11


The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship

Jürgen Habermas


As even the name of the United Nations reveals, world society today is composed politically of
nation-states. The historical type of state that emerged from the French and American revolutions
has achieved global dominance. This fact is by no means trivial.

The classical nation-states in Northern and Western Europe evolved within the boundaries of
existing territorial states. They were part of the European state system which already took on a
recognizable shape with the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. By contrast, the “belated” nations –
beginning with Italy and Germany – followed a different course, one which was also typical for the
formation of nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe; here the formation of the state followed
the trail blazed by an anticipatory national consciousness disseminated by propaganda. The
difference between these two paths (from state to nation vs. from nation to state) is reflected in
the backgrounds of the actors who formed the vanguard of nation and state builders. Along the first
path, these were lawyers, diplomats, and military officers who belonged to the kings administrative
staff and together constructed a “rational state bureaucracy” (in Max Weber’s sense); along the
second, they were writers and historians, and scholars and intellectuals in general, who laid the
groundwork for Cavour’s and Bismarck’s subsequent diplomatic and military unification of the state
by propagating the more or less imaginary unity of the “cultural nation.” After the Second World
War, a third generation of very different nation-states emerged from the process of decolonization,
primarily in Africa and Asia. Often these states, which were founded within the frontiers
established by the former colonial regimes, acquired sovereignty before the imported forms of state
organization could take root in a national identity that transcended tribal differences. In these
cases, artificial states had to be first “filled” by nations that coalesced only later. Finally,
with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the trend toward the formation of independent nation-states
in Eastern and Southern Europe has followed the path of more or less violent secessions; in the
socially and economically precarious situation in which these countries found themselves, the old
ethnonational slogans had the power to mobilize distraught populations for independence.Thus today
the nation-state has definitively superseded older political formations.1 To be sure, the classical
city-states also had successors in modern Europe, for a certain period, in the cities of Northern
Italy and – in the territory of the old Lodiaringia (Lorraine) – in the belt of cities out of which
Switzerland and the Netherlands emerged. The structures of the old empires also reemerged, first in
the form of the Holy Roman Empire and later in the multi-nation-states of the Russian, Ottoman, and
Austro-Hungarian Empires. But in the meantime the nation-state has displaced these remnants of
premodern states. We are at present witnessing the fundamental transformation of China, the last of
the old empires.

Hegel took the view that every historical formation is condemned to decline once it has reached
maturity. One need not accept Hegel’s philosophy of history to recognize that the triumphal
procession of the nation-state also has an ironical, obverse side. The nation-state at one time
represented a cogent response to the historical challenge to find a functional equivalent for the
early modern form of social integration which was in the process of disintegrating. Today we are
confronting an analogous challenge. The globalization of commerce and communication, of economic
production and finance, of the spread of technology and weapons, and above all of ecological and
military risks, poses problems that can no longer be solved within the framework of nation-states
or by die traditional method of agreements between sovereign states. If current trends continue,
the progressive undermining of national sovereignty will

necessitate the founding and expansion of political institutions on the supranational level, a
process whose beginnings can already be observed. In Europe, North America, and Asia, new forms of
organization for continental “regimes” are gradually emerging above the level of the state, regimes
which could one day provide the requisite infrastructure for the currently rather inefficient
United Nations.

This unprecedented increase in abstraction is merely the continuation of a process the first major
example of which is the integration achieved by the nation-state. Hence I think that we can take
our orientation on the precarious path toward postnational societies from the very historical model
we are on the point of superseding. First I would like to review the accomplishments of the
nation-state by clarifying the concepts “state” and “nation” (I) and explaining the two problems to
which the nation-state provided a solution (II). Then I will examine the potential for conflict
built into this form of national state, namely the tension between republicanism and nationalism
(III). Finally, I would like to deal with two current challenges that overburden the nation-state’s
capacity for action: the differentiation of society along multicultural lines (IV) and the
processes of globalization that are undermining both the internal (V) and the external (VI)
sovereignty of the existing nation-states.


I   “State” and “Nation”

The “state” on the modern conception is a legally defined term which refers, at the level of
substance, to a state power that possesses both internal and external sovereignty, at the spatial
level over a clearly delimited terrain (the state territory) and at the social level over the
totality of members (the body of citizens or the people). State power constitutes itself in the
forms of positive law, and the people is the bearer of the legal order whose jurisdiction is
restricted to the state territory. In political usage, the concepts “nation” and “people” have the
same extension. But in addition to its legal definition, the term “nation” has the connotation of a
political community shaped by common descent, or at least by a common language, culture, and
history. A people becomes a “nation” in this historical sense only in the concrete form of a
particular form of life. The two components, which are yoked together in such concepts as
“nation-state” and “nation of citizens,” can be traced back to two far-from-parallel processes of
historical development – the formation of states on the one hand (1), and of nations on the other
(2).

