What does the felling of the monument mean?

[habhamaf]

Translation of: "Was bedeutet der Denkmalsturz?" in: *Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung*, 19.4.2003, p. 33.
hm

******************************
Jürgen Habermas:

*What does the felling of the monument mean? Let us not close our eyes
before this revolution in world affairs: the normative authority of
America lies shattered*


The whole world watched that scene on the 9th of April in Baghdad,
followed the American soldiers placing the noose around the neck of the
dictator, watched the tyrant being felled from his pedestal in a most
symbolic act, before a jubilant crowd. First the apparently immutable
monument wobbles, then it falls. Before it crashes liberatingly to the
ground, gravity has to overcome the grotesquely unnatural horizontal
position in which the massive figure, gently see-sawing up and down, is
poised for one last disturbing second. Like the perception of a
picture-puzzle 'flipping', so the public perception of the war seems to
switch with this image. The morally obscene spread of shock and fear
amongst a mercilessly bombarded, starved and helpless population
transforms itself on this day, in the Shiite quarter of Baghdad, in the
enthusiastically greeted liberation of citizens from terror and
repression. Both perceptions contain a kernel of truth, even if they
evoke contradictory moral feelings and attitudes. Must the emotional
ambivalence lead to contradictory judgments?

On the face of it everything is clear-cut. An illegal war remains an
offence against international law even if it leads to consequences which
are normatively desirable. But is that the end of the story? Undesirable
consequences can negate a good intention. Couldn't perhaps favorable
consequences unfold, retrospectively, a legitimating influence? The mass
graves, the subterranean cells and the reports of the tortured leaves no
doubt about the criminal nature of the regime; and the liberation of a
tormented population from a barbaric regime is a high good, the highest
under the politically desirable goods. In this respect the Iraqis
pronounce, whether they celebrate, loot, suffer apathetically or
demonstrate against the occupiers, a judgment upon the moral nature of
the war.

With us [in Germany] two kinds of reactions have become apparent in the
political sphere. The pragmatists believe in the normative power of the
factual and place their faith in a practical judgment which, with an eye
on the limitations which politics imposes on the realization of morality,
pays its respects to the fruits of victory. In their eyes carping about
the justification of the war is fruitless, since this has now become a
historical fact. The others, whether capitulating before the power of the
factual out of opportunism or out of conviction, brush what they hold to
be the dogma of international law aside with the argument that the latter
- full of post-heroic squeamishness against the risks and costs of
military force - refuses to acknowledge political freedom as the true
good. Both of these reactions are off the mark, since they give in to an
affect against the ostensible abstractions of a 'bloodless moralism'
without clarifying for themselves just what it is that the
neo-conservatives in Washington are offering as an alternative to the
domesticization of state force by international law. For the
neo-conservatives confront the morality of international law not with
realism or with the bathos of freedom but with a quite revolutionary
perspective: when international law fails then the politically successful
hegemonic enforcement of a liberal world order is morally justifiable
even when it seeks recourse to means which are indefensible in the light
of such international law. Wolfowitz is not Kissinger. He's much more a
revolutionary than a power-cynic. Certainly, the superpower reserves for
itself the right to act unilaterally - and bring to bear, if necessary,
even preventively, all available military means - to strengthen its
hegemonic position against possible rivals.  But global power ambition is
not an end in itself for the new ideologues. What distinguishes the
neo-conservatives from the school of the 'realists' is the vision of an
American world political order which has jumped the reformist rails of
the UN policies on human rights. It does not betray the liberal goals,
but it does break the civilizing bounds which the charter of the United
Nations placed with good reason upon the process of goal-realization. The
world organization is certainly not yet in a position, today, to force
deviant member states into offering their citizens a democratic and
rule-of-law based order. And the highly selectively pursued human rights
policies are subject to the proviso of implementability: the veto-power
Russia needs not fear an armed intervention in Chechnya. Saddam Hussein's
use of nerve gas against his own Kurdish population is but one of many
instances in the scandalous chronicle of the failure of the community of
nations, which looks the other way even in cases of genocide. All the
more important is hence the core function of peace-keeping, on which the
existence of the United Nations is based - i.e. the enforcement of the
ban on wars of aggression, with which, after World War II, the ius ad
bellum was abolished and the sovereignty of individual states curtailed.

