Subject: Re: HAB: Fwd: What does the felling of the monument mean?
Date: Sat, 03 May 2003 11:08:02 +0000


Apogies for asking the obvious but the following is the text of Habermas's 
essay?

Thanks greatly for this.

MattP.




>From: Claus Hansen <clausdh-AT-tdcspace.dk>
>Reply-To: habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>To: habermas-AT-yahoogroups.com, habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: HAB: Fwd: What does the felling of the monument mean?
>Date: Fri, 02 May 2003 11:36:09 +0200
>
>I believe some of you requested this article in an english translation.
>
>This was posted to the frankfurt-school list earlier today.
>
>Best regards,
>
>Claus
>
>
>
>
>>Translation of: "Was bedeutet der Denkmalsturz?" in: *Frankfurter
>>Allgemeine Zeitung*, 19.4.2003, p. 33.
>>hm
>>
>>******************************
>>Jrgen Habermas:
>>
>>*What does the felling of the monument mean? Let us not close our eyes
>>before this revolution in world affairs: the normative authority of
>>America lies shattered*
>>
>>
>>The whole world watched that scene on the 9th of April in Baghdad,
>>followed the American soldiers placing the noose around the neck of the
>>dictator, watched the tyrant being felled from his pedestal in a most
>>symbolic act, before a jubilant crowd. First the apparently immutable
>>monument wobbles, then it falls. Before it crashes liberatingly to the
>>ground, gravity has to overcome the grotesquely unnatural horizontal
>>position in which the massive figure, gently see-sawing up and down, is
>>poised for one last disturbing second. Like the perception of a
>>picture-puzzle 'flipping', so the public perception of the war seems to
>>switch with this image. The morally obscene spread of shock and fear
>>amongst a mercilessly bombarded, starved and helpless population
>>transforms itself on this day, in the Shiite quarter of Baghdad, in the
>>enthusiastically greeted liberation of citizens from terror and
>>repression. Both perceptions contain a kernel of truth, even if they
>>evoke contradictory moral feelings and attitudes. Must the emotional
>>ambivalence lead to contradictory judgments?
>>
>>On the face of it everything is clear-cut. An illegal war remains an
>>offence against international law even if it leads to consequences which
>>are normatively desirable. But is that the end of the story? Undesirable
>>consequences can negate a good intention. Couldn't perhaps favorable
>>consequences unfold, retrospectively, a legitimating influence? The mass
>>graves, the subterranean cells and the reports of the tortured leaves no
>>doubt about the criminal nature of the regime; and the liberation of a
>>tormented population from a barbaric regime is a high good, the highest
>>under the politically desirable goods. In this respect the Iraqis
>>pronounce, whether they celebrate, loot, suffer apathetically or
>>demonstrate against the occupiers, a judgment upon the moral nature of
>>the war.
>>
>>With us [in Germany] two kinds of reactions have become apparent in the
>>political sphere. The pragmatists believe in the normative power of the
>>factual and place their faith in a practical judgment which, with an eye
>>on the limitations which politics imposes on the realization of morality,
>>pays its respects to the fruits of victory. In their eyes carping about
>>the justification of the war is fruitless, since this has now become a
>>historical fact. The others, whether capitulating before the power of the
>>factual out of opportunism or out of conviction, brush what they hold to
>>be the dogma of international law aside with the argument that the latter
>>- full of post-heroic squeamishness against the risks and costs of
>>military force - refuses to acknowledge political freedom as the true
>>good. Both of these reactions are off the mark, since they give in to an
>>affect against the ostensible abstractions of a 'bloodless moralism'
>>without clarifying for themselves just what it is that the
>>neo-conservatives in Washington are offering as an alternative to the
>>domesticization of state force by international law. For the
>>neo-conservatives confront the morality of international law not with
>>realism or with the bathos of freedom but with a quite revolutionary
>>perspective: when international law fails then the politically successful
>>hegemonic enforcement of a liberal world order is morally justifiable
>>even when it seeks recourse to means which are indefensible in the light
>>of such international law. Wolfowitz is not Kissinger. He's much more a
>>revolutionary than a power-cynic. Certainly, the superpower reserves for
>>itself the right to act unilaterally - and bring to bear, if necessary,
>>even preventively, all available military means - to strengthen its
>>hegemonic position against possible rivals.  But global power ambition is
>>not an end in itself for the new ideologues. What distinguishes the
>>neo-conservatives from the school of the 'realists' is the vision of an
>>American world political order which has jumped the reformist rails of
>>the UN policies on human rights. It does not betray the liberal goals,
>>but it does break the civilizing bounds which the charter of the United
>>Nations placed with good reason upon the process of goal-realization. The
>>world organization is certainly not yet in a position, today, to force
>>deviant member states into offering their citizens a democratic and
>>rule-of-law based order. And the highly selectively pursued human rights
>>policies are subject to the proviso of implementability: the veto-power
>>Russia needs not fear an armed intervention in Chechnya. Saddam Hussein's
>>use of nerve gas against his own Kurdish population is but one of many
>>instances in the scandalous chronicle of the failure of the community of
>>nations, which looks the other way even in cases of genocide. All the
>>more important is hence the core function of peace-keeping, on which the
>>existence of the United Nations is based - i.e. the enforcement of the
>>ban on wars of aggression, with which, after World War II, the ius ad
>>bellum was abolished and the sovereignty of individual states curtailed.
