Religion and Politics: European and Global Perspectives 9780748691746

Citation preview

Religion and Politics

Annual of European and Global Studies Editors: Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski, Johann P. Arnason and Peter Wagner An annual collection of the best research on European and global themes, the Annual of European and Global Studies publishes issues with a specific focus, each addressing critical developments and ­controversies in the field.

Annual of European and Global Studies

Religion and Politics European and Global Perspectives Edited by Johann P. Arnason and Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski

This volume is a collection of articles in memory of the late Willfried Spohn

© editorial matter and organisation Johann P. Arnason and Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski, 2014 © the chapters their several authors, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11.5/13.5 Minion Pro by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9173 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9174 6 (webready PDF) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

 1 Introduction Johann P. Arnason and Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski

1

  2 The Religio-political Nexus: Historical and Comparative Reflections 8 Johann P. Arnason   3 Politics and Religion in a Global Age Jeffrey Haynes

37

  4 Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

59

  5 Europe in the Global Rise of Religious Nationalism Mark Juergensmeyer

82

  6 The European Union’s Civil Religion in the Making? Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski

97

  7 Democracy, Secularism and Islam in Turkey Ayhan Kaya

115

  8 Orthodox Religion and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia Mikhail Maslovskiy and Nikita Shangin

140

  9 Religion and Politics, Church and State in Chinese History John Lagerwey

157

10 Religion and the State in Contemporary Japan Elisabetta Porcu

168

11 Arab Revolutions and Political Islam: A Structural Approach 183 Karel Černý

Religion and Politics

12 Beyond Post-secularism: Religion in Political Analysis (Review Article) Michał Matlak

210

Notes on the Contributors 217 Index 221

vi

1 Introduction Johann P. Arnason and Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski

T

he Annual of European and Global Studies (AEGS) is an independent scholarly periodical, based in the Willy Brandt Centre for German and European Studies at the University of Wrocław (Poland). Its aim is to publish once a year a collection of articles with a shared thematic focus, dealing with European and global issues. The main goal of AEGS is to present wide-ranging scholarly reflections on paradigms, theories and problems concerning European and global developments and their background. In so doing, the Annual will strive for a genuine global dialogue of scholarly perspectives from different regions around the world. Willfried Spohn played a central role in establishing the Annual during his time at the Willy Brandt Centre (2010–12). His intellect, experience and collegiality were essential for the formulation and realisation of this project. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Willfried. It seems fitting to begin this series with a volume on religion and politics, and all the more so because it links up with Willfried Spohn’s published work and unfinished research projects. There are several weighty reasons to treat this theme as a key connecting link between European and global affairs. Debates on religion, its role and its prospects in the contemporary world have to a high degree focused on contrasts between Europe and other parts of the world; the longestablished assumption that modern societies are on a secularising path seems, whatever the problems arising on closer examination, to have a stronger claim to validity in Europe than elsewhere. Not that the case is straightforward: some very seminal work in the human sciences supports the view that if European modernity represents an exit from religion, that historical process and its implications are still very imperfectly understood (the writings of Hans Blumenberg and Marcel Gauchet are particularly interesting in this regard). On the other hand, 1

Religion and Politics

no in-depth analysis of European identity can avoid the question of its Christian sources, and the vicissitudes of European integration have brought this point to the fore. At the same time, growing Islamic presence in Europe is a reminder of enduring religious pluralism, not least in view of the high prominence given to Islamic experience in arguments against over-generalised notions of secularisation. A further reason to take particular note of the Islamic world within and beyond Europe is its importance for the question of monotheism and politics: do the interconnected trajectories of Islam and Christianity support claims to the effect that monotheism as such amounts to a major redefinition of the relationship between religion and politics, or are the divergent paths of different monotheisms more important? These problems are only a sample of the matters for debate that surround past and present constellations of religion and politics. But our brief foray suggests a general guideline for work in the field. Historical and comparative perspectives will help to achieve a balanced view of the issues. That is the main line pursued in the present volume, and it has manifold implications. The historical horizon to be taken into account is a very long one; recent scholarship in historical sociology has highlighted early landmarks and formative developments, especially those associated with the Axial Age (commonly equated with a few centuries around the middle of the last millennium bc). Some of these transformative turns – such as the emergence of monotheism in ancient Israel and of Buddhism in India – centred on religious innovations with political impact. But independently of debates on the Axial Age, to some extent marked by a traditional emphasis on the sources of European civilisation, growing knowledge of non-European experiences and traditions has also disclosed cultural pasts of key importance for later history. The diversity of legacies did not lose its significance with the transition to modernity. If the idea of multiple modernities has been gaining ground (it is better understood as a general guideline for analysis than as a full-fledged theoretical paradigm), that is not least due to the widely recognised influence of religio-political backgrounds on the orienting visions and emerging patterns of modernity. By the same token, the much-debated returns of religion, characteristic of recent decades and often associated with the end of the Cold War, should be placed in the context of different relations between traditions and modernities. Contributions to our volume discuss various aspects, episodes and outcomes of this long history. Johann P. Arnason raises the question 2

Introduction

of the religio-political nexus – in other words, the ideological and institutional intertwining of religion and politics – and argues that this connection, rather than religion as such, should be seen as a meta-institutional framework. This thesis finds support in arguments from social theory, anthropology and civilisational studies. The religio-­political nexus appears as a specific and crucial aspect of the civilisational dimension of human societies, theorised by S. N. Eisenstadt. Drawing on the work of Pierre Clastres, Maurice Godelier and Marcel Gauchet, the author then goes on to trace the changes that led to the consolidation of power centres, culminating in early state formation. Both anthropological sources and comparative historical research throw new light on the background and the context of religious transformations during the Axial Age, and their relationship to politics can now be analysed in more specific terms than in earlier phases of the debate. Jeffrey Haynes explores the relationship between politics and religion in today’s global age. By so doing, he examines both historic and thematic relationships between religious and political actors. He argues that until recently religion had lost most of its political importance, mainly as a result of a global secularisation. However, the current revival of religion in many parts of the world shows that even though secularisation was influential it did not cause a complete removal of religion from the public realm. This recurrence of religion is visible not only in the developing world, but also in the West. Haynes not only discusses various political consequences of the return of religion, but also asks why it has now reappeared as an influential domestic and international political actor. This chapter examines among other things how far religious actors pursuing political goals link their concerns to the consequences of modernisation, especially secularisation. This issue is explored in relation to Islam, whereby Haynes focuses on the question of why religion has become politically and socially significant in the MENA region and the role of globalisation in this context. Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd address the ­difficulties of comparing secularism and link it to the politics of modernity. Their chapter maps out the conceptual development of ‘secularism’ and argues that secularism has increasingly lost its largely taken-forgranted status as shared public discourse and space, with its accompanying inflections of neutrality and universality. The chapter criticises that the academic and political discourses are dominated by a map of the religion–secular separation, as it neatly fits into the modernisation narrative, highlighting on the one hand the progressive differentiation 3

Religion and Politics

of societal spheres, including science, the economy, politics and religion. On the other hand, the narrative of modernisation depicts different societal spheres as emerging from the control of religion. Consequently, this dominant map sustains the presumption that religion and the secular are readily distinguished in modern democratic societies. In contrast to this position, this chapter makes the case that secularism is a far more comprehensive, complex and diffuse ‘package’. The contours of this package shift across time and place and espouse multiple strands with disparate and contingent interactions. Mark Juergensmeyer explores the rise of religious nationalism in Europe. He focuses on the new wave of anti-immigrant xenophobia in post-Cold War Europe. Juergensmayer observes that in Europe, the United States and elsewhere in the developed world, religious activism primarily associated with Christianity has resurfaced while at the same time anti-colonial Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim religious movements have been active elsewhere. He argues that the re-emergence of religious nationalism in all of these cases may be for the same reasons, as they may be instances of a global response to political uncertainty. In this context, religion provides a way of thinking about public virtue, collective identity and world order in the face of a new social reality. This chapter explores the explosion of religious nationalism in Scandinavia, focusing on the Breivik case, discusses trends of xenophobia in contemporary Europe and puts Europe in the global context of religious rebellion. Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski applies the perspective of civil religion to the European Union, a particularly interesting case of a supranational polity. The EU has often been described as a post-modern or postnational polity but it increasingly promotes a sort of civil religion of European integration. It has its own founding fathers, ‘saints’ or heroes including Robert Schumann and Jean Monnet as well as an ideology of peace-making integration that links the pacific period in European history after World War II to the effects of the European integration. At the same time, the EU has developed a set of symbols, rituals and practices regarding its own history, destiny and the collective ‘good self’ that is similar to the religio-political workings of nationalism. This chapter explores aspects of European civil religion by analysing activities of political authorities in the EU attempting to bolster a we-feeling, promote allegiance, solidarity or even to generate sacrificial impulses among its citizens. The chapter argues that civil religion can be conceived of as a type of public policy, a ‘political technology’ or political 4

Introduction

practice which reflects the functional perspective of the religion-politynexus. The chapter focuses on five aspects related to the EU’s civil religion: collective rituals and symbols; foundational ­myth-making; self-images of superiority; missionary activities towards non-members; and the sacred elements of European citizenship. Ayhan Kaya aims to explore the tension between democracy, secularism and Islam in contemporary Turkey. He analyses the Islamist, Kurdish and Alevi claims vis-à-vis the monolithic state regime in Turkey, which has denied the ethno-cultural and religious plurality of the Turkish society. Kaya argues that the social and political transformation of contemporary Turkey by the government of the Justice and Development Party does not constitute a democratic form of governance, as the AKP embodies the authoritarian and repressive legacy of the Kemalist state tradition. This is even more striking since the AKP claims its legitimacy from the rhetoric of struggle against Kemalism. This chapter claims that Turkish democracy is yet far from consolidation and as the divide between Laicism and Islam has so far been ideologically fabricated and exploited by both the so-called Laicist and Islamist groups. Consequently, Kaya argues that democratic consolidation in Turkey depends on the easing of the tension between the advocates of Laicism and Islamism. Mikhail Maslovskiy and Nikita Shangin discuss the revival of Orthodoxy and the role of the Orthodox Church in post-Communist Russia. While they do not deny that the Church has become an important force in social and political life, they criticise over-interpretations of the kind associated with the image of Russia as an Orthodox civilisation returning to its roots or its pre-revolutionary history. As they argue, the present constellation is not a restored union of Church and state, and cannot be described as a de-secularisation from above. Orthodoxy is only one of several ideological influences on the Russian state, and the political weight of the Church has varied in the course of the quarter-century since the downfall of the Soviet regime. In short, it is important to see the issue as a matter of historical situations, rather than invariant traditions or definitive returns. John Lagerwey considers the results of recent scholarship on the history of Chinese religion and argues that they add up to a major revision of hitherto dominant views on China. An over-secularised image of China as a civilisation and as an imperial state must be abandoned; the record suggests that the Chinese imperial institution has functioned as a kind of church-state, and closer analysis of the main 5

Religion and Politics

traditions from which it has drawn support – Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism – shows that they have played religious roles in different but complementary ways. This is not to suggest that the whole pattern has remained unchanged throughout Chinese history. There have been particularly innovative periods, and some dynasties developed more activistic religious policies than others. The current situation, after a period of wars and revolutions, still resembles the traditional model in important ways: the Communist Party retains key features of a churchstate, and the apparent revival of Confucianism must be seen in that context. Elisabetta Porcu’s chapter deals with the question of state and religion in contemporary Japan. In the postwar Japanese constitution, state and religion are separated, but the union thus abolished was of a particular kind, markedly different from European patterns, and the sequel to constitutional change has been correspondingly distinctive. The religion that had been identified with the imperial state prior to 1945, known as State Shintō, was a political construct closely linked to the strategy of a modernising but selectively traditionalistic power elite. Japanese forms of religious life were more communitarian and pluralistic than the official version was made to suggest, and they have continued to play an important social role, not least on the level of local shrines and festivals. These resilient and adaptable traditions have also had some influence on politics, notably through Buddhist organisations. Attempts to reactivate Shintō institutions and practices, even if in a more marginal capacity than before 1945, have been an ongoing and controversial part of recent Japanese history. Karel Černý discusses the progress of political Islam, with particular reference to the ‘Arab Spring’ and the structural explanations of this phenomenon, proposed by various observers and social scientists. Contrary to many other authors, he does not explain the Islamistic turn as a response to blocked or delayed modernisation. He stresses the specific conflicts and imbalances inherent in the patterns of modernity that have developed in the Near East. The authoritarian, army-based and partially secularised regimes that became the target of protest movements and rebellions were products of modern transformations in the region. They proved vulnerable to structural changes brought about by the same processes, such as the demographic shifts that have changed the balance of generations, all the more so since there were no corresponding transfers of power, and the expansion of education. 6

Introduction

Political Islam has taken advantage of the crises caused by these developments. Michał Matlak’s review chapter, ‘Beyond Post-secularism: Religion in Political Analysis’, concludes the volume. The text discusses several recently published books along the lines of post-secularism debate, rethinking the questions of secularism and deculturation. The review highlights a general agreement that ‘secularism’ needs refinement (in both theoretical and normative senses), since there is a widespread assumption that religion has become a persistent element of contemporary social reality. Matlak discusses a proposal by Olivier Roy who stresses the broken relationship between religion and culture and in this way broadens the traditional social scientific perspective that mainly concentrates on the relationship between religion and politics.

7

2 The Religio-political Nexus: Historical and Comparative Reflections Johann P. Arnason

I

Introduction: Willfried Spohn on religion and politics

t is a commonplace that the question of interaction between religion and politics has come back to haunt both academic and broader public debates. Less frequently noted is the inherent ambiguity of the trends and events in question: what some observers see as a return of religion to the political arena is portrayed by others as a stepped-up politicisation of religion. Samuel Huntington’s work on the clash of civilisations (Huntington 1996) has become a standard illustration of the former view. For Huntington, religion is the most important objective determinant of civilisational identity, and as such, it is the main driving force behind the shift from national and ideological to civilisational politics. Huntington’s critics, as well as many other authors with different concerns, have argued that the invocations of traditionalist or fundamentalist principles are better understood as new ways of drawing religious resources into power struggles that have not undergone any basic change. Disagreement on this point does not, however, preclude a common emphasis in another regard: the regained importance of religion is believed to undermine some well-established assumptions about the modern world. On this view, the idea of a fundamental tension between religion and modernity – or, in other words, a secularising dynamic as a defining feature of modernisation – is no longer tenable. The apparent historical evidence for that claim can then be explained away in various terms. The dominance of secular ideas and attitudes is presented as a regional or temporary exception, and sometimes even as an illusion; the last-named approach relies on interpretations that stress the latent religious content of political ideologies and utopias, from the civil religion of liberal nationalism to totalitarian projects. 8

The Religio-political Nexus

In short, doubts about modern secularism are easily awakened, but they rarely develop into sustained rethinking of conceptual and comparative perspectives on modernity. Willfried Spohn was one of the few authors who have so far tried to link the changing configurations of religious life to a paradigm shift in the sociological analysis of modern history. His approaches drew on the idea of multiple modernities, defined in the general sense familiar from S. N. Eisenstadt’s ­writings. The multiplicity of the modern is not simply a matter of different socio-cultural patterns prevailing in different parts of the world and periods of time. More fundamentally, the emphasis is on multiple components of modern societies, on varying relationships between them, and on the diverse spatio-temporal constellations that shape the course of development within the modern field of possibilities. Against this background, Spohn focused on specific aspects less prominent in Eisenstadt’s work. The three texts included in Politik und Religion in einer sich globalisierenden Welt (Spohn 2008) illustrate key themes of this kind, and among them, modern nationalism is a particularly revealing case. Many scholars dealing with that phenomenon have noted a certain affinity with religion (or even, more strongly put, an ability to replace religion) as a recurrent feature of its otherwise variegated versions; in fact, the neglect of nationalism in classical theories of modernisation was one of the reasons why the idea of a general secularising trend seemed unproblematic. In some countries, historical legacies and circumstances led to closer connections between nationalism and the respective dominant religions. Notwithstanding this ambiguity, the secular thrust of European nationalism becomes more visible when confronted with developments within other traditions and civilisations. Non-European nationalistic ideologies draw on European models, but at the same time, they must define themselves in relation to other types of religious culture. Pan-Arab nationalism, inspired by Western examples and to a significant extent pioneered by members of a Christian minority, had to come to terms with Islam as a civilisational framework; that problem was never easy to manage, and in the longer run Arab nationalism proved vulnerable to a counter-offensive of political Islam. Another instructive case is the rise and retreat of Japanese nationalism. It was obviously influenced by European currents, and took the trends represented by late-nineteenth-century integral nationalism to extreme conclusions. But this could only be achieved through an extensive reconstruction of Japanese religious traditions and an upgrading of their political basis (see Elisabetta 9

Religion and Politics

Porcu’s contribution to this volume). Taking both European and nonEuropean trajectories into account, Spohn concludes that ‘on the basis of different civilisations, and in the context of contemporary modernisation and globalisation, the processes that shape nations, nationalism and national identity combine religious and secular factors’ (ibid.: 54). Another focus of Spohn’s reflections on politics and religion was the changing outlook for European integration. His starting point was the observation that recent shifts – the enlargement of the EU after the collapse of the Soviet empire, the problems posed by immigrant communities in Europe, and the troubled relationship with Islam at home and in neighbouring regions – had reactivated the European tradition of structural and cultural pluralism in a new setting. The European civilisational pattern was characterised by ‘multiple political, socioeconomic, religious and cultural centres, and by different religious and cultural lifeworlds as well as world-views’ (ibid.: 60). In successive historical stages, the specific configurations of this underlying diversity have depended on both intra-European trends (including new divisions, such as the early modern conflict between Protestant and Catholic Christianity) and the impact of external forces (from Islamic conquests to Soviet domination in Eastern Europe). If the question of secularism is considered in this context, it is – as Spohn argued – ­possible to speak of a certain secularising transformation of European civilisational pluralism (ibid.: 61), that is, of the overall mode of coexistence and interaction, without any thoroughgoing dissolution of religious components. In line with this background, the predominant mode of European integration has – despite occasional invocations of a Christian heritage – been secular. But precisely this most recent assertion of secularism is called into question by the changes that lead to closer contact with cultures and societies of a more religious disposition. And at the same time, the problems encountered on new fronts throw light on weaknesses of the order so far established. Issues relating to the weak legitimacy of EU institutions have hitherto been tackled at legal levels and – less directly – through economic measures; neither religious nor broader cultural resources have been of much importance.

