By EKOW NELSON
The death of Jürgen Habermas on the 14th of March 2026, at the age of 96, has naturally elicited the kind of reverential obituaries that greet the passing of a towering intellectual figure. And towering he undoubtedly was. His Theory of Communicative Action, his sustained defence of European modernity as an unfinished project, his famous joint manifesto with Jacques Derrida in the aftermath of the Iraq War — all of it marked him as one of the defining philosophical minds of the post-war era.
I came to Habermas rather late and while I can’t claim to have been an avid student of his works, I counted him among those European thinkers whose intellectual seriousness I much respected.
And then came Gaza
Habermas’s intervention on Palestine — co-signing a statement that, while nominally deploring civilian suffering, provided unmistakable philosophical cover for the Israeli assault — was not, as some of his defenders suggested, a lapse or a contradiction of his broader commitments. As the Columbia scholar Hamid Dabashi observed with characteristic precision, it was entirely consistent with them. It revealed, as Gaza has revealed so much else, the hidden boundary condition of European universalism: that it was never quite universal. That the famous circle of moral concern, drawn so expansively in the seminar rooms of Frankfurt and Paris, in books, essays and journal articles, quietly excluded those of us of the Orient — Arabs, Iranians, Palestinians, Africans, and Asians — as fully human subjects deserving of the same protections its philosophy proclaimed for all.
As Dabashi puts it with a directness that I find impossible to improve upon, those of us outside the European sphere of moral imagination do not exist in their philosophical universe. We are not actors in their moral drama. We are, at best, its backdrop — and at worst, as Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant so candidly put it, “human animals” — a metaphysical menace to be conquered and quieted.
I begin with Habermas not to speak ill of the recently departed, but because his death, occurring precisely as the architecture of Western hypocrisy reaches its most naked expression in Iran, is a moment of profound historical coincidence that demands reflection. The man who spent a lifetime theorising communicative rationality, democratic legitimacy and the unfinished promise of the Enlightenment passed just as the governments of that same European Enlightenment tradition were warning a country they had just bombed not to defend itself.
The philosopher of public reason departed as the Security Council produced silence in response to the assassination of a foreign head of state on his own soil. It is, I think, more than irony. It is an epitaph for a particular illusion — the illusion that the universalist ambitions of Western philosophy and the universalist claims of Western-designed international law and institutions were ever genuinely universal at all. What follows is an attempt to trace how that illusion was constructed, how it was maintained, and how, in Iran, it finally proved itself to be bereft of any of the universalist claims made for it, beyond all reasonable denial.
The Order and Its Origins
Writing about the end of the post-war world order some months ago, I confessed to having unconsciously assumed a kind of permanence about the institutions that emerged from the catastrophe of the two great wars. I cited Heraclitus — “all things pass and nothing stays” — in other essays but somehow failed to apply it to the architecture of norms I had grown up taking for granted. The United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — these all seemed to me, as they did to many of my generation, to represent something genuinely new and permanent in the history of nations: an attempt, however imperfect, to subordinate the naked logic of power to something resembling principle.
The post-1945 settlement, as I noted in my review of Dean Acheson’s magisterial account of its creation, was the second attempt in a single generation at such an architecture. The first, Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, had unravelled in part because the United States refused to join it and partly because the major powers were never genuinely prepared to be constrained by collective authority when it conflicted with their national interests. The second attempt was more durable — but, as Thucydides had warned two and a half millennia earlier in the Melian Dialogue, the strong remained prepared to do what they could.
Human rights, it turned out, had a fairly specific geography. And nowhere has that geography been more brutally exposed recently than in the treatment of Iran.
A Bargain Made and Broken
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action concluded in 2015 between Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union was, by any measure, a significant diplomatic achievement — one of the more serious attempts in recent decades to resolve a genuinely dangerous proliferation question through negotiation rather than force. Iran agreed to cap its uranium enrichment at 3.67%, dramatically reduce its stockpile, and submit to IAEA inspections on terms more intrusive than almost any previously negotiated. In return, sanctions would be lifted and Iran would regain access to its own assets — billions of dollars frozen in Western banks. Not Western charity. Its own money, held hostage pending compliance. And Iran complied. The IAEA said so, inspection after inspection.