>>
>>With that, classical international law had at least taken one decisive
>>step in the direction of a cosmopolitan legal order. The United States -
>>which for half a century could claim to be a pacemaker on this road -
>>has, with the Iraq war, not only destroyed this reputation and given up
>>the role of a guarantor power in international law; with its violation
>>thereof she sets future superpowers a disastrous example. Let's not kid
>>ourselves: America's normative authority lies shattered.
>>
>>Neither of the two conditions for a legally justifiable use of military
>>force was fulfilled: neither the situation of self-defense against an
>>actual or imminent attack, nor an authorized decision by the Security
>>Council in accordance with Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Neither
>>Resolution 1441 nor one of the seventeen preceding and ('used-up') Iraq
>>resolutions could count as sufficient authorization. Something which the
>>alliance of the war-willing confirmed performatively, for that matter, by
>>first of all seeking a 'second' resolution, and then withdrawing it when
>>it became clear that they would not be able to count even on the 'moral'
>>majority of the non-veto members. Finally the whole procedure was turned
>>into a farce by the President of the United States declaring repeatedly
>>that he would act, if necessary, without a mandate of the Security
>>Council. In the light of the Bush Doctrine the military build-up in the
>>Gulf lacked from the outset the character of a mere threat. This would
>>have presupposed the avertibility of the threatened sanctions. The
>>comparison with the intervention in Kosovo also offers no exoneration. It
>>is true that an authorization by the Security Council in this case was
>>not reached either. But the retrospectively obtained legitimation could
>>be based upon three circumstances: on the prevention - as it seemed at
>>the time - of an ethnic cleansing in the process of taking place, on the
>>imperative - covered by international law - of emergency assistance
>>holding erga omnes for this case, as well as the incontrovertibly
>>democratic and constitutional character of all the member states of the
>>ad hoc military alliance. Today the normative controversy is dividing the
>>West itself. Admittedly, a remarkable difference in the argumentative
>>strategies between the continental European and the Anglo-Saxon powers
>>had begun to manifest itself already then, in April of 1999. While the
>>one side drew from the disaster of Srebrenica the lesson that military
>>intervention was necessary to close the gap between efficacy and
>>legitimacy which earlier missions had revealed - to make headway in the
>>direction of a fully institutionalized world civil rights - the other
>>side was content with the goal of spreading its own liberal order
>>elsewhere in world, by force if necessary. At the time I ascribed this to
>>differences in the respective legal traditions - Kant's cosmopolitanism
>>on the one hand, John Stuart Mill's liberal nationalism on the other. But
>>in the light of the hegemonic unilateralism which the policy theorists of
>>the Bush Doctrine have been pursuing since 1991 - as Stefan Frhlich
>>showed in this newspaper on 10th April - one could surmise, with
>>hindsight, that the American delegation was already pursuing the
>>negotiations of Rambouillet from this novel perspective. Whether this is
>>true or not, George W. Bush's decision to consult the Security Council is
>>at any rate no longer based on a desire - internally long since regarded
>>as superfluous - for authorization by international law. This backing was
>>sought only because it could have increased support for the "Coalition of
>>the Willing" and allay reservations within the domestic population. At
>>the same time we should not read the new doctrine as an expression of
>>normative cynicism. Functions like that of the geo-strategic
>>consolidation of spheres of power and of resources which such a policy
>>may *also* fulfill may tempt one to adopt a critique-of-ideology
>>approach. But this conventional explanation trivializes the break -
>>inconceivable even a year-and-a-half ago - with the norms to which the
>>United States has been committed until now. We'd be well advised not to
>>spend time on a search for motives, but rather to take the new doctrine
>>at its word. Otherwise we'd misread the revolutionary character of a
>>re-orientation based on the historical experiences of the past century.
