By Jurgen Habermas
The crucial issue of dissent is whether justification through international law can, and should, be replaced by the unilateral, world-ordering politics of a self-appointed hegemon.
HOBSBAWM RIGHTLY named the 20th century the "American century". Neo-conservatives can see themselves as `victors' and can take undisputed successes - the re-ordering of Europe and the Pacific after the surrender of Germany and Japan, as well as the reformulation of Eastern and Central Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union - as the model for a new world order, all carried out under the leadership of the United States. From the liberal perspective of a post-histoire, a la Fukuyama, this model has the advantage of making laborious and awkward discussions of normative goals pointless: what could possibly be better for the people than the worldwide spread of liberal states and the globalisation of free markets? Moreover, the road there is clearly marked: Germany, Japan and Russia were forced to their knees by war and the arms race. In today's era of asymmetric warfare, military might is now more attractive than ever, since the victor is determined a priori and can purchase victory with relatively few victims. Wars that make the world better need no further justification. Saddam Hussein pulled from his pedestal is a sufficient argument for justification.
This doctrine was developed long before the terror attack on the twin towers. The cleverly manipulated mass psychology of the all-too understandable shock of September 11 certainly helped create the initial climate in which the new doctrine could find widespread support - now in a rather different, more potent version, intensified by the addition of a "war against terrorism". This intensification of the Bush Doctrine depends on defining an essentially new phenomenon in the terms of conventional warfare. In the case of the Taliban regime, there was a causal connection between an elusive terrorism and a "rogue state" - an enemy that could be attacked and seized.
As opposed to the doctrine's original version, this connection between hegemonic unilateralism and doing battle against a creeping threat introduces the argument for self-defence. But this also imposes new burdens of proof. The U.S. had to try to convince a global public sphere of contacts between Saddam Hussein and the Al-Qaeda. Apart from the difficulty of the lack of evidence, the Bush Doctrine does not even offer a plausible explanation for the preventive use of military force.
In the face of enemies who are globally networked, decentralised, and invisible, the only effective kinds of prevention will be on other operative levels. Neither bombs nor rockets, neither fighter jets nor tanks will be of any help. What will help is the international networking of flows of information among intelligence services and prosecutorial authorities, the control of flows of money and the rooting out of logistical supplies.
The addition of a war on terrorism to the original doctrine therefore offers no new legitimacy for the pursuit of a hegemonic world order. Saddam Hussein pulled from his pedestal remains the argument: a symbol for a new liberal order for an entire region. The war in Iraq is a link in the chain bringing about a new world order, justifying itself with the claim that it replaces the futile human rights politics of an exhausted world organisation. What is speaking against it? Moral feelings lead us astray because they attach to individual scenes and particular images. There is no way to avoid the question of how to justify the war as a whole. The crucial issue of dissent is whether justification through international law can, and should, be replaced by the unilateral, world-ordering politics of a self-appointed hegemon.
Empirical objections to the possibility of realising the American vision converge in the thesis that global society has become far too complex; the world is no longer accessible to a centralised control, through politics backed up by military power. In the technologically supreme and heavily armed superpower's fear of terrorism, one can sense a "Cartesian anxiety" - the fear of a subject trying to objectify both itself and the world around it; trying to bring everything under control. Politics loses its primacy over the horizontally networked media of both markets and of communication once it attempts to regress to the original, Hobbesian form of a hierarchical security system. A state that sees all its options reduced to the stupid alternatives of war or peace quickly runs up against the limits of its own organisational capacities and resources. It also steers the process of political and cultural negotiation down a false track, and drives the costs of coordination to dizzying heights.
But even if the design for a politics of hegemonic unilateralism could be implemented, it would generate side-effects that are undesirable according to its own normative criteria. The more that political power (understood in its role as a global civilising force) is exercised in the dimensions of the military, secret security services and police, the more it comes into conflict with its own purposes, endangering the mission of improving the world according to the liberal vision. In the U.S. itself, the administration of a perpetual "wartime president" is already undermining the foundations of the rule of law.
Above all, however, the American superpower's self-proclaimed role of trustee runs up against the objections of its own allies, who remain unconvinced on good normative grounds of its paternalistic claim to unilateral leadership. There was a time when liberal nationalism saw itself justified in promulgating the universal values of its own liberal order, with military force if necessary, throughout the entire world. This arrogance does not become any more tolerable when it is transferred from nation-states to a single hegemonic state. It is precisely the universalistic core of democracy and human rights that forbids their unilateral realisation at gunpoint. The universal validity claim that commits the West to its "basic political values", that is, to the procedure of democratic self-determination and the vocabulary of human rights, must be confused with the imperialist claim that the political form of life and the culture of a particular democracy - even the oldest one - is exemplary for all societies.
The "universalism" of the old empires was of this sort, perceiving the world beyond the distant horizon of their borders only from the centralising perspective of their own worldview. Modern self-understanding, by contrast, has been shaped by an egalitarian universalism that requires a decentralisation of one's own perspective. The "reason" of modern rational law does not consist of universal "values" that one can own like goods, and distribute and export throughout the world. "Values" - including those that have a chance of winning global recognition - do not come from thin air. They win their binding force only within normative orders and practices of particular forms of cultural life. If thousands of Shias in Nasiriya demonstrate in equal measure against both Saddam Hussein and the American occupation, they express the truth that non-Western cultures must appropriate the universalistic content of human rights from their own resources and in their own interpretation, one that will construct a convincing connection to local experiences and interests.
And this is why multilateral will-formation in inter-state relations is not simply one option among others. From its self-chosen isolation, even the good hegemon, having appointed itself the trustee of general interests, cannot know whether what it maintains is in the interest of others to do is, in fact, equally good for all. There is no sensible alternative to the ongoing development of international law into a cosmopolitan order that offers an equal and reciprocal hearing for the voices of all those affected. The world organisation of the U.N. has so far not suffered truly significant damage. Insofar as the "small" member-states on the Security Council refused to buckle under pressure from the larger states, it has even gained in regard and influence. The reputation of the world organisation can suffer only self-inflicted damage: if it were to try, through compromises, to "heal" what cannot be healed.