Civil Disobedience and Modernity, 1978–1987 151
that recall his critique of both technocracy and the paternalistic wel-
fare state: A citizen could never be autonomous if meaning and iden-
tity are provided for him^65 : “Whomever allows himself to be guided
by functional imperatives of calculability, consensus formation and
social integration by means of the provision of meaning, must shun
the enlightening effect of historiography.”^66 Through a close study
of the theory and practice of civil disobedience, Habermas arrived
at the conclusion that the task of We s t bi n d u ng was too important to
be left to the historians or to NATO’s security planners.
DYNAMICS OF THE DEBATE ON THE RIGHT OF RESISTANCE:
A CHANCE AND TWO DANGERS
The Bonn demonstration against the NATO decision on deploy-
ment was the biggest in West German history,^67 but Habermas
made no public statement about it. He entered the public debate
on the matter for the first time in 1983; by then, the stationing of
missiles was essentially a fait accompli. The state’s identification
of “inner enemies” is what lured him into the debate. In 1983, the
Rechtsstaat appeared to him threatened by authoritarian legalism
in a manner reminiscent of the previous decade: “In the name of
militant democracy [wehrhafte Demokratie] the patriots of the fall
of 1977 emerged, smelling inner enemies and not grasping that the
legitimacy of rechtsstaatlichen institutions rests in the end on the
non- institutionalizable mistrust of the citizens.”^68 Once engaged in
the debate, Habermas found a discussion of the right of resistance
that oscillated between two poles. Each side in the Euromissile
debate drew its own lessons from German history, but neither was
convincing to him. The left used the terms “nuclear Auschwitz” and
“nuclear Holocaust” to legitimate its call for resistance to deploy-
ments it saw as suicidal for Germany. The right invoked the failed
appeasement policies of the 1930s. Habermas chafed against a debate
structured by these antinomies.
(^65) Ibid.
(^66) Ibid.
(^67) Herf, War by Other Means, 137.
(^68) Habermas, “Über den doppelten Boden des demokratischen Rechtsstaates”
[1985], in EAS, 23.