WorldView: Germany's leading intellectual Jürgen Habermas has warned that failure to agree on future EU integration will hand a win by default to "neo-liberal orthodoxy".
Awarded the Bruno Kreisky prize for human rights last month, Prof Habermas conceded in his acceptance speech that intellectual contributions like his, and indeed the debate on the future of Europe, was doomed to be lost in the information avalanche of the Internet age.
"The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralised access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus." The only chance was for intellectuals to develop an "avant- garde sense for relevance".
Intellectuals should revive their relevance in public debates by developing a healthy suspicion of "the normative polity infrastructure" in a debate. They can liven debates by spotting what's lacking in the discussion, presenting imaginative alternatives and plucking up courage to get a dying discussion moving again with a few polarising words.
"The intellectual has to be able to get excited and yet have enough political judgment not to over-react."
Prof Habermas then put his words into action, saying what gets him worked up most: the debate on the future of Europe. That others find the topic boring is all the more reason to sound an alarm bell.
"If we are not able to hold a Europe-wide referendum before the next European elections in 2009 on the polarising question of the goal of European unification, the future of the Union will be decided in favour of neo-liberal orthodoxy.
"By avoiding this touchy issue for the sake of a quiet life, and continuing to muddle along the well-trodden path of compromise, we will give free reign to the dynamic of unbridled market forces and watch as the European Union's current political power is dismantled in favour of a diffuse European free-trade zone."
He proposed a number of urgent measures to break the paralysis that set in after the French and Dutch rejection of the constitutional treaty.
The first measure, unlikely to find favour in Dublin, is tax harmonisation to counteract the effects of globalisation, demographic changes and immigration and "win back political clout on a supra- national level".
"Without convergent tax rates and medium-term harmonisation of economic and social policies, we are, in effect, relinquishing our hold over the European social model."
At the same time he contended that the return to "ruthless hegemonic power politics" and the clash between the western and Islamic worlds make reform of the UN and world economic institutions more urgent than ever.
The future could not be where Europeans continue to submit to the "dictates and regulations" of the US in Nato deployments.
"Only a European Union capable of acting on the world stage - and taking its place beside the USA, China, India and Japan - can press for an alternative to the ruling Washington consensus.
"The time has come for us to attain a position where even in a joint military deployment we still remain true to our own conceptions of human rights, the ban on torture and wartime criminal law."
The only way for the EU to get beyond the Dutch and French referendums without reverting to a free-trade zone was to accept the core- periphery principle, he told his Austrian audience. Hand-in-hand with an avant-garde Europe goes an EU foreign minister, a directly-elected EU president and an EU financial basis.
Prof Habermas suggested putting these proposals to the people in an EU-wide referendum held concurrently with the next European Parliament elections. The decision would only be accepted if it received a double majority of the member states and the electorate.
"At the same time, the referendum would only bind the member states in which a majority had voted in favour. Europe would then move away from the convoy model where the tempo is set by the slowest member."
His speech reiterated the warning from his 2003 essay, co-written with Jacques Derrida, that the "avant-garde core Europe cannot consolidate into a miniature Europe but, as so often, must be the locomotive".
In France's Nouvel Observateur ahead of the French constitutional referendum he urged voters to beware the "xenophobic" right-wing lure of protectionist nation states.
His remarks in Vienna about intellectual irrelevance appear to have been prophetic: where the arguments of the leading light of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory once found a wide audience, only the left-wing Tageszeitung carried an article on his latest speech.
Still, German foreign minister Frank Walter Steinmeier gave an approving nod to Prof Habermas's latest speech in the Bundestag last month. "Because describes the danger so completely correctly, it is all the more reason to confront it in a more engaged fashion."
Berlin will use its EU presidency next year to "take on the pressing constitutional questions with new courage".
Prof Habermas noted in his Vienna speech that his avant-garde position echoed that of Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt in his book The United States of Europe.
"This example you can see, ladies and gentleman," remarked Prof Habermas, "that politicians who are ahead of the game can drag along intellectuals with them."