Habermas’s Theological Turn and European Integration

Abstract

Jürgen Habermas’s recent work is defined by two trends: an engagement with the realm of the sacred and a concern for the future of the European Union. Despite the apparent lack of connection between these themes, I argue that the early history of European integration has important implications for Habermas’s conclusions about the place of faith in public life. Although Habermas’s work on religion suggests that the sacred contains important normative resources for postsecular democracies, he continues to bar explicitly religious justifications from discourse within state institutions. I question this exclusion of faith by reconstructing the role that political Catholicism played in the foundation of the European project. By focusing on two of the most important actors involved in the creation of the first European Community, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, I show how explicitly religious reasons can broaden political perspectives, resulting in the creation of new, inclusive, postnational forms of communal life. Pushing Habermas to accept the implications of his theological turn, I argue that pluralistic, nondogmatic and nonauthoritarian religious claims should be allowed to enter into the formal public sphere through a discursively determined interpretation of secular translation.

Keywords:

• Religious rationality
• secular translation
• European integration
• Jürgen Habermas
• postsecularism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Peter Gordon, Seyla Benhabib, Maeve Cooke, Jorge Valadez, Alessandro Ferrara, Doug Casson, Simone Chambers, Victor Muniz-Fraticelli, Brian Milstein, Ian Storey, Rodrigo Chacón, Libby Newman, Don Tontiplaphol, Peter Rožič, Mie Inouye, Matthew Lochner, and Rebecca Gryzb, as well as the reviewers and the editors of this special issue, Camil Ungureanu and Paolo Monti, for their helpful and generous feedback. This manuscript started as a presentation for a “Theology on Tap” meeting organized by the Catholic Student Center at Yale University in 2013. Earlier drafts were presented in 2015 at the Critical Theory Roundtable at Yale University; the Association for Political Theory’s Annual Conference at the University of Colorado Boulder; the Harvard European Philosophy Workshop; the New England Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting; and at the Harvard Social Studies Faculty Workshop. I thank the participants at all of these gatherings for their thoughtful engagement with my work.

Notes

1. See Harrington, “Habermas’s Theological Turn?” 45–61; Borradori, ed., Philosophy in a Time of Terror; Habermas, “Does Europe Need a Constitution?”; and Habermas, Europe: The Faltering Project.

2. I use these terms in a descriptive sense. For more on these categories, see Verovšek, “Expanding Europe through Memory,” 535.

3. See Habermas, Religion and Rationality.

4. Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 217; and Haas, Beyond the Nation-State.

5. For more on immanent critique, see Verovšek, “Potential of Economic and Monetary Integration”; Ferrara, “Varieties of Transcendence,” 111.

6. See Ingram, “How Secular Should Democracy Be?”

7. Habermas, Future of Human Nature, 109; Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 228.

8. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Preface to the First Edition, 100-1, translation modified; and “What is Enlightenment?” 17–23.

9. Marx, “Contribution to the Critique,” 54, emphasis in original.

10. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 20. See Weber, The Protestant Ethic; Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life; and Durkheim, Division of Labor in Society.

11. See Gordon, “Critical Theory.”

12. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action; See Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, 247.

13. Habermas, Religion and Rationality, 160, 149; and Ferrara, “Varieties of Transcendence,” 112.

14. Habermas, “Reply to My Critics,” 353, emphasis in original; Ratzinger and Habermas, Dialectics of Secularization, 43, 50; and Habermas et al., Awareness of What Is Missing. See also Chambers, “How Religion Speaks,” 219–21.

15. Berger, “Globalization and Religion,” 10; Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 116; and Gordon, “Critical Theory,” 467–68.

16. Habermas, “Reply to My Critics,” 348.

17. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 58–66.

18. Rawls, Political Liberalism: Expanded, 462.

19. Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 130; and Ungureanu, “The Contested Relation,” 405–29.

20. Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 130.

21. Allen, “Having One’s Cake,” 149; Lafont, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 236; and Spohn, “A Difference in Kind?” 122.

22. Habermas, Religion and Rationality, 160.

23. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 17, emphasis in original.

24. Ratzinger and Habermas, Dialectics of Secularization, 31; and Habermas, “Reply to My Critics,” 81, 108.

25. Wolterstorff, “The Role of Religion,” 105, emphasis in original.

26. Habermas, et al., Awareness of What Is Missing, 75.

27. Ibid., 75; see also Chambers, How Religion Speaks, 218–21; and Wolin, “Habermas and Post-Secular Societies,” 16–18.

28. Geyer, “Sein Niveau entzündet.”

29. See, for example, Haas, The Uniting of Europe; Milward, The European Rescue; and Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe.

30. Kalyvas and van Kersbergen, “Christian Democracy,” 196; and Kaiser, Christian Democracy, 9.

31. Kalyvas and van Kersbergen, “Christian Democracy,” 197; and Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy.

32. Hanley, “Christian Democracy,” 464.

33. For more on how the Christian Democratic movement predisposed its members to a pro-integration stance, see Kalyvas and van Kersbergen, “Christian Democracy,” 196; and Pulzer, “Nationalism and Internationalism,” 22.

