Year XXXIX, Number 1, July 2026

Lucio Levi

Honorary editor of the Federalist Debate and former President of UEF-Italy. Professor emeritus of political science at the University of Turin.

Whenever an age of profound crisis such as ours is experienced, the problem of building a new order arises. The last message transmitted to us by Jürgen Habermas is that we have truly reached the sunset of the old liberal-democratic world order and the dawn of a barbaric civilization in which Trump and Putin – the leaders of the guiding powers of the old bipolar world order – speak the same language.

Faced with the decline of democracy in much of the world, even in countries where it seemed most deeply rooted, Habermas never tired of warning first and foremost the Germans, but also Europe and the West, against the temptation to fall back into nationalism, which in Germany bore the sinister name of National Socialism and Nazism. Nor did he ever give up believing in the possibility of reviving the great goals of European and world federalism.

He had been concerned since the time of the Appeal for a United Europe, signed in 2003 with Derrida, about Europe's loss of weight on the international stage. In more recent times he warned Europeans of the dangers of weakening the Euro-Atlantic axis. He continued to ask where the energies had been found that drove progress from barbarism and chaos to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, to the Kantian dream of a universal democracy and a World Federation.

The European Union must have the courage to launch a proposal for political regeneration that makes it possible to develop a foreign and security policy, a common defence, an internal policy that transforms immigration into a problem to be addressed through collective responsibility, adequate social and environmental policies, and to overcome the obstacle of unanimity that paralyzes political decision-making.

According to Habermas, the European Union is the region of the world that can play a pioneering role in realizing this political design. The creation of international organizations does not imply the abolition of states, but the limitation of their powers and their transformation into organs of a global legal and political system.

The conclusion of this argument is that the ongoing financial, economic, social and environmental crisis has condemned the idea of a self-regulating market and has once again placed on the agenda of world politics the need to establish political powers and rules to govern the market.

Habermas repeatedly stressed that the principle of legitimacy of a multinational community, such as the European Union – and of which the United States and Switzerland are antecedents – cannot be based on a supposed ethnic, linguistic or cultural unity. He insisted that the identity of the European citizen must be founded on constitutional patriotism.

This means that such identity, on the one hand, must have a patriotic nature, affirming that the state and democratic institutions are the highest form of collective life and that values higher than private interest and individual selfishness therefore exist. On the other hand, however, the identity of the European citizen must free itself from belonging to the nation, understood as a closed entity, in order to affirm loyalty to the universal principles of the rule of law, democratic participation, social and environmental security, and peace.

The concepts used by Habermas – global civil society, cosmopolitan law, domestic world politics, world citizenship – which he never abandoned, even in the face of the return of nationalism, power politics and war, are the coordinates that open the road to the formation of a new international order capable of overcoming internal fragmentation in a world reorganizing itself into large regional blocs.

The rise of Trump to the leadership of the United States has produced a deep fracture in the Western world that has strengthened nationalist, racist, anti-Islamic and antisemitic tendencies. It is a fracture that must be healed on the economic, political, social and environmental levels.

Recent elections held in Hungary highlighted the clash that has divided the West: on one side, the illiberal democracy of Orbán and Trump; on the other, liberal European democracy. The meaning of this division is clear: liberal democracy has won and has enabled the West to take a powerful step forward toward the recomposition of the non-American West.