(1) The historical success of the nation-state is due in large part to the advantages of the modern
state apparatus as such. Evidently, the territorial state, with its monopoly on the legitimate use
of violence and its differentiated administrative apparatus financed by taxation, was better able
to cope with the functional imperatives of social, cultural, and, above all, economic modernization
than were older political formations. For our purposes it will suffice to recall the ideal-typical
model worked out by Marx and Weber.

(a)  The executive branch of the state which became detached from die royal household consisted of
a functionally specialized bureaucratic organization which was run by legally trained officials and
which could draw on the reserve force of a standing army, die police, and the penal system. The
imposition of “civil peace” (Land-frieden) was the necessary precondition for monopolizing these
legitimate means of violence. A state is sovereign only if it can both maintain law and order
internally and protect its borders against external threats. It must be capable of prevailing over
all competing powers within its borders and of asserting itself in the international arena as a
competitor with equal standing. The status of a subject of international law is contingent upon
achieving international recognition as an “equal” and “independent” member of the system of states.
Internal sovereignty presupposes the ability to maintain law and order, external sovereignty the
ability to assert oneself in the “anarchistic” competition for power among states.

(b)  Even more important for the modernization process is the separation of the state from “civil
society” (in Hegel’s sense of “bur-gerliche Gesellschaft”); hence the functional specification of
the state apparatus. The modern state is both an administrative and a tax-based state, which means
that it limits itself to essentially administrative  tasks.  It  leaves  the  productive  tasks,
which were  formerly accomplished within the framework of political power, to a market economy
differentiated from the state. To this extent, it secures the “general conditions of production”;
hence the legal framework and infrastructure that are necessary for capitalistic commodity exchange
and for the corresponding organization of the labor force. The financial needs of the state are met
by a privately generated tax income. The price the administrative system pays for the benefits of
this functional specialization is its dependence on the performance of an economy regulated by
markets. Although markets can be established and regulated by political means, they obey a logic of
their own that escapes state control.

The differentiation of the state from the economy is reflected in the differentiation between
public and private law. Insofar as the modern state makes use of positive law as a means of
organization and mplementation, it binds itself to a medium that instantiates, through the concept
of law and die derivative concepts of subjective right and of the legal person (as the bearer of
rights), a new principle made explicit by Hobbes: within an order of modern law that is set free
from immediate moral expectations (though only in certain respects), the citizens are permitted to
do anything dial is not prohibited. Regardless of whether state power has already been domesticated
by the rule of law and the crown has become “subject to the law,” the state cannot make use of the
medium of law without organizing social intercourse in the separate sphere of civil society in such
a way that private persons enjoy – at first unequally distributed – individual liberties. With the
separation of private from public law. the individual citizen, in her role as “subject” (“Untertan”
in Kant’s terminology), first acquires at least a core of private autonomy.2

(2) Today we all live in national societies that owe their unity to an organization of this type.
Of course, such states existed long before there were “nations” in the modern sense. ‘State and
nation have fused into the nation-state only since the revolutions of the late eighteenth century.
Before I examine the specific nature of this connection I would like to review, in a brief
digression on conceptual history, the genesis of the modern consciousness that underlies the
interpretation of the citizen body as a nation in somediing other than a merely legal sense.

In the classical Roman usage, “natio” like “gens” functions as a contrasting concept to “civitas.”
Nations were originally communities of shared descent which were integrated geographically through
settlements and neighborhoods and culturally through their common language, customs, and
traditions; but they were not yet integrated politically through the organizational form of a
state. This root meaning persisted through the Middle Ages into early modern times whenever ůnatio”
and “lingua” were treated as equivalent. Thus, for example, students at medieval universities were
divided into ůnations” according to their country of origin. In an era of increasing geographical
mobility, the concept served primarily as a means of internal differentiation of orders of knights,
of universities, monasteries, ecclesiastical councils, merchant settlements, etc. Thus it happened
that a national origin ascribed by others was from the very beginning linked in a conspicuous way
with the negative demarcation of foreigners from one’s own people.

Around this time, the term “nation” acquired a meaning opposed to the nonpolitical usage in a
different context. The feudal system of the old German Empire had been superseded by corporative
states ( Standestaaten) based on contracts in which the king or emperor, whose power depended on
taxes and military support, granted the nobility, the Church, and the towns certain privileges, and
therewith limited participation in the exercise of political power. These ruling estates, which met
in ůparliaments” or ůdiets,” represented the country or “the nation” vis-a-vis the court. As the
“nation,” the aristocracy acquired a political existence that was still denied the “people” as the
mass of the subjects. This explains the revolutionary implications of the slogan “the King in
Parliament” in England and, especially, of the identification of the “Third Estate” with the
“nation” in France.

