In the early 1980s, a reheating of the Cold War between the superpowers had far-reaching consequences for West German politics. The four-year-long debate over a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) decision to station nuclear missiles in West Germany, known as the “Euromissile debate,” broke up the Social-Liberal coalition in 1982 that had ruled for thirteen years. Helmut Kohl became chancellor in 1982, a position he would hold for the next sixteen years. This new phase of the Cold war produced die Wende (the turn) in German politics. The years surrounding die Wende drew Habermas into two major public debates. The first concerned the Euromissiles, the second the Historikerstreit, or “historians's controversy.” Underlying both, according to Habermas, was the agenda of Helmut Kohl, whom he described as a “neoconservative.” In response to this neoconservative challenge in both foreign policy and vis-à-vis the memory of the Nazi past, Habermas formulated three new theoretical positions that have left a lasting imprint on his oeuvre. The first was a theoretical defense of civil disobedience; the second was an articulation of modernity, identified with an Enlightenment notion of public, rational critique, and a “project worth completing”; and the third was an explication of “constitutional patriotism,” a source of national pride for Germans centered on the idea of constitutional rights.