It is clear that the alarm threshold has long since been exceeded (also due to the destructive and deadly means of manipulation available today): it is not only democracies that are in crisis, but civil society itself, which no longer finds in shared values the glue of solidarity.
And yet we have introduced universal suffrage and public schools for all, adopted inclusive Constitutions and laws, signed the Declaration of Human Rights and created the United Nations and its specialized agencies in the fields of culture, work, food, health, finance... established International Courts of Justice and signed Protocols for the protection of the environment... It seems incredible that all this activism in the humanitarian and educational fields, in the protection and promotion of law and human rights, has not produced the civil growth that was expected, a depth of co-responsibility for the common good that was expected.
What happened and what to do? The causes are multiple and not simplifiable but on one point it is perhaps useful to clarify. Politics and modern democratic institutions, alone, are clearly not enough: they need the strong values at the base of modern civilization and forgotten or erased if we want to give vent to a tangible new shared ethos that is terribly lacking. The moral evidence and the ethical added value that act as a solidarity glue for human coexistence do not in fact arise automatically from the institution of a democratic constitutional State and its laws, nor even from solemn Declarations of intent, even if they were the most noble and visionary. The modern State needs to recover its shared value roots if it does not want to drift towards new barbarities that we thought we had defeated.
In a 2004 conference entitled “The Pre-Political Moral Foundations of the Liberal State,” Jürgen Habermas highlights an important distinction regarding the notion of citizenship: the role of “Citizens of society” and that of “Citizens of the State”. The former are mere “recipients of the law”, the latter “authors of the law”. «From the recipients of the law it is expected only that they, in the exercise of their subjective freedoms and rights, do not go beyond the limits of the law. From citizens of the State, who assume the role of democratic co-authors of the law, it is expected that they have motivations and attitudes other than simple obedience towards coercive laws of freedom. They must exercise their rights of participation in an active way and not only in view of their own legitimate interest but also by orienting themselves towards the common good. This requires bringing into play a motivational investment that cannot be subject only to legal coercion. Political virtues are essential for the consistency of a democracy. The status of citizen of the State – says Habermas – is placed, to a certain extent, in a civil society, which lives on spontaneous resources that are pre-political».
Without the sharing of values within a civil society that nourishes them, the State is an empty shell or the place of the exercise of power and the coercion of freedom. For Habermas, "citizens appropriate the principles of the constitution not only in their abstract content, but in their concrete meaning, starting from the historical context of their respective histories. A cognitive process is not enough for the moral contents of fundamental rights to take root in deep internal convictions. There can be solidarity among the members of a political society only if the principles of justice find their way into the densest fabric of the cultural orientation of values". "A destabilizing modernization of society internally - underlines the German philosopher considering the problematic context of today - could certainly make the social bond brittle and wear down that solidarity on which the democratic State relies".
These detailed observations are Habermas's answer to the question provocatively posed already in the mid-1960s by the philosopher Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, namely "whether the secularized liberal state does not live on normative presuppositions that it itself is not able to guarantee". Böckenförde denounced with words that today are more prophetic than ever "the transformation of the citizens of liberal societies into isolated monads that act for their own interests and that oppose each other with their own subjective rights, as if they were weapons...". "To what extent - he asked - can peoples united in a state live solely on the guarantee of individual freedom without having a bond that unifies them and that precedes this freedom?" That bond that unites communities, for Böckenförde, is pre-political: it is ethical, cultural and religious.
Habermas – from a non-believing point of view – illustrates what Böckenförde's assumption can mean for example for the essential question of Human Rights: "Translating the idea of a man created in the image and likeness of God into the idea of an equal dignity of all men, to be respected unconditionally, constitutes an example of a saving translation. It uses and discloses the content of biblical concepts well beyond a given religious community, up to the general public of those who have other faiths or do not believe".
Faced with the dangerous detachment of society before everyone's eyes, in the post-secular era "it is in the very interest of the constitutional State - says Habermas - to maintain respectful relationships with all those cultural resources that feed the normative conscience and solidarity of citizens". For Western democracies, after centuries of clashes between believers and non-believers, this suggests the usefulness of recognizing and valorizing the baggage and the reciprocal philosophical-cultural, political and juridical integrations of the Greco-Judeo-Christian civilization (and of Roman law) upstream of the modern constitutional State, which represent its basic value-based glue.