>>The historian Eric Hobsbawm quite rightly named the 20th "the American"
>>Century. The Neoconservatives could see themselves as the 'victors' and
>>regard the controversial successes - the reorganization of Europe and the
>>Pacific/South East Asian area after the defeat of Germany and Japan, as
>>well as the transformation of Eastern as well as Eastern and
>>Middle-European societies after the disintegration of the Soviet Union -
>>as a model for a new world order. From the point of view of a
>>liberalistically read post-histoire  la Fukuyama this model has the
>>advantage of being able to dispense with the complicated justification of
>>normative goals: what more could people possibly want than the world-wide
>>spread of liberal nations and the globalization of free markets? The road
>>hence is also clear: Germany, Japan and Russia have been forced to their
>>knees by war and the arms race. Military force is an all the more
>>attractive option today as in asymmetric wars the victor is in any case
>>an a priori certainty. Wars which improve the world require no further
>>justification. At the price of negligible collateral damage they remove
>>unambiguous evil, which under the aegis of a powerless community of
>>nations would otherwise persist. The Saddam falling from his pedestal is
>>the argument which suffices as justification.
>>
>>This doctrine was developed long before the terrorist attack on the Twin
>>Towers. The cleverly instrumentalized mass psychology of the shock of 11
>>September did however first of all create the climate within which this
>>doctrine could find broad support - if in a somewhat modified version,
>>that of the "War against Terrorism". That it should come to a head in the
>>Bush Doctrine is something it owes to the definition of a novel
>>phenomenon in the familiar concepts of conventional warfare. In the case
>>of the Taliban regime there was indeed a causal connection between a
>>terrorism difficult to pin down and an attackable 'rogue state'.
>>According to this model it is possible to adapt the classical conduct of
>>war between nations to deal with that treacherous danger posed by diffuse
>>and globally operating [terror-]networks. Compared to the original
>>version this connection of hegemonic unilateralism with defense against
>>an insidious danger mobilizes the additional argument of self-defense. At
>>the cost however of then being saddled with a a new burden of proof. The
>>American administration had to seek to convince world public opinion of
>>contacts between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida. This dis-information
>>campaign was for all that successful enough domestically for 60% of
>>Americans - according to the most recent opinion polls - to greet the
>>regime change in Iraq as "expiation" for the terrorist attack of 11th
>>September.
>>
>>But for the preventive use of military means the Bush Doctrine does not
>>really provide a plausible explanation. Since the para-statal violence of
>>the terrorists - the "war in peace" - is not graspable with the
>>categories of war between nations it doesn't ground in the least the need
>>to weaken the notion of national self-defense (strictly regulated in
>>international law) in the direction of preemptive military action.
>>Against the globally networked, decentralized and invisibly operating
>>enemies what is of use is prevention at a different operative level. Here
>>what is of use are not bombs and rockets, not airplanes and tanks, but
>>the internationally connected national intelligence- and police services;
>>the control of monetary channels, the tracking down of logistic
>>connections in general. The corresponding "security programs" impinge not
>>on international law but on nationally guaranteed civil rights. Other
>>dangers, arising from the failure (America's own fault) of a politics of
>>non-proliferation of ABC weapons is in any case more manageable through
>>negotiations than through wars of disarmament - as the reserved reaction
>>to North Korea shows. A doctrine concentrating on terrorism does not i.e.
>>provide, compared to the directly pursued goal of a hegemonic world
>>order, an increase in legitimacy. The Saddam felled from his pedestal
>>remains the argument - symbol for the liberal reorganization of an entire
>>region. The Iraq war is a link in the chain of a global politics which
>>justifies itself by claiming that it has replaced the unavailing Human
>>Rights policies of a used-up world organization. The United States takes
>>over as it were the mandate in which the United Nations failed. What's to
>>be said against this?
>>
>>Moral feelings can lead one astray, since they stick to individual
>>scenes, to specific images. There's no way of avoiding the question of
>>the justification of the war in general. The decisive controversy
>>revolves around the question whether justification in the light of
>>international law can and should be replaced by the unilateral global
>>politics of a self-empowering hegemon.
>>
>>The empirical objections to the feasibility of the American vision boil
>>down to the way world society has become too complex for it still to be
>>steerable from some central point, based on a politics of military force.
