184 Habermas: An intellectual biography
old German Democratic Republic (GDR) posed a dire threat to the
progress achieved in liberalizing West German political culture – an
achievement with which he was by now deeply identified. Democracy
was an undisputed good for Habermas, but he wondered: Could
democracy function without a liberal political culture that could
“meet it halfway”?^53 During this period, Habermas’s republican
commitment to a robust form of popular sovereignty vied for pri-
macy with his liberal anxieties that citizens of the former GDR
might not be equipped for the challenges of self-government. The
difficulties Habermas had in negotiating his response to the East
German revolution of 1989 are visible in BFN. The tension between
its civic republican and liberal impulses expresses Habermas’s con-
tradictory reactions to the changing landscape of German politics
in the years 1989–90.
In interviews and essays both published and circulated privately,
Habermas complained that reunification was an “annexation” of the
East by the West. A historic opportunity was missed for the two
states to choose a common future together, he argued. The fran-
tic pace and authoritarian mode of reunification would only rein-
force the cultural and economic asymmetry between the two states
and pose dangers to both. Perhaps most disturbing to Habermas
was the way the revolution appeared to undermine an imminent
West German progressive electoral majority that seemed for the
first time within grasp: “... [T]he old Federal Republic was well
on the way towards [becoming] a modern democratic society with
strengthened political participation and towards a protest culture,”^54
he argued. Habermas interpreted the results of the elections of
March 1990 as a critical reversal of this positive trend: “There is a
mentality predominating in the new states that we recognize from
the Adenauer period. The GDR has not yet caught up with the dra-
matic transformations of value-orientations that has occurred in the
Federal Republic since the ‘60s.”^55 Habermas thus was engaged in
a tricky balancing act: He could not ignore the threat he saw of
intellectual contamination by the GDR – he spoke of the potential(^53) See the “Postscript” (1994), in BFN, 461, for one of his frequent uses of this
phrase.
(^54) Michael Haller, The Past as Future, trans. and ed. Max Pensky, Foreword,
Peter Hohendahl (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994 ), 57;
orig. Vergangenheit als Zukunft (Zurich: Pendo, 1990).
(^55) Ibid., 58 (emphasis added).