Jurgen Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union: A Response, translated from the German by Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 2012) ("Today, all federations have adapted themselves more or less to the nation state model; the United States, too, has become a federal state at the latest since the end of the Second World War. The United Nations can understand itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century as an association of 193 nation states. The question that James Madison already confronted in 1787 arise all the more urgently with regard to the European Union: can a federation of member states with democratic constitutions satisfy the conditions of democratic legitimation without clearly subordinating the national level to the federal level?" Id at 32-33.).
Jurgen Habermas, Europe: The Faltering Project, translated from the German by Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 2009) (From "The Constitutionalization of International Law and the Legitimation Problem of a Constitution for World Society": "Cosmopolitan citizens take their orientation from universalistic standard which the peace and human rights policies of the United Nations must satisfy no less than a global domestic politics negotiated among the global players. National citizens, by contrast, measure the conduct of their governments and chief negotiators in the international arenas in the first instance not in accordance with global standard of justice, but above all in terms of the effective pursuit of national or regional interests. But if this conflict were fought out in the heads of the same citizens, the notions of legitimacy which evolved with the cosmopolitan framework of the international community would inevitably clash with the legitimate expectations and demands derived from the frame of reference of the respective national-states." Id. at 109, 116.).
Jurgen Habermas, The Lure of Technocracy, translated from the German by Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 2015) (From "The Next Step--And Interview": For the first time in the history of capitalism, the collapse of the entire financial sector manifestly had to be averted or postponed through the guarantees of the taxpayers; and in most cases the citizens didn't even receive the corresponding property titles in return. The injustice of the burden-sharing cries out to heaven: the banks continue to gamble away merrily while the protests retain a more local character--on London streets in flames, on Puerta del Sol in Madrid, before the City Hall in Lisbon, on Syntagma Square in Athens and so forth, Occupy Wall Street aside, these movements are as different from each other in cause, character, composition and motivation as the occasions and conditions at the national levels. The silent majorities to which these movements appeal are disheartened. They probably sense the systematic entanglements of everyone with everyone else, and are overwhelmed by the sense of the fatal impotence of their governments in the face of the potential threat of still unregulated markets. For this reason alone, we need a workable core Europe in order to re-establish a halfway tolerable balance between politics and the market." Id. at 63, 70-71.).