The civilisational turn, I: defining a dimension Spohn’s analyses of the two themes mentioned above thus converge on a general point: the question of the relationship between religion and 10

The Religio-political Nexus

politics – or, to place more emphasis on their intertwining, the religiopolitical nexus – is best approached from a comparative civilisational perspective. More specifically, it is to be explored in the context of institutional integration and division within civilisational frameworks. The following discussion will link up with these ideas and attempt to take the civilisational conception of the religio-political nexus a few steps further. Our emphasis will be on general presuppositions and recurrent themes, rather than on concrete cases; but some indications for a research programme should emerge along the way. To avoid misunderstandings, we should start with a clarification of the civilisational approach. Contrary to the widespread view that this entails a focus on observable entities known as civilisations, and on their privileged status as (in Toynbee’s terms) intelligible units of history, the starting point to be emphasised here is a more analytical aspect: the civilisational dimension of human societies. As defined by S. N. Eisenstadt (2003), it involves the intertwining of two basic components. Culturally specific ways of experiencing and understanding the world combine with modes of defining, demarcating and regulating the main arenas of social life. Some obvious implications of this perspective should be noted. Eisenstadt’s formulations, as summarised here, refer to the interrelations of two factors, not to a programming of the institutional side by the cultural one (his occasional use of the term ‘cultural program’ should be seen as a remnant of his earlier, functionalist phase). The relationship in question allows for influences in both directions; this is easier to accept if we bear in mind that the cultural articulations of the world provide space for conflicting interpretations, and that the interpretive imagination, though never reducible to a purely instrumental role, is always interconnected with the fields of social power. The implicit reference to power is reinforced by Eisenstadt’s description of the divisions of social life as arenas, that is, conflictual spaces. Finally, the proposed model does not assume an invariant relationship between the cultural and the institutional component. The spectrum of possible institutional variation within a shared cultural horizon can be greater in some cases than in others, and the same applies to possibilities of autonomous institutional development. It is within this frame of reference that we should situate the religiopolitical nexus: as a particular, more or less pronounced and autonomous aspect of the cultural-institutional one. As we have seen, the question of power is inherent in the very idea of institution, but further 11

Religion and Politics

specifications are needed to theorise a political sphere; links between religious and political institutions are taken for granted in some definitions of civilisational formations (such as Western Christendom, Eastern Christendom and Islam, which differ in interconnected ways on both levels), but a general formulation of the problematic calls for closer analysis. And to pave the way for that, we must detach the idea of the civilisational dimension from some other claims in the text where it is proposed. Eisenstadt argues that the civilisational dimension, although universally present in human societies, has remained latent for most of the time; it reached a higher level of visibility, awareness and elaboration during the Axial Age. This latter term refers to a period of several centuries around the middle of the last millennium bc, widely regarded as a time of exceptionally significant cultural change in several regions of the Old World, and theorised by Eisenstadt as the most formative phase in the history of civilisations. The question of the Axial Age will be discussed from another angle below; here we need only note that Eisenstadt is defining the historical limits of civilisational analysis. The point – though not as clearly expressed as one might wish – seems to be that the civilisational perspective is only applicable when it can link up with cultural interpretations that bring its proper theme into focus, and that this precondition was created by the transformations of the Axial Age. This thesis answers a question that was implicitly posed but never explicitly tackled in classical sociology. Max Weber’s comparative civilisational studies presuppose a historical divide, roughly identical with the one posited by historians and archaeologists who speak about ‘early civilisations’ or the ‘origins of civilisation’. The beginnings of statehood, urbanisation and writing appear as interconnected aspects of a great transformation, and their joint impact on social life marks the entry into the domain of civilisational analysis. A very different line was taken by Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, when they introduced the notion of civilisation (in the pluralistic sense) as a necessary complement to the more developed concept of society. They drew on anthropological research and had no doubt about the relevance of civilisational perspectives to stateless societies. Mauss’s later writings show no signs of changing views on this subject. For the French tradition, then, civilisational ‘families of societies’, groupings of several – sometimes numerous – integrated social units are no less characteristic of the tribal and the prehistoric world than of the history that began some 6,000 years ago. But this position was never confronted with the Weberian one. Eisenstadt’s argument 12

The Religio-political Nexus

about the civilisational dimension and its emergence during the Axial Age seems to shift the chronological boundaries of the civilisational field even further down the track than Weber did. This line of demarcation seems incompatible with current knowledge of early civilisations, their diversity, and the correspondingly different backgrounds to the Axial Age. If we are to retain the idea of historical openings to the civilisational dimension, it must therefore be added that they are not limited to the Axial Age. The civilisations commonly described as archaic represent an earlier breakthrough; and with a view to our present topic, it should be added that both their novelty and the divergent historical paths which they took were closely related to varieties of the religio-political nexus. More specifically, the patterns, problems and metamorphoses of sacral rulership were central to the broader civilisational frameworks. Evolving scholarship on ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia has been particularly instructive on this point; earlier oversimplifications of the contrast between the two civilisations (seen as a stark dichotomy of divine kings in Egypt and non-divine ones in Mesopotamia) have been abandoned, but significant differences are well established. As will be seen, sacral rulership is not only central to the problematics of pre-axial civilisations. It is also bound to come up as a key theme if we attempt to broaden the framework of Eisenstadt’s reflections on the historical formations shaped by axial legacies. But to substantiate the latter point, we should first consider the implications of recent anthropological work on societies before the rise and beyond the domain of city- and state-centred civilisations.

Lessons from anthropology Whether we can apply the civilisational perspective to the societies variously known as prehistoric, stateless or primitive is a more difficult question (there is no good reason to shun the last term; it need not be and has not always been understood as an invidious description). But there is at least an ongoing debate among anthropologists, primarily French ones, that points in this direction, and it revolves around the religio-political nexus. A brief glance at the highlights may help to make the civilisational connection more explicit. The story should start with Durkheim, whose Elementary Forms of the Religious Life became not only a sociological classic, but also a lasting source of themes and problems for anthropological thought. Durkheim’s analysis culminated in the interpretation of religion as a primary institution from 13

Religion and Politics

which other institutions, including political ones, emerge through historical processes. At the most primitive stage, the political component is submerged in an undifferentiated authority that takes religious forms. Interesting variations on the theme of religion and politics can be found among Durkheim’s followers, beginning with Marcel Mauss, but here the next landmark to be noted is Pierre Clastres’ work on the anti-statist character of primitive societies (Clastres 1977). Clastres did not engage with Durkheim in any sustained way, but his argument may be read as a reworked version of the Durkheimian one. For Clastres, the evanescence of the political in primitive societies is a matter of blockage rather than mere undifferentiation; these societies are instituted in such a way that a separate power centre cannot emerge, and can therefore be credited with a vision of ‘society against the state.’ This institutional imperative is inconceivable without a cultural framework, and in the given case, that must mean a religious articulation of the world. That part of the picture was less prominent in Clastres’ work, but Marcel Gauchet’s political history of religion (Gauchet 1985) subjected it to closer examination. Drawing on Clastres’ account of primitive societies but incorporating it into a much more grounded and systematic theory of history, Gauchet sees the political aspect of human societies as – in the last instance – an expression of their ability to make their own history. But he distinguishes two very different attitudes to this ability: societies that negate it and strive to conjure it away differ from those that embrace it in a gradually clarified way. The fundamental paradox of history is that it begins with the negative attitude; the transition to a positive one is a complex and protracted process, and it begins with the emergence of the state. Here we can note a second paradox. The affirmation of autonomy on the part of human societies begins with the formation of a separate power centre. The subsequent path to collective autonomy culminates in modern democracy. But to clarify the contrast and the transition between the two patterns of self-understanding, the role of religion must be taken into account. For Gauchet, primitive societies are not simply – as Durkheim argued – characterised by elementary forms of the religious life; rather, their religions are the most emphatically dominant and all-embracing ones. The key feature is the grounding of cultural and institutional patterns in a mythical past. The inventions of the ancestors can be re-enacted in rituals, but neither questioned nor re-interpreted in significant ways. This sovereignty of a sacralised and immutable past makes stateless societies more religious than those that emerge later and develop more 14

The Religio-political Nexus

complex religions. The absence of the state, ensured by the overall institutional framework, leads to a collapse of the political into the religious. Against that background, the authority wielded by elders, warriors or males in general appears less important. Gauchet places somewhat more emphasis on shamanism; the shaman represents a specific ability to move between the human world and the sacral powers on which it depends. But there is no access to the founding past as such. The situation changes radically with the emergence of the state, which originally takes the form of sacral rulership. In that capacity, it acts – in Gauchet’s words – as a sacral transformer: ‘the religious Other enters the human domain’ (ibid.: 29). The sacral ruler represents an upgrading of human agency, and this puts him at the beginning of a long history that ends with the exit from religion and the ascendancy of secular democracy. Further discussion of that part of Gauchet’s work is beyond the scope of this paper. The present aim is to bring his conception of primitive religion and of the great historical divide between stateless and state-centred societies, summarised above, into the discussion about civilisational analysis and its limits. And in that context, we should note Gauchet’s criticism of the conventional views on the beginnings of civilisation. His main point is that the emergence of the state and the invention of writing are not as closely linked as has often been assumed (especially in the French anthropological tradition, stateless societies were frequently equated with societies without writing). He refers to Africa as the prime example of state formation without writing. The processes in question are, for obvious reasons, poorly documented, and difficult to reconstruct; but for Gauchet, they belong to the history of the state as a sacral transformer. He does not pose the problem in explicitly civilisational terms; but as I will argue, his approach can be developed in that direction. But to round off the picture, let us take a quick look at another author who reaffirmed the primacy of the religio-political nexus after a long detour through other perspectives, and linked this view to a more nuanced conception of pre-state societies than the one developed by Clastres and Gauchet. Maurice Godelier’s search for the ‘foundation of human societies’ should, as he stresses, not be confused with philosophical questions about the genesis or the nature of the social nexus. On that level, the problem can be dismissed as a non-issue: the human being in toto is a social animal, and social being involves the whole spectrum of human activities. The genuine question arises when 15

Religion and Politics

we consider the transformation of societies and the constitution of new ones. According to Godelier, such processes involve a combination of several factors. The most visible aspect is the appropriation of a territory, that is, ‘a set of natural elements . . . that provide human groups with a certain amount of resources for living and development’ (Godelier 2007: 204). The group that takes possession of a more or less clearly bounded territory develops an overarching collective identity that links together – in one way or another – subdivisions of various kinds. Both the defence of the territory and the regulation of activities within it – including the social division of labour – are under the control of groups more or less distant from everyday work and enjoying other more or less extensive privileges. In the course of history, the character, the power and the legitimacy claims of these elites vary significantly. But until relatively recent times, ‘invisible beings, to whom humans attribute powers, have been an essential component of the sovereignty that human groups exercise over a territory, over the resources they could exploit there, and – eventually – over other human groups that resided there’ (ibid.: 205). This last aspect is what was described above as the religio-political nexus, central to most historical societies. A radical problematisation of its logic (not to be mistaken for an abrupt disestablishment or a definitive decline) only began in the eighteenth century. There is, as far as I know, next to no evidence of direct intellectual contact between Gauchet and Godelier. Both are obviously moving within a – broadly speaking – Durkheimian universe of discourse. But some contrasts and complementarities may be noted. One of Godelier’s notable strengths is his emphasis on the diversity of stateless societies in various phases of development. New Guinean tribes and various Polynesian islands represent vastly different versions of chiefly power and clan hierarchy. The result is, in short, a more historical vision of societies outside (and by implication before) the commonly emphasised mainstream transition to archaic civilisations. On the other hand, there is no denying the force of Gauchet’s argument about the denial of social creativity and self-determination. The upshot of lessons to be learnt from both authors is that the religio-political nexus in stateless (or, sit venia verbo, primitive) societies is marked by tensions. Fundamental features of the religious framework act against the constitution of power centres with high transformative capacity; but counter-trends can at least accentuate the forms of inequality and domination that are always present, and may lead to high levels of stratification. The tension 16

The Religio-political Nexus

is obviously not of the same kind as that which figures so prominently in discussions on the Axial Age. But it seems equally clear that we should not think of axial transformations as outbreaks of tensions against a background of unity and closure. The points at issue can to some extent be clarified in light of more processual approaches. A conception of state formation as a long-term dynamic, subject to interruptions, shifts of focus and changes of context, would fit the historical vision that Godelier tries to bring into anthropological research. Finally, the emphasis on an evolving political dimension is linked to another theme that can also serve to correct the disembodied image of ‘society against the state’. The geopolitical aspect, implicit in the reference to territorial possession, is a crucial part of the picture. It is a commonplace that broad definitions of the state – those that do not treat statehood as a late medieval or early modern invention – have to include a territorial basis; if that component also belongs to the core structure of stateless societies and to the dynamic of their history, their political life is by the same token shaped by interaction and conflicts with other societies in a shared geographical environment. The religious side of the integrative nexus is also implicated in these connections.

The civilisational turn, II: expanding the framework Bearing in mind the abovementioned perspectives on religion and politics, based on different but not incompatible reworkings of Durkheimian themes, we should now reconsider the civilisational approach to the issue. As I have argued, the religio-political nexus can be subsumed under the concept of the civilisational dimension; but at the same time, a focus on this specific aspect can throw new light on the whole field covered by Eisenstadt’s definition. In various publications (see especially Eisenstadt 1993), he insists on the difference between two levels of religion: it can be analysed as an institution among others, but in another sense, it represents a set of basic civilisational orientations (an ontological or cosmological vision of the kind referred to above). In the latter capacity, it defines the horizons of overall institutional articulation and development. For Eisenstadt, this analytical distinction was one of Durkheim’s fundamental insights, but it remained underdeveloped because the programme set out in the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life was not taken further, and the sociological tradition did not take it on board. Eisenstadt was giving a civilisational twist to the idea that religion constitutes a ‘meta-institution’, 17

Religion and Politics

to use the term suggested by Gianfranco Poggi in his interpretation of Durkheim (Poggi 1972). The conclusion to be drawn from the neoDurkheimian work summarised above is that the meta-institutional status should rather be attributed to the religio-political nexus. In Durkheim’s Elementary Forms, the political aspect of societal power and authority is submerged in the religious one; Clastres and Gauchet brought it into the open by thematising the power-containing and power-levelling logic inherent in the institutions of primitive societies, whereas Godelier’s more historical view of the same social worlds highlights the diverse ways of distributing power. In both cases, and with good reasons, notions of kinship or production as the main integrative factors in primitive societies are rejected. The political dimension, in the sense of an overall distribution of power translating into social rules, is the primary domain of integration, and during most of human history, it was intertwined with the religious sphere. Eisenstadt’s analyses of this complex revolve around three main points. First and foremost, axial transformations (including the most distinctively religious ones, such as those occurring in ancient Israel and India) led to more ambiguous and unsettled relations between world-views and political institutions. New conceptions of order, based on more differentiated visions of reality, made it possible to legitimise power in more complex and ambitious ways; but they also opened up new possibilities for protest and critique. These tendencies developed in unequal ways in different civilisations, and that leads us to the next point. The contrast between legitimising and subversive trends was most pronounced where it linked up with a polarisation of orthodoxy and heterodoxy; this in turn depended on the elaboration of rival cognitive doctrines, most highly developed in religious contexts and particularly in monotheistic traditions. Among the latter, Christianity stands out through its long history of schisms and heterodoxies. Eisenstadt’s third theme is closely connected to this last aspect. His comparative sociology of revolutions stresses their long-term cultural genealogy, but not so much in the sense of a general axial connection as in relation to more specific trends. The early modern Euro-Atlantic revolutions, drawing on a long record of heterodox thought and activism, were the first major breakthroughs of their kind. Revolutions in other civilisational contexts (from Russia and China to Turkey and Iran) were, in decisive but different ways, influenced by Western precedent; on the other hand, their specific adaptations of Western models and sources reflect the respective civilisational backgrounds. 18