The democratic transformation of the Adelsnation, the nation of the nobility, into a Volksnation,
the nation of the people, which has been in progress since the late eighteenth century, presupposes
a deep transformation in consciousness inspired by intellectuals, a transformation first
accomplished by the urban, and above all formally educated, middle classes before it found a
resonance in the wider population and gradually brought about a political mobilization of the
masses. Popular national consciousness crystallized into the “imagined communities” (Benedict
Anderson) propagated in national histories, which became the catalysts of a new form of collective
self identification: “Thus nations arose in the final decades of the eighteenth century and in the
course of the nineteenth century . . .: conceived by a small number of scholars, publicists, and
poets-Volksnationen in concept but far from it in reality.” To the extent that this idea took root,
however, it became apparent that, with its transformation from the concept of an aristocratic
nation into that of a nation of the people, the political concept had inherited the power to
generate stereotypes from the older, prepolitical concept of the nation as an index of descent and
origin. The positive self understanding of one’s own nation now became an efficient mechanism for
repudiating everything regarded as foreign, for devaluing other nations, and for excluding
national, ethnic, and religious minorities, especially the Jews. In Europe nationalism became
allied with antisemitism, with disastrous consequences.


II The New Form of Social Integration

Interpreted in light of their results, the complex and long-running processes of the “invention of
the nation” (Schulze) played the role of a catalyst in the transformation of the early modern state
into a democratic republic. Popular national self-consciousness provided the cultural background
against which “subjects” could become politically active “citizens.” Belonging to the “nation” made
possible for the first time a relation of solidarity between persons who had previously been
strangers to one another. Thus the achievement of the nation-state consisted in solving two
problems at once: it made possible a new mode of legitimation based on a new, more abstract form of
social integration.

Briefly stated, the legitimation problem resulted from the fact that the pluralism of worldviews
that followed the schism of the religious confessions gradually stripped political authority of its
religious grounding in “divine right.” The secularized state now had to derive its legitimation
from different sources. The second problem, that of social integration, was connected, simplifying
once again, with urbanization and economic modernization, with the increasing scope and
acceleration of the circulation of people, goods, and news. Populations became unmoored from the
corporative social ties of early modern societies, thereby becoming at the same time both
geographically mobilized and isolated. The nation-state responded to both of these challenges by
politically mobilizing its citizens. For the emerging national identity made it possible to combine
a more abstract form of sociál integration with new structures of political decision making.
Democratic participation, as it slowly became established, generated a new level of legally
mediated solidarity via the status of citizenship while providing the State with a secular source
of legitimation. Of course, there was no modern state that had not defined its social boundaries in
terms of citizenship rights. But belonging to a particular state at first meant nothing more than
being subject to a state power. Only with the transition to the democratic state was this
ascriptive, organizational membership transformed into an acquired membership – based on (at least
implicit) consent – of citizens who were expected to participate actively in the exercise of
political power. However, we must distinguish between the legal-political and the properly cultural
aspects of die new meaning that membership acquired with the shift from the status of a subject to
that of a citizen.

As we have seen, the two defining characteristics of the modern state were the sovereignty of state
power embodied in the prince and the differentiation of the state from society through which a core
of individual liberties was conferred (in a paternalistic manner) on the private citizens. With the
shift from royal to popular sovereignty, the rights of subjects were transformed into human rights
and civil rights, that is, into basic liberal and political rights of citizens. Viewed as ideal
types, they guarameed political as well as private autonomy, and in principle, even equal political
autonomy for everyone. The democratic constitutional state is, ideally speaking, a voluntary
political order established by the people themselves and legitimated by their free will-formation.
According to Rousseau and Kant, the addressees of the law should be able to conceive of themselves
at the same time as its authors.

But such a legal-political transformation would have lacked driving force, and formally established
republics would have lacked staying power, if a nation of more or less self-conscious citizens had
not emerged from a people defined by its subjection to state power.This political mobilizadon
called for an idea that was vivid and powerful enough to shape people’s convictions and appealed
more strongly to their hearts and minds than the dry ideas of popular sovereignty and human rights.
This gap was filled by the modern idea of the nation, which first inspired in the inhabitants of
state territories an awareness of the new, legally and politically mediated form of community. Only
a national consciousness, crystallized around the notion of a common ancestry, language, and
history, only the consciousness of belonging to “the same” people, makes subjects into citizens of
a single political community – into members who can feel responsible for one anotlier. The nation
oř the Volksgeist, the unique spirit of the people – the first truly modern form of collective
identity – provided the cultural basis for the constitutional state. As described by historians,
this thoroughly artificial fusion of older loyalties into a new national consciousness, which was
also steered by bureaucratic imperatives, is a long, drawn-out process.

This leads to a double coding of citizenship, with the result that the legal status defined in
terms of civil rights also implies membership in a culturally defined community. Without this
cultural inter-pretation of political membership rights, the nation-state in its emergent phase
would scarcely have had sufficient strength to establish a new, more abstract level of social
integration through the legal implementation of democratic citizenship. The counterexample of the
United States does demonstrate that the nation-state can assume and maintain a republican form even
without the support of such a culturally homogeneous population. However, in this case a civil
religion rooted in the majority culture took the place of nationalism.

