Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays

The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays

Jurgen Habermas
Reviewed by By G. John Ikenberry
March/April 2002
Print Email
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.
Jurgen Habermas
MIT Press
2001
216 pp.
0262582066
$21.95

The renowned German philosopher Habermas has spent his career articulating a universalist vision of political life. He has long advocated a "postnational" Germany where shared identity is attached to nonterritorial values of constitutionalism and democratic rights. Humans possess a rational capacity to reason and communicate, he believes, and therefore they can come to agreement on the basic institutions of law, values, and politics. In this book, he turns to the dynamics of globalization and welcomes the declining relevance of the nation-state. But Habermas is not an unalloyed optimist. Globalization alone does not contain the seeds of a better political order, he writes, and democracy may not necessarily survive a "postnational" world. Habermas is at his best in elaborating the dilemmas and ambiguities inherent in modernization. But he is less clear on how popular sovereignty and the collective will of global citizenry can take shape in a stateless world.

And his view that transnational networks of communication, nongovernment organizations, and popular political movements can legitimately underpin popular rule and global solidarity is problematic at best.

Related

Essay, Oct 1971
The Berlin Blockade and the Use of the United Nations
Philip C. Jessup

With the tentative accord on the status of Berlin achieved by the envoys of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France in August it appears that this cause of contention may finally be put to rest. Agreement has been a long time in coming.

Read
Essay, Special 1983
Europe and America in 1983
Christoph Bertram

The surface was all smiles and harmony. After years of transatlantic distress, the major nations of the democratic West assembled in May in the splendor of Colonial Williamsburg to manifest their unity and their confidence. There were two new faces among the seven heads of state and government, both symbols of a significant political change in their respective countries: West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who had replaced Helmut Schmidt in October 1982 and whose party, the Christian Democrats, had just been confirmed by a massive popular vote on March 6, and Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, the leader of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party and government who, in striking contrast to his predecessors, articulated a newly confident, internationally minded Japan.

Read
Essay, Jan 1972
East Germany between Moscow and Bonn
Robert Gerald Livingston

Seventeen months of intricate negotiation involving the four powers responsible for Germany, the two German states and the North Atlantic and Warsaw Treaty alliances have finally yielded a Berlin agreement. It is the first major East-West accord in Europe since the Austrian State Treaty in 1955 and suggests that old-fashioned diplomacy still has its virtues. The agreement's provisions, which are far better than Western foreign offices dared hope when the negotiations began, regulate the thorniest aspects of the Berlin problem, notably the access issue. But they do not solve the problem in the sense of establishing a new status for the city. Indeed, whether the agreement holds up at all depends on whether the present détente in Europe continues. Experience with Soviet policy has taught that this is not predictable. One result is, however, certain: the agreement compels the West to come fully to terms soon with the second German state. The German Democratic Republic is becoming, as Alice might put it, permanenter and permanenter.

Read