The Religio-political Nexus

To broaden the field of discussion and to bring the anthropological debate into closer contact with social theory, a brief excursus on ideas in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis will be useful. His social and political philosophy centred on the twin themes of social creativity in general and the particular features of its autonomous, that is, reflective and self-questioning, mode; at a later stage, continuing concern with these issues led him to outline ways of theorising power and religion, and thus to develop a distinctive conception of the religio-political nexus. The analysis of power (Castoriadis 1991) begins with the observation that in its capacity as social power, it is exercised on actors, and therefore not identifiable with the mere ability to make a difference; but the next step is to argue that the most fundamental power over actors is the ‘ground power’ of institutions over individuals. Here the affinity with Durkheimian insights is unmistakable. But Castoriadis goes on to add that since no society can achieve total control through institutions (uncertainties of various kinds are built into social life), there is always a need for specific institutions of explicit power, with some authority to enforce rules and inflict sanctions. In stateless societies, the power wielded by elders, warriors or chiefs is of this kind. For Castoriadis, ‘the political’ is coextensive with the sphere of explicit power; as soon as the latter exists (and that means, as he assumes, from the beginning of human societies), it becomes an object of negotiation, manoeuvre and rivalry. It can, however, be argued that the distinction between ground power and explicit power implies a meta-institutional role of the former: it is an aspect of instituting society as such. To complete this brief account of Castoriadis’s reflections on power, two further distinctions must be added. The state, defined as a separate power centre with some kind of organised apparatus, is a particular form of explicit power, emerging at different historical junctures in different places; but Castoriadis seems to agree with those who identify its beginnings with archaic civilisations. Another line of development leads to the invention of politics, which Castoriadis ascribes to the Greek polis. We can, in his view, only speak of politics when open confrontation of institutional alternatives becomes possible. This was the most momentous innovation of ancient Greek political culture, and it took place in a large number of small societies that did not embark on the path of state formation. For Castoriadis, the polis is a stateless society, but of a type that differs from older versions precisely in its capacity to question its institutions and envisage alternative regimes. This means that the invention of the state and the invention of politics 19

Religion and Politics

occurred not only in different places, but also in different historical settings. Another implication to be noted is that politics, as defined by Castoriadis is about establishing a reflexive connection between the two levels of social power. The centres and mechanisms of explicit power are to be used to determine or change the instituted patterns of ground power. But if the idea of significant changes to power structures before the emergence of the state is accepted, this reflexive turn is much older than Greek-style politics. Further evidence of that can be found in the history of archaic civilisations. To mention only one case, Pharaoh Akhenaten’s (1353–36 bc) failed attempt to change the religious and political order of ancient Egypt was clearly an assault on ground power by the most exalted kind of explicit power, and it was articulated through a religious reform. This was long seen as an early breakthrough to monotheism, but more recent scholarship tends to describe that aspect in more qualified terms, while more emphasis is now placed on the elevation of sacred kingship and its exclusive relationship to a single god (Assmann 2012; Maciejewski 2012). To stress such precedents is not to deny the novelty of Greek efforts to define and distinguish alternative political orders. But if the move from explicit power to politics is a long-drawn-out process rather than an abrupt break, and if the repercussions of this process affect the patterns of ground power, it seems justifiable to expand Castoriadis’s concept of the political and apply it to the changing interconnections of all three levels. This broader notion of a political sphere will be adopted here. Castoriadis’s conception of power and the more specific interpretation of the political dimension are linked to outlines of a theory of religion, sketched in his writings from the same period but even less developed in detail (Castoriadis 1997). A Durkheimian connection is evident in the opening statement that religion functions, for most of human history, as an overall framework for the institution of society. Castoriadis then adds the more distinctive point that this makes religion central to the regime of heteronomy that has prevailed in most societies. Heteronomy is, in the most general terms, the transfiguration of social creativity into extra-social determinants, and religious notions, from sacred order to single God, are the main supports of such constructions. But although Castoriadis follows Durkheim in putting the notion of the sacred at the centre of religious life, he redefines it in a very radical way. The sacred is, for him, not primarily a self-projection or a self-misrepresentation of society, it acquires this role as a constitutive element of heteronomous societies, but that level 20

The Religio-political Nexus

presupposes a more fundamental one. In the context of the human condition, or more precisely human being in the world, the sacred is a transfiguration of the chaos that underlies and relativises all partial order. It reflects the intuition that the world is not exhausted by empirical or rational determinations, but at the same time, it deflects this view beyond onto an imaginary construct that functions both as a protective instance (despite the ambiguity so forcefully underlined by Durkheim) and as a superior source of order. This view of religion entails certain approaches to the religio-­political nexus. The idea of ground power and its originally unquestioned presence in institutions is easily compatible with the conception of stateless but sacralised ancestral order, as developed by Clastres and Gauchet. Explicit power always involves some kind of privileged relationship to the sacred dimension, reflected in ritual and ceremonial roles. This connection, and by the same token the religio-political nexus as a whole, reaches a new level with the institution of sacral rulership as a matrix of statehood. The last topic does not figure in Castoriadis’s discussion of power, but the general thrust of his argument seems compatible with Gauchet’s political history of religion. It should be reiterated that the idea of religion implicit in the whole above line of argument follows the Durkheimian model up to a point, without accepting its sociological reductionism. The patterns of the religious imaginary are to be analysed in terms of the sacred as an eminent reality beyond everyday experience, open to personalising as well as depersonalising transformations (later developments and divergences are characterised by changing relations between these two trends, rather than by any definitive shift from one to the other). But with the invention of politics, accomplished – as Castoriadis assumes – in stateless societies of a new kind, the picture becomes more complicated. Politics presupposes autonomy, and vice versa; but the autonomy that enables polis society to choose between alternatives had a cultural background, and according to Castoriadis, the Greek mythological imagination – as known from the Homeric epics – gave expression to a distinctive view of the human condition. In this ‘Greek grasp of the world’ (Castoriadis 2004: 35), the focus was on the situation of mortals in a partially ordered world; on their relationship to immortal but multiple, disorderly and competitive gods in less than complete control of events and destinies; and on the relationship between agonistic and communitarian values. If this mythological paradigm is at the root of later developments in philosophical reflection, it seems clear that here the religious 21

Religion and Politics

grounding of cultural patterns was restructured in a way that took it beyond heteronomy. But Castoriadis never confronted his conception of the sacred with this historical experience. From another point of view, however, Castoriadis’s arguments can put us back on the civilisational track. His analysis of power and p ­ olitics, however brief, leads to clear historical conclusions: the separate inventions of politics and statehood represent large-scale and long-term alternative formations. Their subsequent destinies differ widely. It was the state-based version, reinforced by new forms of religio-political nexus, that absorbed the politics-centred one. the ­ Macedonian imperialism, Hellenistic kingship and the Roman empire might be seen as landmarks on that path. But as closer examination of the history of European political thought shows, the absorption was never complete, and it was followed by a revival of politics on the basis of more universalistic aspirations to autonomy. With these observations, we are going beyond Castoriadis’s explicit statements. But the empirical implications and limitations of his approach are, in the present context, less important than the point that he is referring to macro-historical constellations of the kind that other authors have called civilisations. That level of analysis now becomes more accessible than it was in the works of the anthropologists quoted above. It is therefore advisable to return to the civilisational dimension and focus more narrowly on its religious and political components. The most obvious conclusion to be drawn from anthropological work of the abovementioned kind is that historical boundaries may have to be redrawn; if the structures of religious and political life in stateless societies are as complexly interwoven as the post-­Durkheimian debate suggests, we have a prima facie reason to extend the scope of civilisational analysis beyond the great divide generally equated with the beginnings of civilisation. This enlargement of the field can be backed up by theoretical grounds. On the one hand, the cultural ontology of stateless societies has a religious dimension, and the separation of the sacred from everyday reality is central to that part of the picture. There was for some time a marked tendency to downplay the religious component of the world-view associated with this phase of human development (Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of the ‘savage mind’ is a prime example), but this has more recently been criticised by authors with otherwise different agendas. One of the ways to bring religion back in was to stress its plausibly reconstructed role in the neolithic revolution (Cauvin 2010), which Lévi-Strauss had primarily seen as a testimony to 22

The Religio-political Nexus

the intellectual potential of the savage mind. Another is René Girard’s attempt to bring religion back into anthropological debates by insisting upon its primordial link to violence. (Girard 2011). In any case this rediscovery highlights a pattern of division that is inseparable from the notion of the sacred; whether we define its opposite as profane, mundane or ordinary, or try to combine these terms, there is always an underlying vision of layered reality. It follows that the emphasis on ontological continuity in Eisenstadt’s references to pre-axial cultures must be qualified. Axial transformations cannot be understood as a matter of division replacing continuity; rather, the two aspects are always combined in some way, but new – and, as the case may be, more radical – articulations of division may be superimposed on or synthesised with older ones. On the other hand, the institutional architecture of human societies can be analysed as an overall distribution of power, with varying forms and degrees of explicit power (just as the varying separate domains of religious life can be distinguished from the implication of the religious imaginary for the overall institutional pattern). To put it another way, there are meta-institutional levels on both sides, and this puts the religio-political nexus at the centre of the civilisational dimension. This conclusion paves the way for a renewal of the anthropological connection that was characteristic of classical French approaches to civilisations. There is, of course, no denying that the absence of written traditions sets strict limits on the kind of inquiries pursued by civilisational analysts. The question of possibilities that might nevertheless be open has not been much discussed, and although it is one of the most interesting frontier problems of civilisational analysis, it is too complex to be taken up here. Instead, I will conclude with brief remarks on the relevance of the religio-political problematic to the interpretation of the Axial Age and to the research programme that Eisenstadt derived from comparative reflections on that period.

The Axial Age and its consequences Some noteworthy analyses of the Axial Age have focused on changes to the relationship between religion and politics. Louis Dumont argued, at an early stage of the debate, that the differentiation of these two spheres was the defining and enduring achievement of the period; with some reservations about China, he thought that this description was applicable to the otherwise different civilisational centres involved in the axial turn. In a more recent and much more exhaustive study of 23

Religion and Politics

ancient Israel, Greece, China and India, Robert Bellah summed up detailed analyses of key figures in the claim that ‘in each axial case, what I am calling social criticism is combined with religious criticism’ (Bellah 2011: 577). Social criticism is, in this context, always linked to visions of a more just political order. Here the emphasis is thus on interconnected reforms of religion and politics, rather than on the separation of the two spheres. But although Bellah has much more to say than Dumont on the world-views elaborated by axial thinkers, neither of them deals in a systematic way with the question of religious and/or non-religious elements in the new cultural articulations of the world. For analyses or at least indications in that vein, we must turn to Eisenstadt’s work. His idea of a division between the transcendental and the mundane suggests that a common denominator of axial changes to perspectives on the world is to be defined beyond the contrast between religious and non-religious notions. The point of using the term ‘transcendental’ rather than ‘transcendent’ seems to be that the question of primary reference to divine or human instances is left open. The assumption that Eisenstadt wants to allow for differences in this regard is confirmed on the level of concrete examples. He refers to Greece and China as axial civilisations centred on a secular dimension (in the latter case he also uses the expression ‘this-worldly transcendentalism’); a certain ambivalence is evident when he uses the term ‘salvation’ (which means, briefly, an alignment of the mundane with the transcendental), but notes that in the Greek and Chinese cases it relates to the political sphere. If we want to clarify the issues at stake in this context, it seems best to start with basic historical points. Recent scholarship on ancient Greece and ancient China has without any doubt strengthened the case for including the religious sphere and its changes in the respective axial trajectories. In the Greek case, the commonly invoked reason for stressing secular trends was the spectacular development of philosophy and politics. Not that the strength, variety and longevity of Greek religion could ever be ignored, but the notion of polis religion, now central to debates on the subject, has brought this aspect of the Greek world to the foreground and made its role in the axial constellation more visible. There is probably no better shorthand explication of this concept than Robin Osborne’s comments: ‘The gods constitute an interest group not represented in the assembly, but whose views are such that no one in the assembly can claim to know them . . . but they have to be represented’, and ‘it was in relation to the gods, and not simply in relation 24

The Religio-political Nexus

to other men, that individuals came to acquire and envisage their own capacities for autonomy’ (Osborne 2013: 292). In short, the idea of polis religion emphasises the involvement of a polytheism without sacred texts or exclusive priesthoods in the formation, the functioning and the ambitions of the political community. This approach is easily linked – though not originally connected – to the more speculative thesis that the polytheistic world of the Homeric epics must have been the product of a religious revolution, which would then have been roughly contemporaneous with the social and political prelude to the polis. This view seems plausible, but not easy to substantiate. If I am not mistaken, Moses Finley (1964) was the first to express it. In the Chinese case, the evolving view on religion in the Axial Age is part of a more comprehensive revision affecting traditional Western views on Chinese civilisation and its political order (see John Lagerwey’s paper in this volume). The over-secularised image of China was a joint product of European misunderstandings, going back to eighteenth-century sources, and interpretations developed by reformist thinkers from a Confucian background. Although many details are still disputed, it is now widely accepted that the religious aspects of Chinese institutions and thought were much more significant than was long assumed. In this regard, the Confucian tradition is the most crucial part of the picture, and the question to be raised here relates to its formative pre-imperial period. In that context, several reasons support the interpretation of Confucius’s project as a religious reform. The ultimate authority of Heaven is essential to the Confucian message, even if the master is recorded as unwilling to elaborate on this connection, and it is debatable whether the idea of Heaven was consistently de-personalised. The vision of a reformed order, embodied in a cultivated ruler, was inseparable from a comprehensive regulation through ritual. Last but not least, Confucius invoked the tradition of the Zhou dynasty, associated with a strong version of sacral rulership and a particularly emphatic connection to Heaven. As for other currents of the Chinese tradition, the religious – and more specifically mystical – themes in Daoist classics were always more obvious than the corresponding aspect of Confucianism; what recent scholarship has added is a more adequate understanding of later developments, especially the appropriation of axial Daoism by an organised religion from the second century ad onwards, and of the very significant role that this religion went on to play in the Chinese imperial regime (much more important than the official Confucian image and its Western 25

Religion and Politics

interpreters would have it). Finally, the current known as Legalism, most often taken to represent secular rationality in political action, has turned out to be a more ambiguous intellectual phenomenon. Its elusive but pervasive links to Daoism suggest religious underpinnings to the model of state-building and power-maximising rationality. This view is supported by recent work on the strong ritual structures of the ‘warring states’ that dominated the scene during the last phase of the Axial Age (see especially Lewis 1997). In both Greece and China, a closer look at the record thus leads to the conclusion that the religio-political nexus was restructured rather than weakened during the Axial Age. It would be misleading to claim that these two civilisations became less religious than the two other axial centres (ancient Israel and India). They were and remained ­religious in a different way, and differed also from each other. Their specific features will stand out more clearly if we consider further changes that became possible in the wake of religious and political innovations. In the Greek case, the polis became a hotbed of reflection. But philosophical and political thought were not as closely interwoven as they should have been according to Eisenstadt’s conception of the Axial Age (where criticism and reform in the social realm are supposed to draw inspiration from ontological principles). The two thematic trends seem to have been mutually autonomous, with limited overlap and a late attempt to achieve systematic unity (in the Platonic and Aristotelian modes). Philosophical reflection was, to a very significant extent, a dialogue with religion; the first author to bring this into the debate on the Axial Age was S. C. Humphreys (1986), but it has been taken up by others. On the political side, the gradual shift towards an idea of man-made order – interconnected with institutional change – can also be construed as a dialogue with religion. Some representatives of the sophistic movement in the fifth century bc seem to have severed the link to religion, but this question is disputed, and in any case, this was neither characteristic of the movement as a whole, nor did it translate into a political project. And the Platonic response to intellectual and political problems of the classical period gave a new impetus to the dialogue with religion, took it in a direction later seen as the beginning of a metaphysical tradition, and attempted a close integration of political thought. Even the very reduced role of the divine in Aristotle’s metaphysics is still a part of the dialogue with religion and a possible opening for a more elaborate rational theology. But philosophy is not the only cultural genre to be mentioned in this context. Greek tragedy 26

The Religio-political Nexus

has also been described both as a political art and as a dialogue with religion; its relationship to democracy is controversial, but the upshot of the discussion seems to be that tragedy as we know it could only have developed in the environment of a democratic polis. A similar case can be made for the plastic arts as a field of intersection between political and religious influences. In short, the religio-political regime of polis society was conducive to the formation of an intellectual and an aesthetic sphere with autonomous dynamics. But as the classic Spartan counter-example shows, institutional transformation could also take a turn that blocked such developments. Later destinies of the Greek intellectual legacy are a good example of the complex history unfolding after the Axial Age, and they depended on both religious and political contexts. The metaphysical version of philosophical reflection was a part of the cultural arsenal appropriated by Christianity as it rose to sole power within the Mediterranean world. As Jan Patočka put it, Greek metaphysics became the alphabet of revelation; in other words, the intellectual resources that had developed though a dialogue with polis religion served to rationalise and systematise a religious vision of very different origin and character, first articulated within another axial tradition. The different outcomes of this cross-civilisational fusion in Eastern and Western Christendom were, as is well known, closely related to different relations between religious and political power. In the West, the public sphere created through the conflict between empire and papacy (Melve 2007), the invention of the university and the uniquely sustained elaboration of rational theology added up to a powerful intellectual-institutional complex with long-term historical impact. Together with a whole spectrum of other forces, too multiple to be discussed here, it belongs to the prehistory of the scientific revolution that took decisive steps in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. This last-named transformation paved the way for a restructuring of the intellectual sphere, with an emerging divide between scientific inquiry and philosophical reflection. The decisive steps along that path were taken by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, whose logic entailed a new twist to the field of relations between religion, politics and the growth of knowledge. Beyond this landmark lies the disputed terrain of modern secularism, mentioned in the introductory part of this chapter. A brief comment on the other axial civilisation seen as secularly oriented (not only by Eisenstadt) will help to indicate a comparative context. In the present stage of mutual knowledge, a comparative 27

Religion and Politics

intellectual history of Europe and China seems even more difficult to develop than a social or political one; but some basic outlines are reasonably well established. Chinese civilisation produced one of the very few autonomous traditions of philosophical reflection, but the boundaries between philosophy and religion were not drawn in the same way as in the European sequel to Greek thought (that applies of course even more markedly to India). To judge from the work so far done or made accessible in Western languages, the relative weight of two different modes of thought is still a matter of debate. On the one hand, philosophical reflection developed in the orbits of distinct but never mutually insulated religious cultures, including those that merged during the Axial Age and developed into long-term historical and civilisational forces (Confucianism and Daoism). On the other hand, a certain effort to elaborate key notions and assumptions beyond the limits of specific traditions has been highlighted by some historians of Chinese thought. The work of François Jullien has focused on such themes (see especially Jullien 2009). In any case, there was no dominant religion and no cultural demand for a rational theology, and hence no development comparable to the mutual transformation of Christianity and philosophy in the medieval West. Last but not least, there was no Chinese parallel to the European scientific revolution.