>>The fear of terrorism experienced by the technically highly-armed
>>superpower seems to express the Cartesian fear of a subject seeking to
>>turn itself and the world around it into an object, in order to bring
>>everything under control. It is a politics which, in the horizontally
>>connected media of the market and of communication, begins to fall
>>behind, regressing to the original Hobbesian primordiality of a
>>hierarchical security system. A nation which reduces all options to the
>>dumb alternatives of war and peace runs up against the limits of its own
>>organizational powers and resources. It also leads the negotiation with
>>competing powers and foreign cultures in false channels and pushes the
>>coordination costs to dizzying heights.
>>
>>Even if this hegemonic unilateralism were realizable it would still have
>>side-effects which would, by its own criteria, be morally undesirable.
>>The more political power manifests itself in the dimensions of military,
>>secret service and police, the more does it undermine itself - the
>>politics of a globally operating civilizing power - by endangering its
>>own mission of improving the world according to liberal ideas. In the
>>United States itself the permanent regime of a "War President" is already
>>undermining the foundations of the rule of law. Quite apart from the
>>practiced or tolerated torture methods beyond its borders, the war regime
>>is not only denying the prisoners of Guantnamo Bay the legal rights
>>conferred on them by the Geneva Convention. It confers powers on the
>>security services which encroach on the constitutional rights of its own
>>citizens.
>>
>>And what about the really counterproductive measures the Bush Doctrine is
>>likely to demand in case of the by no means unlikely scenario of the
>>citizens of Syria, Jordan, Kuwait and so on making unfriendly use of the
>>democratic rights which the American Government has so kindly made them a
>>present of? In 1991 the Americans liberated Kuwait - democratize it they
>>did not. Most of all it is the superpower's presumptuous trusteeship
>>which is criticized by its coalition partners, who are, for good
>>normative reasons, unconvinced by the unilateral leadership claim. There
>>was a time when Liberal Nationalism felt itself justified in propagating
>>the universal values of its own liberal order throughout the world, with
>>military backing where needed. This self-righteousness does not become
>>any more sufferable by it being ceded from the nation State to a
>>hegemonic power. It is the very universalistic core of democracy and
>>human rights itself which forbids its universal propagation by fire and
>>sword. The universalistic validity claim which the West associates with
>>its 'political core values' - i.e. with the procedure of democratic
>>self-determination and the vocabulary of human rights - may not be
>>confused with the imperial demand that the political life-form and
>>culture of a particular democracy, and be it the oldest, is to be
>>exemplary for all other societies. Of this order was the 'universalism'
>>of those ancient empires which perceived the world beyond their borders -
>>shimmering on a distant horizon - from the central perspectives of their
>>own world-views. The modern self-understanding is on the contrary marked
>>by an egalitarian universalism which insists on the de-centering of each
>>specific perspective; it requires the relativization of one's own
>>interpretive perspective from the point of view of the autonomous Other.
>>
>>It was American Pragmatism itself which made insight into that which was
>>good and just to all parties concerned dependent upon a reciprocal
>>acceptance of mutual perspectives. The reason upon which modern rational
>>law is based is not expressed in the validity of universal 'values'
>>capable of being owned, exported, and distributed globally. 'Values' -
>>including those for which one could expect global recognition - don't
>>hang in the air; they become binding only in the normative order and
>>practices of specific cultural forms of life.
>>
>>When in Nasiriya thousands of Shiites demonstrate against Saddam and the
>>American occupation, they bring to expression that non-Western cultures
>>must appropriate the universalistic content of human rights from within
>>their own resources and within an interpretation which can make a
>>convincing connection to local experiences and interests. For that reason
>>the multilateral formulation of a common purpose is not one option
>>amongst others - especially not in international relations. In its
>>self-chosen isolation even the good hegemon, presuming for itself
>>trusteeship in the name of the common good, has no way of knowing whether
>>the actions it claims to be in the interests of others is indeed equally
>>good for all. There is no meaningful alternative to the further
>>cosmopolitan development of an international system of law in which the
>>voices of all concerned are given an equal and reciprocal hearing.
>>
>>The world organization has not as yet suffered irreparable damage. Since
>>the 'smaller' members did not buckle under to the bullying of the larger
>>ones it has even grown in stature and influence. The reputation of the
>>world organization can be damaged only by its own actions: if it should
>>seek to 'heal' by compromise what cannot be healed.
>>
>>--
>>
>>   habhamaf-AT-f-m.fm
>
>____________________________________________________________________________
>"Hos mange mennesker er det allerede en uforskammethed, nr de siger 'jeg'" 
>(T.W. Adorno)
>
>
>
>
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