Well, I tried a little criticism of the venerable Jurgen on the Nabermas list when this article came out. Got spat at a little bit, but no worthwhile debate ensued, I'm afraid. Anyway, here's my response of the time (early June):
I don't think 'war' is discursively useful terminology, btw. As what happened on the Basra Road was not 'war', neither is Novi Sad or Belgrade 'war'. It is destruction and it is killing - but all in one direction. War denotes effective fighting between at least two parties, no?
You also write:
>I think the question of how to "use" Habermas's theory for political
>purposes is itself highly questionable in light of Habermas's longstanding
>insistence that substantive political positions cannot be derived from
>philosophically justified procedures. Habermas's political writings are
>unavoidably informed by his philosophical views, but here he does not
>write as a "real expert in morals" as Rippert snidely puts it.
And I mostly agree. Rippert's shot is a cheap one, but not wholly empty. Habermas is deploying status/authority here. An arrogantly normative article, for mine (my German is just projected Dutch, so I'll remember this call if apologies turn out to be warranted later on). Now to Rippert's article:
Rippert: "What is most noticeable here as well, is that reality is completely left out. The professor is not interested in questions about the origins of the war-the real reasons why 19 NATO states are reducing a small country to ruins and terrorising the population, by means of a relentless bombardment that makes use of the most modern weapons. He simply repeats the war propaganda that the bombing is a "punitive military action against Yugoslavia" which became unavoidable following the collapse of Rambouillet. Its supposed aim is "to ensure a liberal resolution of Kosovar autonomy inside Serbia".
Me: Rippert goes to my main problem here. Habermas spends no time on what actually happened. To disbelieve NATO 'facts' and their 'statement of intent' is to be bracketed out of this argument altogether. Where's the 'dialogue free from domination' here? Where's his 'truth = warranted assertibility' I appreciate that many here would like to avoid too much investigation of the tediously empirical, and that's a norm I shall try to observe, but this represents a constraint on useful discussion, no?
A contextual note, though: German authorities investigated in February and explicitly and repeatedly found no 'ethnic cleansing' - I've sources, but let's leave this for now. Even NATO came up with a figure of 2000 dead in the year up to to March '99. They've killed that many civvies themselves - and the 2000 killed by Serb militias weren't all civvies - and 5000 soldiers [many of 'em conscripts] as well! None of this is to be read as a defence of that unconscionable opportunist, Milsosevic, either.
Rippert: "In better times, Habermas, resting on Hegel, spoke about form and content, and pointed out that the form of a social development is moulded by its content, and that form is essential. What then must be deduced from the brutal form of this war about its aims and content? Here the good professor remains silent."
Me: I can't pass comment, because Rippert says it so well! Nineteen of the world's richest and most powerful countries attack a small country - assuming a right found neither in law nor conscience, a right that makes might right everywhere. And the power isn't all tomahawks and cluster bombs - it's PR, too. I'd have thought the role of PR in this (and I've sources there, too) might be of interest to a man who trades on the foundational significance of communication. Habermas swallows the PR releases, thus bypassing the job of interrogating content. As form, strategic bombing has been known since 1944 to be 'problematic', and, in this particular case, to be categorically counter-productive (never mind, the question of strategic timing that has long concerned Robert Fisk).
So, whatever the content, the form alone generates questions (not that I recommend ever looking at form alone). Milo's still in the chair (but then, there are plenty worse than he in that elite), A couple of hundred thousand Albanian Kosovars won't be in their homes by winter, and German and British capital are falling over themselves to win the contracts to rebuild what they destroyed - contracts let by international finance agencies through which control of the region is entrenched (that and an occupying army). Add US strategic concerns vis a volatile and unpredictable Russia. Not the sort of stuff we discuss on this list, but just possibly a hint at the content underpinning the form, eh?
Rippert: "The more the reality of the war belies the propaganda, the more professor Habermas raises the debate to the level of complete abstraction-as if abstract terms had taken up arms. According to his Communication Theory, the warmongers and opponents are on the same level. In his eyes, both are pacifists. "conscientious pacifists", on the one hand, and "legal pacifists" on the other. And both can marshal good arguments. The "legal pacifists" orient towards international law and condemn the war because it contravenes international law, just as it contravenes the constitutional proscription on wars of aggression. The "conscientious pacifists" make human rights their starting point and legitimise the war as a humanitarian intervention "preventing crimes against humanity".
Me: Again, a strategic and exclusionary narrowing of the debate. I'm neither a legal nor conscientious pacifist on this (more 'anti-imperial domination' at the macro level, and 'anti-strategic bombing' at the micro) The US government kills more people than anyone else - has done for years. Clinton says 'sorry' to 100000 Guatamalan corpses, and that's okay - didn't he start his presidency with the Ricky Rector outrage, and didn't he take the electorate's mind off his pecker by killing half a dozen innocent Sudanese factory workers (please, correct me if I'm wrong). The US government killed as many in a week in Panama than Serb militias killed in a year (up to March - after all, what happened after that was as much to do with NATO as anybody else) ... 700000 dead Iraqis - Christ, but the list is a long one! 'Conscientious pacifists'? Some want those murderers up against a wall! 'Legal pacifist'? If the law allows the US government to kill with impunity, we should reject it! Here Habermas promotes the world's salient murderers of the last thirty years as the guarantors of a peace and democratic discourse! Where's the critical reflection in that? Where's the content!? Whither the individual-entity-in-'co-origination'-with-the-whole that *BFN* implied should underpin the new world society?
