Page 83 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

78 Jürgen Habermas

localised narratives of what it means to live a good life? And to what
extent can we get beyond seeing the nation state functioning as the
natural host for such patriotisms?
But more unsettling is the sense that precisely this trope is already
the currency of a noxious globalism that has come to prominence
since (but certainly did not begin with) the catastrophic events of
September 2001. The clash of two fundamentalisms pits a politics of
religion against a religion of politics. The US President and his British
assistant assert precisely the patriotism of a ‘way of doing things’
(constitutional democracy and the norms of capitalist globalisation)
which is supposedly colour blind, inclusive, international and
ethnically neutral, against their ideological opponents. Rather than
sidestepping Habermas’s formulation as a potentially dangerous
apologia for a smug and aggressive ‘end of ideology’ globalism, a more
productive response would be to see how it could be used to orient a
thoroughgoing critique of a mythologised constitutional patriotism,
something even more urgent now than at the time Habermas was
formulating his ideas.
But Habermas does not intend the term to serve only as ideology
critique in the negative sense. He’s seeking a positive basis upon which
new bonds of solidarity might emerge between people who wish to
retain diverse cultural identities. The term ‘constitutional patriotism’,
however linguistically vexed, can be productive in engaging with
contemporary challenges of cultural politics and political culture. The

first merit is precisely that it pushes us into thinking beyond the nation
state. In The Inclusion of the Other, Habermas traces something of the
prehistory and modern emergence of the nation state, acknowledging
an ongoing tension, stretching back through the Middle Ages and
the Roman Empire, between civic and ethnic narratives of political
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community. The achievement of the modern nation state was to
facilitate societal integration and solidarity between strangers at a
time when world-views were fracturing, societies were becoming
more complex, and people were becoming more mobile.
But nation states have emerged as deeply ambivalent entities
that have seen rights of membership paternalistically conferred on
citizens through the construction of various shades of Volksnation
narrative that project an artificial sense of homogeneity and
common descent:

only a national consciousness, crystallised around the notion of a common
ancestry, language and history, only the ‘consciousness’ of belonging to ‘the

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