146 Habermas: An intellectual biography
But Habermas did not stand near the center of an “internationalist
mood.”^48 This argument misses Habermas’s clear endorsement of
We s t bi n d u ng. Habermas’s positions from this period do represent
a break with the political language of Adenauer and Schumacher’s
early Cold War antitotalitarian consensus. But, rather than signi-
fying the erosion of moral standards or boundaries, it shows that
Habermas reaffirmed We s t bi n d u ng on his own terms. Where Kohl,
Genscher, and CDU General Secretary Roland Geissler linked the
commitment to the “intellectual and spiritual foundations of democ-
racy” with unwavering allegiance to NATO, Habermas delinked the
two issues.^49 This was not tantamount to delinking West Germany
from the West, however. Through a sophisticated interpretation of
civil disobedience, as we shall see in the concluding section of this
chapter, Habermas redefined the “moral substance of democracy”
of which Kohl and Geissler spoke.
Habermas concluded his 1982 lecture on the neoconservative
cultural-political project by claiming that it represented a historic
break with the “political culture of the Bundesrepublik” that had
taken root after 1945:
The Federal Republic opened itself to the West without reserve for
the first time; we took up the political theory of the Enlightenment... learned of religious pluralism, of the radical-democratic spirit
of Pierce, Mead and Dewey. The neoconservatives turn away from
these traditions.^50
Habermas thus framed the coming CDU-FDP coalition as an
expression of a German neoconservatism that was incompatible
with the “political culture of the West.” In the political context,
this was a clever reformulation of the debate. Kohl saw himself
as an Adenauerianer and consciously modeled his politics on the
chancellor who had been the primary architect of West Germany’s
We s t bi n d u ng. Meanwhile, in the 1980s, the SPD left and the Greens
were still arguing that Adenauer had foreclosed the route to a united,
demilitarized Germany. By describing the security thinking of the
neoconservatives as an expression of traditional German statism,
Habermas articulated a different vision of what linked Germany
(^48) Herf, War by Other Means, 266.
(^49) Ibid., 186.
(^50) Habermas, “Die Neokonservativen,” in DNU, 54.