Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

465Popular Sovereignty as Procedureeffects, we are more aware of the dangers; we now experience theinexorable development of productive forces and the global expansionofWestern civilization more as threats. One can no longercoax an unredeemed promise from the production-centered capitalistproject. The workers' social utopia is exhausted.(b) Something similar holds for the rise of the modern stateapparatus. A'i Alexis de Tocqueville already saw, the French Revolutionby no means signified an innovation in the development ofstate bureaucracies. At most, it accelerated trends that were alreadyunder way. Today, the integrative capabilities of the state continueto diminish under the pressure of regional movements, on the onehand, and worldwide corporations and transnational organizations,on the other. Where the ethos of instrumental rationality stillsurvives, it hardly finds any support in the unpredictable organiza-·tional accomplishments of self-programming government administrations.(c) We find a genuine product of the French Revolution, however,in the nation-state that could require universal conscriptionof its patriotic citizens. With national consciousness, a new form ofsocial integration developed for enfranchised citizens who werereleased from the bonds of estates and corporations. This Frenchmodel also guided the last generation of states emerging fromdecolonization. But, with their multiethnic societies, the superpowersof the United States and the Soviet Union have never fit intothe nation-as-state scheme. And the contemporary heirs of theEuropean system of states, having taken nationalism beyond itslimits, find themselves on the path to a postnational society.(d) There seems to be only one remaining candidate for anaffirmative answer to the question concerning the relevance o£theFrench Revolution: the ideas that inspired constitutional democracy.Democracy and human rights form the universalistcore of theconstitutional state that emerged from the American and FrenchRevolutions in different variants. This universalism still has itsexplosive power and vitality, not only in Third World countries andthe Soviet bloc, but also in European nations, where constitutionalpatriotism acquires new significance in the course of an identitytransformation. This, at least, is the opinion recently expressed byRudolf von Thadden at the German-French meeting in Belfort: