HABERMAS AND DERRIDA'S FELDZUG*

Juergen Habermas and Jacques Derrida greeted President Bush with a piece in yesterday's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which they call for a common European approach to foreign affairs -- or, as the authors put it with explicit reference to Immanuel Kant, a "world domestic policy" (Weltinnenpolitik). Habermas and Derrida see this piece as a counterpoint to the letter signed by Aznar, Berlusconi, Havel, et al. on January 31 of this year supporting Bush's pressure on Iraq, a move which they call "an expression of loyalty to Bush. . .to which the Spanish prime minister invited -- behind the backs of the rest of Europe -- the other European governments who were willing to go to war."

The full text of the essay isn't available on FAZ's site, but the selections indicate the following arguments:

• Europeans must try to provide "balance" against the "hegemonic unilateralism of the U.S." How precisely this is to be done is not clear, but pressure through international bodies including the U.N. seems to be the main means.


• Europeans should aim high: the guiding idea should be the creation of a Kantian "cosmopolitan (world) order on the basis of law." Europeans should take heart at the fact that they have already solved two important modern political problems: supranational political order (through the E.U.) and social justice (through the European welfare state).


• WWII taught the Europeans that national sovereignty must sometimes be restricted in order to restrain military power as well.(This of course is the exact opposite of the lesson that the U.S. seems to have learned, or is now claiming that it has learned, from WWII.)


• The experience of working through decolonization has taught Europeans to adopt a stance of "reflective distance" to their own uses of power. This point of view -- which also allows them space to consider the perspective of the colonized -- should be seen as a critical resource in building a more humane global society.

In today's Tagesspiegel, Richard Herzinger reviews (rather bitterly) Habermas and Derrida's essay, along with several other recent attempts by prominent intellectuals along the same lines -- including Richard Rorty -- here. Herzinger's main complaints are that the essay is long on abstractions and short on politics. Herzinger castigates Habermas for ignoring the recent French and German missteps that (in his opinion) led to the split of "the Eight" and ultimately to European powerlessness vis-a-vis the U.S. in the first place; in particular, he wonders how extensive Schroeder consulted with his European colleagues before he gave a flat "no" to war in Iraq, and what, if anything, legitimates the French assumption of leadership in this issue. Herzinger is pointing to two very important weaknesses in any common European search for a future foreign policy: German domestic turmoils (which most people agree heavily influenced Schroeder's aggressiveness on the anti-war issue) and French pride.

Habermas and Derrida read the huge anti-war demonstrations on February 15th as a sign of the "birth of a European public [Oeffentlichkeit]." Rorty does the same (see below). Maybe they're right. With Herzinger, I'm not sure that these demonstrations should exempt Schroeder from criticism, however.I have defended Schroeder's opposition to Bush here in the past, but I think it's probably a bit too far to claim, as Habermas seems to be doing, that Schroeder was acting as an agent in some kind of Europe-wide "learning process" with respects to standing up to American power; his motives were almost certainly focused on domestic political gain, and there is perhaps some truth to the claim that he could have been more diplomatically adept, even if, as I said earlier, I'm not sure this would have mattered all that much to Bush.

Rorty's essay from the Sueddeutsche Zeitung this weekend is here. In a reaction to Habermas and Derrida's essay, Rorty (rightly, to my mind) calls upon Europeans to resist the Bush administration's attempts to pursue a divide and conquer strategy with Europe. Rorty claims that the European attempts to resist Bush could serve as inspiration for Americans who also believe that the present administration is leading the country down the wrong path.

I'll post links to english versions of these essays as soon as I find them.

*Feldzug (from the Oxford German-English Dictionary): (Milit., fig.) campaign.