In May 2018, Donald Trump walked away from the agreement. Not because Iran had violated its terms. Simply because he judged it a badly negotiated deal that rewarded Iran undeservedly, and maintained that Iran remained a regional and global threat regardless. Snapback sanctions were reimposed with devastating effect.
Here is where the logic of Western statecraft reveals something essential about itself. The European signatories, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the self-appointed guardians of the rules-based order and the custodians of Habermasian communicative rationality, turned to Iran and said: you must continue to honour your obligations under this agreement. The agreement that one of its principal parties had just torn up. Iran must honour the terms whose promised relief had just been snatched away. There was no meaningful rebuke for the United States, beyond polite expressions of hope for an eventual return to the agreement at some unspecified future date. In the meantime, if Iran failed to comply with the terms of the agreement that had just been repudiated by Washington, Europe would impose further sanctions.
I have tried to locate the principle at work here in any system of law, philosophical tradition, even any elementary understanding of fairness, and I cannot find it. A contract requires consideration on all sides. Pacta sunt servanda — agreements must be kept — is a principle binding on all parties, not some. What was being demanded of Iran was compliance with a repudiated contract under threat of further punishment. It was coercion wearing the clothes of law. And the European philosophers who had spent careers theorising the conditions for legitimate discourse and the foundations of democratic obligation said nothing of consequence about it.
When Iran — predictably, and in terms of the basic logic of reciprocal obligation, entirely reasonably, though others would characterise it as provocative — began enriching uranium beyond the previously agreed levels, the West and its press reported this as Iranian “violations,” carefully erasing from the narrative the prior breach that had rendered Iranian compliance both pointless, illogical and economically ruinous. History, once again, was made to begin on the day the weaker party stopped complying — not the day the stronger party made compliance ludicrous.
Bombs in the Middle of Negotiations
The diplomatic betrayal, brazen as it was, was merely the prologue to something far graver. In June 2025, while active negotiations were underway — talks in which Qatar was playing a constructive intermediary role and in which an agreement appeared, by many accounts, to be within reach — the United States and Israel launched coordinated military strikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure. What became known as the twelve-day war was, under any serious reading of the United Nations Charter, an act of unprovoked aggression against a sovereign state. There was no Security Council authorisation. There was no imminent Iranian military threat capable of justifying pre-emptive action under Article 51. There was simply the unilateral decision, made in Washington and Tel Aviv, that Iran’s nuclear programme should be destroyed before diplomacy could succeed — because, one is forced to conclude, a successful diplomatic outcome was precisely what was not wanted.
The response from Europe was not condemnation. It was a warning to Iran not to retaliate. The country that had been bombed, in plain violation of the Charter those same European governments invoke constantly in relation to Ukraine, was cautioned that defending itself would have consequences. The aggressor nations faced none.
Compare this — and the comparison is not merely instructive, it is indicting — with the response to Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023. The Western position was immediate and unequivocal: Israel had an absolute right of self-defence. Arms flowed. Diplomatic vetoes were cast at the Security Council against ceasefire resolutions. No limit was placed on the means of response.
Or compare it with the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: again, the West was clear — this was illegal aggression, Ukraine had every right to fight back, and the international community must rally to the defence of the principles of the post-war order. Weapons, money, sanctions, solidarity. And on that particular point, the West was right. Ukraine’s right to defend itself against unprovoked Russian aggression was, and remains, entirely legitimate. The defence of that principle was correct.
What is not legitimate — what exposes the principle as selectively applied — is that the identical logic was systematically denied to Iran. The structure of the Western response is not determined by the principle of self-defence or sovereign integrity. It is determined by who the victim is, and whether they fall within the circle of Western moral recognition.
But when Iran is bombed — bombed mid-negotiation, without provocation, without authorisation — it is warned not to respond. And Western governments offer military support not to the victim of the attack but against it. The principle at work is not self-defence. Neither is not international law. It is not even, as I have argued above, the Habermasian ideal of communicative reason. It is simply the oldest principle in the book: we may do what we will; you must suffer what you must.