Thus far I have focused exclusively on the achievements of the nation-state. But the connection
between republicanism and nationalism also engenders dangerous ambivalences. With the rise of the
nation-state, the meaning of state sovereignty also changes, as we have seen. This not only has an
impact on the shift from royal to popular sovereignty; it also changes the perception of external
sovereignty. The idea of the nation is inextricably bound up with the Machiavellian will to
self-assertion by which” the conduct of sovereign states in the aréna of the “great powers” had
been guided from the beginning. Now the strategie self-assertion of the modern state against
external enemies is transformed into the existential self assertion of “the nation.” With this a
third concept of “freedom” is introduced. The collective concept of national freedom competes with
the two individualistic concepts of freedom, that of the private liberties of members of civil
society and that of the political autonomy of citizens. More important is the question of how the
freedom of the nation is to be construed: whether on an analogy with the liberty of private persons
who differentiate themselves from, and compete with, one another, or on the model of the
cooperative self legislation of autonomous citizens.

The model of public autonomy takes precedence if the nation is primarily conceived as a legally
constituted entity, that is, as a nation of citizens. These citizens may indeed be patriots who
understand and uphold their constitution as an achievement in the context of the history of their
country But they construe the freedom of the nation – following Kant – in cosmopolitan terms,
namely, as the authorization and obligation to enter into cooperative agreements or to establish a
balance of interests with other nations within the framework of a peaceful federation (Volkerbund).
The naturalistic conception of the nation as a prepolitical entity, by contrast, suggests a
different interpretation, according to which the freedom of the nation consists essentially in its
ability to assert its independence by military means if necessary. Like private persons in the
market, peoples pursue their respective interests in the free-for-all of international power
politics. The traditional image of external sovereignty is dressed up in national colors and in
this guise awakens new energies.


III The Tension between Nationalism and Republicanism

In contrast to the republican freedoms of individuals, the independence of one’s nation, which must
if necessary be defended with the “blood of its sons,” designates the place where the secularized
state preserves a residue of nonsecular transcendence. In times of war the nation-state imposes on
its citizens the duty to risk their lives for the collective. Since the French Revolution, general
conscription has gone hand-in-hand with civil rights; the willingness to fight and die for one’s
country is supposed to express both national consciousness and republican virtue. Thus the
inscriptions of French national history reflect a double memory trace: political milestones in the
fight for republican freedom are united with the death-symbolism of memorials for soldiers killed
in action.

The nation is Janus-faced. Whereas the voluntary nation of citizens is the source of democratic
legitimation, it is the inherited or ascribed nation founded on ethnic membership (die geborene
Nation der Volksgenossen) that secures social integration. Staatsburger or citizens constitute
themselves as a political association of free and equal persons by their own initiative;
Volksgenossen or nationals already find themselves in a community shaped by a shared language and
history. The tension between the universalism of an egalitarian legal community and the
particularism of a community united by historical destiny is built into the very concept of the
national state.

This ambivalence remains harmless as long as a cosmopolitan understanding of the nation of citizens
is accorded priority over an ethnocentric interpretation of the nation as in a permanent state of
war. Only a nonnaturalistic concept of the nation can be combined seamlessly with the
universalistic self understanding of the democratic constitutional state. Then the republican idea
can take the lead in penetrating socially integrating forms of life and structuring them in
accordance with universalistic patterns. The nation-state owes its historical success to the fact
that it substituted relations of solidarity between the citizens for the disintegrating corporative
ties of early modern society. But this republican achievement is endangered when, conversely, the
integrative force of the nation of citizens is traced back to the prepolitical fact of a
quasi-natural people, that is, to something independent of and prior to the political opinionand
will-formation of the citizens themselves. Of course, many reasons could be given for the lurch
into nationalism. I will mention just two, one conceptual, the other empirical.

There is a conceptual gap in the legal construction of the constitutional state, a gap that is
tempting to fill with a naturalistic conception of the people. One cannot explain in purely
normative terms how the universe of those who come together to regulate their common life by means
of positive law should be composed. From anormative point of view, the social boundaries of an
association of free and equal consociates under law are perfectly contingent. Since the
voluntariness of the decision to engage in a law-giving praxis is a fiction of the contractualist
tradition, in the real world who gains the power to define the boundaries of a political community
is settled by historical chance and the actual course of events – normally by the arbitrary
outcomes of wars or civil wars. It is a theoretical mistake with grave practical consequences, one
dating back to the nineteenth century, to assume that this question can also be answered in
normative terms with reference to a ůright to national self-determination”.

Nationalism has found its own solution to the problem of boundaries. While national consciousness
itself may very well be an artifact, it projects the imaginary reality of the nation as an organic
development which, in contrast with the artificial order of enacted law and the construction of the
constitutional state, needs no justification beyond its sheer existence. For this reason, recourse
to the “organic” nation can conceal the contingency of the historically more or less arbitrary
boundaries of the political community and can lend them an aura of imitated substance and
“inherited” legitimacy.

