he castigated Chancellor Merkel and other European politicians for their national short-sightedness and inability to resolve the indebtedness of individual European states by upholding the principle of European solidarity in such a way that would consolidate the powers of European institutions and their democratic legitimacy at the same time. Since then, Habermas has espoused the idea of European control of national budgets, though arguing that coordination and overall approval should be in the hands of the European Parliament rather than the European Commission. The eurozone, he says, requires further political integration and caps on national powers in economic policy. Thus the deficit of democratic legitimacy at a national level should be counterbalanced not only by the overall economic stability of the eurozone, but also by stronger parliamentarism in the form of cooperation between national parliaments and the European Parliament. Habermas’s criticism of German and European policy, which favours investors and capital over citizens and democracy, should therefore result in the further weakening of the nation state and the transfer of decision-making powers to European institutions, whose democratic legitimacy is much weaker and largely mediated through the democratic procedures of the Union’s member states. Anyone familiar with Habermas’s intellectual development can see a change in his philosophical and political arguments that is nothing short of shocking. In 1962, the then 33-year-old Habermas published his doctorate work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which already contained one of the central pillars of his political philosophy, according to which late-capitalist society and its form of representative democracy are experiencing a systemic legitimation crisis. Habermas claims that this can be overcome only by the radical democratisation of the public sphere, based on free debate and the rational recognition of common arguments, which can restore humankind’s lost link to an authentic lifeworld 98 Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS276740
while yoking the expansive rationality of the economic, political or legal system. In the past three decades, Habermas has pitted discursive ethics steeped in free and equal civil discourse and in rules on communicative rationality against systemic rationality. On the outbreak of the European debt crisis, however, he performed a volte-face and now wants to see career politicians and economists take decisions in such a way that – through the systemic rationality of the economy and European political institutions – European solidarity, civil society and a democratic public sphere are eventually formed. But what if such solidarity is not created? Might we not end up with a European dictatorship engendering even greater animosity among the citizens of member countries than now?! Democratising debt will not resolve the impact that it has on citizens in the different EU countries. Nor can it resolve the economic asymmetries sparked by the introduction of the common currency, handing countries such as France and Germany the opportunity to pursue what has effectively been a dumping policy for their products, while governments in other countries, especially in the southern wing of the eurozone, embarked on the uncomplicated – but in the long run destructive – policy of running up debts so that their citizens could buy those products with a sense of rapidly growing affluence.
××× Rather than moving forward with further Europeanisation and watering down national democracies, in the current situation we must ask ourselves how Europe actually governs itself and how its governance intervenes in the political life of EU citizens. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Marquis de Condorcet, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, claimed that the new ruling class of the Modern Age of Reason would be those mastering the art of calculation and versed in economic sciences, industrial organisation and state administration. The new political sovereign was 99 Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS276740
to be calculemus, a method of governance relying on profitability, statistics, systemic analysis, organisational techniques and expert knowledge. Monarchs with their bureaucracy were to be replaced by independent experts able to take decisions without succumbing to personal or parochial interests. This view was also adopted by Condorcet’s pupil, Saint-Simon, according to whom scientists and industrialists make up the productive classes in the new industrial society taking over the reins of power from the old “metaphysical” professions of lawyers and career politicians. Political government, according to Saint-Simon and others, was to be transformed into the scientifically managed self-governance of society. Political reason was to give way to administrative reason, which was supposedly able to rationally organise the life of society and satisfy human needs far better than any form of political government, including democracy. The German sociologist Max Weber considered bureaucracy an inescapable consequence of the modernisation of society, but in this context he also mentioned the “new servitude” and “benevolent feudalism” that might evolve from such a bureaucratically rational government. Modern rationalisation paradoxically increases the antagonisms between the various systems of values, so the universal rule of reason eventually falls apart and an age of “new polytheism” is ushered in. And Weber rounds off this description of the cultural contradictions of modernity with a Nietzschean vision of the “last people”, who will be “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart”. Today’s Europe lives in Condorcet’s shadow of calculemus and under the diktat of Weber and Nietzsche’s last people – specialists! If we look at the origins and causes of today’s Greco-European stasis, we can see that this is about so much more than political corruption in a medium-sized European nation with a dysfunctional economy and a state that has thus far been driven by cronyism, not democracy. The overall way in which modern European society – 100 Ukázka elektronické knihy