Page 84 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere Since Structural Transformation 79

same’ people, makes subjects into citizens of a single political community –
into members who can feel responsible for one another … The counterexample
of the United States does demonstrate that the nation-state can assume and
maintain a republican form even without the support of such a culturally
homogeneous population. However, in this case, a civil religion rooted in
the majority culture took the place of nationalism. 69

Today, as is well known, the nation state is under immense strain from
the increasingly global flows of capital, media, people, hazards and

technologies. Under such conditions, the politics of ethnonationalism
have been in defensive ascendency. Rather than condemn the nation
state as wholly redundant or regressive, though, Habermas reminds
us of its ambivalence:

Though the nation-state is today running up against its limits, we can still
learn from its example. In its heyday, the nation-state founded a domain
of political communication that made it possible to absorb the advances in
abstraction of societal modernization and to re-embed a population uprooted
from traditional forms of life in an extended and rationalised lifeworld
through the cultivation of national consciousness. 70

This may look like a strategically glib reading of history. But the
point is that Habermas wants to rescue the republican kernel that
at least idealistically underscored the emergence of the nation state,
namely a political culture that is capable of including and drawing
upon a large, complex citzenry in all its diversity. The point is to
think this through at institutional levels other than that of the nation
state, including regions, supranational bodies such as the European
Union, and cosmopolitan arrangements that allow for citizens to
begin to ‘belong’ to the hitherto phantasmagoric global political
communities in whose name institutions from the UN to Amnesty
International frequently purport to speak. It means challenging the
cultural patriotism of the popular media; it means imagining ways
in which the European legislature (rather than executive) could
be rendered more powerful and accountable simultaneously; it
means imagining a cosmopolitan order in which the membership,
representation and accountability of supranational institutions could

be mediated through filters other than the nation state, including
non-governmental institutions that are themselves made more
accountable than at present; it means much more besides. If all this
sounds ridiculously idealistic or simplistic, we should remember that

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