| 哈贝马斯谈论伊拉克之战
哈贝马斯谈论伊拉克之战
Letter to America:
An Interview
with Jürgen Habermas
By Danny Postel
Nation
December 16,
2002
In an effort to provide a needed international
perspective in the debate over US foreign policy, The Nation asked a
number of foreign intellectuals to share their reflections. This is
the fourth in that series, consisting of an interview with Jürgen
Habermas, professor emeritus of philosophy at Frankfurt University
and author of numerous books, including The Future of Human Nature
(forthcoming in English from Polity Press). The interview was
conducted in the United States, where Habermas is a visiting
professor at Northwestern University, by Danny Postel, a reporter
for The Chronicle of Higher Education and editor of the forthcoming
Debating Kosovo (Cybereditions). --The Editors
What is your
position on the imminent war with Iraq?
The United States
should not go to war without unequivocal backing from the United
Nations.
What conditions would have to be met in order for
you to support military action against Baghdad?
The
immediate conditions are those specified by the last resolution of
the Security Council. And it should be up to the Council to
interpret the findings. In any case, there should be no military
action without a long-term commitment--and a realistic
perspective--for coping with the uniquely explosive concentration of
problems in the Near East. Just bombing Saddam Hussein out of his
palace and leaving the "cleanup" to others won't do.
Previous humanitarian interventions by NATO showed a
shocking insensitivity to "collateral damage"--the term reveals what
it's supposed to conceal. In the future, military strategy should
convincingly meet the condition of "proportionality" in every single
strike.
You supported the Persian Gulf War in 1991...
Yes, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was a violation of
international law, and Saddam Hussein moreover threatened Israel
with gas warfare.
...and NATO's Kosovo intervention in 1999.
Because of the stalemate within the Security Council, there
was a greater burden of justification in this case. The massacre of
Srebrenica changed my mind. Confronted with crimes against humanity,
the international community must be able to act even with military
force, if all other options are exhausted.
At that time, one
could already see characteristic national differences in the modes
of justification. In Continental Europe, proponents of intervention
took pains to shore up rather weak arguments from international law
by pointing out that the action was intended to promote what they
saw as the transition from a soft international law toward a fully
implemented human rights regime, whereas both US and British
advocates remained in their tradition of liberal nationalism. They
did not appeal to "principles" of a future cosmopolitan order but
were satisfied to enforce their demand for international recognition
of what they perceived to be the universalistic force of their own
national "values."
How do you see your position on Iraq
today in relation to those previous positions?
Factions
within the American Administration may have wanted for obvious
reasons a regime change in Iraq anyway. But the public perception of
the issue did not shift until Bush responded to September 11 by a
declaration of "war" against terrorism. Since a state can wage war
only against other states, that quick redefinition of a generically
new phenomenon in familiar but misleading terms offered a way to
satisfy the popular expectation "that something had to be done."
Bush's foreign policy seems hence to be dominated by domestic
concerns. The intervention in Afghanistan could for a while conceal
the paralyzing disproportion involved in bringing to bear against a
diffuse network of slippery enemies the high-tech machinery of a
superpower armed to the teeth. An irritating situation one could not
cope with was displaced by the familiar pattern of warfare with
enemies whom you can seize. But Iraq is not Afghanistan.
Governmental announcements notwithstanding, there is so far no
unambiguous evidence of Baghdad's involvement in specific acts of
terrorism.
How do you see the role of the United States on
the contemporary world stage?
What disturbed me most was the
Administration's new National Security Strategy of the United
States. With this provocative document, a superpower assumes the
privilege of launching pre-emptive strikes against anyone who
appears to be sufficiently suspicious; it declares, moreover, its
determination to prevent any competitor from even approaching a
status of equal power. Not long ago, a generation of young Germans
who were liberated from the Nazi regime by American soldiers
developed admiration for the political ideals of a nation that soon
became the driving force in founding the United Nations and in
carrying out the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals. As a consequence,
classical international law was revolutionized by limiting the
sovereignty of nation-states, by abolishing the immunity of state
authorities from supranational prosecution and by incorporating
unprecedented crimes into the penal code of international
jurisdiction. Should this same nation now brush aside the civilizing
achievement of legally domesticating the state of nature among
belligerent nations?
What is your view of US-German
relations at this time?
The bullying attitude of Bush,
Rumsfeld and others toward members of the German government reminds
me a bit of scuffling among adolescents in the schoolyard. [German
Chancellor Gerhard] Schröder was right to reject the tacit shift in
Bush's Iraq policy--from the declared goal of "disarmament" toward
"regime change." He should have confirmed, though, his unreserved
respect for the authority of the UN. I find myself also in agreement
with [Foreign Minister] Joschka Fischer's repeated attempts to get
the "Quartet"--the United States, Russia, the European Union and the
UN--engaged in a joint effort to arrive at and guarantee a peaceful
resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. This
conflict also has roots in German and European history. Since the
founding of the Federal Republic, solidarity with Israel has been an
unwritten law of German foreign politics, whoever was in charge, and
it will remain so for the time being. Our recent national elections
have proved once again that anti-Semitism is, at present, not a
danger within the larger population either.
And what about
relations between the United States and Europe more generally?
Many Americans do not yet realize the extent and the
character of the growing rejection of, if not resentment against,
the policy of the present American Administration throughout Europe,
including in Great Britain. The emotional gap may well become deeper
than it has ever been since the end of World War II. For people like
me, who always sided with a pro-American left, it is important to
draw a visible boundary between criticizing the policy of the
American Administration, on one hand, and the muddy stream of
anti-American prejudices on the other. Remembering the period of the
Vietnam War, it would be helpful in this respect if the opposition
in Europe could relate to, and identify with, a similar movement in
this country. Yet compared with 1965, timidity now prevails here.
Maybe a kind of systematically distorted communication
between the United States and Europe is also in play. I had not
thought of such a possibility until an American friend tried to
explain to me what he perceived as the hawkish worldview of
influential people like Paul Wolfowitz. They think of themselves, so
the explanation goes, as the real defenders of universalist ideals.
Europeans, always susceptible to anti-Semitism, are perceived as
falling back on the cynical realism of their pre-1945 power games,
while brave Americans and Britons are rushing to arms for the same
goals as in World War II. From this perspective, only the
Anglo-Saxons are committed to defending the universal values of
freedom and democracy against an "evil" that is now embodied in
"rogue" states. If that were in fact more than a caricature, we
would need, perhaps, a discussion on the respective faults and
merits of what we might contrast as "liberal nationalism" and
"cosmopolitanism."
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