Jürgen Habermas is the voice of a generation that fears the German chancellor may undo the hard-won gains of the European project, writes DEREK SCALLY
SIX DECADES ago a generation of “angry young men” burst onto the British stage, lobbing dramatic mortars into their disillusioned and directionless postwar society.
Today Germany is in the grip of a campaign by the “angry old men”, led by 82-year-old philosopher Jürgen Habermas.
In a new book and public appearances, the publicity-shy Habermas has emerged to vent his fury at a disillusioned and directionless European Union in crisis.
Lurking behind his anger, shared by countless retired German politicians and business leaders, is fear: that, rather than stabilise the EU, the political solutions to the euro zone crisis now on the table will destroy the project created as a 21st-century answer to the 20th-century tragedies.
Germany’s angry old men are afraid they will outlive the project to which they dedicated much of their lives.
The title of the new Habermas book Zur Verfassung Europas is a play on words, meaning both “On the state of Europe” and “On Europe’s constitution”.
A mixture of essays and interviews, the book opens with what amounts to a bill of indictment against Angela Merkel.
From the first page, he mocks the “arduous” learning process of her Berlin administration, moving “reluctantly and in small steps” towards Europe.
Berlin has become, he argues, “the engine of a Europe-wide enmity” for “closing its eyes to the only constructive way out” of the crisis: more Europe.
On Merkel’s watch, he says, the euro zone crisis has unfolded as a confusion of “national solo runs, haggling over bailouts, ambiguous signals and delayed concessions”.
In a final, withering nod to the German leader, he adds: “The headless incrementalism betrays the lack of a far-thinking perspective.” After attacking her crisis record to date, he then launches a broadside against Angela Merkel’s plan for the EU’s future.
After the stability pact and other voluntary “mechanisms” failed to bridge differing political, economic and historical understandings in Europe, he says, the focus has shifted to a qualitative leap forward in integration.
But, he argues, a failed logic of the stability pact is finding its way into the proposed solution of budgetary oversight.
Noting German breaches of the stability pact, he asks of budgetary oversight proposals: “Who should show whom obedience regarding the implementation of decisions?”
For Habermas, the financial crisis means economics overshadows the political debate over Europe’s future.
But this political dimension is, he argues, what will be the lasting effect of the euro zone crisis.
His main warning is against the push to inter-governmental solutions to the crisis, in which euro zone leaders appoint themselves as an “auto-empowered European Council of 17, a model of post-democratic pursuit of dominance”.
The new enemy is no longer Eurosceptics, who argued that democratic legitimacy is not possible beyond the national level, but those who favour the executive creep of the European Council.
While the old centre of power, the European Commission, lingers in an “idiosyncratic limbo”, he writes, the council, where national leaders meet, now has a power “not unlike the kings of early 19th century constitutionalism”.
Integrating the council into the institutional structure through the Lisbon treaty has come at a “high price of resolutions lacking legitimacy”, he says, citing euro zone bailouts and plans to co-ordinate national budgets.
Recent Franco-German initiatives contradict the spirit of the treaty, he argues, by trying to cement this intergovernmental domination of the EU.
“Through this central-steering by the council, the imperative of the markets can be transferred to national budgets . . . with legally amorphous agreements, through threat of sanction and pressure, pushed through disempowered national parliaments.”
He sees EU leaders seizing the euro zone crisis as a way of transforming the European project into the opposite of what he thinks it was supposed to be. “The first attempt at a democratic, judicial supranational community would become an arrangement for the exercise of post-democratic-bureaucratic authority.”
His alternative is to keep on developing the EU into a transnational democratic community, where living conditions are brought within a certain acceptable bandwidth, “without levelling cultural differences” by budget oversight.
Stepping back from the institutional struggle, he sees an urgent need to address bailout- and reform-fatigued citizens who have been asked to show “supranational extension of civic solidarity”.
The best way of doing this is for cross-border communication, where media in member states highlight parallels in political debates and controversies across the union.
This is the only way to undo the asymmetrical “us-and-them” EU narrative to date, he says.
It is an interesting idea: to set German resentment at having to bail out its euro zone neighbours against Irish resentment at having to bail out German banks.
Behind this is a presumption by Habermas – or is it a hope? – that the apathy of national populations to the EU would dissolve and a “European public” would emerge if the media could only show how deeply European decisions already affect citizens.
National parliamentarians have a role to play, too, he says: to embrace a transfer of power to transnational democratic structures in Brussels or face an intergovernmental diktat.
Rather than licking our wounds, or arguing over the rights and wrongs of the bailouts, Habermas warns that it’s time to wake up. The show has moved on, to the end-game of European integration.