There is a new story in Der Spiegel about Habermas and his continuing theoretical project of democratizing the European Union.
All he offers is the kind of vision that a constitutional theorist is capable of formulating: The “global community” will have to sort it out. In the midst of the crisis, he still sees “the example of the European Union’s elaborated concept of a constitutional cooperation between citizens and states” as the best way to build the “global community of citizens.”
Reading this, I could not shake the comparison of Habermas to past European philosophers like Hermann Cohen or Edmund Husserl, who on the eves of the most devastating conflicts the world had seen up till then, tried to articulate a notion of a united Europe held together by a common civilization.
