Habermas and European Integration: Social and Cultural Modernity Beyond the Nation-State.

• Author: Eris, Ozgur Unal
• Position: Book review

Habermas and European Integration: Social and Cultural Modernity Beyond the Nation-State

By Shivdeep Grewal

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012, 129 pages, ISBN 9780719078705.

SHIVDEEP GREWAL has written this excellent research-turned-into-a book on Jurgen Habermas, one of the most important philosophers of our time. He makes a thorough analysis of Habermas' work and in the theoretical part of the book he discusses how modernity in both cultural and social terms has evolved in such a way that transcends the importance of nation state and finds a new meaning at the European Union level.

According to Grewal, social modernity is defined as the struggle of civil society to resist an ever increasing bureaucratisation and technocratisation. This definition can also be understood as juridification and legal consolidation of successive stages of social evolution. Cultural modernity is defined as progressive rationalisation, in the sense that increasing rationalisation gradually replaced mythical and religious belief as bases of social integration. As complementary to these two segments of modernity, Grewal looks in detail at the Habermas' conceptualisation of alternatives beyond the nation state, which would come to mean an opening and interpretation of national public spheres ultimately ending in the form of a European constitution. Normally, the European nation-state has been defined by two factors, one negative and one positive. The welfare state is the positive factor; it provides the ordinary citizen with a set of social rights and, ensures that the capitalist economy operates in accordance with the public interest. Exclusionary nationalism, in contrast, is the negative factor. While a feeling of national solidarity has helped in securing identification with the democratic constitutional state, this feeling of national solidarity has often been bolstered by invidious conceptions of ethnic and cultural superiority. The negative consequences of nationality are apparent, so Habermas believes, both in the wars of the twentieth century and in the present difficulties Europe's nation-states confront in integrating cultural minorities. Coupled with this negative factor are also constraints imposed by trends of globalization and increase in international competition, which have produced negative consequences for the social-democratic welfare state as the nation-state is no longer able to sustain the social-democratic rights that are...