Rippert paraphrases Habermas: "For the first time, the German government is taking human rights seriously. "Direct membership in an association of world citizens would even protect national subjects against the arbitrary actions of their own government." The war should be "understood as an armed peace-enforcing mission, authorised by the international community (even without a UN mandate)." It represents "a step on the path from the classical international law of nations towards the cosmopolitan law of a world civil society"."
Me: No it bloody doesn't! A 'classical' realist international relations account presents a picture very different from that fed to us by Habermas, but you've not refuted it by simply drawing another picture! And where's the empirical evidence that there has been even so much as a trend in this direction? Or that this is what's happening here?
Habermas waxes lyrical on form without any regard for content. Why should it be 'understood as an armed peace-enforcing mission'? Honestly now, where's the prospect for peace in ANY of this? Never mind the mass-killing done in its execution; I'm asking in what way has peace been served in the foreseeable future? There's MORE fear and loathing, MORE weaponry in the society - local power relations have changed a little, that's all. Couldn't have been any other way. And won't be. Peace had a better chance in February! And what's so good about a civil society? An aggregate of individual entities where the powerful politely and legally fleece the powerless - a form whose content is hegemonic domination - THAT'S civil society! How do we fit discourse into THAT? Where's emancipation? Where's the Habermas of yore, ferchrissakes?
Rippert: "Such hocus-pocus is employed to obscure the simple fact that a little country is being terrorised by a coalition of imperialist great powers, in order to establish a type of NATO protectorate in Kosovo."
Me: In what way is that claim significantly wrong?
Rippert: "This theoretician would have us believe that NATO terror will produce a democratic world civil society."
Me: Indeed explicitly says that we 'should' do so. Moot definitions of 'civil society' aside, how on earth does Habermas see this coming about? The act was undemocratic, it was about choosing sides (neither of which was the Albanian Kosovars - before this year, the KLA was a marginal and foreign-supplied outfit, whose views were roundly rejected by Kosovars at the election that put Rugova in), it was about exacerbating fear and loathing, it was about lying, and it was about a proposed treaty no-one could have accepted (indeed Serbia rejected one just like it in 1914 - you might remember). Building your hopes on foundations like that is a recipe for frustration and disillusionment.
Rippert: "But where, pray tell, were the citizens themselves consulted about this? Where have they agreed to it? Do the Serbs not also belong to this "world civil society"?
Me: An inane argument according to Vic (whose posts, incidentally, I usually admire very much). Why inane, Vic?
We're killing people on the grounds that their political system does not serve them as a rational model of discourse, will-formation and coordinated action would have it serve them. This we do in the name of a new world order (or so H would have it), logically pursued every bit as much in their name as anyone else's. If they want this, too - why kill 'em?
If they don't want it - how does an undemocratic force get the moral or logical legitimation to bomb them for not wanting it? What happened to the Habermas who wrote *Justification and Application*? Remember that stuff about incommensurable 'individual self-descriptions' and the concomitant need for agreeing to disagree? That was the sort of stuff Rugova used to say, and there's acknowledgement for it in the Yugoslav constitution. But now, the Serbs have been painted as 'Hitler-like' for their counter-insurgencies [and some autonomously local outrages I do not deny] where the disagreement to disagree was with the equally belligerent KLA [NOT the Albanian-Kosovar people as a whole], but NATO is heroic for its devastation of Serbia, where MOST of those immediately concerned were [effectively necessarily in peaceful fashion] disagreeing with them! Where's the respect for the 'lifeworld' category in that? Where's the bleeding obvious, and very Habermasian, notion that democracy and peace depend on how we handle the confontation between the one and the all? Does universalistic morality meet the particular form of life halfway here? Probably not a fair question, as Habermas never really tells us what he meant by this or its constituent terms (Well, not in 'Morality and Ethical Life', anyway).
There seems no room for the 'one' in Habermas's cherished new world order at all! Given its birth, it could only be a Pax Americana, after all (too materialistic an analysis for some here, I'm sure - but that is where my initial outrage at Habermas's argument came from, after all).
Rippert: "The arguments of this social philosopher recall the comments of an American general in the Vietnam War, who justified the torching of a village by saying it had to be destroyed in order to be"saved."
Me: Goes back to my earlier rant about the 'virtues' of strategic bombing, a course of action that can only kill indiscriminately, does not defeat morale, does not unseat rulers, and does lay the environment waste for years to come. It is never the tool of saviours.
Rippert: "As democratic legitimisation of the war, Habermas cites the "19 undoubtedly democratic states" of the NATO coalition. "The 'air attacks' have so lowered Habermas's democratic standards, that even Turkey is raised to the level of an 'undoubtedly democratic state'," commented Josef Lang in the Swiss weekly Wochenzeitung on May 20."
Me: Lang nails this absolutely unbelievable claim beautifully. What on earth has happened to Jurgen? Is Rippert's vulgar 'being determines consciousness' line on this the best answer on offer?
Too tired to waffle on any more (no bad thing, I'm sure).
Cheers, Rob.