(continued)
Jürgen Habermas
Learning from Catastrophe?
A Look Back at the Short Twentieth Century
II. Two Physiognomies of the Century
The continuities of social modernization extending through the
century can only inadequately teach us what is characteristic of
the twentieth century as such. Thus historians tend to punctuate
the historical flow of their narratives with events, rather
than trends and structural transformations. And indeed the
physiognomy of a century is molded by the caesurae of great
events. Among those historians who are still willing to think in
terms of large historical units, a consensushas emerged that the
“long” nineteenth century (1789-1914) is followed by a
“short” twentieth century (1914-89). The outbreak of the
First World War and the collapse of the Soviet Union thus
frame an antagonism that stretches through both world wars
and the Cold War. Of course, this punctuation permits three
very different interpretations, depending on where one locates
this antagonism — on the economic level of social systems, on
the political level of superpowers, or on the cultural level of
ideologies. Which hermeneutical viewpoint is chosen is, naturally
enough, itself determined by a conflict of ideas that has
dominated the century.
The Cold War is carried on today by historiographic means,
whether the terms of the conflict are described as the Soviet
Union’s challenge to the capitalist West (Eric Hobsbawm), or
the struggle of the liberal West against totalitarian regimes
(François Furet). Both interpretations explain in one way or
another the fact that only the United States emerged from the
world wars in a politically, economically, and culturally
strengthened position, and from the Cold War as the world’s
only superpower, an outcome that has labeled the twentieth
century “the American century.” The third reading of the Cold
War is more ambiguous. As long as “ideology” is employed in a
neutral sense, the title The Age of Ideologies (Hildebrand)
expresses nothing more than a variant of a theory of totalitarianism,
according to which the struggle of regimes reflects a
struggle of contending ideologies. But in another sense, the
same title signals the claim (developed by Carl Schmitt) that
since 1917 the mutually opposed utopian projects of world
democracy and world revolution, with Wilson and Lenin as
their exponents, have engaged one another in a global civil
war (Ernst Nolte). According to this ideology critique from
the Right, 1917 marks the point where history became infected
with the bacillus of the philosophy of history, and was so badly
derailed that it was not until 1989 that it was able to jump back
onto the normal tracks of pristine national histories.
Each of these three perspectives endows the short twentieth
century with a distinctive physiognomy. According to the first
reading, the century is driven by the challenge presented to the
capitalist world system by the single largest experiment ever
conducted on human beings: carried out with extreme brutality
and at the cost of enormous sacrifice, the forced industrialization
of the Soviet Union certainly set the course for its rise to
the status of a superpower, but it also left the Soviet Union
without a sound economic and social-political basis on which to
construct a superior, or even a viable, alternative to the Western
model. The second reading sees the century under the shadow
of a totalitarianism that broke entirely with the civilizing forces
ushered in by the Enlightenment, destroying the hopes for a
domestication of state power and a humanization of social
relations. The boundless violence of regimes engaging in total
war shatters the barriers of international law just as ruthlessly as
the terrorist violence of single-party dictatorships neutralizes
constitutional protections internally. These first two readings
divide up light and shadow between the forces of totalitarianism
and their liberal enemies clearly enough; for the
third, post-fascist reading, the century stands overshadowed
by an ideological crusade of parties whose mentalities are essentially
similar, even if they are not of the same rank. Both sides
appear to fight out the global contradictions between programs
justified by differing philosophies of history; programs that owe
their power to kindle fanaticism to essentially religious energies
perverted to serve secular ends.
Notwithstanding all their differences, these three interpretations
have one thing in common: they all oblige us to look at the
gruesome features of a century that “invented” the gas chambers,
total war, state-sponsored genocide and extermination
camps, brainwashing, state security apparatuses, and the
panoptic surveillance of entire populations. The twentieth
century “generated” more victims, more dead soldiers, more
murdered civilians, more displaced minorities, more torture,
more dead from cold, from hunger, from maltreatment, more
political prisoners and refugees, than could ever have been
imagined. The phenomena of violence and barbarism mark
the distinctive signature of the age. From Horkheimer and
Adorno to Baudrillard, from Heidegger to Foucault and Derrida,
the totalitarian features of the age have also embedded
themselves into the very structure of its critical diagnoses. And
this raises the question of whether these negativistic interpretations,
by remaining transfixed by the gruesomeness of
the century, might be missing the reverse side of all these
catastrophes.
Of course, it took decades for those who were directly
involved and affected to come to a conscious assessment of
the dimensions of the horror that finally culminated in the
Holocaust, in the methodical annihilation of the Jews of Europe.
But even if it was suppressed at first, this shock eventually
set loose energies, even opened new insights, that brought
about a reversal in the perception of this horror during the
second half of the century. For the nations that dragged the
planet into a technologically unlimited war in 1914, and for
the people who were forced to confront the mass crimes of an
ideologically unlimited war of extermination after 1939, the
year 1945 also marks a turning point — a turn toward something
better, toward the mastering of the forceof barbarism that had
broken through the very foundations of civilization in Germany.
Should we not have learned something from the catastrophes
of the first half of the twentieth century?
My doubts regarding all three of these readings can be
expressed in this way: the demarcation of a short twentieth
century forces periods of global war and the Cold War period
together into a single unit, suggesting the appearance of a
homogenous, uninterrupted, 75-year war of systems, regimes,
and ideologies. But this has the effect of occluding the very
event that not only divides this century chronologically, but
also constitutes an economic, political, and above all a normative
watershed: the defeat of fascism. In the context of the Cold
War, the ideological significance of the wartime alliance
between the Western powers and the Soviet Union against
the German Reich was dismissed as “unnatural” and promptly
forgotten. But the Allied victory and the German defeat of
1945 permanently discredited an array of myths which, ever
since the end of the nineteenth century, had been mobilized
against the heritage of 1789. Allied victory not only sparked the
democratic developments in the Federal Republic of Germany,
Japan, and Italy, and eventually Portugal and Spain. It undermined
the foundations of all forms of political legitimation that
did not — at least verbally, at least in words — subscribe to the
universalist spirit of political enlightenment. This is of course
little consolation for victims of ongoing violations of human
rights.
