"What we've got here is a failure to communicate." Thus the captain of prison 36 addresses the eponymous hero of Stuart Rosenberg's 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke after his failed attempt to escape from the prison chain gang.
Jürgen Habermas, Germany's leading public intellectual, would endorse the prison captain's insight but not his response (which in Luke's case entailed more physical punishment). Indeed, Habermas's most recent pronouncements on the globe's current difficulties--from burgeoning inequality and environmental degradation to the Iraq War and transnational terrorism--argue that all these problems would be best addressed through a process of uncoerced communication. Rational deliberation would lead to agreement on a set of universal norms that all partiescould accept and follow. Their application could be mediated through a reformed United Nations resembling a parliament of world citizens. In the words engraved above the BBC's Broadcasting House: "Nation shall speak peace unto nation"--except that there would be no nations either, but global citizens.
Given his understanding of this progressively evolving global cosmopolitanism, Habermas regards the events of September 11 (although "monstrous") as the consequence of "the spiral of violence [that] begins as a spiral of distorted communication." He further contends that the "hegemonic" and "unilateral" intervention of the United States and its coalition partners in Iraq is a cause of further miscommunication and escalating global violence. How did he come to such an understanding of national and international politics? And why are his numerous works regarded with reverence not only among left-leaning social scientists from Aberystwyth to Zurich, but also by the German foreign minister and the new bureaucratic class that manages European integration?
