The following interview with Jürgen Habermas was conducted by the editor of Granta on 23 July 2023.

Editor:

You’ve never shied away from taking positions on the political issues of the day. The Russian attack on Ukraine and the question of how and on what scale the EU states and the United States should support Ukraine is no exception. Last year, you defended Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s position – viewed by many as hesitant and evasive – and explained how complicated the constellation really was. Germans, you argued, could not simply admire and envy the national patriotism of Ukrainians. For post-war Germans pride themselves on having built a society for which the values of national patriotism are already a matter of history.

Jürgen Habermas:

Two months after the outbreak of the war, when I wrote the article for Süddeutsche Zeitung that you refer to, what surprised me – and what I still cannot understand – had nothing to do with the West’s politically required partisanship for Ukraine’s struggle against a murderous aggressor. There was never any doubt about how the Russian invasion should be evaluated in normative terms, and I consider the military and logistical aid to Ukraine to be right. What startled me in those first days and weeks of the war was the thoughtlessness and shortsightedness of the uninhibited emotional identification with the event of war as such. I’ve never been a pacifist. But I experienced the attack on Ukraine as a fateful violation of an inhibition concerning the archaic violence of war, an inhibition that had become uncontroversial in Europe. Yet the outbreak of this war with a nuclear power did not trigger any anguished reflection, but instead immediately prompted a highly emotionalized war mentality, as if the enemy were standing outside our own door. These bellicose reflexes – as though we had not learned in the meantime to see war in Europe as a superseded stage of civilization – really irked me.

However, your question refers to a particular aspect – not the entirely understandable solidarity with Ukraine under invasion, but the lack of psychological distance from the Ukrainians’ inflamed national consciousness. It is not as if the process unfolding before our eyes – that of a far from linguistically, culturally and historically homogeneous population coalescing into a nation, as it were under the pressure of this brutal war of aggression – provides even the slightest ground for criticism. But we should understand it as a historical process. In the Federal Republic of Germany, we needed half a century to achieve the necessary critical distance from our own nationalistic past, extremely burdened as it is by crimes against humanity. I was astounded by the lack of any inkling of recognition of this historically understandable difference in mentalities in the rush to identify with the events of the war.

Quite apart from German sensitivities, I find the historically shaped differences in political mentalities among the three parties involved in the war revealing. After the fall of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires during the First World War, Russia is perhaps arguably the last empire in which the fossilized remnants of an imperial mentality have survived. This mentality is now running up against the nationalism of the Ukrainians inflamed by the war, while in the West, there had been at least the hope, perhaps strongest in Germany and faintest in the United Kingdom, that the post-national spirit that gave rise to the United Nations human-rights order after the Second World War would continue to spread. This political mentality has been of major importance for long-term cooperation and mutual understanding across national borders, at any rate within the EU and especially in the Schengen Area. Having a clear perception of these mentalities is simply a matter of useful information: quite apart from the unambiguous assessment of the war in terms of international law, they give rise to different perspectives on the nature, cause and progress of the conflict.

Editor:

Do you think that by admitting Ukraine, the European Union would risk promoting the return of older-style nationalism that could marginalize, or at least challenge, the constitutional patriotism to which you have devoted so much of your thought and action?

Habermas:

No, it would not make any difference. On the EU’s eastern flank, we’ve long had member states that insist on upholding the sovereignty they only regained after 1990 more forcefully against Brussels than is sometimes conducive to joint action or even to upholding constitutional principles. A historically informed view of the development of the different mentalities and of the interest positions within Europe and the Western alliance might help to explain the actual reason for my political unease. Under US leadership, the West is in a certain sense keeping the war going – while making no discernible efforts to rein it in. The danger of escalation alone means that Western governments are certainly no longer ‘sleepwalking’, but, quite apart from the danger of escalation, I fear that the conflict is increasingly slipping out of their hands. In any case, as it progresses, it is unfolding a divisive dynamic at the global level that is completely derailing a world society which until now has been at least halfway economically integrated, albeit in an asymmetrical way.

