Kleine Politische Schriften VIII) is a 1997 book composed of a collection of transcripts of interviews with the German philosopher and social critic Jürgen Habermas conducted by various European media in the mid-1990s.

Schmitt advocated a "normalizing" view of German history, whereby Communism and Nazism would be equated, and the continuity of a reunified Germany with her pre-1945 past would be affirmed.

Although the nation-state was, in the 18th and 19th centuries an appropriate location and scale for the development of an emancipated political public sphere, by the aftermath of World War II this was no longer the case.

Based on his theoretical notion of societal legitimacy coming only from the active, ongoing consent of the people, Habermas shows how his notion of a political public sphere provides, by means of the deliberative agreements developed in radical liberal democracy, a way for people who formerly considered themselves strangers can come to see themselves as having a common self-interest at a larger social scale than they had previously imagined.

The second larger consideration for Habermas is the supplanting of what he calls "constitutional patriotism" for ethnic nationalism as the substantial glue holding a diverse, pluralistic society together.