Sacral rulership, East and West The background to these key traits of Chinese thought and culture includes a factor that also has a broader bearing on comparative history and calls for some final remarks: the Chinese imperial institution. It was a particularly effective and resilient version of sacral rulership, and a reminder that this form of political order was neither marginalised nor rendered obsolete by the axial transformations. It was, as we have seen, a crucial aspect of early statehood, and as such a historical innovation of the first order; but it also proved open to reinterpretations and complex modifications in different civilisational settings. The case of the Chinese imperial institution was an outstanding example of combining archaic elements with rationalising efforts and religious upgrading. It emerged as a result of the final round of a struggle between large states with high mobilising capacity, and after a longer phase of fragmentation that affected not only territorial structures, but also the very institutional core of rulership (until the eve of unification, an increasingly powerless Zhou dynasty retained its 28

The Religio-political Nexus

ritual sovereignty alongside the upstart political centres that competed for power on the ground and aspired to higher symbolic status). The first imperial dynasty, the Qin (221–6 bc), self-destructed in very short time through ultra-despotic rule and – more conjecturally – because of inadequate religious foundations. The succeeding Han dynasty laid more lasting foundations for imperial order, and two aspects of its achievement are especially relevant to our topic. On the one hand, a selective appropriation of themes and teachings from the Axial Age served to construct an ideological framework for the new regime. Recent scholarship suggests that the operative result was more syncretic and less predominantly Confucian than used to be thought; but on a more theoretical level, the idea of dividing the very complex intellectual field into more self-contained traditions seems to date from the Han period. On the other hand, the model of imperial rulership that took shape under the Han was a religio-political institution in its own right (the emperor was a religious figure), not just a political centre. It can therefore – up to a point – be described as a fusion of the roles played by empire and papacy in Western Christendom; but it must be added that both sides of the twofold authority were defined in specific civilisational terms. The terminal crisis of the Han dynasty around ad 200, and particularly the outbreak of popular revolts linked to Daoist millenarianism, show that neither the political nor the religious field was easy to keep under control. But in the longer run, the imperial institution proved exceptionally capable of revival after breakdowns and adaptation to changing historical circumstances. During the post-Han period of fragmentation, from the early third to the late sixth century, the example set by the defunct dynasty remained a paradigm to be revered, imitated on a more local scale, or restored through conquest. When reunification was finally achieved by the Sui dynasty (581–618) and consolidated by the T’ang (618–907), it resulted in a significant upgrading of the imperial model. Buddhism, introduced to China under the Han but more effectively diffused during the interim period of imperial breakdown, became an integral part of the ideological framework and gave a more universal meaning to the image of the ruler. The three traditions now attached to the imperial centre – Daoism, Confucianism and Buddhism – seem to have been associated with Chinese, regional and trans-regional dimensions of imperial rule (this expanded reach was another step beyond the Han), but detailed connections are disputed. The Buddhist component of the model suffered an irreversible 29

Religion and Politics

setback in the ninth century, but the framework of the three traditions remained in place. And from the beginning of the second millennium, a further factor came into play. Conquest dynasties from beyond the northern frontier took over parts or all of China, and developed different ways of combining the Chinese patterns of imperial power with their indigenous practices and traditions. The eleventh- and twelfth-century rulers of North China developed a system of dual administration; the Mongols, who subjugated the whole imperial domain, established themselves as a Chinese dynasty while also claiming the heritage of the world conqueror Chinggis Khan; the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) pursued more modest aims than the Mongols, but achieved a more viable synthesis of Chinese and Inner Eurasian traditions and built an imperial state much larger than China proper. In all these cases, the composite power structures owed something to Inner Eurasian versions of sacral rulership, much less ideologically elaborate, less moralised and less rationalised than the Chinese one. This long and complex history must be taken into account if China’s modern transformations are to be put into an adequate perspective. This applies, in particular, to comparative studies of the Chinese revolution, variously defined as the century between 1850 and 1949, the period between the downfall of the Qing in 1911 and the Communist takeover in 1949, or as a process beginning with the first military conflict between China and a Western power, 1840–2, and still going on. This vast upheaval was obviously, as Eisenstadt stressed, influenced by the Confucian legacy, but also by the cumulative experience of sacral rulership. Those who follow Eisenstadt’s model of axial civilisations will emphasise that the notion of a ‘mandate of Heaven’ transformed the image of the ruler and made him accountable. But although the importance of this idea is beyond doubt, it should be seen as one aspect of a more complex picture. There are reasons to believe that it goes back to the rise of the Zhou dynasty, that is, the end of the second millennium bc, and even if we discount this uncertain genealogy, there is no doubt that the later Confucian – or at least primarily Confucian – conception of the mandate was grafted on to a more archaic stratum of symbolism and ritual, perpetuated through ideologies and institutions of the imperial period. On the other hand, historical turningpoints and transformations added new contents to the notion of sacral rulership. The Buddhist conception of the universal king as protector of the law and the community, crucially important for the Sui and T’ang reconsolidation of the empire, differed from the mandate of 30

The Religio-political Nexus

Heaven. Another innovation was the abovementioned double identity of conquest dynasties. It can also be argued that the most autocratic rulers, such as the founder of the Ming dynasty (the Hongwu emperor, 1368–98) reinterpreted the mandate in their own way. Finally, both the leadership of the Taiping rebellion (1850–64) and the Communist regime that won the civil war in 1949 invented new variants of imperial autocracy. In brief, the Chinese trajectory was characterised by an enduring but also variously amplified and adapted paradigm of sacral rulership. This phenomenon calls for a rethinking of the relationship between axial and pre-axial modes of order. The pattern briefly described above does not imply a thoroughgoing break with the archaic background, nor can it be reduced to the general formula of a compromise between the old and the new (interpretations of the Axial Age and its consequences have tended to shift between these two perspectives). It makes more sense to describe the Chinese constellation as an innovative and adaptable synthesis of the archaic and the axial, and to conclude that such possibilities must be taken into account when analysing the impact of Axial Age transformations on later history. To round off our discussion, contrasts and parallels with another case will be outlined; the obvious choice is the historical path already compared to China with regard to other matters, that is the trajectory from ancient Greece to Western Christendom and beyond. The two very different sequences illustrate the range of alternatives opened up by transformations of sacral rulership. The anti-monarchic turn of the polis, most forcefully highlighted in the work of Christian Meier (especially Meier 2011), was a precondition of the most distinctive developments of the Greek Axial Age. But there was another side to this far-reaching cultural reorientation. The institution of monarchy gave way to the de-centred political field of the Greek city-state; but at the same time, the imaginary signification of kingship was elaborated beyond the limits of local experience, and obviously with some reference to the older traditions of neighbouring civilisations. This imaginary survival of kingship took a new turn when it became a part of Greek debate and reflection on alternative political regimes. That context did not ipso facto lead to sacralisation; but the broader field of Greek cultural imagination provided an opening for such interpretations. The semi-divine realm of heroes, linked to the gods through genealogies or other kinds of myth, was a plausible source of sacral dignity for kings. It was the continuity of monarchic 31

Religion and Politics

rule in peripheral parts of the Greek world that gave more substance to these notions, and the particular case of the Macedonian state was to prove decisive. Here a strong tradition of monarchy claiming divine descent seems to have been reinforced by institutions reminiscent of the early polis but maintained in a subordinate position; the rise to prominence and power within the Greek world provoked resistance, but also aroused expectations based on Greek visions of kingship. A geopolitical breakthrough then occurred in two steps: Macedon surpassed other regional attempts to build a territorial state, and this was followed by a takeover of the Persian empire. This major realignment of power centres gave rise to a new version of sacral rulership, known as Hellenistic kingship. Its core structures and varieties have been extensively debated by historians, but some basic features now seem beyond dispute. Hellenistic regimes deified the ruler, and the background to this redefinition of power was an intercivilisational encounter. We must, in other words, allow for Greek as well as Near Eastern sources, and take note of the specific Macedonian input. From a long-term comparative point of view, the record of Hellenistic kingship in full strength is less important than its impact on the adversary to whom it succumbed. For the warlords who competed for succession to the Roman republic, Hellenistic forms of rule represented a model that could be adapted to the aims and needs of a more imperial power. This was not easy to achieve, and the first sustained attempt – by Julius Caesar – ended in a celebrated failure. The successful solution, presided over by the man who in due course became known as Emperor Augustus, was an extremely complex arrangement that still has the power to baffle historians. But for present purposes, it is enough to note that the new office of the emperor was an embodiment of the religio-political nexus. As historians of religion now see it, the imperial cult gave the Mediterranean world its first common deity. This was an integral part of the imperial regime, and when the third-century crisis threatened the whole edifice of Roman power, the attempts to reform it were at first accompanied by renewed emphasis on the imperial cult, in connection with a general effort to revive traditional religion. That response fell short of success; there is no compelling reason to believe that there was only one alternative to it, but in any case, the one that prevailed was as paradoxical as it proved world-changing. If the Augustan settlement was based on controlled borrowings from a political culture whose civilisational background had a lasting influence on the Roman world both before and after the transition from republic 32

The Religio-political Nexus

to principate, the Constantinian one took a very different turn. The religion that now became the ideological mainstay of the empire came from afar in more senses than one. Its axial ancestry stood in marked contrast to the one with which Roman power had aligned itself. The religious transformation that took place in ancient Israel is commonly described as monotheistic, and the term has probably taken hold for good; but the significant core of this innovation was the idea of a sovereign god as creator and legislator, and its main political implication was a rejection of sacred kingship. Jan Assmann (2000) calls this radical change of horizons a ‘semantic relocation’ (semantische Umbuchung). The attributes of sovereignty were transferred from an earthly ruler who could also claim some kind of divine status to an exclusive god whose revealed law became the only true religion. Certain forms of the religio-political nexus were thus disallowed; in particular, there could be no extension of divinity to a ruler and no reinforcement through affiliation with multiple gods. On the other hand, the new religious orientation opened up new possibilities of influencing the political sphere. It could be re-sacralised in more roundabout ways, without returning to archaic patterns. On a very limited scale, the Jewish temple state that functioned within the Persian empire represented a regime of that kind (sometimes described as a theocracy). But on the whole, the political autonomy and – a fortiori – the geopolitical space of post-exilic Judaism were too limited for the ‘Mosaic distinction’ (Assmann 2000) between true religion and idolatry to have a significant impact on that level. Later Christian uses of models and narratives from the Old Testament throw some light on the potential of the previously under-used Judaic source. It was, however, primarily Christianity that brought the longterm implications of the monotheistic turn (as defined above) into the political dimension; and it was the mutual embrace of Christianity and a reformed Roman empire that first enabled a large-scale interaction between monotheism and sacral rulership. The road to this historical turning-point was a tortuous one. In the beginning was a heterodox offshoot of Judaism, taking a more other-worldly stance than otherwise known in that tradition; the disappointment of eschatological expectations, as well as the adaptation to a world larger than the original setting and more lasting than expected, led to a gradual transformation. The Christian community grew into a kind of counter-society within the empire, and in that capacity it had to embark on its own appropriation of Greek culture, different from the imperial one but not without significant 33

Religion and Politics

points of contact. No properly political institutions could emerge in this context, but the Christian community developed an internal organisation that could – in changed circumstances – assume political roles. The second great transformation, more rapid but with more far-reaching unintended consequences, began with Constantine’s conversion. This was neither a conquest of the centre by a triumphant religion, nor an instrumentalisation of religious resources by imperial rulers. The Constantinian turn is best understood as a convergence of two historical forces, with transformative effects on both sides but leaving each of them with a set of fundamentally insoluble problems. The imperial centre could not avoid involvement in religious controversies, and individual emperors sometimes went beyond the demands of the situation; but from the early fourth to the late sixth century, that is until the end of attempts to rebuild a united empire from the intact basis in the east, it proved impossible to contain the schismogenetic trends inherent in Christian doctrine and institutions. On the other side, Christianity became an official religion, and in due course the only permitted one; as such it had to integrate the imperial order into its vision of the world, but this meant reconciling it with a religious culture that had retained a strong though no longer acutely eschatological stance, transfigured its founder into a saviour outranking all worldly rulers, and developed its own centres of ideological power. There was no simple or easily enforceable answer to the question of relations between divine, scriptural, episcopal and imperial authority. Some kind of sacral legitimacy had to be attributed to the empire, but the proposed solutions ranged from the ideas put forward by Constantine and his allies, who aimed at a close integration of emperor and Church, to Augustine’s distinction between the city of god and the city of man. Varying options continued to dispute the field; what later history inherited from the Christianised empire was thus a problematic rather than a model. In the event, the late Roman empire had very limited time to grapple with the problems arising from its self-redefinition. There is no doubt that they contributed to the troubles of the fourth and fifth century. But they were intertwined with a complex array of other factors; and in particular it seems clear that geopolitical upheavals played a key role in the processes that led to division and decomposition. In any case, the outcome was a transformation of the Roman world, giving rise to three civilisational complexes. Neither the interrelations nor the long-term destinies of Western Christendom, Byzantium and 34

The Religio-political Nexus

Islam will be discussed here. It should suffice to recall that in all three cases, the sacralisation of political power in general and empire in particular was a defining feature as well as a source of complications. The lessons so far offered by comparative history suggest that Western Christendom experienced the most varied versions and the most momentous transformations of the religio-political nexus. A late product of this long history was the early modern formation known as absolutism. The term has often been criticised for its misleading implications; but it seems too rooted in the self-understanding and the ambitions of the regimes in question to be discarded. Sacral foundations were not only crucial to the claims and practices of absolutism; they also shaped its direct and indirect influence on the historical forces that entered into conflict with it. Modern nationalism and modern democracy, but also the revolutionary versions of democratic aspirations and the totalitarian responses to democratic transformations (Lefort 1994), were post-absolutist phenomena and very significantly affected by that background. With these observations we rejoin the issues mentioned at the beginning with reference to Willfried Spohn’s work. But further ventures into that field must wait for another occasion.