The other reason for the lurch into nationalism is more trivial. Precisely the artificiality of
national myths, both in their learned origins and their dissemination through propaganda, makes
nationalism intrinsically susceptible to misuse by political elite That domestic conflicts can be
neutralized by foreign military successes rests on a socio-psychological mechanism that governments
have repeatedly exploited. But how the class conflicts generated by accelerated capitalist
industrialization can be diverted was prefigured for a belligerent nation-state striving for world
prominence: the collective freedom of the nation could be interpreted in terms of an imperial
expansion of power. The history of, European imperialism between 1871 and 1914, and the integral
nationalism of the twentieth century (not to speak of the racist policies of the Nazis), illustrate
the sad fact that the idea of the nation did not so much reinforce the loyalty of the population to
the constitutional state but more often served as an instrument to mobilize the masses for
political goals that can scarcely be reconciled with republican principles.

The lesson to be learned from this sad history is obvious. The nation-state must renounce the
ambivalent potential that once progelled it. Though the national state is today running up against
its limits, we can still learn from its example. In its heyday, the nation-state founded a domain
of political communication that made it possible to absorb the advances in abstraction of societal
modernization and to re-embed a population uprooted from traditional forms of life in an extended
and rationalized lifeworld through the cultivation of national consciousness. It could play this
integrative role all the better in that democratic citizenship was connected with cultural
membership in the nation. Today, as the nation-state finds itself challenged from within by the
explosive potential of multiculturalism and from without by the pressure of globalization, the
question arises of whether there exists a functional equivalent for the fusion of the nation of
citizens with the ethnic nation.


IV The Unity of Political Culture in the Multiplicity of Subcultures

Originally, the suggestive unity of a more or less homogenous nation could ensure the cultural
embedding of a legally defined citizenship status. In this context, democratic citizenship could
form the focal point of social ties of mutual responsibility. But today we live in pluralistic
societies that are moving further and further away from the model of a nation-state based on a
culturally homogeneous population. The diversity of cultural forms of life, ethnic groups,
religions, and worldviews is constantly growing. There is no alternative to this development,
except at the normatively intolerable cost of ethnic cleansing. Hence republicanism must learn to
stand on its own feet. The central idea of republicanism is that the democratic process can serve
at the same time as a guarantor for the social integration of an increasingly differentiated
society. In a society characterized by cultural and religious pluralism, this task cannot be
displaced from the level of political will-formation and public communication onto the seemingly
natural substrate of a supposedly homogeneous nation. The latter would merely serve as a facade for
a hegemonic majority culture. For historical reasons, in many countries the majority culture is
fused with the general political culture which claims to be recognized by all citizens regardless
of their cultural background. This fusion must be dissolved if it is to be possible for different
cultural, ethnic, and religious forms of life to coexist and interact on equal terms within the
same political community. The level of the shared political culture must be uncoupled from the
level of subcultures and their prepolitical identities. Of course, the claim to coexist with equal
rights is subject to the proviso that the protected faiths and practices must not contradict the
reigning constitutional principles (as they are interpreted by the political culture).

The political culture of a country crystallizes around its constitution. Each national culture
develops a distinctive interpretation of those constitutional principles that are equally embodied
in other republican constitutions – such as popular sovereignty and human rights – in light of its
own national history. A “constitutional patriotism” based on these interpretations can take the
place originally occupied by nationalism. This notion of constitutional patriotism appears to many
observers to represent too weak a bond to hold together complex societies. The question then
becomes even more urgent: under what conditions can a liberal political culture provide a
sufficient cushion to prevent a nation of citizens, which can no longer rely on ethnic
associations, from dissolving into fragments?

Today this problem has arisen even for classical immigrant countries like the United States. The
political culture of the United States provides more space than other countries for the peaceful
coexistence of citizens from widely divergent cultural backgrounds; it enables everyone to maintain
two identities simultaneously,to be both a member and a stranger in her own land. But the rising
tide of fundamentalism and even terrorism (as witnessed by the Oklahoma bombing) represent a
warning signal that even here the safety net of a civil religion, which interprets an impressively
continuous constitutional history of more than two centuries, could be torn apart. My sense is that
multicultural societies can be held together by a political culture, however much it has proven
itself, only if democratic citizenship pays off not only in terms of liberal individual rights and
rights of political participation, but also in the enjoyment of social and cultural rights. The
citizens must be able to experience the fair value of their rights also in the form of social
security and the reciprocal recognition of different cultural forms of life. Democratic citizenship
can only realize its integrative potential – that is, it can only found solidarity between
strangers – if it proves itself as a mechanism that actually realizes the material conditions of
preferred forms of life.

