Politics & Power Quote by Jurgen Habermas

Habermas manages to praise and needle the post-9/11 world in the same breath: a coalition “against terrorism” is “clever,” yet “fragile,” an alliance held together less by shared principles than by emergency. That double adjective does the real work. “Clever” signals strategic improvisation - the U.S. assembling a temporary moral and diplomatic permission slip. “Fragile” warns that legitimacy built on fear and shock is inherently unstable, prone to fracture the moment interests diverge or methods curdle into abuse.

The larger wager is classic Habermas: crisis can be a shortcut to institutional evolution. “Classical international law” evokes the Westphalian model - sovereign states, consent-based treaties, rules that stop at borders and often stop short of enforcement. By contrast, a “cosmopolitan order” is his long-running hope for a rights-based global politics where individuals, not just states, are the ultimate subjects of law. Terrorism, in this framing, is both the threat and the excuse: a transnational violence that exposes how dated state-centric rules are, and how tempting it is to bypass law entirely.

The subtext is a challenge to American power. The U.S. can either treat the coalition as a tool for unilateral action dressed up as multilateralism, or as a hinge moment to strengthen genuinely shared legal authority - courts, norms, accountability. Habermas isn’t romantic about the coalition; he’s testing whether an ad hoc alliance can be converted into durable legitimacy before it collapses under its own contradictions.