Western governments want to avoid formal participation in the war. What I’ve found disturbing from the very beginning, however, is the lack of perspective; they are providing Ukraine with endless reassurances of unlimited military assistance up to that threshold, but without declaring their own political goals. Officially, they are leaving everything else up to the Ukrainian government and its fortune in the arms of the Ukrainian soldiers. This failure to publicly articulate political goals is all the more incomprehensible the more the course of the war reveals how the geopolitical constellations are changing to the disadvantage of the United States, a superpower in decline, and of the EU, which is incapable of acting internationally. That is why, in the run-up to the Munich Security Conference, I recalled in another article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung – ‘A Plea for Negotiations’ – that, by providing the military aid that ultimately makes the prolongation of the war possible, the West has assumed a shared moral responsibility. Quite apart from the Ukrainians’ determination to resist the invasion, the West’s logistical support and weapons systems mean that it shares moral responsibility for the daily casualties of the war – for all the additional deaths and injuries and all the additional destruction of hospitals and critical infrastructure. It would not be a betrayal of Ukraine, therefore, but a clear normative requirement, if the United States and Europe were to insist on exploring all avenues for a ceasefire and a face-saving compromise for both sides.

Editor:

In the 1990s, you defended the NATO intervention in the Balkans. Yet now you may be the most prominent German expressing skepticism concerning the nature of the support for Ukraine that is being organized in particular through NATO.

Habermas:

I just explained why this allegation is mistaken: I’ve not spoken out against effective support for Ukraine. What I criticize is the failure of the West to develop its own perspectives and to reflect on its own goals in providing military assistance, as well as its failure to accept shared moral responsibility for the victims of the war.

Editor:

Then have you changed in the meantime, or has the context changed? Did your support for the intervention in the Balkans have anything to do with your having seen it as a solidarity-building exercise for Europe, whereas you now fear that the Ukraine policy could have the opposite effect? In short: why were you on the side of the liberal humanitarian interventionists in the 1990s? And why are you now taking a position that is otherwise more closely associated with the Left, but also with American realists such as John Mearsheimer and the experts at the Rand Corporation?

Habermas:

I’ve never accepted the conception of political realism, which can be traced back to Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau, that justice between nations is impossible. This doesn’t rule out coincidental agreement with some conclusions we draw from different premises. I considered the Kosovo war, which was waged by NATO in 1999 without a Security Council resolution under pressure from the Clinton administration, to be legitimate at the time on humanitarian grounds, even though it was dubious from the point of view of international law. That judgment weighed heavily on me, because it was the first military deployment of the Bundeswehr since the founding of the Federal Republic. Nevertheless, I considered this intervention to be justified at the time as a humanitarian intervention, with similar qualifications to those expressed by a leading expert in international law such as Christian Tomuschat.

This had nothing whatsoever to do with political hopes concerning Europe. It was rather that the end of the Cold War had raised hopes that a durable, peaceful world society might be possible. At that time, humanitarian interventions were a major issue – even if they did not always prove to be successful later on. In 1998, the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court in The Hague was adopted, and it entered into force in 2002. The war in Kosovo spurred the discussions that then led to the recognition of the ‘responsibility to protect’. At the beginning of the 1990s, the foreign policy of the administration of the elder George Bush was in place: under the leadership of the United States, then still the sole undisputed superpower, the human-rights regime that had long been established in the medium of international law was to be politically enforced. There was ample evidence at the time of the willingness and the ability of the United States to pursue a different policy from the one we have come to expect – after George W. Bush’s military adventure in Iraq, Obama’s political half-heartedness, and four years of Trumpian irrationality – from a declining superpower that has become less predictable. We are all relieved over the Biden administration – but it is not set in stone.

At the end of the 1990s, the United States was still a superpower which had acquired an undisputed authority in the post-war period in Europe and beyond. At the same time, we could look back on a wave of new foundations of democratic regimes. In academia, disciplines such as peace studies, international relations and international law had experienced enormous growth. The drafts for a constitutionalization of international law initiated by German jurists were still being seriously debated. Many legal experts at the time thought that the prospects for the success of a global implementation of human rights were good. It’s too easy in hindsight to make fun of such idealism. No contemporary historian worth their salt would write history exclusively from the cynical perspective of the disappointing outcomes, as if hard-nosed realism always knows better. Aware of the contingencies of historical events, historians must also acknowledge the disappointed – but at the time not unfounded – intentions and hopes that guided the actions of the protagonists, even if their plans ended in failure. It’s often only in hindsight that we can understand why they failed.