The Sequel Nobody Should Have Been Surprised By
And then, buoyed and intoxicated by the success of the military operation to abduct the former president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro — the extra-judicial operation that snatched a sitting head of state from a third country without any legal process whatsoever — the Americans and Israelis — again, precisely as a new agreement with Iran appeared within reach — launched a second wave of strikes, this time assassinating the Supreme Leader and much of the Iranian leadership on Iranian soil, without legal basis of any kind.
Europe produced no formal condemnation. Instead, Iran was warned — again — not to respond. It was urged instead to return to the negotiations that had just been bombed into ruin. Again. Return to talks with the parties that keep killing your negotiating counterparts. Israel, meanwhile, was invading and shelling southern Lebanon in response to Hezbollah missile attacks, and the Security Council was producing the silence that has become its now consistent and most reliable output.
The Philosophical and the Political
I want to return to Habermas here, because I think the connection is not merely symbolic. Dabashi argued — rightly, in my view — that Habermas’s disregard for Palestinian lives was not a contradiction of his philosophical commitments but a revelation of their limit. The critical theory tradition, for all its genuine achievements, had always had a hidden provincial core — a moral imagination whose reach, when tested, turned out to extend reliably only to those who existed within the European epistemic community. Philosophers such as VY Mudimbe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Walter Mignolo or Enrique Dussel in Argentina, or Kojin Karatani in Japan have, as Dabashi observed, far more legitimate claims to universality than Habermas and his tradition ever possessed.1
The rules-based international order is, in this sense, the political expression of the same structure. It was built by the West, theorised by Western jurists and philosophers, and has always carried within it the same hidden boundary condition: that its protections extend most reliably to those within the European and American sphere of moral recognition. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine — a European country — provoked an immediate, unified and genuine Western response. Iran’s subjection to unprovoked military strikes, the assassination of its leaders, the bombing of its negotiating processes — produce warnings to Iran not to escalate. The structure of the response is not determined by the principle. It is determined by who the victim is.As Dabashi has argued more broadly, Western philosophy has systematically excluded non-Europeans from the very ontological apparatus of its moral thought. 2
The Iran episode is that exclusion made visible in foreign policy, in Security Council abstentions, in the eerie silence of European capitals in the face of actions that would have produced immediate and thunderous condemnation had they been directed at a Western ally.
The Unlearned Lesson of the League of Nations
I have written before about the structural failure of the League of Nations — how it collapsed not because collective security was a wrong idea, but because the major powers were unwilling to submit themselves to the system they had created. The United Nations is failing for precisely the same reason. The Security Council veto, intended to keep the great powers inside the tent, has instead become the instrument of their permanent impunity. When the founding members and their allies act in ways that would attract universal condemnation if done by others, the veto ensures no institutional consequence follows. The body meant to enforce the rules becomes the shield behind which rule-breakers hide.
Edward Gibbon, whose reflections on Rome’s decline I return to often, described the later empire as a condition in which the forms of the old constitution were preserved long after its substance had departed — with a performative theatre of legitimacy concealing the reality of power. The United Nations, in its current form, finds itself in a similar condition.
The nations of the Global South — those that were told for generations that the post-war order represented something genuinely new, something worth defending, something that distinguished the twentieth century from the centuries of rapacious colonial plunder that preceded it — are drawing their own conclusions. They are not wrong to do so. And the world’s most eminent philosopher of communicative reason has gone to his grave having declined to offer them anything meaningful in their hour of need.
If mankind survives the ongoing conflagration, then a new international architecture — genuinely multilateral, genuinely binding, not structurally exempting its most powerful members from its most consequential rules — would not be a utopian aspiration. It is an urgent and necessary alternative to what we have now: a world in which law is a weapon wielded by the powerful against the less powerful, dressed in the borrowed language of universalism, and underwritten by a philosophical tradition that has finally, in Gaza and Iran, been fully exposed.
Heraclitus was right. All things pass as this too, shall. The question is what we choose to build in their place.
© Ekow Nelson
Madrid, Spain
(1) Hamid Dabashi, “The War on Gaza Has Exposed European Philosophy as Ethically Bankrupt,”
Middle East Eye
(2) Ibid