Civil Disobedience and Modernity, 1978–1987 169
self-revolutionizing project, animated by a “non-institutionalizable
mistrust of itself.” This project had three dimensions of “noniden-
tity.” First, by remaining nonidentical with itself, the Rechtsstaat
refused the legal closure of its moral horizon. Second, by making
the constitution nonidentical with the political culture, the values of
society could evolve. Third, the idea of the West was not reducible
to the “Atlantic value community” of NATO and therefore was not
identical to it. Constitutional patriotism could be attained without a
heightened climate of internal and external “security.”
In a remarkable passage from 1983, Habermas drew a link
between the spheres of foreign policy, historical writing, and law
that confirms the suspicion that Habermas’s interventions in the
debates over civil disobedience, the Euromissiles, and the historians’
accounts of the Nazi past were united by a common denominator.
For Habermas, this was the inability of his antagonists to tolerate
ambiguity:
It is the same mentality, in the military, historical, and juristic
professions, which cling to unambiguities all the more when the
people involved feel that the rug is being pulled from under their
feet.... If it is true that the superpowers even in the atomic age are
preparing a return to the unambiguousness of winnable wars, then
it repeats in this security-utopia the same thought-structure which
occurs in the legal positivist misunderstanding of militant democ-
racy, which seeks to do away with the ambiguity of civil disobedi-
ence. Authoritarian legalism denies the humane substance of the
nonidentical, exactly at the point where the democratic Rechtsstaat
draws its substance.14 6
This passage illuminates the nature of Habermas’s integrated
philosophical-political project in the mid-1980s. Habermas viewed
Kohl as a politician who had been able to translate neoconservative
theoretical positions into electoral success. Habermas responded
with a redefinition of We s t bi n d u ng. Together Habermas’s positions
on civil disobedience, constitutional patriotism, and modernity
articulated a moral language of Westbindung that could compete
with the neoconservative discourse. The two most celebrated con-
cepts Habermas developed in the 1980s were that of modernity as
14 6 Habermas, “Testfall,” 52: “... wiederholt sich in dieser Utopie der Sicherheit
die gleiche Denkstruktur wie in jenem rechtspositivischen Missverständnis
der wehrhaften Demokratie.”