So, if you bear in mind the historical context of those years, the contrast with the current situation is obvious. A declining superpower riven by domestic political divisions is now focused primarily on competition with China, the rising major power, while the EU remains fragmented and weakened from within by right-wing populist movements. The vociferous appeals to the unity and strength of NATO are already reactions to the drastic geopolitical changes that have occurred in the meantime to the disadvantage of the West. From an enlightened post-colonial perspective, the West is no longer in a position to make loudmouthed normative appeals to a human-rights order that it has violated itself to persuade neutral powers like India, Brazil and South Africa to take sides in support of Ukraine, although such partisanship would undoubtedly be justified. With the weakening of its own geopolitical influence, as recently described in a self-critical online essay by Fiona Hill, ‘Ukraine in the New World Disorder’, the West has, empirically speaking, forfeited the global credibility and authority required to make the normative arguments for itself as the champion of the political implementation of the peace and human-rights order, as it was still able to do in the 1990s. It is not as if our normative arguments are any less valid today than they were then, but today we must be more concerned that an impotent political rhetoric might rob the principles of the UN of whatever remains of their international recognition. The talk of ‘our values’ that has now become commonplace contributes to the devaluation of rationally justified principles.

Editor:

Your articles and interviews in the German newspapers sometimes make you appear like a counselor to the Social Democrats.

Habermas:

Political consulting was never my thing. Without being a card-carrying member of the party, I do see myself as a left social democrat; but as a public intellectual, I’ve criticized the SPD all my life.

Editor:

What do you make of the German Greens? How has a party that was once built on fear and rejection of nuclear power (and nuclear weapons) gone on to become the one most willing to risk nuclear war? How do you account for this trajectory? Did some kind of anti-totalitarian bacillus take hold of the party after 1989?

Habermas:

The Greens have the historical distinction of having put the issue of climate change on the political agenda. In Germany, however, they have now more or less lost their former social-political wing; their young voters mostly come from similar milieus to the economic-liberal Free Democrats. And as far as their ‘anti-totalitarian’ stance goes, I’m undecided. In Germany, this expression is rarely used symmetrically in political disputes, but almost always against the Left.

Editor:

You’ve long been skeptical of NATO and had very harsh words for the organization in the 1980s. Together with Macron, you call for Europe to develop its own self-defense capabilities. Would that also mean Europe freeing itself from something like American tutelage? And isn’t NATO itself perhaps the main hindrance to any independent European defense initiative? Some observers believe that this has always been an important function of NATO from the US perspective. But even if you don’t want to go that far, wasn’t and isn’t NATO a useful tool for Washington to wring concessions from Europe in other areas (trade, monetary policy, etc.)?

Habermas:

So we’re working our way through one misunderstanding after another. But first things first: I enjoy an unblemished reputation among the German public for my pro-American stance. There’s no special merit in that for someone of my generation. However, I do take credit for consistently advocating the necessity of a normative identification with the political tradition and culture of the West in the old Federal Republic. NATO may have played a role when I insisted that it was not enough to adopt an instrumental orientation to the West on the grounds that the United States was providing military protection during the Cold War. For if that was all that was involved, Adenauer’s Germany, with its unbroken continuity of former Nazis occupying key positions in almost all functional areas, would never have become a reliable democratic partner. You have no idea how often I’ve declared and written since my critique of Heidegger in 1953 that anti-Americanism has always been associated with the most questionable German traditions.

Editor:

But if NATO also prevents the possibility of anything approaching European autonomy in world affairs, would it not be worth adopting a more Gaullist position, and entertaining the possibility of a withdrawal from NATO?

Habermas:

I can’t remember ever having called for Germany to withdraw from NATO. And I’ve never had any truck with Gaullism. That’s probably also the wrong term for Macron’s European policy. His ambitious initiatives in support of a Europe capable of acting politically at the global level failed due to the resistance of the German government, especially of Chancellor Angela Merkel and her finance ministers Wolfgang Schäuble and Olaf Scholz. But that’s all yesterday’s news. Today, I no longer believe that the EU will play a globally influential role in the future. When Macron offers us intelligent reminders that the interests of the United States and the Western Europeans are also different with regard to the war in Ukraine, he’s merely following a perfectly normal precept of political prudence. Aren’t Europeans instead making a mistake by ignoring the deterioration of the geopolitical situation for the West as a whole? And isn’t it rather dangerous for the longer-term support of Ukraine when we turn a blind eye to the unpredictability of a partner we still depend on completely for our own security? The political and cultural divisions have become apparent in American society at the very latest since Trump, and the collapse of the American party system or even the convulsion of important political institutions such as a politically neutral Supreme Court are developments that have been in the offing since the late 1990s, if you cast your mind back to the role played by Newt Gingrich. And I fear that they may have even deeper roots.

Photograph © Katharina Sattler, Habermas House