The Russian war on Ukraine led to major changes in the worlds of politics and thought, and Germany received a large share of these changes. German Chancellor Olaf Schultz considered it a turning point in history. Will Europe and Germany really enter a new era?
In what direction does history turn?
In one aspect of the war in Germany, the war is revealing the division between currents and generations over the lessons that the country must draw from its history of waging bloody conflicts, as some of the country's leading artists and intellectuals line up for or against supplying Kyiv with weapons in a series of open campaigns.
Days after the German government announced that it would send about 50 anti-aircraft "Geppard" cannons to Ukraine, a statement signed by 26 prominent artists and thinkers, including novelists and writers Martin Walser, Julie Zee and Robert Setaler, called for paying attention to Germany's "historic responsibility" by "helping both sides to Find a middle ground that both can accept."
The statement was met with angry responses, including symbols from the German right and the Green Party, and 58 artists and thinkers, including the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Herta Müller, signed a statement criticizing the first statement, saying that "those who want a negotiated peace that does not lead to Ukraine's submission to Russian demands, must They should increase (Ukraine's) defense capabilities and weaken Russian hostility as much as possible."
generation gap
Sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas has coined the German debate over arms exports as a generational gap in which "highly self-confident" and "loud" language is used in the context of military conflict.
He added that the younger generation, represented by Habermas with German Foreign Minister Annallina Barbock, 41, "brought up sensitivity to normative questions" and was only able to "see war through the prism of victory or defeat", while his generation - Habermas is 92 years old year- "knows that a war against a nuclear power cannot be won in the traditional sense of the word."
He said the "widespread pro-dialogue and peacekeeping focus in German politics" was a "hard-earned mental conviction", given its track record as an aggressive militaristic state, values that have historically been denounced by the right. .
In the report written by British historian Adam Toze, an academic at Columbia University, to the newspaper "New states man", he considered that Russian aggression raises such fundamental questions for Germany, because the "nation" in its current form owes its existence to the peaceful end of the Cold War. that enabled the reunification of the divided countries.
The success of the unification era, in the early 1990s, was the fruit of a policy in which trade and détente with the Soviet Union worked to pull the Iron Curtain, as “maintaining good relations with Moscow always meant making an agreement with the devil,” and according to the writer, preconceived stereotypes do not reflect the complexity of German Politics The truth is that the problem of balancing Russia and Germany is a real one, and no one embodies this history more consistently than Jürgen Habermas.
German philosopher
Half a century ago, Habermas emerged as the heir in West Germany to the critical theory tendencies known as the Frankfurt School, named after the Institute for Social Research founded at the University of Frankfurt in 1929.
From his Marxist roots in the interwar era, Habermas put forward his critical theory of communication in the 1960s and 1970s.
His lifelong preoccupation was with the possibility of reason and the liberation inherent in language, discourse, and deliberation.
Driven by a commitment to traditions traced back to the Enlightenment, he distanced himself in the 1980s from radical French thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
In the late 1990s, he supported the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
All this earned him fame as a defender of "Western Power".
The writer says that the common conclusion that Habermas is a "conformist" figure means that his philosophy and politics have been profoundly misunderstood, but most of all his public role in modern Germany;
For 70 years, he was a polemical force in public life, challenging the great philosopher Martin Heidegger's links to Nazism, in the 1970s he formulated a complex theory of the legitimacy crisis, and in the 1980s he opposed nuclear rearmament and denounced the nationalist shift in historiography.
At the moment of national unity in 1990, he demanded not simply the annexation of East Germany but rather a constitutional agreement, and in the late 1990s his call for the Greens to agree to intervene in Yugoslavia in the name of the responsibility to protect was controversial, and in 2003 Habermas formed a common front with Derrida against The war in Iraq, and between 2010 and 2015, after he had long criticized the judicialization of German politics under the powerful authority of the Constitutional Court, decried the technocratic drift of eurozone politics.
In 2022, Habermas again fears the return of the right under the mantle of enthusiasm for the Ukrainian resistance, and he wrote his long article on April 28, fearing that, and was met with a storm of rejection.
This time around, Habermas is accused of defending an old and discredited tradition of West German politics, colluding with Putin, and clinging to outdated ideas about nuclear war at a time when the Ukrainian cause is thriving among younger generations of Germans.
What Habermas objects to is not the calls to do more for Ukraine, but the way it is being done. What worries Habermas is “the self-confidence with which the morally disaffected in Germany pursue a reticent federal government.” Self-confidence betrays itself and escalation risks appalling.
Supporters of the German philosopher consider that enthusiasm in support of Ukraine is not limited to right-wing hawks, but also extended to many former pacifists in the ranks of the Green Party, and Habermas fears that what is being called into question is a German peaceful transition that should never be taken for granted.
The transition has been difficult and, as Habermas points out, "it has been repeatedly denounced by the right".
This method of arguing is typical of Habermas.
While he presents a sharp political critique, and provides an analysis of the social and political foundations on which the trends are based, Habermas believes that the conflict is between "contemporary but historically asynchronous mentalities."
As critics have argued and acknowledged by Habermas, he and his generation were influenced by the politics and consequences of the nuclear age, and this imposed an end to military history in any conventional sense.
For Habermas, Ukraine is in the process of building a nation-state, and Germany is much more than that.
Checking the spontaneous reactions of enthusiasm and solidarity with Ukraine, he advises Germans to consider this gap and what it entails. “Isn't it a form of self-delusion to count on a Ukrainian victory in the form of Russia's murderous war without taking up arms yourself? Hostile rhetoric is inconsistent with platforms from which it is launched.
Post-war mirage
What Habermas warns his German colleagues about is the mirage that there is some way to the future through Ukraine.
He considers that the challenge to be faced collectively in Europe is how to provide real support while realizing the distance, "Ukraine must not lose this war", and yet "its project to build a nation-state must continue", and the task is different for Europe itself, what should To be exposed by the contrast with Ukraine is not the lack of a proper heroic national identity, but the lack of post-national capacities at the level of the European Union, as he puts it.
The writer Adam Toze concludes by saying that the United States is providing tens of billions to help Ukraine fight it, and the ability of American politicians to agree on that military support and not on health care or climate change policy is a sign of America’s dysfunction, and what American policy will bring in the near future facilitates any Someone guess it, and soon Europe may face a confusing clash of historical and political times not in Eastern Europe, but across both sides of the Atlantic.