With that, classical international law had at least taken one decisive
step in the direction of a cosmopolitan legal order. The United States -
which for half a century could claim to be a pacemaker on this road -
has, with the Iraq war, not only destroyed this reputation and given up
the role of a guarantor power in international law; with its violation
thereof she sets future superpowers a disastrous example. Let's not kid
ourselves: America's normative authority lies shattered.

Neither of the two conditions for a legally justifiable use of military
force was fulfilled: neither the situation of self-defense against an
actual or imminent attack, nor an authorized decision by the Security
Council in accordance with Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Neither
Resolution 1441 nor one of the seventeen preceding and ('used-up') Iraq
resolutions could count as sufficient authorization. Something which the
alliance of the war-willing confirmed performatively, for that matter, by
first of all seeking a 'second' resolution, and then withdrawing it when
it became clear that they would not be able to count even on the 'moral'
majority of the non-veto members. Finally the whole procedure was turned
into a farce by the President of the United States declaring repeatedly
that he would act, if necessary, without a mandate of the Security
Council. In the light of the Bush Doctrine the military build-up in the
Gulf lacked from the outset the character of a mere threat. This would
have presupposed the avertibility of the threatened sanctions. The
comparison with the intervention in Kosovo also offers no exoneration. It
is true that an authorization by the Security Council in this case was
not reached either. But the retrospectively obtained legitimation could
be based upon three circumstances: on the prevention - as it seemed at
the time - of an ethnic cleansing in the process of taking place, on the
imperative - covered by international law - of emergency assistance
holding erga omnes for this case, as well as the incontrovertibly
democratic and constitutional character of all the member states of the
ad hoc military alliance. Today the normative controversy is dividing the
West itself. Admittedly, a remarkable difference in the argumentative
strategies between the continental European and the Anglo-Saxon powers
had begun to manifest itself already then, in April of 1999. While the
one side drew from the disaster of Srebrenica the lesson that military
intervention was necessary to close the gap between efficacy and
legitimacy which earlier missions had revealed - to make headway in the
direction of a fully institutionalized world civil rights - the other
side was content with the goal of spreading its own liberal order
elsewhere in world, by force if necessary. At the time I ascribed this to
differences in the respective legal traditions - Kant's cosmopolitanism
on the one hand, John Stuart Mill's liberal nationalism on the other. But
in the light of the hegemonic unilateralism which the policy theorists of
the Bush Doctrine have been pursuing since 1991 - as Stefan Fröhlich
showed in this newspaper on 10th April - one could surmise, with
hindsight, that the American delegation was already pursuing the
negotiations of Rambouillet from this novel perspective. Whether this is
true or not, George W. Bush's decision to consult the Security Council is
at any rate no longer based on a desire - internally long since regarded
as superfluous - for authorization by international law. This backing was
sought only because it could have increased support for the "Coalition of
the Willing" and allay reservations within the domestic population. At
the same time we should not read the new doctrine as an expression of
normative cynicism. Functions like that of the geo-strategic
consolidation of spheres of power and of resources which such a policy
may *also* fulfill may tempt one to adopt a critique-of-ideology
approach. But this conventional explanation trivializes the break -
inconceivable even a year-and-a-half ago - with the norms to which the
United States has been committed until now. We'd be well advised not to
spend time on a search for motives, but rather to take the new doctrine
at its word. Otherwise we'd misread the revolutionary character of a
re-orientation based on the historical experiences of the past century.
The historian Eric Hobsbawm quite rightly named the 20th "the American"
Century. The Neoconservatives could see themselves as the 'victors' and
regard the controversial successes - the reorganization of Europe and the
Pacific/South East Asian area after the defeat of Germany and Japan, as
well as the transformation of Eastern as well as Eastern and
Middle-European societies after the disintegration of the Soviet Union -
as a model for a new world order. From the point of view of a
liberalistically read post-histoire à la Fukuyama this model has the
advantage of being able to dispense with the complicated justification of
normative goals: what more could people possibly want than the world-wide
spread of liberal nations and the globalization of free markets? The road
hence is also clear: Germany, Japan and Russia have been forced to their
knees by war and the arms race. Military force is an all the more
attractive option today as in asymmetric wars the victor is in any case
an a priori certainty. Wars which improve the world require no further
justification. At the price of negligible collateral damage they remove
unambiguous evil, which under the aegis of a powerless community of
nations would otherwise persist. The Saddam falling from his pedestal is
the argument which suffices as justification.