This perspective is suggested at any rate by the type of welfare state that developed in Europe
under the favorable – though, of course, no longer obtaining – conditions of the postwar period.
After the hiatus of the Second World War, an over-heated nationalism had exhausted its reserves of
energy. Under the umbrella of a nuclear balance between the superpowers, the European countries –
and not just the divided Germany – could not conduct a foreign policy of their own. Territorial
disputes ceased to be an issue. Internal social conflicts could not be diverted outward but had to
be dealt with in accordance with the primacy of domestic politics. Under these conditions it became
possible to uncouple the universalistic understanding of the democratic constitutional state to a
large extent from the imperatives of a power politics guided by national interests and oriented to
geopolitical goals. In spite of a then prevailing mood of global civil war and anticommunist
propaganda, the traditional linkage of the constitutional state with the ambitions of national self
assertion was loosened also throughout the broader population.

The trend toward what might be termed a “postnational” self understanding of the political
community may have been more pronounced in the former Federal Republic of Germany than in other
European states, given its peculiar situation and the fact that it had, after all, been deprived of
fundamental sovereignty rights. But in most of the Western and Northern European countries, the
welfarestate pacification of class antagonisms had given rise to a new situation. Over time, social
security systems were instituted and expanded, reforms in areas such as schooling, the family,
criminal law and the penal system, data protection, etc., were implemented, and policies of equal
opportunity for women were at least initiated. Within a single generation the status of citizens,
however imperfect, was markedly improved in its legal and material substance. What is important in
the present context is that this made the citizens

themselves more keenly aware of the priority of the issue of the implementation of basic rights –
of the priority that the real nation of citizens must maintain over the imagined ethnic-cultural
nation.

The system of rights was extended under the economically favorable conditions of a comparatively
long period of economic growth. Each individual could come to recognize and appreciate citizenship
status as that which links her with the other members of the political community and makes her at
the same time dependent upon and co-responsible for them. It became clear to all that private and
public autonomy presuppose one another in the circuit of reproduction and improvement of the
conditions of preferred ways of life. At any rate, the citizens intuitively realized that they
could succeed in regulating their private autonomy fairly only by making an appropriate use of
their civic autonomy, and that an intact private sphere is in turn a necessary precondition of such
political participation. The constitution confirmed itself as the institutional framework for a
dialectic of legal and factual equality that simultaneously reinforces the private and the civic
autonomy of the citizens.

But this dialectic has in the interim ground to a halt quite independently of local causes. If we
are to explain this fact, we must turn our attention to the trends that are currently receiving
attention under the heading of “globalization.”


V Limits of the Nation-State: Restrictions of Internal Sovereignty

The nation-state at one time guarded its territorial and social boundaries with a zeal bordering on
the neurotic. Today these defenses have long since been penetrated by inexorable transnational
developments. Anthony Giddens defines “globalization” as the intensification of worldwide relations
resulting in reciprocal interconnections between local happenings and distant events. Global
communication takes place either in natural languages (usually via electronic media) or in special
codes (principally, money and law). Since “communication” has a double meaning here, these
processes give rise to two opposed tendencies. On the one hand they promote the expansion of
actors’ consciousness, on the other the differentiation, extension, and interconnection of systems,
networks (such as markets), or organizations. Whereas the growth of systems and networks multiplies
possible contacts and exchanges of information, it does not lead per se to the expansion of an
intersubjectively shared world and to the discursive interweaving of conceptions of relevance,
themes, and contributions from which political public spheres arise. The consciousness of planning,
communicating, and acting subjects seems to have simultaneously expanded and fragmented. The
publics produced by the Internet remain closed off from one another like global villages. For the
present it remains unclear whether an expanding public consciousness, though centered in the
lifeworld, nevertheless has the ability to span systemically differentiated contexts, or whether
the systemic processes, having become independent, have long since severed their ties with all
contexts produced by political communication.

The nation-state at one time provided the framework within which the republican idea of a society
that consciously shapes itself was articulated and even institutionalized to a certain extent.
Typical of the nation-state, as we have seen, was a complementary relationship between state and
economy on the one hand, and between domestic politics and power struggles between states on the
other. Of course, this schema only applied under conditions in which national politics could still
exert effective influence on the corresponding “national economy” ( Volkswirtschaft) . Thus in the
era of Keynesian economic policies, for example, growth depended on factors that were by no means
only favorable to capital investment but also benefited the population as a whole – factors such as
the stimulation of mass consumption (under pressure from independent trade unions) and improvements
in production techniques (based on independent research) which also led to the shortening of the
working day, or such as the training of workers within the framework of an expanding education
system (which improved the general level of education of the population as a whole), and so forth.
At any rate, national economies provided a range of opportunities for redistribution that could be
exploited, through wage policies and – on the side of the state – welfare and social policies, to
satisfy the aspirations of a demanding and intelligent population.

