Juergen Habermas at a discussion in Munich, 2007. Wikicommons/ Wolfram Huke. Some rights reserved. After Brexit and with the prospect of a second referendum in Scotland, and Catalunya demanding independence too, it has proven hard to return to normal. It is not so much the legal wrangling that should worry us. Rather we are forced to re-think a much more fundamental question. Do our traditional sociological and political concepts still have value? Do they still conceptualise what they pretend to conceptualise? Take a closer look at the recent work of one of Europe’s strongest advocates, Jürgen Habermas, and it seems that sociological concepts that once had great significance are now perhaps more of a hindrance to our understanding, particularly when the idea of Europe is reduced to a mere Hegelian trope, or worse, a kind of political theology.
Assuming entropy
Almost three years ago the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported an exchange that took place at Princeton University (“Demokratie kommt ohne Völker aus”, “Democracy doesn’t need peoples”, FAZ, 7 May 2014). Princeton seemed the ideal place for Jürgen Habermas to make some tentative suggestions of how to reform European institutions to suit our changed conditions and make decision-making in the new EU more legitimate and presumably more democratic. Habermas floated the idea of creating a European government that would be directly responsible to, and controlled by, a Congress-like new bicameral system. What came as a surprise to the Princeton audience was less the idea of empowering the European Parliament – similar ideas have been voiced before − as the suggestion that a European equivalent to the US Senate should be created to which the European Council of Ministers would be directly responsible. According to Habermas, the advantage would be that each nation state that is a member of the EU would be on an equal footing, independent of its population size, thereby forming a counterweight to the first chamber or House in which the size of the population of each nation state and member would still matter.
Some of the academics present in the audience, most outspokenly amongst them the intellectual historian Jonathan Israel, challenged Habermas on a number of counts: Who would send the equivalent of two senators to this newly formed European body? Would it be nation states or peoples? What would happen to those European nations and peoples who were without a state, such as Scotland for example? What would happen to those European nations and peoples who were without a state, such as Scotland for example?
