Adela Cortina and Enrique Dussel in the Mirror of Gaza

Adela Cortina has published in El País a defense of social democracy that deserves consideration in our space. In “Saving Social Democracy,” published on June 24, 2026, she proposes separating the social democratic idea from party labels which, in her view, no longer adequately embody it. Her argument is, in essence, “reasonable”: in the face of widespread corruption, civic disaffection, pervasive public falsehood, institutional decay, and social and political polarization, Europe needs to recover a liberal-social democracy grounded in freedom, equality, solidarity, social rights, and a citizenry capable of assuming shared responsibilities.

The defense of the social democratic tradition is not irrelevant. It is difficult to deny the historical importance of the welfare state, public services, labor rights, health, education, and social protection, the democratic limitation of the market, and the very idea that citizenship is not exhausted by voting or by abstract legal status. European social democracy was, at least during its golden decades, a partial but effective response to the dispossession produced by industrial and financial capitalism. Even today, it retains normative and political resources worth defending against the far right, authoritarian neoliberalism, and the corporate reduction of every social relationship.

Yet the problem is not merely one of saving social democracy. It is a matter of determining whether the historical intuition from which social democracy emerged still possesses effective reality and, if so, under what historical judgment it must be rearticulated in order to move beyond its relative weaknesses and absolute limitations.

For the contemporary crisis cannot be reduced, as Cortina does, to the corruption of political parties, the loss of trust in public institutions, or the replacement of deliberation by propaganda and digital platforms. All of this must be taken into account, but it is not the core of the problem; it is rather one of its symptoms. The deeper crisis revolves around a conception of European universalism that continues to speak in the name of human rights, cosmopolitanism, dignity, and the rule of law, while methodically accepting that a considerable part of humanity may be treated—when geopolitical realism so demands—as surplus, a permanent threat, or sacrificial material in the name of security and the preservation of the European project.

Gaza has turned this contradiction into a historical test, though it is neither an isolated episode nor a sectoral issue that can be added as a footnote to an agenda of contemporary problems. It is, rather, the most harrowing, visible, and revealing example of a European modus operandi rooted in the biased way Europe perceives itself and interprets itself as the center of universal history. Gaza therefore compels us to ask what it means today to speak of universalism, citizenship, law, dialogue, solidarity, or humanity when a population can be subjected to the systematic destruction of its material conditions of existence—homes, hospitals, schools, supply networks, family ties, territory, memory, and future—without this producing an effective rupture in the moral self-understanding of European institutions and cultural elites.
The question is not only whether Europe has been consistent with its principles. That formulation is too comfortable. The issue is whether those principles can continue to function as universal principles when they fail fully to recognize those who endure the extreme violence of a political, military, and economic order supported, tolerated, or justified by the principal Western institutions.

This is why it is useful to return to the debate between Enrique Dussel and Adela Cortina. Not because Cortina’s article lacks valuable intuitions, nor because her defense of social rights, deliberative democracy, and civic responsibility should simply be dismissed. The point is that her diagnosis once again locates the crisis in the internal deterioration of European democracy—corruption, disaffection, public falsehood, and the loss of institutional quality—without sufficiently interrogating the geopolitical horizon that makes that deterioration possible and, in a certain sense, exceeds it. Her silences regarding Gaza are not external to her argument: they express a deeper limit of the tradition to which she belongs. They form part of a web of exceptions, silences, and complicities made visible in the interventions of Habermas and other representatives of German critical theory regarding Israel and the devastation of Palestine. Where Germany’s historical commitment to the memory of the Holocaust is translated into an almost unconditional defense of the State of Israel, the universality of human rights risks becoming an administered universality: capable of denouncing barbarism in the abstract, yet unable to recognize it when it erupts in forms geopolitically legitimized by a Western ally.

The discussion between Enrique Dussel and Adela Cortina gives conceptual form to the problem at stake here. Held in 1999 at the Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla, at a time when Habermasian thought was expanding markedly in Spain and throughout much of the Ibero-American philosophical sphere, the debate does not simply pit two ethical schools against one another, nor does it amount to a reductionist opposition between Europe and Latin America. It brings into play two different ways of understanding universality, justice, and the relation between practical reason and the victim. The decisive question is not only who may participate in dialogue, but what happens when the lives of those affected have been materially negated before dialogue can even begin.