References Assmann, J. (2000), Herrschaft und Heil: Politische Theologie in Altägypten, Israel und Europa, Munich: Hanser. Assmann, J. (2012), ‘Echnaton, Tutanchamun und Moses’, in J. Assmann and H. Strohm (eds), Echnaton und Zarathustra: Zur Genese und Dynamik des Monotheismus, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, pp. 13–40. Bellah, R. (2011), Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, Boston MA: Harvard University Press. Castoriadis, C. (1991), ‘Power, politics, autonomy’, in C. Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 143–74. Castoriadis, C. (1997), ‘Institution of society and religion’, in C. Castoriadis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis and the Imagination, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 311­–30. Castoriadis, C. (2004), Ce qui fait la Grèce, t.1: D’ Homère à Héraclite, Paris: Seuil. Cauvin, J. (2010), Naissance des divinités, naissance de l’agriculture. La révolution des symboles au Néolithique, Paris: CNRS. Clastres, P. (1977), Society Against the State. Essays in Political Anthropology, Oxford: Blackwell. Eisenstadt, S. N. (1993), ‘Religion and the civilizational dimension of politics’, in S. A. Arjomand (ed.), The Political Dimensions of Religion, Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 13–42. Eisenstadt, S. N. (2003), ‘The civilizational dimension in sociological analysis’, in

35

Religion and Politics S. N. Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, Leiden and Boston: Brill, vol. 1, pp. 33–56. Finley, M. (1964), The World of Odysseus, London: Chatto & Windus. Gauchet, M. (1985), Le désenchantement du monde. Une histoire politique de la religion, Paris: Gallimard. Girard, R. (2011), La violence et le sacré, Paris: Fayard. Godelier, M. (2007), Au fondement des sociétés humaines. Ce que nous apprend l’anthropologie, Paris: Albin Michel. Humphreys, S. C. (1986) ‘Dynamics of the Greek “breakthrough”: The dialogue between philosophy and religion’, in S. N. Eisenstadt (ed.), The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations, Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 92–110. Huntington, S. T. (1996), The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster. Jullien, F. (2009), La philosophie inquiétée par la pensée chinoise, Paris: Seuil. Lefort, C. (1994), L’invention démocratique, Paris: Seuil. Lewis, M. E. (1997), ‘Ritual origins of the warring states’, Bulletin de l’École française de l’Extrême-Orient, no. 84, pp. 73–98. Maciejewski, F. (2012), ‘Der Gottesstaat von Amarna. Zum Beziehungsaspekt der Atonreligion’, in J. Assmann and H. Strohm (eds), Echnaton und Zarathustra: Zur Genese und Dynamik des Monotheismus, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, pp. 41­–62. Meier, C. (2011), A Culture of Freedom. Ancient Greece and the Origins of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Melve, L. (2007), Inventing the Public Sphere: The Public Debate during the Investiture Contest (c. 1030–1122), Leiden and Boston: Brill. Osborne, R. (2013), ‘Democracy and religion in classical Greece’, in J. P. Arnason, K. Raaaflaub and P. Wagner (eds), The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy: A Politico-Cultural Transformation and its Interpretations, Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Poggi, G. (1972), Images of Society, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

36

3 Politics and Religion in a Global Age Jeffrey Haynes

H

ow does globalisation change our understanding of the relationship between religion and politics – beyond the general idea that the core of globalisation is to imply greatly increasing interdependence between states and peoples, with what happens in one part of the world affecting what occurs elsewhere? Yet this is to overestimate the extent to which people agree on what globalisation is and how it affects them. One common focus is to claim that many religious people – especially in many developing countries – regard globalisation as a thoroughly malign and comprehensive Westernising process, as it brings them into sustained contact with values, ideas and norms which many find on the whole unwelcome. This perception of globalisation is to judge it inherently undesirable, a flattening process whereby Western – especially American – capitalism and culture increasingly dominate the globe, including the countries of the developing world. A second aspect of this view is that the Western world keeps itself rich at the expense of the rest of the globe, especially non-Western territories, with poor people, who are often also religious, bearing the brunt of this damaging relationship. This is possible, it is asserted, because Western interests determine trading terms, interest rates and dominance of highly mechanised production, via control of important international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). An alternative view emphasises that globalisation offers enhanced opportunities for international cooperation in relation to various issues, including social development, human rights and democracy, as well as increased input into conflict resolution, peace making, and peace building. This more benign assessment of globalisation sees it as a wholly or mainly positive force for good, enhancing chances of international cooperation to resolve a range of economic, developmental, 37

Religion and Politics

social, political, environmental, gender, and human rights concerns and injustices. The last 25 years – that is, since the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s – is seen as a period which offers unprecedented opportunity for collective efforts involving both states and non-state actors, including religious, to tackle various pressing global concerns. For many, progress would be enhanced by bottom-up contributions from local groups and grassroots organisations around the world, including various religious organisations and movements. In sum, globalisation in both views is a multifaceted process of change, universally affecting states, local communities, industrial companies and individuals. Religious organisations and movements are not exempted from its influence and, as a result, like other social agents, such religious entities participate in and are affected by globalisation. This chapter looks at the political impacts of globalisation on two key areas: the relationship between the West, including Europe, and the Muslim countries of the Middle East on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the extent to which democratisation – a key global political development of the last forty years – changes the relationship between religion and politics more generally. Because of its topicality, the chapter concludes with a short case study of the Arab Spring in relation to political ­developments, especially democracy.

Religion and globalisation There are numerous definitions of globalisation. Many focus on the idea that globalisation is a continuing means by which the world is more and more characterised by common activity, emphasising in particular how many highly important aspects of life – including wars, crime, trade and culture – are becoming increasingly globally interrelated. This implies that globalisation is also a matter of a change in consciousness, with people from various spheres, including business, religion, sport, politics and many other activities, thinking and acting in the context of what many would regard as an increasingly ‘globalised’ world. One result is that ‘territoriality’ – a term signifying a close connection or limitation with reference to a particular geographic area or country – now has less significance than it once did. Thus globalisation suggests greatly increased interdependence, involving both states and non-states: what happens in one part of the world affects others. Overall, then, globalisation encompasses the idea that humankind is currently experiencing a ‘historically unique increase of scale to a global 38

Politics and Religion in a Global Age

interdependency among people and nations’. It is characterised by (1) rapid integration of the world economy; (2) innovations and growth in international electronic communications; and (3) increasing ‘political and cultural awareness of the global interdependency of humanity’ (Warburg 2001). Globalisation has deep historical roots, beginning in the 1500s and encompassing three interrelated political, economic and technological processes (Clark 1997). While it is appropriate to perceive of globalisation as a continuous, historically based, multifaceted process, it is important to note that there have been periods when it has been especially speedy. For example, its pace increased from around 1870 until the start of World War I in 1914. This was partly because during those four decades, ‘all parts of the world began to feel the impact of the international economy, and for the first time in history it was possible to have instant long-distance communication (telegraph, radio) between people’ (Warburg 2001). After World War II, the speed, density and international impact of globalisation expanded again – as it did once more after the Cold War came to an end in 1989. According to Keohane, the overall impact of these processes of globalisation resulted in an end-state: ‘globalism’. According to Keohane (2002: 31), globalism is ‘a state of the world involving networks of interdependence at multicontinental distances, linked through flows of capital and goods, information and ideas, people and force, as well as environmentally and biologically relevant substances.’ Thus globalism refers to the reality of being interconnected, while globalisation denotes the speed at which these connections grow – or diminish. Overall, the concept of globalism ‘seeks to . . . understand all the inter-connections of the modern world –­and to highlight patterns that underlie (and explain) them’ (Nye 2002). In short, globalisation can be thought of usefully as a current, multi-dimensional process with historical roots, involving intensification of global interconnectedness between both states and non-state actors. It also suggests reduction of the significance of territorial boundaries and of state-directed political and economic structures and processes. Globalisation leads to an expansion of channels, pressures and agents via which various norms are diffused and interact. In Europe, globalisation was also characterised after the Cold War by real or imagined interaction between various religious, especially Islamist, movements in various parts of the developing world. The perception of baleful Islamist cross-border movements in overt conflict with the West led 39

Religion and Politics

some observers to conclude that we are witnessing a worldwide ‘resurgence of Islam’ (Zemni 2002: 158); for Huntington (1996) it was a ‘clash of civilisations’, which centred on what he saw as clashing value-sets. In addition, the alleged ‘resurgence’ of Islam – and a­ ssociated political Islam or ‘Islamist’ movements – led to a response: ‘anti-Muslimism’ in some Western European countries. 

Religion and democratisation The second focus in this chapter of the political impact of religion in the current era of deepening globalisation is its relationship with one of the most profound, and geographically widespread, phenomena of the last 40 years: democratisation. I examine the issue in relation to three main claims: • religious traditions have core elements which are more or less conducive to democratisation and democracy; • religious traditions may be multi-vocal – but at any moment there may be dominant voices more or less receptive to and encouraging of democratisation; and • religious actors rarely if ever determine democratisation outcomes. However, they may in various ways and with a range of outcomes be of significance for democratisation. This may especially be the case in countries that have a long tradition of secularisation. Underpinning both foci of the chapter – the relationship of Islam and the West and the connection between religion, democratisation and democracy – is the fact that over the last decades, religions have left their assigned place in the private sphere around the world. Many have as a result become uncharacteristically politically active in various ways and with a mixture of outcomes. In many countries, the re-emergence from political marginality dates back until at least the early 1980s. As the US-based sociologist José Casanova notes, at this time ‘what was new and became “news” . . . was the widespread and simultaneous refusal of religions to be restricted to the private sphere’ (Casanova 1994: 6). This development involved a more general remodelling and re-assumption of public roles by religion, which theories of secularisation had long condemned to social and political marginalisation. The context is that it was once widely believed that modernisation would inevitably lead to both religious privatisation and secularisation. 40

Politics and Religion in a Global Age

As a result, there would be a fundamental, global decline in religion’s social and political importance. This was believed to be the case, regardless of religious tradition or form of political power dominant in the context where religions operated. However, Iran’s 1978–9 Islamist revolution posed fundamental questions in relation to this conventional wisdom. At the same time, the Roman Catholic Church began to play an increasingly important role in relation to Poland, and by extension to involve itself in democratisation issues more widely in Central and Eastern Europe, before extending to Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and Latin America. Overall, these developments not only collectively emphasised that modernisation does not fundamentally or unproblematically lead to secularisation, but also that religion can sometimes play an essential role in issues of political representation and legitimacy. In short, contrary to secularisation theory, recent years have seen a widespread – some say, global – resurgence of religion, typically manifested as significant political actor. This has involved various religious traditions. Overall, it emphasises not only that there is more than one relevant interpretation of modernisation, but also that religion can and does play a role in political changes, even in s­ ecularising regions of the world, including Western Europe.

Religious de-privatisation and political change: a global phenomenon Globally, two phenomena are simultaneously taking place. First, there is said to be an increase in various forms of spirituality and religiosity, although this also implies in many cases both fragmentation and decline in societal clout of hitherto leading religious organisations in many countries (Haynes 2013). The increase in spirituality and religiosity are manifested in various ways including ‘new’ religious and spiritual phenomena, including manifestations of ‘New Age’ spirituality; ‘foreign’, ‘exotic’ Eastern religions, including Hare Krishna; ‘televangelism’; renewed interest in astrology; and ‘new’ sects, such as the Scientologists. Note, however, that such religious entities, as Casanova points out, are ‘not particularly relevant for the social sciences or for the self-understanding of modernity’, because they do not present ‘major problems of interpretation . . . They fit within expectations and can be interpreted within the framework of established theories of secularization’ (Casanova 1994: 5). The point is that they are normal phenomena. They are examples of private religion. They do not individually or 41

Religion and Politics

collectively question or challenge the extant arrangements of society, including political and social structures. Indeed, such religious phenomena are apolitical; and ‘all’ they really show is that many people are interested in spiritual issues and sometimes they involve new expressions. In addition, in many European countries where Roman Catholicism is the main religious faith – such as Italy, Poland and Spain – the Catholic Church has long been losing moral authority, especially for many young people (Ceccarini 2009; Hennig 2009). Globally, the multiplicity of existing and new religious phenomena belies the idea that religion will inevitably lose its popular appeal, even in officially secular countries, including France and Turkey (Hurd 2008). Second, not only Christian churches – especially the Roman Catholic Church in both transnational and national contexts – but also Islamic religious actors in many countries, as well as Jewish entities in Israel, now openly seek to articulate viewpoints on a variety of political and social issues, more readily and openly than in the past. Such religious entities typically resist state attempts to sideline them, actively involving themselves in political debates, including those focused on ­democratisation and democracy. Three questions are central in seeking to account for religion’s widespread involvement in democratisation (the process of becoming democratic) and democracy (the process of embedding or consolidating democracy). First, why should religious organisations seek to become actors with political goals related to democratisation and democracy? Evidence suggests that this can occur when religious entities feel that change is necessary and that the state is not well equipped to oversee and lead such changes, not least because the solutions it seeks are secular ones; and they do not chime well with religious interpretations. Second, how widespread is the phenomenon? Evidence suggests that it is extensive. Third, what are the political consequences of religion’s intervention in politics, especially questions of democracy? The short answer is that they are variable. For example, sometimes religion appears to have a pivotal influence on political outcomes – for example, the role of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland in relation to democratisation in the 1980s. Elsewhere, for example, recently in relation to Islamists in Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey, or Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, political outcomes are both unexpected and variable. While differing in terms of specific issues that encourage them to act politically, religious actors commonly reject the secular ideals that have long dominated theories of political development in both developed 42

Politics and Religion in a Global Age

and developing countries, appearing instead as champions of alternative, confessional outlooks, programmes and policies. Seeking to keep faith with what they interpret as divine decree, they typically refuse to render to secular power holders automatic material or moral support. Instead, they are concerned with various social, moral, and ethical issues, which are however nearly always political to some degree. Religious actors may challenge or undermine both the legitimacy and autonomy of the state’s main secular spheres, including government and more widely political society. In addition, many churches and other comparable religious entities no longer restrict themselves to the pastoral care of individual souls. Now, they raise questions about, inter alia, interconnections of private and public morality, claims of states and markets to be exempt from extrinsic normative considerations, and modes and concerns of government. What religious actors also have in common is a shared concern for retaining and increasing their social importance. To this end, many religious entities now seek to bypass or elude what they regard as the cumbersome constraints of temporal authority and, as a result, threaten to undermine the latter’s constituted political functions. In short, refusing to be condemned to the realm of privatised belief, religion has widely reappeared in the public sphere, thrusting itself into issues of social, moral and ethical – and in many places, political – contestation.

Islam and the West In recent years, the general debate about the relationship between religion and politics in today’s global age has been dominated by renewed discussion centring on the historic and contemporary impact of Western cultural, political and economic domination over Islam, a process that some see as an intrinsic aspect of today’s Westerndominated globalisation. This process and development involves what are often claimed to be essentially Western values and norms: pluralism, liberal democracy, relativism and radical individualism, coming into contact with different values allegedly held by Muslims. Various critics, notably Edward Said (1978, 1993) and Bryan Turner (1978, 1994), have challenged this notion – Said called it ‘Orientalism’ – on various (empirical, theoretical and methodological) grounds. Said challenged the self-proclaimed objectivity of Orientalist accounts of the Middle East – and of Muslims generally – by deconstructing the assumptions and dominant themes of that discourse. The concept of 43

Religion and Politics

Orientalism captures the idea that Islam is an inherently atavistic body of religious and social thought, fundamentally at odds with Western thought and culture. Said (1978: 2) defines Orientalism as a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) the ‘Occident’. For Said, while many Western politicians and academics have sought to essentialise both Muslims and Islam into unchanging categories, these assumptions were problematically rooted in historical generalisations – with little or no empirical foundation. His critique was damning: Orientalist thinking, built on depictions of the region as inherently backwards and barbarous as a result of supposedly inescapable characteristics of Islam, served the political prerogatives of colonialism well, since such intellectual discourse allowed the legitimisation of discrimination and exploitation (Said 1993: 96). Said quotes Lord Cromer, the British governor of Egypt from 1882 to 1907. According to Cromer, ‘the Oriental generally acts, speaks and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the European. While the European is a close reasoner and a natural logician, the Oriental is singularly deficient in the logical faculty’ (Cromer quoted in Said 1978: 39). Cromer was not an isolated example, an aberration; rather, he was representative of a wider trend, carrying ideas that were dominant for long periods and show no signs of dying out a century later. As Heristchi and Teti (2006) note, Orientalism held a monopoly on the discourse on the Middle East, from history, culture and politics, to artistic expression. Lord Cromer was, of course, a product of his times, but his prejudiced views are certainly not extinct at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. We can note continued use of Orientalist ideas and thinking in relation to the problematic use of the term ‘Islam’, to imply a unifying conceptual category predicating social and political order, with related political biases. In this view, the Muslim world still is often seen as a monolithic, unchanging, underdeveloped, violent, anti-democratic space: a direct result of the perceived fundamental characteristics of Islam. Thus, one of today’s most contentious issues – the nature of the relationship between politics and Islam in Europe – may be a relatively new concern in Europe, but it has long been of centrality to political development in several parts of the world, including the Middle East, North Africa and parts of subSaharan Africa. In these cases, Islam has long been a central focus of political-science analysis, often with an Orientalist bias. Samuel Huntington’s egregious clash of civilisations thesis is an 44

Politics and Religion in a Global Age

example of what might be called nouveau Orientalism. Huntington first presented his argument in a 1993 article, followed by a book three years later. Huntington claimed that following the end of the Cold War, there was a new, global clash under way, replacing four decades of secular conflict between liberal democracy/capitalism and communism. Now there was a new clash between the (Christian) West and the (mostly Arab, mostly Muslim) East. The core of Huntington’s argument was that after the Cold War the Christian, democratic West found itself in conflict with Islamic fundamentalism, a key threat to international stability. So-called Western values – strongly informed by Protestant and Catholic versions of Christianity – were said by Huntington to be conducive to the spread of liberal democracy. For evidence of his claims, he noted the collapse of dictatorships in Christian countries in southern Europe (Greece, Portugal, Spain) and throughout Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by the development of liberal democratic political systems and norms (rule of law, free elections, political rights and civil liberties). For Huntington, such democratisation was conclusive proof of the synergy between Christianity and liberal democracy, key foundations of a normatively desirable global order built on these (Western) liberal values. In addition, around the same time, the US neoconservative Francis Fukuyama argued that Islam is inherently undemocratic or even anti-democratic, while Islamic fundamentalism has a more than superficial resemblance to European fascism (Fukuyama 1992: 236). Nouveau Orientalism was not restricted to a few – however notable – US academics. It was also influential among some American and European politicians, collectively articulating the view that Islam is the undesirable Other. For example, soon after 9/11, US Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos asserted that ‘unfortunately we have no option but to take on barbarism which is hell bent on destroying civilization . . . You don’t compromise with these people. This is not a bridge game. International terrorists have put themselves outside the bonds of protocols’ (interview with Tom Lantos, BBC Radio 4, Today, 20 November 2001). Similar, albeit more restrained, comments were made by a former French president, Valérie Giscard d’Estaing. Critics of such claims noted, however, that it is one thing to argue that some Muslims have qualitatively different perspectives on liberal democracy than some Christians, but that it is quite another to claim that all Muslims are engaged in serious conflict with the (Christian) West because of their differing political and social values. They pointed out 45

Religion and Politics

that there are in fact many ‘Islams’ – and only the malevolent or misinformed would associate all Muslims and their political articulations, whether in the USA, Europe or elsewhere – with an undifferentiated and simplistic idea of an anti-Western ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. The idea of one-dimensional or wholesale religious/cultural/civilisational conflict is also problematic for another reason: it is actually impossible to identify, articulate and demarcate anything like clear territorial boundaries between different civilisations/cultures/religions. Because they in practice overlap and intermingle it is completely unfeasible to claim that ‘civilisations’ act coherently as undifferentiated single-purpose actors. Huntington’s image of clashing civilisations focuses on an essentially undifferentiated category – a civilisation – and places insufficient emphasis on the various trends, competitions, conflicts and disagreements that take place within all such traditions, whether Islam, various Christianities (Protestantism, Catholicism, Orthodoxy), Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism, and so on. In short, it is not useful to view civilisations/cultures/religions as closed systems of essentialist values and analytically unhelpful to perceive the world as comprising a strictly limited number of civilisations/cultures/religions, each with their own unique core set of beliefs which ­necessarily contrast with others. Finally, Huntington’s image of clashing civilisations problematically ignores the fact that many radical Islamist groups – such as al Qaeda or the perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbai bombings, Pakistan’s Lashkar-eTaiba (‘Soldiers of the Pure’) – primarily target not the West per se but more generally unrepresentative, corrupt, illegitimate or ‘un-Islamic’ governments. By this reckoning, anti-Westernism is a by-product, not a central dynamic, of this focus. Most radical Islamist groups emerged in the 1980s and 1990s following serious domestic political and economic governmental failures, regimes that for the most part were supported by the US government, the European Union and/or individual European governments. This latter factor provides much of the context for the anti-Western tendencies of radical Islamist groups. Overall, the arguments of Said and Huntington underline that there is a deep-rooted tradition in Western thought that sees the Orient – that is, for our purposes, the Arab/Muslim world – as distinct and distinctive compared to the Christian West. This is not, as already noted, a novel issue. During the centuries of Western imperialism, there were frequent debates about what rights non-Christian and non-European peoples should be allowed to enjoy. The specific conflicts between 46

Politics and Religion in a Global Age

Christianity and Islam were moulded dualistically by notions both of holy war – suggesting a special kind of conflict undertaken effectively outside any framework of shared rules and norms – and just war, carried out for the vindication of rights within a shared framework of values. The result was a strand of Western thought suggesting that, because of their nature, some forms of political power – such as states and/or ideologies – cannot realistically be dealt with on normal terms of engagement, that is, by accepted rules between civilised actors in international relations.

