144 Habermas: An intellectual biography
spoke of the dangers posed by the rearmament “insanity.”^38 By the
late summer of 1982, Genscher was still trying to underscore the
importance of the missiles for Germany’s We s t bi n d u ng, but in so
doing he revived a language of friend and enemy that was foreign to
the Ostpolitik that he had long represented.^39 This could have been
the trigger for Habermas’s remarks on the new Schmittianism. Since
1969 , Willy Brandt had conducted a new version of Ostpolitik – initia-
tives with the USSR and Eastern Bloc countries aimed at reducing
the danger of war and nurturing liberalization in the East through
gestures of reconciliation. In 1972, West Germany signed the Basic
Treaty with East Germany, thereby establishing formal diplomatic
recognition between the two states for the first time.
The stationing of the Euromissiles was a watershed moment in
postwar German political culture because it lifted the taboo on the
discussion of German reunification. Helmut Kohl recommitted West
Germany publicly to the cause of German reunification and believed
in the value of a more confrontational politics with the USSR. The
heightening of Cold War tensions during the Euromissile debate
created an atmosphere reminiscent to Habermas of the conservative
1950s. Kohl’s anticommunism reminded him of Adenauer’s. But the
political utility of rhetorical anticommunism was one thing, policy
another. Kohl retained Genscher as foreign minister, thereby con-
firming his support for détente and maintenance of the treaties with
Moscow and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Ostpolitik
was not dead, but the tone had changed.
When Kohl became CDU chairman in 1973, he argued that
the party should emphasize the “value order”(Wertordnung) and
“value-premises” of German democracy that bound it to NATO
and the West.^40 This was the language of militant democracy
employed during the 1950s by the Federal Constitutional Court
that Habermas had contested. Now, as the Cold War reheated, the
old language was revived. At a party conference in May 1980, Kohl
charged that the SPD was “no longer speaking the same language”
as it had when its post-1945 leaders, Kurt Schumacher, Ernst Reuter,
and Carlo Schmid, had held power.^41 Kohl critiqued the SPD for(^38) Honneth et al., “Dialektik,” in DNU, 183.
(^39) Habermas, “Neokonservativen,” 158: “We will not forget who our friend
and ally is, and who is not our friend and ally... like the U.S.A., we are part
of the West.”
(^40) Herf, War by Other Means, 99.
(^41) Ibid., 110–11. Kohl’s speech to annual party conference of CDU in May 1980.