The year 1945 saw a change in the cultural and intellectual
climate that formed a necessary condition for all three of the
uncontested cultural innovations of this century. The revolutionary
changes in the fine arts, architecture, and music that had
begun in the decades before, during, and after the First World
War, and which drew from the experience of war itself,
attained worldwide recognition only after 1945, in the past
tense, as it were, of “classical modernism.” Until the early
1930s, avante-garde art produced a repertoire of entirely new
aesthetic forms and techniques, opening a horizon of possibilities
that was exploited but never transcended by the experiments
of international art during the second half of the century.
Only two philosophers, Heidegger and Wittgenstein — both
opposed to the spirit of modernism, to be sure — possessed a
comparable originality and exerted a comparable historical
influence.
This changed cultural climate after 1945 also formed the
background for the political developments which, according
to Eric Hobsbawm,1 changed the face of the postwar period
until the 1980s: the Cold War (a), decolonialization (b), and
the construction of the social welfare state (c).
(a) The continuing spiral of an arrogant, exhausting arms
race certainly succeeded in keeping directly threatened nations
in a state of continual fear. Nevertheless the mad calculations of
a balance of terror — MAD was the self-ironic abbreviation for
mutually assured destruction — did prevent the outbreak of a
hot war. The unexpected, mutual concession of two superpowers
gone wild — the eminently reasonable agreement that
Reagan and Gorbachev reached in Reykjavik that introduced
the end of the arms race — makes the Cold War appear in
hindsight as a high-risk process of the self-domestication of
nuclear alliances. This is also an apt description for the peaceful
implosion of a global empire, whose leadership recognized the
inefficiency of a supposedly superior mode of production, and
admitted defeat in the economic race rather than following the
time-honored pattern of deflecting internal conflicts with military
adventures abroad.
(b) The process of decolonialization did not follow a straight
path either. In hindsight, however, the colonial powers only
fought rearguard actions. The French fought in vain against
national liberation movements in Indochina; in 1956 Britain
and France saw their military adventure in Suez end in failure.
In 1975 the United States was forced to end its intervention in
Vietnam after ten costly years of war. The year 1945 marked
the end of Japan’s colonial empire and the independence of
Syria and Libya. Britain withdrew from India in 1947; Burma,
Sri Lanka, Israel, and Indonesia were all founded in the following
year. The western regions of the Islamic world from Iran to
Morocco next gained independence, followed gradually by the
states of Central Africa and finally the last remaining colonies in
Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. The end of the apartheid
regime in South Africa, and the return of Hong Kong and
Macao to China, conclude a process that has at least formally
ended the dependencies of colonial peoples and established new
states (all too often torn by civil war, cultural conflicts, and
ethnic strife) as equal members in the UN General Assembly.
(c) The third development is an unambiguous change for the
better. In the affluent and peaceful Western European democracies,
and to a lesser degree in the United States, Japan, and
some other countries, mixed economies made possible the
establishment and effective realization of basic social rights.
Of course, the explosive growth of the global economy, the
quadrupling of industrial production, and an exponential
increase in world trade between the early 1950s and the early
1970s also generated disparities between the rich and the poor
regions of the world. But the governments of the OECD
nations, who were responsible for three-quarters of global production
and four-fifths of global trade in industrial goods during
these two decades, had learned enough from the catastrophic
experiences of the period between the two world wars to
pursue intelligent domestic economic policies, focussing on
stability with a relatively high rate of economic growth, and
on the construction and enhancement of comprehensive social
security systems. In welfare-state mass democracies, highly
productive capitalist economies were socially domesticated for
the first time, and were thus brought more or less in line with
the normative self-understanding of democratic constitutional
states.
These three developments lead a Marxist historian such as
Eric Hobsbawm to celebrate the postwar era as a “golden age.”
But since 1989 at the latest, there has been a growing public
realization that this era is reaching its end. In countries where
the social welfare state is still acknowledged as a positive
achievement even in hindsight, there is a growing mood of
resignation. The end of the twentieth century was marked by
a structural threat to the welfarist domestication of capitalism,
and by the revival of a socially reckless form of neoliberalism.
Commenting on the current mood — somewhat depressed,
somewhat clueless, the whole thing washed over by the throb
of techno-pop — Hobsbawm could almost be taken for an
author from late Roman antiquity: “The Short Twentieth
Century ended in problems, for which nobody had, oreven
claimed to have, solutions. As the citizens of the fin-de-siècle
tapped their way through the global fog that surrounded them,
into the third millenium, all they knew for certain was that an
era of history had ended. They knew very little else.”2
Even the old problems — peacekeeping and international
security, economic disparities between North and South, the
risks of ecological catastrophe — were already global ones. But
today these problems have all been sharpened by a newly
emerging problem that supersedes the old challenges. Capitalism’s
new, apparently irrevocable globalizing dynamic drastically
reduces the G7 states’ freedom of action, which had
enabled them, unlike the economically dependent states of
the Third World, to hang on to a relative degree of independence.
Economic globalization forms the central challenge for
the political and social orders that grew out of postwar Europe
(III). One way to meet this challenge would consist in strengthening
the regulatory power of politics, to allow politics to catch
up with global markets that are beyond the reach of nation-states
(IV). Or does the lack of any clear orientation for ways of
meeting this challenge indicate not that we can learn from
catastrophes, but indeed that we only learn from catastrophes?
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