This doctrine was developed long before the terrorist attack on the Twin
Towers. The cleverly instrumentalized mass psychology of the shock of 11
September did however first of all create the climate within which this
doctrine could find broad support - if in a somewhat modified version,
that of the "War against Terrorism". That it should come to a head in the
Bush Doctrine is something it owes to the definition of a novel
phenomenon in the familiar concepts of conventional warfare. In the case
of the Taliban regime there was indeed a causal connection between a
terrorism difficult to pin down and an attackable 'rogue state'.
According to this model it is possible to adapt the classical conduct of
war between nations to deal with that treacherous danger posed by diffuse
and globally operating [terror-]networks. Compared to the original
version this connection of hegemonic unilateralism with defense against
an insidious danger mobilizes the additional argument of self-defense. At
the cost however of then being saddled with a a new burden of proof. The
American administration had to seek to convince world public opinion of
contacts between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida. This dis-information
campaign was for all that successful enough domestically for 60% of
Americans - according to the most recent opinion polls - to greet the
regime change in Iraq as "expiation" for the terrorist attack of 11th
September.

But for the preventive use of military means the Bush Doctrine does not
really provide a plausible explanation. Since the para-statal violence of
the terrorists - the "war in peace" - is not graspable with the
categories of war between nations it doesn't ground in the least the need
to weaken the notion of national self-defense (strictly regulated in
international law) in the direction of preemptive military action.
Against the globally networked, decentralized and invisibly operating
enemies what is of use is prevention at a different operative level. Here
what is of use are not bombs and rockets, not airplanes and tanks, but
the internationally connected national intelligence- and police services;
the control of monetary channels, the tracking down of logistic
connections in general. The corresponding "security programs" impinge not
on international law but on nationally guaranteed civil rights. Other
dangers, arising from the failure (America's own fault) of a politics of
non-proliferation of ABC weapons is in any case more manageable through
negotiations than through wars of disarmament - as the reserved reaction
to North Korea shows. A doctrine concentrating on terrorism does not i.e.
provide, compared to the directly pursued goal of a hegemonic world
order, an increase in legitimacy. The Saddam felled from his pedestal
remains the argument - symbol for the liberal reorganization of an entire
region. The Iraq war is a link in the chain of a global politics which
justifies itself by claiming that it has replaced the unavailing Human
Rights policies of a used-up world organization. The United States takes
over as it were the mandate in which the United Nations failed. What's to
be said against this?

Moral feelings can lead one astray, since they stick to individual
scenes, to specific images. There's no way of avoiding the question of
the justification of the war in general. The decisive controversy
revolves around the question whether justification in the light of
international law can and should be replaced by the unilateral global
politics of a self-empowering hegemon.

