany. The member states have enough to worry about with their own internal problems. Their political elites will pay no attention to the larger European issues, unless intellectuals provoke some public debate about them. But this they generally do not, here in Germany even less than in France or Britain. So your scepticism is unfortunately quite justified. Assuming that some kind of political union did come about in Europe, who should control it? Would you be satisfied with a disabled democracywithout a critical public sphere? No, I am for a European federal state, and that means a European political constitution. Such institutions, at the moment only on the drawing-board, could help to foster those processes without which they would lack any infrastructure. A common political culture cannot be conjured up ex nihilo, nor will it be spontaneously generated by economic interaction. But we can certainly aim for a European constitution, and citizens initiatives that transcend national boundaries. A European-scale civil society could develop if a European public sphere were constructed. That is the sore point. Such a project is in no way doomed to failure by the variety of our national languages, as the German Constitutional Courts judgement on Maastricht thought to
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conclude. In the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands the school system is already creating a bilingual population. Why should English, as the most widely shared second language in Europe, come to grief on the narcissism of the other major nations? You still have some illusions about our media-driven societies. Yes indeed, media-driven societies! But the desublimation of the sublimea flop is a flopdoes have something refreshingly egalitarian about it. Of course, if everything were to be transformed into a kind of talk show, in which everyone became a compre chatting to other compres, the world would indeed conform to Luhmanns image of it. I do not think I really harbour any illusions about the condition of a public sphere in which commercialized mass media set the tone. There are now many attempts to conceptualize this virtual reality. My book Between Facts and Norms approaches the problem from a quite different perspective. From the perspective of a democratic sovereignty? Yes. For our constitution does still express the idea of the self-determination of a democratic community. The mere proposition that the power of the State derives from the people does not tell us very much about actual social relations; but it does not say nothing at all. For example, citizens would not bother to vote if they did not intuitively cling to the idea that the ballot-box does still something to do with the classical conception of democratic self-determination. So can we interpret this idea in a way that safeguards it against cynical evacuation, or immediate recoil from the realities of highly complex societies? In the normative picture I propose, communication in the mass media plays an important role. A distracted public, almost no more than electronically connected, can with minimum attention absorb information from the mass media about all kinds of issues and interventions, in fleeting moments of everyday life, in private settings or small circles. People can then give or withhold assent, and tacitly do so all the time. In this way they participate, if not in the conscious articulation, at least in the weighting of competing public opinions. It is just because the domain of public communication functions as a hinge between the informal shaping of opinion and the more institutionalized procedures of will-formation (for example in a general election or a cabinet meeting) that the conditionI would call it, discursive constitutionof the public sphere matters so much. Even public television is no longer discursive in this sense. It is true that the political sphere forms part of a wider cultural sphere, and today both are linked directly to the soiled channels of private television. Public television is now competing in a race to the bottom with the most degraded presentation and programming of commercial television. Public broadcasting has problems of its own
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as a form: but it rested on the correct idea that not all social functions can calmly be left to market forces. Culture, information and criticism are all dependent upon a specific form of communication all their own. The imperative of ratings ought not to penetrate the very pores of cultural communication. Do I need to tell you this? What then of the future of parties in our democracy, that depend on a less damaged public sphere? Are we not witnessing the slow death of democracy based on political parties, as these become less and less significant for the articulation and resolution of major issues, and the social milieux which nurtured loyalties to them disintegrate? Political scientists have described these trends quite well. If we look at Lazarsfields radio research of the early 1940s, we can see that they are by no means all new. But it is true the personalization of political issues by the media and the cult of immediate contact between leaders and TV audiences have considerably increased the plebiscitary dimension of politics, and reduced the importance of party organizations. Externally directed public relations come to overshadow internal communications among the party membership, as public persuasion degenerates into market research. On the other hand, we must remember the younger generation. The general population is more intelligent, or at least better educated and informed, and in many respects more interested in political issues today. If forms of political participation change, it is not necessarily a turn for the worse. Should parties continue to become more and more bureaucratic and market-minded, counter-trends may arise in civil society. The Greens have now followed the classic path from a social movement to a political party. But that does not have to be typical. Other initiatives remain alternative in form and sometimes, like Greenpeace, win a world-wide influence. If party-political democracy is dissolving, both older and newer forms of public sphere come under pressure. The ground is shifting under us, and we need new rules of the game in the mass media. The media democracy of the United States does not exactly offer an appealing example. How might the role of the media be redefined? That is a very good question, for which I have no immediate answer. I have not thought enough about the issue. In any case, in Europe we are still a long way away from the end of party democracy. Parties continue to select and form their own personnel, and the professional quality of our politicians is not so bad. There must always be room for mavericks, but God preserve us from shimmering figures like Berlusconi or Ross Perot, emerging from nowhere. A structurally conservative system like the Federal Republic is liable to various kinds of blockage of impulse and outlook. Do you think this society is too beholden to its past, and to practices of social compensation?