Although capitalism from its inception was a global development, the economic dynamic was fostered
by the modern state system and in turn had the effect of reinforcing the nation-state. But today
thesetwo developments no longer reinforce one another. To be sure, “the territorial restriction of
capital never corresponded to its structural mobility. It was due rather to the peculiar historical
conditions of European civil society “But these conditions have undergone a fundamental
transformation with the denationalization of economic production. Nowadays all industrial countries
are affected by the orientation of the investment strategies of ever more enterprises to globally
interconnected financial and labor markets.

The current debates over economic competitiveness highlight the ever-widening gap between the
limited room for nation-states to maneuver and global economic imperatives that are less and less
susceptible to political influence. The most important variables are, first, the accelerated
development and diffusion of new productivity enhancing technologies and, second, the sharp
increase in the reserves of comparatively cheap labor. The dramatic employment problems in the
former First World stem not from classical international trade relations but from globally
interconnected relations of production. Sovereign states can benefit from their economic systems
only as long as “national economies” to which their interventionist policies are tailored still
exist. But with the recent trend toward the denationalization of the economy, national politics is
gradually losing its influence over the conditions of production under which taxable income and
profits are generated. Governments have less and less influence over enterprises that orient their
investment decisions within a global horizon. They are caught in the dilemma of having to avoid two
equally unreasonable reactions. A policy of protectionistic isolationism and the formation of
defensive cartels is hopeless; but balancing the budget through cutbacks in the domain of social
policy is no less dangerous in view of its likely social consequences.

The social consequences of an abdication of politics, which tacitly accepts a chronically high
level of unemployment and the dismantling of the welfare state as the price to be paid for
international competitiveness, are already discernible in the DECD countries. The sources of social
solidarity are drying up, with the result that social conditions of the former Third World are
becoming commonplace in the urban centers of the First World. These trends are crystallizing in the
phenomenon of a new “underclass.” Under this misleading singular term sociologists unite the
diffuse varieties of marginalized groups who are to a large extent segmented off from the rest of
society. The underclass comprises those pauperized groups who are left to fend for themselves,
although they are no longer in a position to improve their social lot through their own initiative.
They no longer possess any veto power, any more than do the impoverished regions over the developed
regions of the world. However, this kind of segmentation does not mean that fragmented societies
could simply abandon part of their population to their fate without political consequences. In the
long term at least three consequences are unavoidable. An underclass produces social tensions that
discharge in aimless, self-destructive revolts and can only be controlled by repressive means, with
the result that the construction of prisons and the organization of internal security in general
becomes a growth industry In addition, social destitution and physical immiseration cannot be
locally contained; the poison of the ghettos infects the infrastructure of the inner cities, even
of whole regions, and penetrates the pores of the society as a whole. This leads finally to a moral
erosion of the society, which inevitably undermines the universalistic core of any republican
polity. Formally correct majority decisions that merely reflect the status anxieties and self
assertive reflexes of a middle class threatened by the prospect of social decline undermine the
legitimacy of the procedures and institutions of the democratic constitutional state. In this way
the great achievement of the nation-state in integrating society through the political
participation of its citizens is squandered.

While this scenario is by no means unrealistic, it illustrates just one among several possible
future developments. There are no laws of history in the strict sense, and human beings, even whole
societies, are capable of learning. An alternative to the abdication of politics would be if
politics were to follow the lead of the markets by constructing supranational political agencies.
Europe in transition toward the European Union provides a suitable example. Unfortunately, more
than one lesson can be drawn from it. At present the European states are lingering on the threshold
of a monetary union which would require the national governments to renounce their sovereignty in
currency matters. A denationalization of money and monetary policy would necessitate a common
financial, economic, and social policy Since the Maastricht Treaty, opposition has been growing in
the member states to a vertical expansion of the European Union that would confer essential
characteristics of a state on the Union, thereby relativizing the sovereignty of the member states.
The nation-state, conscious of its historical achievements, stubbornly asserts its identity at the
very moment when it is being overwhelmed, and its power eroded, by processes of globalization. For
the present, a politics still operating within the framework of the nation-state limits itself to
adapting its own society in the least costly way to the systemic imperatives and side-effects of a
global economic dynamic that operates largely free from political constraints. But instead it
should make the heroic effort to overcome its own limitations and construct political institutions
capable of acting at the supranational level. Moreover, the latter would have to be connected to
processes of democratic will-formation if the normative heritage of the democratic constitutional
state is to function as a break on the at present unfettered dynamic of globalized capitalist
production.


VI “Overcoming” the Nation-State: Abolition or Transformation?

Talk of overcoming the nation-state is ambiguous. On one reading – let us call it the postmodern –
the end of the nation-state also marks the end of the project of civic autonomy, which, on this
view, has in any case hopelessly overdrawn its credit. According to the other, nondefeatist
reading, the project of a society that is capable of learning and of consciously shaping itself
through its political will is still viable even after the demise of a world of nation-states. The
dispute concerns the normative self understanding of the democratic constitutional state. Can we
still identify with it in an era of globalization or must we renounce it as a cherished, though
obsolete, relic of the old Europe?