34. Dierickx, “Christian Democracy,” 15–30.

35. Yzermans, ed., Major Addresses of Pope Pius XII.

36. Documents Pontificaux de sa Sainteté Pie XII, 405, my translation; Chelini-Pont, “Papal Thought on Europe,” 131–46.

37. Bromberger and Bromberger, Jean Monnet, 84; see Schuman, “Démocratie et Christianisme.”

38. Quoted in Lücker and Seitlinger, Robert Schuman und die Einigung Europas, 128.

39. Luttwak, “Franco-German Reconciliation,” 37–63; Schuman, quoted in Pierre Gerbet, La genèse du Plan Schuman, 29; and Rettman, “‘EU Saint’.”

40. Bossuat, “La politique française,” 319–32; and Deighton, Building Postwar Europe, 21–37.

41. Kaiser, Christian Democracy, 230; and Adenauer, “Adenauer an den Präsidenten der Belgischen Kammer,” in Briefe, 318.

42. Adenauer, “Adenauer an Herbert Eulenberg,” in Briefe, 57.

43. Adenauer,“Adenauer an Dr. Jakob Kindt-Kiefer,” in Briefe, 192.

44. Adenauer,“Adenauer an Helene Wessel,” in Briefe, 96–97, and “Aktennotiz über ein Gespräch,” 124.

45. Adenauer, “Adeanuer an Oberbürgermeister Dr. Karl Scharnagl,” in Briefe, 78; and Annan, Changing Enemies, 224.

46. Schuman, “European Integration.”

47. Schuman, “Ce que signifie.” Translation reproduced from Fimister, Robert Schuman, 200.

48. Müller and Plichta, “Zwischen Rhein und Donau,” 37–38.

49. Young, quoted in “Charlemagne: Real Politics, at Last?” The Economist; Pulzer, Nationalism and Internationalism, 22; and Chenaux and Mayeur, Une Europe Vaticane?, 419, 427.

50. Parsons, “The Triumph of Community Europe,” 108, emphasis in original; and see also Parsons, A Certain Idea of Europe.

51. For more on the history of the ECSC, see Gillingham, Coal, Steel.

52. Habermas, “‘The Political’,” 27; and Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 122.

53. Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution Or Recognition, 112.

54. See Verovšek, “Meeting Principles and Lifeworlds.”

55. Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 202; and Forst, Justification and Critique, 95.

56. Benhabib, “Claiming Rights across Borders,” 692; and Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” 88–243.

57. Habermas and Derrida, “What Binds Europeans Together,” 295.

58. Fligstein, Euro-Clash, 178; and Lacroix, “Does Europe Need Common Values?” 141–58.

59. Habermas and Borradori, “Fundamentalism and Terror,” 33.

60. Benhabib, “Claiming Rights Across Borders,” 692; and Lafont, “Religion and the Public Sphere,” 236.

61. Cooke, “A Secular State,” 235; and see also Cooke, “Avoiding Authoritarianism.”

62. Habermas, Future of Human Nature, 104.

63. Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 4.

64. Adenauer and Küsters, Teegespräche, 551; and Levin, Turkey and the European Union, 379–404.

65. See Habermas, Between Facts and Norms.

66. Adorno, “Reason and Revelation,” 174; and Valadez, Deliberative Democracy, 58.

67. Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 30. For more on atheist theologians, see Burton, “Study Theology.”

68. Cooke, “Violating Neutrality?” 250, 254.

69. See Kennedy, “Address.”

70. Bauman, “No More Walls in Europe”; Pope Francis, “Conferral of the Charlemagne Prize.”

71. Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 124.

72. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 475.

73. Taylor, “Radical Redefinition of Secularism,” 36.

74. For a similar approach, see also Newman, Liberalism in Practice.

75. Cooke, “A Secular State,” 227; for a comparison between Habermas and Taylor, see Spohn, “A Difference in Kind?” 120–35.

76. Berger, “The Desecularization of the World,” 2–4.

77. Ratzinger and Habermas, Dialectics of Secularization, 23; and Habermas, “Notes on Post-Secular Society,” 17.

78. Habermas, “‘The Political’,” 23; and Cooke, “Beyond Dignity and Difference,” 79, 88.

79. Cooke, “A Secular State,” 234; Habermas and Borradori, “Fundamentalism and Terror”; and Ungureanu, “Contested Relation,” 405.

80. Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 131.

81. Valadez, “The Implications of Incommensurability,” 155.

82. Habermas, Future of Human Nature, 104.

83. Allen, “Having One’s Cake,” 151.

84. Habermas, “Europapolitik in der Sackgasse”; and Gordon, “Christian Democracy and Critical Theory,” 179, 197.

85. Harrington, “Habermas’s Theological Turn?” 59.

86. See Valadez, Deliberative Democracy.

87. See Gadamer, Truth and Method; and Cooke, “The Limits of Learning,” 7.

88. Ferrara, “Europe.”

89. See Habermas, The Postnational Constellation.