The Lure Of Technocracy Analysis

Published in response to the 2009 banking and public debt crisis in the Eurozone, Jürgen Habermas makes an argument to salvage the project of European unification in his 2013 book The Lure of Technocracy. In order to prevent the European Union from slipping into a technocracy tailored to the financial markets, Habermas suggests the EU’s transformation from a pre-dominantly monetary to a truly political union. While the nation-states will maintain their independence, their national citizens must also begin to think of themselves as European citizens and hence adopt a dual role of belonging. Focusing on the chapters “The Lure of Technocracy,” “European Citizens and European Peoples,” and “The Dilemma Facing the Political Parties,” I argue that Habermas’ vision of a future European Union has four main limitations: The first two are concerned with the horizontal relationship between European citizens and solidarity’s
The “expansion of the We-perspective of national citizens into one of European citizens” (Habermas 10) preserves national integrity while establishing new supra-national ties between individuals. While the old, enduring national ties between citizens arise from what Benedict Anderson would call “national consciousness” (Anderson 39), the new supra-national links have to be brought into existence through solidarity. Even though national and supra-national ties work in tandem, solidarity must first overcome national thinking in order to coexist with it later. Drawing on Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities,’ I will show that this task can hardly be achieved through solidarity as a strictly political concept. Along the same line, I will also challenge Habermas’ understanding of Anderson’s national consciousness as primarily political