After having discussed the need for ‘normative impulses’ for effective social and political integration in Europe, impulses that can only come about ‘through overlapping projects for a common political culture’, Jürgen Habermas, in the title essay to The Postnational Constellation, immediately reassures his readers that such projects ‘can be constructed in the common historical horizon that the citizens of Europe already find themselves in’. And a moment later he indeed identifies an already existing ‘normative self-understanding of European modernity’. What, though, is this self-understanding of European modernity, and what is its specificity?

Some have objected to Habermas, or to all those who try to identify normative underpinnings for European political integration, that such European self-understanding is either entirely indistinct from the general self-understanding of the West, i.e. a commitment to human rights and liberal democracy, or highly problematic, because it makes overly ‘thick’ presuppositions, which are untenable against the background of European cultural diversity, and risks reviving non-liberal European political traditions. The proposition made in the following attempt to reconstruct the normative self-understanding of European political modernity is different. It suggests, on the one hand, that the general, universalist commitment to liberal democracy is insufficient to understand Western polities. The commitment to political modernity does not lead unequivocally to a certain institutional form of the polity. It is open to interpretation, and the existing polities that share this commitment are indeed based on a variety of such interpretations.