Worries about the third world war: Jürgen Habermas promotes “timely negotiations” with Putin

In his plea for negotiations in the Ukraine conflict, which was published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Tuesday evening, Jürgen Habermas twice referred to “half of the population”, who are skeptical, if not downright hostile, to western deliveries of arms and, most recently, main battle tanks to Ukraine. The 93-year-old philosopher speaks of the “hesitation” and “reflection” of this group, who find it difficult to make themselves heard against the “bellicistic tenor of a concentrated published opinion”.

And Habermas mentions a “gradually starting discussion in Germany about the sense and possibility of peace negotiations” – and that he joins the voices “urging public reflection on the difficult path to negotiations”.

Did Habermas also think of the “Manifesto for Peace” that left-wing politician Sarah Wagenknecht and women’s rights activist Alice Schwarzer drew up and published a week ago in what at first glance seemed a bizarre coalition? It is striking that his haunting, carefully considered essay appears just after this largely publicly condemned publication of the “Manifesto”, as was the case almost a year ago.

I am concerned with the preventive nature of timely negotiations that prevent a long war from claiming even more human lives and destruction (…).

Jürgen Habermas

In April 2022, Habermas also defended the Chancellor’s hesitation in terms of arms deliveries in an essay for the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” and criticized the “confidence” of some political decision-makers, at the same time as one of various celebrities, including Alice Schwarzer, Juli Zeh and Alexander Kluge signed an open letter to the Chancellor asking him not to deliver more heavy weapons to Ukraine.

It is “this process of rearmament” that Habermas starts with. Its dynamic, which is difficult to misunderstand, worries him, not least because of the Ukrainian demands for other types of weapons after the Leopard commitment. He sees the danger of being “driven unnoticed across the threshold to a third world war”.

At the center of his stringently understandable essay, Habermas deals with two questions: at what point will the West become a war party, and whether willy-nilly it already is. Also that the US government “cannot maintain the formal role of an uninvolved person”.

The other question is a discrepancy, which is also of a conceptual nature: on the one hand, Ukraine must not “lose”, which is why it should be supported for as long as possible. On the other hand, it is now often said in Russia that Putin must be “defeated”. For him, this means that differences between pacifists and non-pacifists are also rather diffuse within the political factions and that “even in the broad camp of partisan supporters of Ukraine, opinions differ with regard to the right time for peace negotiations”.

Find acceptable compromises

Another line of argument on which Habermas moves is a historical one. It is the post-World War II realization that gave rise to the Charter of the United Nations and the establishment of the Court of Justice in The Hague that no sovereign state has the right to wage war at will: “If the outbreak of armed conflict does not painful sanctions, which are also painful for the defenders of the broken law, can be prevented, the alternative offered – compared to a continuation of the war with more and more victims – is the search for tolerable compromises”.

In his essay, Habermas makes no suggestions as to what the negotiations should look like; a status quo ante February 23 seems to him to be a starting point. But his appeal is an impressive one, his reference to the West’s inevitably increased share of responsibility in this war.

And this responsibility also includes developing strategies to end this war as quickly as possible, regardless of victory or defeat. That should not go unchallenged – but the way Habermas argues here, his voice will not go unheard.

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