Cortina defends a central thesis of discourse ethics: a norm is just when all those affected by it can accept it following a dialogue conducted under conditions of symmetry. Legitimacy cannot rest exclusively on the decision of the expert, the philosopher, the ruler, or the representative; it must be justifiable to those who suffer the consequences of the norm. And when those affected cannot participate because of poverty, hunger, exclusion, subordination, or cultural inequality, there is a duty to transform the material and cultural conditions that make their participation impossible. The historical task of justice would thus consist in turning potential interlocutors into actual interlocutors.
This position possesses a democratic force that it would be unjust to minimize. It does not merely defend empty procedures, nor does it reduce politics to electoral competition. It requires that those excluded cease to be objects of representation and become subjects who can speak; it recognizes that there is no justice where certain groups are systematically silenced, where their interests do not count, or where their participation is blocked by conditions of deprivation and subordination. The ideal of symmetry does not describe an already existing order: it functions as a criterion of critique and as guidance for the effective transformation of the conditions of participation.

Dussel does not deny this core. In the debate, he expressly recognizes the political force of discourse ethics and of Cortina’s civic proposal. His objection lies on another plane and alters the very order of the problems: the victim does not first appear as someone who must be included in a procedure of dialogue. The victim appears as a damaged life, as denied corporeality, as a subject whose material possibility of reproducing his or her existence has been shattered by a specific historical system.
The victim does not merely say, “They did not let me participate.” The victim says: “I am hungry”; “I cannot reproduce my life”; “my body has been turned into an object of domination”; “my community has been expelled from the land where I was born”; “my labor produces a wealth from which I am dispossessed”; “my existence has become impossible within this order.” The pain of which Dussel speaks is not a mere subjective feeling. It is the pain of a negated life: the material experience of someone who discovers that suffering is neither a private accident nor a natural destiny, but the effect of a historically produced system and, precisely for that reason, something transformable and ethically reprehensible.
This is where the decisive difference lies. For discourse ethics, injustice becomes visible in the exclusion of those affected from the process through which norms are justified. For Dussel, that exclusion is real, but it does not exhaust the problem. A system can be unjust even before victims come to deliberate about it, because it materially produces hunger, poverty, racism, sexual subordination, territorial expulsion, or avoidable death. The criterion of critique is not only the absence of communicative symmetry; it is the impossibility of reproducing the human life of those who suffer under the system.

This thesis should not be confused with abstract vitalism. Cortina understandably fears that the principle of life may become an ambiguous category, susceptible to justifying paternalism, control over bodies, or authoritarian conceptions of the good life. Her caution belongs to a German philosophical tradition shaped by the historical experience of the Holocaust and by the need to prevent appeals to life, the people, or nature from once again becoming grounds for racial hierarchies, political exclusions, or forms of biopolitical domination. In the name of life, reactionary policies, hierarchies among human existences, and forms of moral regulation that deny individual autonomy have been defended. But it does not follow that life must be expelled from philosophical and political vocabulary because it has been appropriated, at particular historical moments, by authoritarian, racist, or biopolitical doctrines. To turn that appropriation into a conceptual veto would be to accept that the history of its abuses can deprive us of an indispensable category for thinking vulnerability, suffering, and the material dependence of human beings.

In Dussel’s case, life does not designate an isolated biological reality or mere organic persistence. It designates human life in its bodily, social, cultural, linguistic, political, and spiritual density. Eating, dwelling, receiving an education, caring, speaking, creating, remembering, participating, and hoping are not accidental contents added to an already complete existence; they are constitutive mediations without which a human life cannot be realized. Dussel’s critique does not seek to impose a doctrine of the good life or to replace autonomy with tutelage: it seeks to show that there is no effective freedom, enforceable right, or rational dialogue where the material and symbolic conditions of existence have been destroyed. Without this reference to life, universalism risks preserving its juridical form while losing the body it claims to protect.

Gaza makes this difference visible with irrefutable force. We are not dealing with a population that has not been sufficiently heard in international forums, nor with a deficit of representation that could be corrected through broader participatory procedures or better-articulated dialogue. We are confronting the destruction of the conditions for reproducing the life of a people: hunger and thirst administered as instruments of war; the devastation of homes, hospitals, schools, and supply networks; mass displacement; the rupture of family and community networks; the permanent exposure of bodies to death, mutilation, degrading abuse, and trauma; the obliteration of territorial continuity, memory, and every collective horizon of the future.

For this reason, Gaza cannot be understood merely as a failure by the international community to incorporate Palestinians into a symmetrical conversation. It is proof that a political, military, and economic order can materially destroy the very possibility that a population might speak, deliberate, consent to, or contest the norms that govern it. Where the basic mediations of human life are razed, the problem is no longer merely that those affected have been excluded from dialogue: dialogue presupposes lives whose possibility of existing is being denied. Gaza, then, is not a question of how better to hear victims after the devastation, but of how to judge an order that produces devastation and yet claims to preserve the legitimacy of its principles, institutions, and consensuses.
This is also the measure of European responsibility. Europe has not been an external, powerless, or merely indifferent witness to the devastation of Gaza. Its governments, institutions, trade ties, military exports, diplomatic alliances, and cultural elites have contributed, with varying degrees of intensity, to sustaining the political framework within which that devastation has been allowed to continue. The unconditionality—or merely rhetorical conditionality—of much European support for Israel has meant, in practice, that the defense of international law and human rights has been subordinated to a geopolitical raison d’état.