If not only the nation-state has run its course but along with it all forms of political
integration, then individual citizens are abandoned to a world of anonymously interconnected
networks in which they must choose between systemically generated options in accordance

with their preferences. In this postpolitical world the multinational corporation becomes the model
for all conduct. The impotence of a normatively guided politics in the face of an increasingly
independent global economic system appears, from a systems-theoretical perspective at any rate,
only as a special case of a more general development. Its vanishing point is a completely
decentered world society that splinters into a disordered mass of self reproducing and self
steering functional systems. Like Hobbesian individuals in the state of nature, these systems form
environments for one another. They no longer speak a common language. Lacking a universe of
intersubjectively shared meanings, they merely observe one another and behave toward one another in
accordance with imperatives of self preservation.

J. M. Guehenno depicts this anonymous world from the perspective of individual citizens who have
become detached from the obsolete solidarity of democratic communities and must now orient
themselves in the chaotic bustle of mutually adapting functional systems. These “new” human beings
have sloughed off the illusory self understanding of modernity. The neoliberal inspiration of this
Hellenistic vision is all too clear. The autonomy of the citizen is unceremoniously stripped of the
moral components of democratic self-determination and pared back to private autonomy: “Like the
Roman citizen of the time of Caracalla, the citizen of the imperial age of the networks defines
himself less and less by his participation in the exercise of sovereignty and more and more by the
possibility he has to act in a framework in which the procedures obey clear and predictable rules.
. . . It matters little whether a norm is imposed by a private enterprise or by a committee of
bureaucrats. It is no longer the expression of sovereignty but simply something that reduces
uncertainties, a means of lowering the cost of transactions, of increasing transparent [y]”.
Through a perverse play on Hegel’s polemic against the administrative state (Not- und
Verstandesstaat), the democratic state is replaced by a “state of law deprived of all philosophical
reference to natural law, reduced to an ensemble of rules with no other basis than the daily
administered proof of its smooth functioning.” Norms that are both effective and responsive to
expectations of popular sovereignty and human rights are replaced--under the guise of a “logic of
networks” – by the invisible hand of supposedly spontaneously regulated processes of the global
economy However, these mechanisms which are insensitive to external costs do not exactly inspire
confidence. This is true at any rate of the two best -known examples of global self- regulation.

The “balance of powers” on which the international system was based for three hundred years
collapsed some time between the First and Second World Wars, if not before. Without an
international court and a supranational sanctioning power, international law could not be invoked
and enforced like state law. However, conventional morality and the “ethics” of dynastic relations
ensured a certain level of normative regulation of warfare. In the twentieth century, total war has
destroyed even this weak normative framework. The advanced state of weapons technology, the arms
build-up, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction have made abundantly clear the risks
inherent in this anarchy of powers unregulated by any invisible hand. The founding of the League of
Nations was the first attempt at least to domesticate the unpredictable dynamic of power relations
within a collective security system. With the foundation of the United Nations, a second attempt
was made to set up supranational political agencies responsible for instituting peace on a global
scale. With the end of the bipolar balance of terror, the prospect of a “global domestic politics”
(C. E von Weizsacker) seems to have opened up, in spite of all the set-backs in the field of
international human rights and security polity. The failure of the anarchistic balance of power has
at least made evident the desirability of political interventions and arrangements.

Similar observations hold true for the other prime example of spontaneous self regulation.
Obviously even the global market cannot be managed exclusively by the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund if the asymmetrical interdependence between the DECD countries and the
marginalized countries that have not yet developed self sustaining economies is ever to be
overcome. The conclusion reached by the recent UN global summit on social problems in Copenhagen is
unsettling. There is a lack of competent agencies at the international level with the power to
agree on the necessary arrangements, procedures, and political frameworks. Not only the disparities
between North and South call for such cooperation but also the drop in standards of living in the
wealthy North Atlantic countries, where social policies restricted to the nation-state are
powerless to deal with the effects of lower wages on globalized and rapidly expanding labor
markets. The lack of supranational agencies is especially acute when it comes to dealing with the
ecological problems addressed from a global perspective at the Earth Summit in Rio. A more peaceful
and just political and economic world order is unthinkable without international institutions that
are capable of taking initiatives, and above all without a harmonization between the continental
regimes that are today just emerging, and without the kind of policies that could only be carried
out under pressure from a mobilized global civil society.

This lends support to the competing reading according to which the nation-state should be
“transformed” rather than abolished. But could its normative content also be preserved? The
optimistic vision of supranational agencies which would empower the United Nations and its regional
organizations to institute a new political and economic world order is clouded by the troubling
question of whether democratic opinion- and will-formation could ever achieve a binding force that
extends beyond the level of the nation-state.



In: Habermas, Jürgen. The Inclusion of the Other. Studies in Political Theory. Ed. Ciaran Cronin
and Pablo De Greiff. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999. 105-127