In his latest offering, The Lure of Technocracy, Jüregen Habermas argues for Europe to continue working towards a closer political union based upon a discourse-theoretical model of politics. Elizabeth Folan O’Connor writes that this model can help the continent reach a ‘place where the all the nations of Europe stand alongside each other as equals in a democratically legitimate political union as opposed to creditor and debtor member states of a dysfunctional monetary union’

Folan O'Connor, Elizabeth

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07/08/2015Book Review: The Lure of Technocracyblogs.lse.ac.uk /lsereviewofbooks/2015/08/07/book-review-the-lure-of-technocracy/In his latest offering, The Lure of Technocracy, Jüregen Habermas argues for Europe to continueworking towards a closer political union based upon a discourse-theoretical model of politics. Elizabeth FolanO’Connor writes that this model can help the continent reach a ‘place where the all the nations of Europe standalongside each other as equals in a democratically legitimate political union as opposed to creditor and debtormember states of a dysfunctional monetary union’.The Lure of Technocracy. Jürgen Habermas. Polity Press.2015.With a fragmenting European Union (EU) threatening to unravelall progress to date, Jürgen Habermas’s latest book, The Lureof Technocracy, the third book in a series, explores a crisis-stricken EU as it struggles to deal with the banking andsovereign debt crisis in the aftermath of the global financialcollapse of 2008. Beginning with an analysis of the structuraldesign flaws that made the EU vulnerable to crisis, the first twosections of the book explore the obstacles that threaten theproject, and a pathway for moving closer towards politicalunification via the transnationalisation of democracy.From the perspective of the philosophy of law, Habermas seesthe main obstacles facing the EU today as a crisis of legitimacy.Arguing against a retreat back to the defensive position of thenation state that other leading European intellectuals prescribe,including Wolfgang Streeck, Habermas makes a case forEurope to continue working towards closer political union.Fearing the ‘abject spectacle of a capitalist world societyfragmented along national lines’, the only way forward is toprogress beyond what is, in effect, a monetary union designedby elites towards a democratically-legitimate supranationalpolitical union of equal states and equal peoples legitimised notonly in law, but by a rational and robust European publicsphere.Key to achieving this in the short term, according to Habermas, will require elevating the European Parliament to thesame status as the Council. It will also require Germany to accept short- and medium-term negative redistributiveeffects in its long-term interests, and for the UK to vote to stay the course. All of which will require the braveleadership similar in scope to the kind Churchill demonstrated after the Second World War.The longer-term, however, will require a monumental leap of faith from politicians, political parties and citizens aliketo move beyond the loss of decision making power that has them paradoxically clinging firmly to traditional notions ofthe nation state (and its porous borders) towards a higher level, constitutional process. What Habermas prescribesis nothing short of a philosophical recalibration of the politics of the left and the right, something that will requiremoving beyond the politics of divide towards a discourse-theoretical model of governance that acknowledges thelegitimacy of both.With this, Habermas advances an argument first developed in Between Facts & Norms (1992) as a way to bridge1/3the gap between the two conceptions of political theory that have divided politics ever since the first Frenchassembly took their seats according to their differing opinions about the demise of the ancien regime – those on theright of the assembly seeking to preserve the republican rule of law (the ‘ancients’) and those on the left seeking toembrace progressive liberal democracy (the ‘moderns’). Bridging this divide will require each to acknowledge thelegitimacy of both via a discourse-theoretical model of politics that does ‘justice to the intuition that democracy andthe rule of law are co-original’. If Europe is to succeed in progressing towards a closer political union, Europeanpoliticians, political parties and peoples will have to realise that the ancient rule of law and modern democracy are infact, ‘co-original’ and not left versus right, ancient versus modern, republican rule of law versus liberal democracy,but both at the same time, buoyed by the informed discourse of a rational public sphere. It will require a solidarity,Habermas argues, that is closer to the original meaning of fraternité, before processes of modernization hollowedout the idea and led to class antagonisms.Image Credit: EU Flagga, MPD01605. Flickr. CC-BY-SA 2.0.It may take a good deal of commitment, transparency and leadership in an age when access to information (andmisinformation) is only a click away, but for Habermas, only the discourse-theoretical model of politics can helpmember states move beyond the politics of divide. This argument continues one of the most enduring threads in hisintellectual life: the call for the nation states of Europe to embrace historical progress by continuing, not abandoning,a model of global governance derived from Kant’s cosmopolitanism, which is predicated on the assumption thatindividual and political ‘basic rights’, on which democratic constitutions are founded, also apply to states andorganisations across national borders. From this core conception, only when a constitutionally-legitimatesupranational European political union of equals transcends its differences will an invigorated EU take a strongerand more coherent role in dealing with the problems facing world societies today.Although a ‘translingual citizenship uniting such a variety of different languages is a novelty’, Habermas argues thatEuropeans already share the principles and values of largely overlapping political cultures. He reasserts his view ofthe importance of the public sphere in the processes of legitimation. A European-wide political communication withina rational and robust public sphere will help it abandon the ‘institutionally-frozen picture of the constitutional state’because it will help us all see that there are certain issues that transcend the individual, culture and the nation state.We can already see the beginning of what this might look like as Manual Castells’ idea of the global public spheredemonstrates how individuals all over the world are beginning to coalesce arguments around similar themes, suchas inequality, global warming and human rights.Although it will be no small feat to move beyond over 30 years of embedded neoliberal capitalist organisation that2/3sees member states categorised according to creditworthiness, in many ways there is no alternative – one onlyneeds to have witnessed the impact of the banking crisis on some of Europe’s weakest members to see that thecosts of failure are too great, that Habermas is right when he says that renouncing the difficult work of closerEuropean unification will in the long-term mean turning our backs on world history, and, in particular, social gainsand normative achievements of the democratic state are under pressure as much from a resurgent Russia as theyare from global capitalism.With this book, Jürgen Habermas, philosopher, social theorist and leading European intellectual, outlines the mainobstacles dividing Europe so that it may continue the ‘civilizational achievements’ it managed to forge out of theruins of the Second World War, to reach a place where the all the nations of Europe stand alongside each other asequals in a democratically legitimate political union as opposed to creditor and debtor member states of adysfunctional monetary union. But don’t just take Habermas’s word for it—as he cites in the preface to this edition,Churchill himself made the case for ‘a kind of United States of Europe’ in a speech he gave at the University ofZurich on 19 September 1946, asking a question that might be asked again today: ‘Why should there not be aEuropean group which could give a sense of enlarged patriotism and common citizenship to the distracted people ofthis turbulent and mighty continent?’Elizabeth Folan O’Connor, PhD, MSc, BA, is an assistant lecturer in the School of Applied Social Studies atUniversity College Cork, Ireland.Copyright 2013 LSE Review of Books3/3

Book review: the lure of technocracy

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