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It may well be that the traumatic upheavals of German society in this century have made the political mentality of the country a little too conservative. But I am very wary of neo-liberal philippics against the alleged dead-weight of our welfare state. More flexibility means decodedthat labour-power should be stripped of every specific or personal quality and treated as merely a commodity like any other. Have we not learnt from Marx that the one cannot simply be converted into the other? Of course there are genuine mental blocks, of a different kind. It was difficult for many people to grasp, at the very moment of national reunification, that the hour of the nation-state had already sounded. Others repress the problem of the end of full employment and the need to redistribute a lower volume of necessary labour. Since capitalism has triumphed world-wide as a form for the production of social wealth, all the old questions of a just distribution have returned including the need to distribute employment. Do you share Richard Sennetts concern that at the end of the century a new kind of adaptation to capitalism has emerged, as the flexible individual becomes the figure of the age? Sennett gives us an illuminating description of the increasing individualization of social burdens. The flexible individual is one upon whose shoulders society now transfers problems it should be solving itself and cannot address. Currently, there are attempts to uncouple democracy from justice, by emphasizing libertarian rather than social rights. Ralf Dahrendorf, for example, seems to argue that only inclusion really matters, not distributive justice. Then there are the cynics who believe the sole task of the state is to equip people for market competence. What do you think of this new realism? I wonder whether Dahrendorf doesnt actually understand inclusion to mean an equal integration of all citizens. But otherwise you are right. A normative brain-washing is now starting to erode the universalistic foundations of the egalitarian self-understanding of the modern age for the last two hundred years. In Germany, it comes more from conservative than liberal quarters. In our culture, a tradition of anthropological pessimism was always very strong. This is an outlook that loves to cast a wandering historical gaze back to the hierarchical society and fatalistic mentality of ancient empires, and instruct us about the illusions of equality of a relatively short modern epoch, which has misunderstood human nature. This sits very well with a scepticism towards any attempt to re-regulate markets in our time. If one thinks the worldview of the neo-liberal entrepreneur through to its logical conclusion, it is clear why highly mobile individuals, guided solely by personal preferences in a value-free institutional network, should feel a certain fatalism about society at large. This can be seen as the secularized modern equivalent of the religious fatalism of ancient civilizations.