Islam, pluralism, politics and globalisation One of the key concerns with ‘Islam’, in the context of the claim of civilisational conflict with the West, is the issue of democracy and, more generally, political pluralism in the ‘Islamic world’, especially among the Arab countries of the Middle East. This has been a key focus of a growing literature in recent years.1 Many authors now subscribe to the view that there is nothing ‘inherent’ in Islam that means that Muslim countries will ‘inevitably’ lack democratic credentials. Later in this chapter we shall focus briefly on the Arab Spring, and make the point that Islam is one of a range of important characteristics of such countries, implying that religion on its own is never the key determinant of political outcomes; rather it interacts with a range of issues, many of which are not religious at all. On the one hand, however, it is widely asserted not only that many Muslim countries have few structural characteristics conducive to both democratisation and democracy, but also that things have been that way for a long time. This situation did not widely change among the Muslim countries during the two decades of the ‘third wave of democracy’, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, a development stimulated by deepening globalisation (Huntington 1996). On the other hand, Muslim majority countries around the world – of which there are more than 40, from Morocco in the west to Indonesia in the east, collectively home to over a billion people – do not comprise an unchanging, undemocratic monolith. This is also a key research theme on the topic of democracy in the Muslim world, in the context of current globalisation, a focus that also stresses that to understand why some countries in the Muslim world have democratised while others have not, we need to look for explanations to both internal and external factors, including globalisation. 47

Religion and Politics

In the Middle East, the region perhaps most commonly associated with the theory and practice of ‘Muslim government’ or ‘government by Muslims’, we can note four periods, encompassing a period of nearly 150 years, filled with often profound political changes: the 1860s to 1930s; late-1950s to early-1960s; the 1970s to 1990s; and post-2010, the ‘Arab Spring’ years. Each of these periods was notable for phases of deepening globalisation: the 1860s to 1930s, characterised by the global spread of nationalism, including in the Middle East following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; the deepening of the Cold War and the subsequent battle of ideologies that took global form in the 1950s and 1960s; from the 1970s, the gradual demise of the Soviet bloc and the accompanying ideology of communism, with worldwide ramifications, and in the 2000s, especially from 2008, a deepening global economic crisis, which hit the Arab world hard. The first phase was characterised by significant political changes in the region as Ottoman (Turkish) colonial rule came to an end. Between the 1860s and the 1930s, national assemblies were created in a number of countries in North Africa and in the Arabian Peninsula. After Ottoman rule collapsed in the aftermath of World War I, parliamentary regimes were created under mandated British or French rule, reflecting the aegis of a newly formed global body, the League of Nations, in a number of regional countries, including Egypt (1924–58), Iraq (1936–58) and Lebanon (1946–75). Second, in the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a further period of significant political amendments in the region. Within the space of a few years, radical, often junior, army officers overthrew conservative governments in four key regional countries – Egypt, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Influenced by the Soviet Union’s impressive anti-colonial and anti-Western credentials, a common goal was to oust what they regarded as unacceptably unrepresentative governments, widely regarded as unforgivably subservient to Western countries, especially the governments of Britain and the USA. However, over time, it became clear that the new rulers had no intention of democratising their political systems along lines familiar to Western governments and voters. Instead, they installed authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, with the political role of the armed forces well to the fore, and sometimes modelled on the communist governments of the Soviet bloc. Despite their differing political characteristics, they were all regimes with few if any conventional attributes of democracy, beyond regular, albeit heavily controlled, elections. Third, while the third wave of democracy (1970s to 1990s) was not 48

Politics and Religion in a Global Age

overall a time of profound political changes in the Muslim and Arab world, some Muslim countries, notably Turkey (98 per cent Muslim) and Indonesia (88 per cent Muslim), did emerge from authoritarian rule to establish democratic systems during this time. As Noyon (2003) notes, Turkey has now been a ‘functioning democracy’ since 1983, with an increasingly strong case for membership of the European Union. Indonesia emerged in 1998 from three decades of personalistic rule under General Suharto and since then the country has gradually developed a flawed yet recognisably democratic system (Ananta et al. 2005; Nyman 2006). Other Muslim countries that are also noted as having embarked upon political liberalisation or democratisation include Tunisia (98 per cent Muslim) and Egypt (90 per cent), and perhaps Libya (98 per cent Muslim), Kuwait (85 per cent), Jordan (92 per cent), and Algeria (99 per cent). Collectively, these countries began a process of unfinished political liberalisation that appeared to denote real – if somewhat tentative – moves towards more democratic polities. The fourth stage, the post-2010 Arab Spring, as we shall see next, is however characterised by a lack of pattern to the continuing political changes and the role of Islam in that context.

Islam, democratisation and the Arab Spring: what is the role of global factors? The Arab world is undergoing a series of uprisings and rebellions which began in Tunisia in January 2011 and led to the fall of the country’s government. Soon after, the government of Egypt also collapsed. During 2011 and early 2012, there were major political upheavals in Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen, and smaller, although still notable, expressions of political dissent in Algeria and Morocco. These concerns took a new turn in May 2011 with the killing by US agents in Pakistan of the al Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden, ramifications of which for regional and Western security are not clear. The Arab Spring is one of the most important international issues, involving not only religion but also democracy. However, at the time of writing (July 2012), the Arab Spring events have not reached a clear conclusion. In particular, the question of whether there will eventually be widespread, important political changes in the region is not resolved and the issue remains of global importance, not least because of the attempt by the Assad government in Syria to hang on to power in the face of increasingly clear domestic challenges to its rule, which could 49

Religion and Politics

easily spill over to become a regional sectarian imbroglio. To what extent does the outcome in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) depend on global factors, especially external influences? Two sets of external factors can be noted in relation to regime change and democratisation during the Arab Spring: (1) background factors; and (2) interaction of local government and non-government actors. By background factors I mean the influence of generally favourable or unfavourable geostrategic circumstances in relation to regime change and democratisation in the MENA (Haynes 2002). This is not a new phenomenon. The significance of background factors linked to globalisation has been noted since at least the early twentieth century. For example, after World War I, President Woodrow Wilson’s references to the desirability of ‘national self-determination’ in relation to the founding of the League of Nations encouraged nationalists in the Middle East and elsewhere to demand self-rule. A decade later, during the 1930s, tentative moves towards democracy in several Latin American countries could not make headway against a background of regional – and global – economic depression. During the 1960s and 1970s, US fears of the spread of the Cuban revolution led to a regional crackdown on calls for democracy and support for military governments throughout Latin America. More recently, in the 1980s and 1990s, global circumstances (the ‘new world order’) became more advantageous for democracy, following the unforeseen collapse of Europe’s communist regimes. The overall point is that external background factors were influential in relation to regime change in various parts of the world during the twentieth century. However, background factors are never sufficient on their own to lead to fundamental changes of regime unless they interact with what actors in both civil society and political society are doing. During the Arab Spring period, background factors were quite unclear as the earlier Western support for democratisation found in the 1980s and 1990s had given way to an ambivalent position whereby Western governments weighed up the benefits to their perceived security of a country in the MENA becoming democratic. If this meant, for example, that Islamists would assume power, then Western governments might prefer a situation of non-democracy – without Islamists in power – if they believed that this would lead to more security. Pridham (2000: 313–14) notes that ‘the scope for external influences to determine the course of regime change . . . has certainly increased over time’. As a result of the influence of globalisation, Hague and 50

Politics and Religion in a Global Age

Harrop (2001: 47) suggest that ‘weak states must accept both the external setting, and their vulnerability to it, as a given. The task of their leaders is to manage external influences as best they can’. Jackson (1990: 189, 195) points to the fact that many post-colonial countries are not only weak, but also characterised by ‘negative sovereignty’ with ‘adverse civil and socioeconomic conditions’. Consequently, they may well be objects of other, stronger, states’ policies. But not even weak states are necessarily powerless in relation to powerful external states. For example, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the only remaining superpower – the USA – was not able to influence decisively formation and direction of incumbent governments in several ‘weak’ states, including Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Liberia, Nigeria, Somalia, and Sudan. All had important ‘negative’ power resources that lay principally in their potential for ‘chaos power’, that is, capacity to create or make worse regional problems that powerful countries like the USA might be expected – perhaps through the UN – to deal with. That is, the ability of external actors in this regard is linked to the presence or absence of functioning states in the countries they enter; when functioning states are particularly ‘fragile’ – as in most of the countries noted above – then even powerful external actors struggle to implement their preferred policies. Where functioning states do exist, external state actors may encourage their political preferences, including democratisation, through the media of ‘political conditionality’. There are two main forms: (1) ‘positive’ political conditionality to encourage further democratisation; and (2) ‘negative’ political conditionality to promote desired political reforms in hitherto unreceptive countries. From the 1980s, the largest aid donors in quantitative terms – Britain, France, Japan, and the USA, plus the Scandinavian countries – sought to encourage both democratisation and economic liberalisation among countries receiving their aid. These governments, along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, attached political conditionality to aid, loans and investments to recipient countries. If the latter denied their citizens basic human rights – including democratically elected governments – they would be denied assistance. The reasoning behind political conditionality was partly economic. Western governments, the IMF and World Bank all claimed that economic failures were directly linked to an absence of political accountability. Consequently, without democratisation, economic liberalisation would not achieve beneficial results. 51

Religion and Politics

Crawford (2003a, 2003b) discovered that aid sanctions in the 1990s led by the governments of the USA, Sweden, Britain, and the European Union, were effective in promoting political reform in only eleven of the twenty-nine cases (38 per cent) where they were applied. He concluded that aid penalties: (1) were most effective where they added to pressure on governments from internal reform pressures; and (2) failed when they met strong resistance from recipient governments or when they threatened donors’ strategic or commercial interests. However, it became clear that it was easier to state the desirability of political and economic reforms than it was to achieve them. In many cases, attempts at economic reforms, expressed via structural adjustment programmes, and of political reforms, were disappointing. Holland (2002: 132) provides further evidence of the patchy effectiveness of political conditionality. During the 1990s the EU applied sanctions against thirteen, mainly African, developing countries. Holland notes there were contrasting outcomes in two of them: Fiji and Zimbabwe. While the latter’s government seemed impervious to external encouragement to reform, Fiji’s was not. The United States is a key player in relation to democracy promotion, with both the government, and various state-linked bodies, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, actively supporting democratisation and economic liberalisation (Carothers 2002). This is not a new policy, but developed from the 1950s. Sixty years ago, then newly democratic governments in Latin America, including Costa Rica, Venezuela and Colombia, received financial and diplomatic support from the US government. Later, in the 1970s, US foreign policy goals were reflected in President Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy, while in the 1980s President Ronald Reagan’s government promoted democracy as a counter to perceived communist expansionism. In the 1990s President Bill Clinton developed policies linked to political conditionality, a strategy continued during the administrations of George W. Bush (2001–9). The scale of US support in this regard can be gauged from the fact that during the 1990s alone, US governments provided over $700 million to over 100 countries to further d ­ emocratisation (Carothers 1997). The US academic Thomas Carothers (2004) notes that US state assistance is typically focused in what he identifies as a standard democracy template. This involves offering financial support to help develop electoral processes and democratic structures, including constitutions and political institutions, including the rule of law, legislatures, local 52

Politics and Religion in a Global Age

government structures, political parties, improved civil–military relations, and civil society. However, as Leftwich (1993: 612) points out, it takes more than simply external sources of finance to develop democracy. This is because money alone cannot create and embed concrete manifestations of ‘good governance’, without which democracy cannot develop. This outcome is ‘not simply available on order’, but requires ‘a particular kind of politics . . . to institute and sustain it’. Superficially, democratisation may be seen to be encouraged if foreign states limit their perusal of the democratic process to elections alone; indeed, some critics argue, international observation of elections often seems the only consistent test used to judge a shift from authoritarian to democratic rule. But when elections are complete, and the attention of the corpus of international observers moves on, ‘democracy’ is often at best only partially achieved. Anti-democracy elites, often in the military, can remain powerful, and political systems frequently retain narrow bases, characterised by the survival of ‘authoritarian clientelism and coercion’ (Karl 1995: 74). In sum, external democracy promotion and associated funding will not be effective if target regimes are able to ‘acquire democratic legitimacy internationally without substantially changing their mode of operation’ (Lawson 1999: 23). Critics of political conditionality contend that Western governments focus more on security than democracy. Western aid-donating governments may seek to control the pace of democratisation, as ‘too much’ democracy too quickly can be politically destabilising and affect the stability of individual countries and their regional neighbours. Aid-donating and aid-recipient governments may share common interest in limiting the extent of political changes, a theory known as low intensity democracy (LID) (Gills, Rocamara and Wilson 1993). LID is said to satisfy Western governments’ allegedly insincere concerns for democratisation in relation to non-democracies by encouraging strictly limited political reform processes. In short, the LID argument is that in some circumstances Western aid-donating governments prefer that stable – even if authoritarian – regimes receive their aid, over unstable – even if democratically elected – governments. An example said to support this contention is that of Uganda, a small country in East Africa (Haynes 2001). During the 1990s, Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, made a successful diplomatic offensive to sell his ‘no-party’ – that is, not conventionally democratic – political system to the Western aid-donating governments. While neighbouring countries, such as Kenya and Tanzania, were strongly 53

Religion and Politics

encouraged to adopt multi-party democratic systems, Museveni was able to persuade them that his ‘all-inclusive’, party-less, system was (1) stable; (2) capable of dealing with violent challenges to the status quo, including from the dreaded Lord’s Resistance Army; and (3) willing to make innovative appointments, such as that of Vice-President Specioza Wandira Kazibwe, at the time the highest-ranking female politician in Africa (Haynes 2003). In conclusion, it is difficult to be sure about when and why democracy promotion ‘works’, in the sense of demonstrably leading to significant political reforms. It is clearer that aid-donating Western states were often important sources of encouragement to reform at the transition stage of democratisation – but less important later. This is because building democratic structure and processes is linked to longterm efforts that are rooted in the development of internal structures and processes. These points about the problematic intervention of foreign governments into continuing political challenges in non-democratic countries are given credence by the issue of foreign democracy promotion during the Arab Spring.2 Western governments have been torn between wishing to see more democracy in the MENA and the potential dangers to Western security of having hostile Islamist governments in power, as occurred in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001 during Taliban rule. The UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, was however moved to announce in May 2011 that the UK would make a major financial donation in support of democratisation and improved social welfare. The UK government announced that £110 million would be siphoned off from the existing Department for International Development budget, to be focused upon encouraging democratisation in the MENA. In addition, the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office stated that up to £40 million would be spent over the 2011 to 2015 period to try to improve three democratic cornerstones in the Arab Spring countries: increased political participation; improved rule of law; and greater freedom of the press. Finally, the UK pledged to donate a further £70 million, focused generally on economic reform and specifically on aiming to boost youth employment, strengthen anti-corruption measures and promote private-sector investment. In sum, the UK government was committing extensive funds to the democratisation and improved social policy of the Arab Spring countries in a bid, not only to spread democratic values, but also to undermine religious ­extremism in the MENA. 54

