Thus, despite his radical democratic posture, Habermas stands revealed as an elitist both in his style of thinking (and writing), and in the democratically deficient orders, regional and cosmopolitan, he endorses. The erstwhile democrat finds salvation in the elite, and the radical finds himself respectable at last. His work strikes any realist as utopian, but that has only enhanced its cachet in the teaching of what passes for international relations theory in university departments across the planet. This emerging idealist orthodoxy, following Habermas, assumes that all international issues can be solved through more open communication and inclusive dialogue.

From this Olympian cosmopolitan viewpoint, U.S. hegemony represents a greater threat to international order than Al-Qaeda. Similarly, super-states and even middling European nation-states, with their unjust pursuit of national interests, violate and inhibit the norms generated through open dialogue that would otherwise establish a world domestic policy. University presses and academic journals churn out papers and books devoted to Global Ethics for the New Century or Justice, Dialogue and the Cosmopolitan Project.

From this applied Habermasian perspective, a marriage-guidance-counsel approach to foreign policy would solve all the world's problems. If Osama bin Laden, Jacques Chirac, Kofi Annan, a suitably amenable post-Kerry Democrat, a couple of mullahs, a (moderate) rabbi and the odd Swedish sandalista could sit around an uncoerced table, they would arrive discursively at mutually acceptable norms. Violence--itself a construct of the otiose nation-state--disappears. For all a just global governance regime requires is the odd "therapeutic" intervention and the occasional international "police" action.

Idealistic Delusion

Despite its appeal to elite fashions in bureaucracy and academia, the normative doctrine that Habermas and like-minded internationalists promote is both logically flawed and dangerously confused. Incoherence is built into the "architectonics" of the discourse model from which all else follows. From its rationalist structure, which requires "everyone to take the perspective of everyone else", communicative reason excludes from the outset those of a conservative disposition who might find value in history and custom. The principle of universalization dismisses tradition as "regressive" prejudice. Yet for a conservative, it is the prejudices of a particular tradition, not reason, that "renders a man's virtue his habit and not a series of unconnected acts." Ultimately, discourse ethics reduces "morality to a technique", to be acquired by training in communication skills rather than an education in a tradition of behavior.

Indeed, the problem with applying the communicative model to the international order is that it assumes that law and norms emerge unproblematically from enlightened discourse between rational actors. The assumption fails to recognize that law requires authority, not truth or enlightenment, for its enactment. Some men and some governments are irrational, and in such circumstances, whether in Darfur or Baghdad, it may be better if force, rather than endless dialogue, prevails.

Moreover, even if we grant that common law and international law intimate norms we might all ultimately accept, their practical implementation in the absence of a known authority can itself lead to disagreement rather than consensus. In the real world, as any episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm demonstrates, the application of a norm is subject to prudential interpretation among the parties who, in principle, accept it.

Above all, norms conflict. This is particularly evident in international relations, where the norms that might promote a people's democratic right to self-determination frequently conflict with an international right to intervene to prevent genocide. Here, casuistry rather than consensus prevails, even among those on the side of a world domestic society. Thus, we find Habermas defending the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 to prevent genocide and promote democracy but condemning the U.S.-led coalition's intervention in Iraq in 2003 to...well, prevent genocide and promote democracy. Never too keen on instrumental reason, Habermas finds himself arguing that the means somehow justify the end. By contrast, when Habermas defends deeper European integration in spite of its democratic deficit, the cosmopolitan end justifies the undemocratic means. In actual practice, Habermas leaves us with nothing but ambiguity.

And only in the movies is nothing a "really cool hand."

Essay Types: Essay