I haven’t specified a mechanism because I’m proposing a principle, not a law as yet. Laws are allowed to implement the principle imperfectly even when the principle is accepted as the basis of society.
(For example, let’s start with the absolutely minimal requirement: Would you agree with a law that requires all platforms to at least declare that they abide by the pluralist principle of letting the opposition voice their point of view regardless of what goes on in practice? If this is acceptable, we can move on to more rigorous demands like declaring platforms that routinely violate this requirement to be illegal. We can decide on punishments afterwards.)
I’m not saying Germany isn’t doing well today, but today’s Germany is keeping up with and outcompeting the Anglo-Saxon world on its own terms. Germany the deontological “theocracy” (I can justify the term) collapsed in the 20th century and disappeared forever from history. (Even if the transition to dictatorship was not a collapse, surely its results qualify as a genuine collapse.
I don’t understand your point regarding territories. I have tried to reconstruct your argument in various ways, but none of my attempted interpretations that hold together are relevant in the context of the utterance. Germans were forcibly relocated, etc. Are you unaware of the German territorial shrinkage, or are you just being cute by referring to the multiple German nations that previously existed? If it’s the latter, that’s like saying the Italian nation gained a lot of territory in the national unification, even though territories like the Azure Coast, which were culturally Italian, voted to join France. Ask the Germans if they feel like they’ve won out after all. If I were inclined to make arguments of this kind, I could propose the Holy Roman Empire as a German state larger than today’s Germany.)
How many German generals today would cite Kant and Fichte as the basis for their thinking? How many thinkers would use their formulations for calling the Germans to war? (Despite all of Habermas’ tirades against “instrumental rationality”, his thought is saturated with the pragmatic tradition, and German thinkers today are instinctively consequentialist rather than deontological, though still not instrumentalist or utilitarian per se.
Even when they try to deny it, their appeals to consequences remain extensive. For example, Habermas was driven to look to the English intellectual tradition when formulating his philosophy because he decided that the German tradition lacked the resources to criticize Nazism. This means that even if he decides never to appeal to consequences again, at the root, his philosophy was motivated by an appeal to consequences: fascism was bad and he wanted the resources to criticize it.)
(China is also not too shabby at the moment, but to say that Chinese civilization did not collapse in the 20th century would be misleading to say the least. Contemporary Germany is not deontological in the same sense that contemporary India does not represent an authentic continuation of Hindu or Mughal civilizations with respect to their intellectual traditions.)
So you really do think that “the Italian nation gained a lot of territory in the national unification, even though territories like the Azure Coast, which were culturally Italian, voted to join France.” I honestly don’t know what to say to that. I said “nation”, not “state”. A nation is not a nation state.
I think your main error is to conflate duty with legalism. The ethics of duty is decidedly NOT legalistic, it is existential at the root. (The Dewey book gives some concrete examples.) Kant was of part-Scottish ancestry and was inspired by Scottish thinkers to try and come up with a deontological/existential approach to legalism, but it is consequentialism that is naturally legalistic. (with exceptional periods of “emergency”, etc, but on the existential side you have stridently anti-legalistic eschatologists like Dostoevsky or even Berdyaev, really: https://archive.org/details/russianidea017842mbp Dostoevsky would of course have denied being an existentialist, and in a strict sense he would’ve been right, but I’d have trouble honestly justifying the claim that his approach is not existential in the loose sense that’s relevant in this context, where Kant is also existential in the final analysis.)
(I’ll let Orwell explain how much you owe to the culture of England: http://wikilivres.ca/wiki/The_Lion_and_the_Unicorn England is probably the least existential culture of our times. As you probably know, the Austrian school economists were trying to theorize the developments in England. Many German theorists belonged to English-inspired schools like that, but even legalist thinkers who considered themselves proudly non-English were more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSNJGymnLG4
That is satire, but notice how progressive Germans were accused of imitating the English in EXACTLY the same way that Islamists accuse progressive Arabs of copying the West. The nature of the relationship of England to the rest of Europe was previously identical to the nature of the relationship of Europe to the rest of the world.
That’s what you get when you have existentialism at the bottom of your legalism. (And once you approve of the existential approach, it’s difficult to shut the door when extremists start clamoring for a purer version of the approach to which you’ve already fixed your seal of approval.) I strongly disagree with the notion that the contemporary European idea is anything like that. (See Habermas’ objections against Heidegger. Habermas is arguably the philosopher of contemporary Europe.) Even the notion of an “European idea” including Britain is an oversimplification because if you ask Europeans, many of them will tell you that England has a different culture from the rest of Europe. You need to integrate a lot more facts to get less crooked outlines of such matters IMO.
I don’t want you to think I’m putting German culture down or anything, but proposing an interpretation of “the German idea” that has the figure of Faust expurgated from it is like confusing Islamic culture with the Arabian Nights theme.)