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Yet praise of the entrepreneurial spirit also bespeaks a certain sense of contemporary reality. The Berlin Generation now stands rather tragically on its own and feels a sense of solidarity only with itself. Perhaps it senses that after so many incentives to individualism, there is no longer any civil society left. Political existentialism comes to seem more attractive than democratic experimentation. I know what my friend Herbert Marcuse, who even in English never lost his German accent, would have said about all this talk of the Berlin Generation: crap with liquorice. A new generation or a new culture, something we should certainly wish for the new capital, will not come by announcement. A new generation is such because it produces something newnot made to design. There is no mystery about what would be needed. Cultural criticism today lacks a fresh idioma language capable of skewering the phenomena of the hour as mercilessly as Adorno did in the early days of the Federal Republic. The Errors of the Copyist by Botho Strauss2 merely reflects the deadened self-awareness of intellectuals who drape themselves once again in the toga of the spirit. You mention the affective attitudes expressed in these attempts at self-definition or self-discovery. That is very interesting. Young conservative sentiments regularly rose and burst like bubbles during the post-war years, especially in biotopes like the Feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The resentment of our foremost rightwing intellectuals, who regarded themselves as the bearers of authentic German traditions, has left an unmistakable trace in the cultural history of the Federal Republic. These circles cultivated the view that the countrys Western orientation after the war cut us off from the roots of our natural heritage. This outlook became virulent after 1989, the only time when it went onto the offensive with the bid by a New Right to restore self-consciousness to the nation. But this campaign failed, with the debate in 1995 over the meaning that 8 May 1945 has come to acquire for us. No doubt twisted attitudes of a similar sort are now seeking other, less conspicuous outlets. But these I cannot really judge. Towards the end of his rule, Kohl gave the impression he wanted to exorcise the spectres of a Berlin Republic some of his keenest advisors had earlier conjured upas if Berlin was to remain Bonn after all. Did he take fright at his own courage? You should be glad that after the election Schrder also stressed the continuity between Bonn and Berlin. It is not so clear as that. The political fronts seem almost reversed. The SPD has discovered culture and now enthuses about a pace-setting Berlin which
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Playwright and author of crypto-conservative Kulturkritik; Die Fehler des Kopisten (Munich, 1997) offers a diagnosis of the current condition of Germany (1997). 11

warms to the reconstruction of Hohenzollern palace and rejects a memorial to the Holocaust. Why has culturethe cinderella of social-democratic concernssuddenly become so appealing? It is difficult to say what the point of Schrders public relations move really is. Perhaps it wont do any harm. In periods of domestic budgetary stringency, policies which look attractive in the media and cost nothing are popular. Blair discovered constitutional reform, and I fear Schrder has discovered culture. But one can easily slip on this ground, as your examples show. Anyway, costs persist. Do we really wish to leave the fate of the rich cultural infrastructure of a civilized country in the hands of commercial sponsors? A closer look at the United States in this respect is quite sobering. So far as the representation of Germanhistorically speaking, a strongly regionalculture abroad is concerned, the Goethe Institutes do a pretty good job. We hear recurrent criticisms of the cultural opening of the Federal Republic. There is a fear, for example, that in the field of philosophy, continental and German traditions are taking a back seat to Anglo-American themes and approaches. Can you understand this anxiety? The very close connections of post-war German with AngloAmerican philosophy, established largely through emigration, have been an enormous enrichment to us. As the pioneering role of my friend Karl-Otto Apel has shown, active appropriation of analytical philosophy and American pragmatism has given a new impetus to philosophy here, without damaging the substance of the German tradition at all. The influence works both ways. Richard Rortys student Bob Brandom is cracking open the treasury of Hegels thought with the methods of analytical philosophy. Rorty himself is certainly a brilliant analytical philosopher, but he owes his international reputation to a synthetic style of developing themes and connections which owes much to the Hegelian background of pragmatism. What are the traditions of the Bonn Republic which you regard as indispensableif you would accept the expressionfor the Berlin Republic? I believe we would all like to live in a civil country that is cosmopolitan in outlook and ready to play a thoughtful, cooperative role amongst other nations. We would all like to live amongst fellow citizens who are accustomed to respecting the particularity of strangers, the autonomy of individuals, and the plurality of regional, ethnic and religious identities. The new republic would do well to remember the role of Germany in the catastrophic history of the twentieth century, but equally those rare moments of emancipation and achievement of which we can be proud. With no claim to originality, I would also wish to see a disposition which was suspicious of any rhetoric of the high or the deep, which resisted any aestheticization of politics, but also guarded against trivialization where the integrity and independence of the life of the mind was at stake.
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