Science & Tech Quote by Jurgen Habermas

The sting here is in the collision Habermas stages: “international police action” versus “wars again.” He’s not just lamenting renewed violence; he’s diagnosing a category error that powerful states are eager to exploit. “Police action” is the language of law, restraint, and accountable force used to protect a public. “War” is the language of sovereign prerogative, emergency, and winners’ justice. By saying we “had hoped” for the former during Kosovo, Habermas taps the late-1990s optimism that NATO’s intervention might preview a post-sovereign world where human rights could be enforced through something closer to global legality than old geopolitics.

Then he punctures that optimism with a bitter qualification: the killing is “state-of-the-art,” but “still in the old style.” The phrase reads like a moral audit of modern warfare’s favorite alibi: precision. Smart bombs, surveillance, and networked targeting promise cleanliness, even humanitarianism. Habermas’ point is that advanced tools don’t automatically produce advanced norms. You can upgrade the hardware and keep the same operating system: national interest, unilateral decision-making, civilian vulnerability, and a thin veneer of legality.

The subtext is a warning about legitimacy. If interventions are sold as policing but conducted as war, the public is asked to accept a permanent exception: violence without the full constraints of law, justified by humanitarian rhetoric. Kosovo becomes less a triumph of cosmopolitan ethics than a test case in how easily liberal democracies can rebrand war as governance.