For many years, Jürgen Habermas was one of the most respected thinkers in Europe. By the end of his life, people were left trying to understand how such an impressive mind could seem to have sympathised with Russia. Thinking Federalist editor Michael Haiden looks at the philosophy that shaped his life - and eventually led to public sentiment turning against him.

The death of Jürgen Habermas has left the world without one of its foremost public intellectuals. Spending decades advocating for European federalism, he was praised as a visionary, but criticised towards the end of his life for what many saw as naïvety towards Russia. His legacy remains that of both an extraordinary and a complex thinker. When he died on March 14th, Germany and Europe lost one of its most influential philosophers.

Through his work on deliberation and discourse, Habermas explored how people could reach agreement through communication rather than violence. Yet, he was not only an academic. For decades, he championed deeper European integration in essays, newspaper articles, and public lectures. Der Spiegel once called him “The Last European”, while The Guardian noted that he debated “the future of a continent that needed to be rebuilt ethically as well as physically”.

The future of Europe remained a central concern throughout Habermas’s career. But following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he published two controversial essays in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. While supporting Ukraine’s right to defend itself, he argued that Europe should also pursue a negotiated settlement with Russia.

Critics accused him of underestimating the threat posed by Vladimir Putin and of abandoning the values he had spent decades defending. For some, his position sounded like a betrayal of the European project. Yet, Habermas’s stance was reflective of a lifelong commitment to pacifism. More importantly, his pacifism and his federalism were deeply interconnected.

Europe as a means of constraining nationalism

Born in 1929, Habermas experienced Nazism and the Second World War during his youth. These experiences shaped both his pacifism and his deep scepticism towards nationalism. In the European Law Journal, he argued that the EU must evolve into a “transnational democracy.” European integration, in his view, was necessary to bind Germany firmly into Europe and prevent any return to hegemonic ambitions.

Habermas did not reject all forms of national identity. He supported what he called constitutional patriotism: loyalty to democratic institutions and constitutional principles rather than ethnicity, language, or religion. European integration was therefore a way of preserving democracy while limiting the dangers of exclusionary nationalism.

This perspective, however, reflected a distinctly Western European experience. As scholars such as Stefan Auer have noted, many Eastern Europeans associate nationalism not with aggression but with liberation from Soviet domination. Historians like Timothy Snyder have argued that Habermas often overlooked this perspective. Nevertheless, nationalism remained central to his understanding of why Europe needed deeper political integration.

Europe and a cosmopolitan world order

Habermas believed that lasting peace required international law to become genuinely enforceable. He imagined an international order somewhere between a federation of states and a world government, capable of preventing conflict through shared legal institutions. Interestingly, he often focused on the United Nations rather than the EU as the model for such an order.

Yet, Habermas eventually came to see European integration as a crucial step towards that broader goal. Initially sceptical of what he feared might become a purely economic project, he embraced the EU in the late 1980s. He argued that Europe represented something more profound than economic cooperation: a transformation in how sovereignty, conflict, and political community were understood.

This also shaped Habermas’s foreign-policy views. While he supported NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, he became increasingly critical of American unilateralism, particularly during the Iraq War. In response, he advocated a stronger and more coherent European foreign policy.

Europe as the last hope against war

For Habermas, the EU represented a unique achievement: a political space where war and nationalist rivalry were no longer considered normal features of international relations. This conviction explains his concern about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He saw the war as a dangerous regression from the legal and political lessons Europe had learned after 1945.

As the generation that experienced the Second World War disappears, Habermas feared that its lessons could fade too. He remained convinced that European federalism, post-national democracy, and stronger international law offered the best protection against repeating past mistakes.

In 2011, Habermas warned in Der Spiegel: “If the European project fails, then there is the question of how long it will take to reach the status quo again”. His later years were marked by growing pessimism, perhaps explaining what many regarded as his blind spot regarding Russia, but his central message still remains relevant today.

The European project faces challenges from many directions, including from traditional allies. But Habermas’s legacy reminds us that disagreement should not lead to paralysis. The road towards a stronger Europe will inevitably involve conflict and debate. For him, that was never a reason to stop talking to one another. It was precisely why dialogue mattered.