The theory of communicative action

Abstract

Final chapters in Between Facts and Norms signal Habermas’ growing persuasion that processes of economic globalization could undermine the capacities of the nation state as a political centre. He admits that these trends presage conditions that require us to radically rethink the future of democracy. The public sphere will have to outgrow the institutions of politically enfeebled nation states to catch up with galloping economic globalization. A new cosmopolitan agenda will need to be elaborated and an institutional imagination developed that might allow the problem interpreting and solving functions of the modern public sphere to migrate out into structures with a trans-national jurisdiction. Yet in the work of the early 1990s, the task of globalizing the public sphere remains a shadowy thought that only gains substance and clarification in later writings. In a series of major essays published since, Habermas has outlined the urgency of the project of building a global public sphere. He does not underestimate the challenge and does not ignore the adverse signs. The structural violence of a world divided into haves and have-nots, into winners and losers, constitutes a real attack on any hopes for the ‘perpetual peace’ of a cosmopolitan polity. However, Habermas insists that a global public sphere offers the only way forward and is persuaded that there are reasons to believe that this utopian aspiration is still worth investing in. He puts his faith in our abilities to learn from the turbulent histories of the democratic nation states what needs to be done to forge cosmopolitan ties in a dangerous world. His particular hopes are invested in the contemporary progress of European nation states towards political integration achieved peacefully and multilaterally, by negotiations and without militarism.