In this sense, European social democracy cannot limit itself to judging the destruction of Gaza as an external failure attributable solely to the Netanyahu government or the Israeli far right. It must recognize that its own language of universality, when severed from the concrete lives of victims, can function as an enlightened cover for an order of violence. Habermas and other representatives of the German critical tradition are not materially responsible for the crimes committed in Gaza; but their interventions show the extent to which a philosophy of universality can become cultural legitimation when it places solidarity with Israel above the obligation to name, judge, and stop the destruction of Palestinian life.
Europe must therefore be judged not only by what it has said, but by what it has permitted, financed, normalized, or allowed to continue. The question is not whether it has been an indifferent spectator, but whether its political, economic, military, and symbolic support makes it a necessary condition for the continuity of the devastation. When a power, or a union of powers, retains the instruments to exert pressure, impose sanctions, suspend agreements, halt transfers, or diplomatically isolate a state, but chooses not to use them while destruction continues, that abstention ceases to be neutrality: it becomes responsibility.

Under these circumstances, the question cannot be only how to incorporate Palestinians into an international conversation under conditions of symmetry. The question is what kind of world order can present itself as democratic, juridical, or civilized while allowing a population to arrive at the conversation after losing its home, its children, its body, its neighborhood, its school, its hospital, and the very possibility of speaking.

Dussel’s critique begins precisely there. A system does not become unjust only when it violates its own procedures; it becomes unjust when it produces victims. A government does not lose legitimacy only when it manipulates elections or violates the separation of powers. It can lose a more radical, material legitimacy when it makes the reproduction of the lives of its citizens impossible or when it cooperates with orders that make the lives of other peoples impossible.

This distinction between formal legitimacy and material legitimacy is decisive for reconsidering European social democracy. A policy may be procedurally correct, respect certain guarantees, protect social rights, and maintain relatively stable democratic institutions. But if it simultaneously participates in a global architecture that ranks lives, normalizes dispossession, and tolerates the destruction of entire populations, its universalist claim is radically compromised.

Europe’s problem is not that it has accidentally forgotten its values. It is that those values can become a language of self-legitimation when they do not allow themselves to be judged by those who suffer the material consequences of its borders, markets, military alliances, and silences.
This requires abandoning every intellectual idolatry. There are no sacred cows. Neither social democracy, nor European constitutionalism, nor the Habermasian tradition, nor critical theory can be exempt from the test of history. This is not a matter of canceling a tradition or denying its contributions, but of demanding coherence with its own critical claim.
A theory that affirms that norms must be justifiable to all those affected cannot accept that some of those affected be treated as secondary, suspect, or dispensable interlocutors. A theory that defends emancipation against domination cannot look the other way when domination takes geopolitically acceptable forms. A social democracy that invokes solidarity cannot restrict it to the borders of a European identity or to the confines of an international alliance.
Habermasians do not throw in the towel because they still believe that dialogue, institutions, public reason, and democratic cooperation can save something of our shared life. That hope should not be despised. In the face of contemporary cynicism, it retains genuine political dignity.
But Dussel compels us to add one condition: no dialogue is sufficient unless it begins by hearing the cry of those who have been materially excluded from life. No universality deserves that name unless it can allow itself to be interrupted by the victim. No democracy can claim full legitimacy if it protects its procedures while abandoning the lives that its own consensuses have not known, have not been able, or have not wished to save.

After Gaza, the question is no longer only how to save social democracy. The question is whether European social democracy is willing to let itself be transformed by what it has not known how to save, by what it has not been able to save, or, worse still, by what it has not wished to save.

References

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Cortina, A. (1997). Ciudadanos del mundo: Hacia una teoría de la ciudadanía. Alianza Editorial.
Cortina, A. (2026, June 24). Salvar la socialdemocracia. El País.
Deitelhoff, N., Forst, R., Günther, K., & Habermas, J. (2023, November 13). Principles of solidarity: A statement. Normative Orders.
Dussel, E. (1998). Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y de la exclusión. Trotta.
Dussel, E. (2001). Hacia una filosofía política crítica. Desclée de Brouwer.
Dussel, E. (2006). 20 tesis de política. Siglo XXI.
Dussel, E., & Cortina, A. (1999). Debate entre la ética de la liberación y la ética del discurso [Video]. Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla. YouTube.
International Court of Justice. (2024, January 26). Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel): Order indicating provisional measures.
International Court of Justice. (2024, March 28). Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel): Order.
International Court of Justice. (2024, May 24). Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel): Order.