134 Habermas: An intellectual biography
modernity, neoconservatism, and “constitutional patriotism” each
represent a different facet of Habermas’s argument for We s t bi n d u ng
properly understood. It is during these years that Habermas’s
status as a Westernizer of German political culture best comes
into focus.
The Euromissile debate resulted in a multidimensional political
crisis. For intellectuals, it problematized the question of We s t bi n d u ng
and raised the specter of German neutralism, that is, withdrawal
from NATO and the demilitarization of the two Germanies.
Habermas’s writings on modernity from 1980–4 and on constitu-
tional patriotism from 1985–7 contain explicit critiques of neutral-
ism in foreign policy and mark his distance from the Green Party.
Faced with a discourse on the right that treated protest as disloyalty
and that made unwavering adherence to NATO policy the measure
of the commitment to the values of democracy, Habermas redefined
We s t bi n d u ng as a question of political culture. Membership in the
political culture he envisioned required its citizens’ loyalty to the
constitution but also their capacity for independent moral judgment.
In working through this question of the nature of a “mature” demo-
cratic polity in his political writings, Habermas arrived at a view of
the constitution as something that could and must evolve – an open,
fallible learning process – in short, an exemplar of the character-
istics he ascribed to the “project of modernity” championed in his
philosophical writings.
The dynamics of the debate on the “right of resistance” in the
years of the Euromissile debate created a theoretical problem for
Habermas. Neither the criminalization of civil disobedience by the
conservative majority of the constitutional law profession nor the
arguments for its legalization by the minority of the profession was
convincing to him. Both missed what Habermas considered the cor-
rect relationship of legality to legitimacy in a democracy. Habermas
solved his problem by introducing a concept of a Rechtsstaat that was
“nonidentical” with itself. What this meant was that the constitu-
tional framework of the Rechtsstaat needed to be supplemented by
what Habermas called the “non-institutionalizable” mistrust of the
state by its citizens. Toleration for civil disobedience was the “test
case” of a “mature” democratic political culture, to use Habermas’s
language, because it shifted the burden from institutional design to
the consciousness of the citizen.