Politics and Religion in a Global Age

However, a word of caution is necessary: for three main reasons, it is unlikely that the MENA region is about to jump from authoritarianism to democracy as many Central and Eastern European countries did between 1989 and 1991. One general reason for this is that the MENA region has widespread sectarian divisions – leading to conflict between different religious sects, including intra-Muslim (Iraq, Syria) and Muslim–Christian (Tunisia, Egypt) tensions. Religious competition and conflict is one dimension of a more general threat to a process of democratisation in the MENA. There are also generalised, serious economic problems throughout the countries of the MENA. Add to this a deadly rivalry between the region’s two biggest rivals – the governments of Saudi Arabia and Iran – and the scene is set for prolonged political contestation without clear generalised signs of democratic advance. Despite the coming together of people from all faiths in the protests that brought down their governments, both Egypt and Tunisia have recently experienced sectarian tensions and conflict, while Syria may be embarking on the same path. Egypt was the scene of a bloody attack against a Coptic church in Alexandria in December 2010, followed by a clash in the Imbaba district of Cairo which killed at least fifteen, both Copts and Muslims. Tunisia saw the murder of a Polish-born Catholic priest, Father Marek Rybinski, killed on the premises of an inter-denominational school in Tunis, while Islamist protesters gathered together outside the Great Synagogue of Tunis and a chapel was burned near Gabes. In Bahrain, the political violence pitted Shias against Sunnis. In Syria the Assad-led Alawite minority government seeks – increasingly desperately – to exploit politically the country’s now emerging sectarian divisions in its bid to stay in power. Second, the region is undergoing a frightful economic slide. Gross domestic product (GDP) is down and social welfare declining, and all this in the context of some of the fastest-growing populations in the world. Egypt is a good example of what is happening. Arguably, much of the cause of the uprising which led to the overthrow of the Mubarak government in early 2011 was the result of economic frustration, especially among the young, those in the forefront of the rebellion. Egypt’s economy contracted by 7 per cent in the first three months of 2011. Tourism revenue, the mainstay of the economy and the biggest single element in GDP, fell by 80 per cent in the same year, the stock market plummeted, and the IMF revised its growth estimate to a mere 1 per cent in 2011, following 5.1 per cent growth in 2010. 55

Religion and Politics

Third, both Saudi Arabia and Iran are deadly rivals in the MENA. Saudi Arabia has had to deal with the loss of its closest ally, the Mubarak government. Iran contemplates the fall of its ally, the Assad regime. The government of Bahrain is bolstered – but for how long? – by the injection of Saudi troops, while Iran seeks to exploit the growing anarchy in Yemen in order to destabilise its Saudi arch enemy. Overall, evidence suggests that the prospects for a clear and linear path to democracy in the MENA region are currently poor. The most likely outcome is a gradual slide into entrenched and long-term ­political instability culminating in some cases in state failure.

Conclusion This chapter has looked at the relationship between politics and religion in today’s global age. We examined both historic and thematic relationships between religious and political actors. We saw that, although once highly politically consequential, until recently religion had lost most of its political importance, apparently as a result of a key global force: secularisation. The current resurgence of religion in many parts of the world underlines that secularisation was influential but did not lead to the wholesale removal of religion from the public realm; instead, religion’s return to prominence is linked to various political consequences which prompted us to examine why it has now reappeared as an important domestic and international political actor, not only in the developing world but also in the West more generally. Part of the suggested reason, we noted, was that many religious actors now pursuing political goals link their concerns to the consequences of modernisation, especially secularisation. The chapter examined this issue in relation to the world’s second-largest religion – Islam – in order to explain why religion has become politically and socially significant in the MENA in recent years and what the role of globalisation is in this context. We also saw however that the nature of the interaction between religion and politics is a complex one, not only in the MENA but also more generally. A contrast can be drawn between differences that divide secular democratic (Weberian/Schumpterian) politics – essentially rule-governed where there is consensus about the rules – and religious politics as ‘ideological’ politics. In this regard, we noted examples from both the historic and current eras, involving Islam. It is not, however, clear – and this is one area where additional complexity comes in – to 56

Politics and Religion in a Global Age

what extent Islam, or religion more generally, when it engages as a political actor is primarily concerned with spiritual issues, or where, how and in what ways other, more material, concerns also affect what religious actors do politically.

Notes 1. See, for example, Akbar (2002), Diamond, Plattner and Brumberg (2003), Fuller (2003), Noyon (2003), Khan (2006), and Fattah (2006). 2. Paragraphs until the end of this section are derived from Haynes (2011).

References Akbar, M. J. (2002) The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity, London and New York: Routledge. Ananta, A., Arifin, E., Nurvidya, E. and Suryadinata, L. (2005) Emerging Democracy in Indonesia, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Carothers, T. (1997) ‘Democracy without illusions’, Foreign Affairs, 76, 1, pp. 85–99. Carothers, T. (2002) ‘The end of the transition paradigm’, Journal of Democracy, 13, 1, pp. 5–21. Casanova, J. (1994) Public Religions in the Modern World, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Ceccarini, L. (2009) ‘The church in opposition: Religious actors, lobbying and catholic voters in Italy’, in J. Haynes (ed.), Religion and Politics in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, London: Routledge, pp. 177–201. Clark, I. (1997) Globalisation and Fragmentation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crawford, G. (2003a) ‘Promoting democracy from without – Learning from within (Part I)’, Democratization, 10, 1, pp. 1­–20. Crawford, G. (2003b) ‘Promoting democracy from without – Learning from within (Part II)’, Democratization, 10, 1, pp. 77–98. Diamond, L., Plattner, M. and Brumberg, D. (eds) (2003) Islam and Democracy in the Middle East, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Fattah, M. A. (2006) Democratic Values in the Muslim World, Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man, London: Penguin. Fuller, G. (2003) The Future of Political Islam, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave. Gills, B., Rocamara, J. and Wilson, R. (eds) (1993), Low Intensity Democracy, London: Pluto Press. Hague, R. and Harrop, M. (2001) Comparative Government and Politics. An Introduction, 5th ed., Basingstoke: Palgrave. Haynes, J. (2001) Democracy in the Developing World: Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, Cambridge: Polity. Haynes, J. (2002) Politics in the Developing World, Oxford: Blackwell. Haynes, J. (2003) ‘Democratic consolidation in Africa: The problematic case of Ghana’, The Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 41, 1, pp. 48–76. Haynes, J. (2011) ‘The Arab Spring: Prospects and Pitfalls’, 21 June. Published online by the Global Policy Institute at http://www.gpilondon.com/?id=295.

57

Religion and Politics Haynes, J. (2013) An Introduction to International Relations and Religion, 2nd ed., London: Pearson. Hennig, A. (2009) ‘Morality politics in a Catholic democracy: A hard road towards liberalisation of gay rights in Poland’, in J. Haynes (ed.), Religion and Politics in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, London: Routledge, pp. 202–26. Heristchi, C., and Teti, A. (2006) ‘Rethinking the myths of Islamic politics’, in J. Haynes (ed.), The Politics of Religion. A Survey, London: Routledge, pp. 25–36. Holland, M. (2002) The European Union and the Third World, Basingstoke: Palgrave Huntington, S. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations, New York: Simon & Schuster. Hurd, E. Shakman (2008) The Politics of Secularism in International Relations, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jackson, R. (1990) Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karl, T. Lynne (1995) ‘The hybrid regimes of Central America’, Journal of Democracy, 6, 3, pp. 72–86. Keohane, R. (2002) ‘The globalization of informal violence, theories of world politics, and the “liberalism of fear”’, Dialog-IO, Spring 2002, pp. 29–43. Khan, M. A. Muqtedar (ed.) (2006) Islamic Democratic Discourse: Theories, Debates and Philosophical Perspectives, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Lawson, L. (1999) ‘External democracy promotion in Africa: Another false start?’, The Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 37, 1, pp. 1­–30. Leftwich, A. (1993) ‘Governance, democracy and development in the Third World’, Third World Quarterly, 14, 3, pp. 605–24. Noyon, J. (2003) Islam, Politics and Pluralism. Theory and Practice in Turkey, Jordan, Tunisia and Algeria, London: Royal Institute of International Affairs. Nye, J. (2002) ‘Globalism versus globalization’, The Globalist (‘The daily online magazine on the global economy, politics and culture’), 15 April. Available at http:// www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=2392. Last accessed 13 April 2006. Nyman, M. (2006) Democratizing Indonesia: The Challenges of Civil Society in the Era of Reformasi, Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Pridham, G. (2000) The Dynamics of Democratization. A Comparative Approach, London and New York: Continuum. Said, E. W. (1978) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Said, E. W. (1993) Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage. Turner, B. S. (1994) Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism, London: Routledge. Turner, B. (1978) Marx and the End of Orientalism, London: Allen & Unwin. Warburg, M. (2001) ‘Religious organisations in a global world. A comparative perspective’, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Paper presented at the 2001 international conference ‘The Spiritual Supermarket: Religious Pluralism in the 21st Century’, 19–22 April, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. Zemni, S. (2002) ‘Islam, European identity and the limits of multiculturalism’, in W. Shadid and P. S. van Koningsveld (eds), Religious Freedom and the Neutrality of the State: The Position of the European Union, Leuven: Peeters, pp. 158–73.

58

4 Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity* Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

I

n mid-nineteenth-century England, George Holyoake coined the term ‘secularism’ to name an orientation to life designed to attract both theists and atheists under its banner. Impatient with positions defined in opposition to traditional Christian belief, such as atheist, infidel, or dissenter, Holyoake dreamed of a new formation, rallying around the ‘work of human improvement’, that would not be splintered by these older divisions.1 He sought a positive philosophy, one that was not parasitic on what was being rejected. His 1854 Principles of Secularism aspired to give voice to such an alternate vision. Its signature features were its appeal to reason, nature and experience and its passionate commitment to the amelioration of human life. Although clearly differing from forms of traditional Christianity that invoked clerical or scriptural authorities or focused on supernatural means and otherworldly ends, secularism, as Holyoake fashioned it, was not the antithesis of religion or one side of a religion–secularism binary. It was a canopy large enough to house some forms of religion as it excluded others. Its relative capaciousness was one of its defining virtues. For Holyoake a strategic advantage of his newly coined label was the way it riffed on the term ‘secular’ in the Western Christian imaginary. Within a Christian theological framework the secular identifies the temporal and worldly in distinction from, though in relationship to, the eternal and spiritual. By appropriating a term ‘found and respected in the dictionaries of opponents’ Holyoake hoped to underscore the shared resonances.2 A revealing tension runs through Holyoake’s manifesto for secularism, a tension that, as we shall see, surfaces repeatedly in its subsequent appropriations. There is, on the one hand, his big-tent strategy aimed at identifying common ground across diverse constituencies for shared 59

Religion and Politics

transformative aspirations. He identified principles that were, he argued, rooted in nature and evident to reason, and so provable and appropriately public. Secularism, he wrote, is the ‘unity of principle which prevails amid whatever diversity of opinion may subsist in a Secular Society.’3 In this trajectory Holyoake envisioned secularism as a module that potentially coordinated with a variety of philosophies and religious traditions, rather than as an oppositional alternative to them. Hence while he rejected religious traditions as authoritative for belief or practice, he welcomed them as ‘raw materials’ for thought, and even ‘high wisdom for our reverence.’4 There was, however, another far less accommodating strain running through Holyoake’s treatise on secularism. It surfaced, for example, when he endorsed secularism as a ‘policy of life to those who do not accept theology’, or suggested that secularism replaces theology because it ‘rejoices in this life’ rather than fixates on another.5 In this mode secularism is envisioned less as a shared orientation around which a variety of more comprehensive visions might assemble, than as a competing intellectual and moral vision, committed to atheism and materialism. Charles Bradlaugh, another principal leader of the secularist movement in nineteenth-century England, spearheaded this alternate strain. A revealing entry on secularism in the 1920 edition of Hasting’s Encyclopedia on Religion called attention to these dual currents, challenging the theoretical coherence of Holyoake’s rendition and championing the greater consistency and social impact of Bradlaugh’s anti-religious and triumphalist version.6 One can read Holyoake as negotiating with the tensions of these currents, struggling to fashion a modest, pragmatic and flexible variant of secularism against countervailing pressures. In the past century and a half, secularism as an ideological formation and set of related legal, cultural, and political practices has emerged as a defining characteristic of modern democratic societies. Throughout most of the twentieth century the conventional understanding has been that modern democracies are secular democracies, with virtually no attention paid to the various forms that secularism assumes in diverse contexts, or to the competing strains that it harbours. An essentialised, ahistorical version of secularism premised on its separation from, and neutrality with respect to, religion has dominated. This version, built upon a sharp distinction between the public and the private, has secured the public and avowedly common features of state institutions, politics, and reason, through contrast with the private and 60

Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity

parochial features of religions. Although the strains within secularism persisted, it remained secure so long as the consensus that religion belongs within the private sphere held steady. This consensus, never as pervasive as many scholarly and public narratives once led us to believe, has now fractured. Secularism has increasingly lost its largely taken-for-granted status as shared public discourse and space, with its accompanying inflections of neutrality and universality. No longer the unarticulated given, whose invisibility confers much of its power, secularism stands exposed and, in many contexts, opposed. Disputes over the nature and legitimacy of the secular state and society have exploded in recent decades across the globe. Religious actors and movements are challenging, and sometimes violently resisting, the secularist settlements that have come to ­dominate politics and public policy in a range of democratic states. Today we find ourselves, like Holyoake, stuck in a binary, although now it is secularism, its powers of mediation receding, that increasingly anchors one pole of a religion-secular divide. The dominant map of the religion-secular landscape pictures their clear separation, a visual representation of the Western modern secularisation narrative that charts the progressive differentiation of spheres, including science, the economy, and politics, that emerge from the control of religion. This map faithfully represents the links between modernity and secularisation in the Western social imaginary. Although a far more parochial and prescriptive story than its narrators ever imagined, it continues to inform public and scholarly discourses on religion. Perhaps most influential is the manner in which this story works to sustain an oppositional construction of the categories of religion and the secular. In so doing, the insulation and isolation of religion and the secular are foregrounded, rather than their interactions and transformations. By functioning as a static snapshot and not a moving picture, the dominant map sustains the presumption that religion and the secular are readily distinguished in modern democratic societies. Some wield this map as a weapon in defence of modernity under siege by regressive religious forces, and others use it as a rallying cry to mobilise against a creeping secularism hostile to religious visions and values. Others reject the map entirely, denouncing it as a tool of colonial or postcolonial power to reshape all territory in its image. Clearly, the map does not provide an adequate picture of the interactions, conflicts and conundrums at the religion-secular 61

Religion and Politics

boundary, nor a compass for moving past the polarising discourses surrounding it. This chapter makes the case that secularism is a far more ‘comprehensive and diffuse package of ideas, ideals, politics, and strategies than its representation solely as religion’s Other would lead us to expect.’7 The contours of this package shift across time and place. It has a complex history, with multiple strands whose intersections are ‘disparate, discontinuous, and contingent’, making it impossible to define in any fixed or final sense.8 To adapt Paul Rabinow’s observation about studying the politics of modernity, one must track the diverse ways in which insistent ‘claims to being secular’ are made.9 This chapter tracks some of the ways in which these claims to being secular are made in four countries: France, India, the US, and Turkey. It is drawn from Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, a volume that is the product of a multiyear project on the history and politics of secularism. This chapter distils some of its central findings, highlighting the distinctive formations of secularism in relation to religion in these four countries and discussing some of its central themes and conclusions. This particular set of countries yields significant comparative insights into the diversity of secularist formations. Intense public controversies over the nature of the secular state and society, and the public role of religion, have emerged in each of these countries, generating lively, even acrimonious, debates around the politics of religion and secularism. Each of these countries embodies a distinctive conflicted history of secularism worthy of comparative study, and allows for intellectually productive points of contrast as well as interesting commonalities. In addition, the interactions between and among these countries are significant, and go a long way toward illuminating the transnational dynamics of secular power as it gains and loses cultural and political footholds in different contexts. Finally, this set of countries includes four different majority religious traditions (Hinduism, Islam, Protestantism and Roman Catholicism) that, as we shall see, pose distinctive challenges and possibilities in relation to the politics of secularism. Exploring these formations in comparative and global perspective sheds light on the dynamics and dangers of reigning public narratives about the interface of religion and secularism, from the ‘culture wars’ within countries to the purported ‘clash of civilisations’ globally. 62

Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity

Comparative secularisms: France, India, the United States and Turkey It is impossible to offer a simple, singular definition of secularism that carries across time and space. Yet a common thread runs through the variations. In some fashion each of the four varieties of secularism discussed in this essay reflects a processual and often conflicted attempt to remake, reform, or refashion religion. This process is not captured in the standard portrait of secularism that envisions a wall of separation from religion. In suggesting two separate domains, the wall metaphor obscures the interactions and integrations that mark their formations and reformations. Indeed secularism has drawn much of its power from its ability to cloak this process. Different forms of secularism accomplish this remaking of religion differently, with strikingly varied objectives and outcomes. Yet all are driven by a sense that religion needs to be remade, relocated, and related to differently in the modern world. Rather than reproducing the misleading presumption that secularism means simply the separation of religion from state and/or politics, this essay approaches secularism as a modality of governance. It is a tactic, technique, or strategy for overseeing religion. It does not, however, signal the absence of religion. This chapter provides the reader with multiple lenses with which to view the politics surrounding the religion–secular divide and, hopefully, recognise the limitations of this binary. Reading each formation of secularism through the prism of another lends insight into and perspective on our own and others’ practices. The idea is to develop an ear for their variations, their contingencies, and the conditions, both material and otherwise, which enable and constrain them. This counters the pervasive tendency to privilege a single model of secularism, and use it as the norm against which others are judged as either adequate or deficient. Andrew Davison describes this as a process of de-centering secularism. Rather than substitute an alternative model of secularism as the new norm to which all should aspire, our objective is to help to ‘reveal the limits of social theory perpetually steadied within the archetypal models of European experience.’10 This is critical in an increasingly globalised age. France represents in many ways the paradigmatic model of secularism as remaking religion, at least in its own self-representation. As Jean Baubérot explains, secularism constitutes at one and the same time a ‘founding myth of modernity’ and an origin myth for France as a 63