The empirical objections to the feasibility of the American vision boil
down to the way world society has become too complex for it still to be
steerable from some central point, based on a politics of military force.
The fear of terrorism experienced by the technically highly-armed
superpower seems to express the Cartesian fear of a subject seeking to
turn itself and the world around it into an object, in order to bring
everything under control. It is a politics which, in the horizontally
connected media of the market and of communication, begins to fall
behind, regressing to the original Hobbesian primordiality of a
hierarchical security system. A nation which reduces all options to the
dumb alternatives of war and peace runs up against the limits of its own
organizational powers and resources. It also leads the negotiation with
competing powers and foreign cultures in false channels and pushes the
coordination costs to dizzying heights.

Even if this hegemonic unilateralism were realizable it would still have
side-effects which would, by its own criteria, be morally undesirable.
The more political power manifests itself in the dimensions of military,
secret service and police, the more does it undermine itself - the
politics of a globally operating civilizing power - by endangering its
own mission of improving the world according to liberal ideas. In the
United States itself the permanent regime of a "War President" is already
undermining the foundations of the rule of law. Quite apart from the
practiced or tolerated torture methods beyond its borders, the war regime
is not only denying the prisoners of Guantánamo Bay the legal rights
conferred on them by the Geneva Convention. It confers powers on the
security services which encroach on the constitutional rights of its own
citizens.

And what about the really counterproductive measures the Bush Doctrine is
likely to demand in case of the by no means unlikely scenario of the
citizens of Syria, Jordan, Kuwait and so on making unfriendly use of the
democratic rights which the American Government has so kindly made them a
present of? In 1991 the Americans liberated Kuwait - democratize it they
did not. Most of all it is the superpower's presumptuous trusteeship
which is criticized by its coalition partners, who are, for good
normative reasons, unconvinced by the unilateral leadership claim. There
was a time when Liberal Nationalism felt itself justified in propagating
the universal values of its own liberal order throughout the world, with
military backing where needed. This self-righteousness does not become
any more sufferable by it being ceded from the nation State to a
hegemonic power. It is the very universalistic core of democracy and
human rights itself which forbids its universal propagation by fire and
sword. The universalistic validity claim which the West associates with
its 'political core values' - i.e. with the procedure of democratic
self-determination and the vocabulary of human rights - may not be
confused with the imperial demand that the political life-form and
culture of a particular democracy, and be it the oldest, is to be
exemplary for all other societies. Of this order was the 'universalism'
of those ancient empires which perceived the world beyond their borders -
shimmering on a distant horizon - from the central perspectives of their
own world-views. The modern self-understanding is on the contrary marked
by an egalitarian universalism which insists on the de-centering of each
specific perspective; it requires the relativization of one's own
interpretive perspective from the point of view of the autonomous Other.

It was American Pragmatism itself which made insight into that which was
good and just to all parties concerned dependent upon a reciprocal
acceptance of mutual perspectives. The reason upon which modern rational
law is based is not expressed in the validity of universal 'values'
capable of being owned, exported, and distributed globally. 'Values' -
including those for which one could expect global recognition - don't
hang in the air; they become binding only in the normative order and
practices of specific cultural forms of life.

When in Nasiriya thousands of Shiites demonstrate against Saddam and the
American occupation, they bring to expression that non-Western cultures
must appropriate the universalistic content of human rights from within
their own resources and within an interpretation which can make a
convincing connection to local experiences and interests. For that reason
the multilateral formulation of a common purpose is not one option
amongst others - especially not in international relations. In its
self-chosen isolation even the good hegemon, presuming for itself
trusteeship in the name of the common good, has no way of knowing whether
the actions it claims to be in the interests of others is indeed equally
good for all. There is no meaningful alternative to the further
cosmopolitan development of an international system of law in which the
voices of all concerned are given an equal and reciprocal hearing.

The world organization has not as yet suffered irreparable damage. Since
the 'smaller' members did not buckle under to the bullying of the larger
ones it has even grown in stature and influence. The reputation of the
world organization can be damaged only by its own actions: if it should
seek to 'heal' by compromise what cannot be healed.

-- 
  
  habhamaf@f-m.fm