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Handbook on the Politics of Regulation

rights confers the status of citizens, and, as subjects of equal rights citizens have a claim to be respected in their human dignity. It is through the ‘portal’ of human dignity that the egalitarian and universalistic substance of morality is imported into law (p. 81). This conceptualisation of human rights has a foundation on earlier philosophical writings in which the author connects the principles of human rights and popular sovereignty by the procedures of a discursive process of opinion and will formation. For the general reader gripped by the ongoing euro crisis, the appendix provides express satisfaction. Adopting a more reader-friendly style than in previous sections, Habermas scans some of the political responses to the crisis and the failure of political elites – in Germany first and foremost – to put an end to it. The author uses key events and protagonists’ stances thereon to sketch out the contours of the crisis, but perhaps more importantly to illustrate the disparity between where the European Union currently finds itself and where it should be. The reader begins to sense that the author may now view the European cosmopolitan project as under serious threat. The interview with Thomas Assheuer (I), conducted after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the outbreak of the financial crisis, critiques the national unilateral approach adopted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, which presaged her later response to the Greek debt crisis as it played out in May 2010 (II). Particularly resonant is Habermas’ observation that it was only after long weeks of hesitation on providing aid to an over-indebted Greece and the opportunistic tactical manoeuvrings of German domestic politics associated with the state elections in RhineWestphalia that ‘the realization hit home . . . for the first time that the failure of the European project was a real possibility’ (p. 102). The final section, aptly named ‘A pact for or against Europe?’ (III), provides a compelling explanation for the misguided economic policy measures adopted by European Union heads of government in this crisis. Habermas opines that the prescriptions favoured by Germany carry legitimation and outright rejection risks among a ‘Europe-weary’ (p. 132) population of disenfranchised citizens. Germany’s political elites and its Constitutional Court come in for special criticism for a return to a ‘self-centred’ political approach since reunification (pp. 124, 132–3) and an ‘outdated, dogmatic legal conception of sovereignty’ (p. 124) respectively. The media is accused – as is often the case – of overseeing a ‘deplorable transformation of politics’ (p. 136) in Germany and elsewhere. Habermas’ concluding remark that the ‘citizens sense that a normatively hollowed-out politics is withholding something from them’ (p. 138, italics in original) itself suggests both the problem and the solution. It invites the reader to revisit the considered solutions, so impressively articulated in the preceding essays. The antidote to the European Union’s common problems, including its legitimacy dilemmas, is less intergovernmental decision-making (that is, less central steering by the European Council), more democracy and a widening of the bases of citizen participation and consent. In essence, it involves an expanded public sphere. Habermas’ work provides an engaging and pragmatic philosophical response to the challenges of a post-national constellation in a crisis-wracked European Union.