Religion and Politics

modern nation-state.11 Forged in a revolutionary and violent context, French secularism, known as laïcité, bears the marks of its oppositional formation against the Roman Catholic Church, the only officially recognised religion of the time. In its dominant representation it took on features of an exclusive civil religion of the Republic. Seeking to fashion undivided loyalty to the state and counter the power of the Church, French secularism was driven by the desire to protect citizens from religion and not, as in the American case, to also protect religion from the state. The pursuit of liberty in France stood in opposition to religious freedom, not in collusion with it. Champions of this aggressive and absolutist rendition of secularism secured its position through a series of binaries that positioned it as the public, rational, emancipatory alternative to the private, superstitious, authoritarian option that is religion. This worked to sustain the overriding contrast between modernity and tradition. It is a rigidly separationist approach to remaking religion, reflecting, in Baubérot’s words, ‘kingly power over beliefs’ and legitimising the expulsion of religion and religious symbolism from the public realm.12 The broad public acceptance of the 2004 law banning the headscarf and other conspicuous religious symbols from French public schools taps into and reinforces this narration of secularism. However, although this narrative may represent the dominant, even iconic, picture of French secularism, it fails to capture the more complicated interface of religion and secularism in France, past or present. France’s roots are essentially double, and both clerical and anti-clerical tendencies co-exist and compete. Throughout much of the twentieth century and into the present, on the ground, relations between church and state have been more fluid than the oppositional model would suggest, particularly in relation to legal and financial matters. A more accommodationist tradition is evident, with touchstones in an older origination myth of the fifth-century Christian baptism of the French leader Clovis. The history of French secularism is an ongoing contestation between the dominant narrative of a republican civil religion of secularism and a minor thread that reflects a more accommodationist relationship to religion, in this case Roman Catholicism. These competing traditions surge and ebb in response to different historical circumstances. For example the powerful resurgence beginning in 1989 of a forceful state secularism in response to the ‘headscarf affair’ is not simply evidence of a monolithic French model under attack. It is the remobilisation of a discursive strategy, or better, series of strategies both anticlerical and accommodationist, with deep and conflicted 64

Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity

roots in French history and politics. It is also an anxious response to what is perceived (among other challenges such as European integration, economic globalisation, and the process of coming to terms with French colonial and collaborationist projects) as the menacing threat of a growing Muslim immigrant population to French national identity and the French republican model of public space.13 Secular French identity, though presenting itself as neutral and inclusive, appears inflected with religious and ethnic specificity through the prism of the headscarf controversy. Consider the telling words of the French prime minister who remarked at the height of the conflict: ‘do we want the river of Islam to enter the riverbed of secularism?’14 Just as French secularism exhibits a recurring dominant chord in interaction and tension with a minor chord, secularism in the United States is similarly complex. This is important to keep in mind when comparing country cases, as the tendency is to speak in short hand about the French version or the American version. Doing so does serve the legitimate end of highlighting key differences, but always at the expense of effacing the tensive multiplicity within each. So while we can speak of different models of secularism within the four countries, in so doing we run the risk of ignoring voices that give shape to counter strains within each. The multiple traditions of secularism within the United States underscore why summing it up through the pervasive metaphorical shorthand of a ‘wall of separation’ is so misleading. Tisa Wenger calls our attention to two major traditions of secularism as they jostled and competed over the meaning of national identity, focusing on a nineteenth-century controversy over a proposed amendment to the Constitution.15 Advocates of the amendment defended it as a strategy to protect laws and practices that safeguarded liberty and the moral life of the nation, from school prayer, to Sunday closing laws, to military chaplains. Since no particular Christian denomination was privileged, they denied that the amendment ran afoul of the constitutional principle against an establishment of religion. To champions of the amendment, political liberty was grounded in religious liberty, refracted through a nondenominational Protestantism. The opposition, on the other hand, insisted the amendment violated the constitutional principles concerning establishment of religion and religious freedom; it constituted the establishment of a generic Protestantism, and in so doing constrained the liberty of religious minorities and the non-religious. In this controversy the ‘shared value was not secularism but the all-American 65

Religion and Politics

principle of liberty’ over which conflicting narratives emerged.16 So it was not secularism as such but protecting and advancing liberty, however differently defined, which was the driving motor. A coalition of self-identified atheists, secularists and religious liberals pushed for a strong separationist model and reread the founding leaders and texts through the prism of the newly coined category of ‘secularism’. As Wenger writes, ‘a history of secularism as an ideological project must view the formation of the United States not as the success of a preexisting “secularism” but as a contentious and contingent process that helped shape the conditions’ in which it later emerged.17 These two traditions of interpreting the role of religion in American public life continue to shape the discursive landscape, variously working to fuse, disrupt or – through a type of shell game – obscure the links between Christianity and national identity and secular law and practices. In this respect the American case is quite different from the French, where the associations between national identity and an anti-religious secular identity date from the very birth of the French nation-state. In the American context this separationist tradition, with its antireligious sensibilities, although increasingly influential in more elite circles by the early twentieth century, has never been the dominant chord. There is a reason why no American president has self-identified as a secularist, even when invoking the separationist tradition, as did John Kennedy in 1960. Both of these traditions work to remake religion, although it may be easier to see in relation to the separationist trajectory. By insisting that religion belongs within the private sphere, and reading the constitutional principles as endorsing not just the institutional separation of church and state, but also the separation of religion and politics more broadly, secularists seek to compartmentalise, marginalise and tame religion. But the accommodationists, for whom religious liberty and political liberty are seamlessly linked, are also in the game of reforming religion as they advance interpretations of, in this case, Christianity, that align with their interpretations of national identity and democratic values.18 Noting that ‘secular law needs a pliant religion’, Winni Sullivan explores these two traditions of legal secularism as models for managing religion.19 Separationist approaches have sought to eliminate religion from the public sphere, while accommodationist ones have pursued the project of constructing a more universalist version of Christianity that is envisioned as blending seamlessly into secular forms and discourses. 66

Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity

Consider, for example, the way in which American law has sanctioned a particular form of Christian marriage, but all the while insisting that it is ‘not religious’. These two interpretive traditions of legal secularism in American life have sought to manage religion by seeking its ‘homogeneity or absence’.20 Sullivan suggests that in addition to these two classical traditions, there is evidence of a third type in recent legal decisions, though cautioning that all three may be present ‘most of the time in much of the modern Christian west’.21 The third type reflects the recognition of a more diverse religious landscape, and a sense of religious life as more ‘eclectic, adaptive, and acculturating’, mixing it up not only with other religious traditions, but also with practices from the broader culture.22 Religion lived and interpreted in this fashion, Sullivan concludes, seems to neither need particular accommodation nor careful separation. As in the American case, it is a struggle to fit developments in Turkey over the last century into readily available categories such as separation or accommodation, and secular versus religious. Turkish secularism (laiklik), as in the other countries discussed here, refers to a complex set of political arrangements, practices and sensibilities that involve defining, regulating and remaking religion. Framing the Turkish debate as ‘secular moderns’ versus ‘religious anti-moderns’ fails to capture the complex power dynamics at the intersection of religion and politics in Turkey. Secularism in Turkey has been a largely top-down political project of remaking and governing religion. This model, authorised and regulated by state authorities since Atatürk’s founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, is often known as Kemalism.23 It has coincided with the formation of a Turkish nation-state that has sought, with varying degrees of success, to impose a separationist model of a secular state in tandem with an official and heavily regulated version of state (Sunni) Islam. In an essay on the grammar of Turkish laicism and its reification of ‘religion’, which he explores through the prism of the Alevis, a minority Muslim sect, Markus Dressler has described Kemalism as the attempt ‘to secularize public life and the political sphere, and to put public religious practice under state surveillance.’24 Dressler insists that laicism is not anti-religious per se, but like nationalism, should be understood as charged with distinguishing between religious practices conducive and harmful to national unity. In Turkey the result has been a rather authoritarian form of secularism which has incited a range of responses, including most recently a debate similar to that in France concerning whether women wearing a particular form of head 67

Religion and Politics

covering should be allowed to enter public universities. Kemalism, then, has been neither uniform nor gone uncontested. There are important characteristics of laiklik that resonate with the other country cases. For example, Dressler illuminates how deeply intertwined laicism and nationalism are in the Kemalist worldview, also the case, as we have seen, in American and French secularism. He highlights the extent to which laicist discourse concerns itself with the management and production of religion, underscoring its organisation through a public–private distinction correlated with ideas about legitimate and illegitimate religion. He calls our attention to the theological dimensions of Kemalist discourse. This is evident in the Turkish state’s treatment of the Alevis, and the ways in which jurists evaluate Alevism in relation to implicit concepts of Sunni Islam, the dominant religion. This suggests that the challenge to Kemalism in Turkey is neither a side effect of economic or political woes, nor a stage in the rocky transition to Western modernity, nor evidence of an intractable clash of civilisations. Challenges to Kemalism do not signal a clash of civilisations spawned by commitments to pre-modern Islamic practices. Instead they represent a series of efforts to refashion and rework a powerful yet historically contingent Turkish secularist settlement.25 Secularism is as central a term in Indian political life as it is in France and Turkey. Its meaning here, as elsewhere, has become increasingly contested in recent decades. Exploring the historical trajectories that have produced Indian secularism, T. N. Madan observes that it was not a term that was widely used prior to India’s independence in 1947, nor referenced in the Constitution, though it was inserted to the Preamble in 1976 and is deemed an ‘unalterable feature of the constitution’ by the Indian Supreme Court.26 Indian secularism, Madan argues, is distinctive, shaped by the religious and cultural roots of India’s past, and the political challenges of the present. It is most aptly understood as ‘religious pluralism as a positive value combined with the affirmation of national unity within a democratic framework.’27 It is not driven by a separationist impulse to keep the state and religion apart, as in the United States, or religious expression outside the public sphere, as in Turkey and France. Similar to the tradition of religious secularism in the United States, Indian secularism, according to Madan, is not an independent worldview but a ‘religio-secular ideology’. It draws deeply upon the values of religious pluralism and tolerance that are rooted in the Hindu tradition. 68

Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity

The strains within, and controversies over, secularism in India surface through contrast with Zoya Hasan’s interpretation.28 Also affirming its centrality to national identity and Indian political life, she is especially attentive to its erosion in recent decades. Indian secularism must be understood, she argues, within a broader constellation of concepts that include democracy, equality and justice. Forging links that bind these terms within a shared conceptual space is the ‘outstanding achievement of India’s freedom struggle and the heart of its political project.’29 Secularism from this angle is not captured through the idea of disestablishment or separation. To the contrary the state is charged with reforming religion in the interests of social justice and equality, including securing the rights of religious minorities. This has led to laws that abolish such practices as untouchability and child marriage, and that make room for the continuation of personal family law for the minority Muslim community. It is, as Hasan observes, a balancing act as the state seeks to foster a secular democracy that advances national unity, justice, equality, and the rights of minorities. These differing interpretive angles are suggestive of the internal contestation that characterises secularism in India, and in the other country cases. Hasan offers a reading that positions secularism as a political ideology that stands apart and above the religious traditions and communities that it regulates. Madan, on the other hand, envisions secularism as a religio-political vision, one that is more integrated with the religious history and culture of the majority tradition and necessarily so, he suggests, if it is to secure the legitimacy and roots it needs to flourish. Wary of this blend in light of the religious politics of the Hindu right in recent decades, Hasan underlines the vulnerabilities and dangers of any seamless integration between secularism and the majoritarian religious tradition. Their positions represent the different forms of religious secularism and irreligious secularism that we have encountered in the other three country cases. As we have seen, both forms function to reconfigure religion. In the Indian context where disestablishment is not a defining principle, irreligious secularism manages religion more through explicit regulation than through its banishment from public spaces. The religious secularism variant in India, with its heavy accent on pluralism and tolerance, is the product of a series of constructive interpretive efforts of nineteenthand ­twentieth-century intellectuals to reconfigure Hinduism so as to provide a unifying philosophy focused on social transformation that would serve the interests of the nation.30 69

Religion and Politics

In each of the four country cases, religious minorities offer revealing angles into the conflictual history and power politics of secularism. In India, as in the United States, religious minorities have been important voices in advancing an irreligious form of secularism, both countries with significant traditions of religious secularism. In the American context, Jewish Americans and other religious minorities have played a leading role in countering the Protestant–secular fusions that have worked to marginalise or disadvantage minority groups. Similarly, in India, Muslim voices have been among the most vocal in criticising forms of government accommodation of Hindu majoritarianism. The situation is interestingly different in France and Turkey, where separationist/laicist forms of secularism have dominated. In these contexts religious minorities, whether the Alevis in Turkey or Muslims in France, have illuminated the exclusionary features of official or de facto forms of religious establishment that exist in tandem with the secular state, and are actively managed or sustained by it. These comparative observations highlight the way in which secularism functions as a political strategy of nation-states. From this angle the ambiguity of secularism is not so much a conceptual weakness, as a pragmatic flexibility and a political cover that can be mobilised variously, depending upon the political and religious exigencies of the moment.

Lessons learned We have too long been beguiled by a single picture of secularism. Rather than a static solution to the challenges posed by religious and cultural difference, or the result of a clean transfer of authority away from religious institutions, secularism involves defining and remaking religion. Modes of secularism provide different spaces for religion, with the latter understood to be plural in form and always internally contested.31 Juxtaposing the cases of France, India, Turkey and the United States illuminates the diverse historical and religious roots of contemporary state secularist settlements. It also draws attention to the broader global and transnational contexts in which these formations have taken shape. Studying secularism ‘from the ground up’ makes it clear that this field of study is not about disembodied ideas and visions, but ways of life, legal and other disciplinary practices, habits and sensibilities. This section presents three lessons learned from our study, beginning with the relationship between secularism and the West. 70

Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity

The limits of secularism as a Western construct One of the central puzzles in the study of comparative secularisms concerns the complex relationship between secularism and Western history and power. To what extent is secularism the imposition of a Christian and more broadly Western tradition, and to what extent is it an idea that has travelled and, in the process, been reconfigured? Secularism today is not only or essentially Western, as the cases of Turkey and India illustrate. It is clear that Western colonialism and modernism shaped Indian and Turkish secularisms; yet they are not mere replicas of Western secularisms. They are distinctive formations that cannot be reduced to Western models. Our need today, as Nilufer Gole argues, is to recognise both the diversity of secularisms as they take shape in particular country contexts, and their interactions and ‘interconnected histories’32. In so doing we see that ‘formations of the secular follow different historical trajectories and have different religious genealogies in different places, yet they are closely interconnected with hegemonic impositions of Western modernity and colonialism.’33 Only by keeping both aspects in mind can we escape the pervasive tendency to interpret secularism in non-Western contexts as ‘lagging behind, incomplete and non­ contemporaneous with the West’, that is, as a ‘second-rank imitation of the Western original.’34 The global distribution and imposition of secular forms and ways of life has involved transmitting ‘a set of norms that define rationality as well as ethical and aesthetic forms.’35 As Göle explains, ‘secularism works as an organizing principle of social life, and penetrates into everyday life practices and underpins the politics of emancipation and sexuality.’36 She documents the powerful material dimensions of secular modern negotiations of religious difference that often escape analyses focused exclusively on legal, philosophical or institutional questions. This materialisation of the secular–religious divide is expressed through dress, architecture, and the organisation of physical space. Adding a historical dimension to the analysis of secularism outside the West, Rajeev Bhargava suggests that forms of and antecedents to political secularity may have existed in India before modern secularism.37 Seeking to excavate the historical and conceptual resources without which modern Indian secularism would not have taken the form it did, Bhargava identifies a series of cultural spaces where ideas 71

Religion and Politics

and practices associated with individual choice, equality and toleration emerged in multiple Indian traditions. Conversely, dimensions of secularism in the West also reflect influences from non-Western traditions, as Gauri Viswanathan traces in her exploration of popular spiritual movements such as Theosophy, which drew deeply from Indian traditions.38 Similarly, Bhargava suggests that while Europeans may have come to embrace the idea of toleration of other Christian sects from their own experience, the ‘conceptual space for the idea of impartiality toward all faiths’ emerged first in India and was transmitted to Europe through colonial encounters and the legacies inherited from the polities of colonial subjects.39 Norms and forms of secularism are forged and sustained through power relations, including state–society relations, discourses of democratisation, gender relations, nationalist projects and politics, religious and theological imperatives, and colonial and postcolonial interactions. Context-specific analyses of secularism reveal its implications in a host of other forms of politics, including transnational politics, personal identities, nationalist politics, and the politics of securitisation. Despite the Western, and specifically Christian, roots of the term secular (which is derived from the Latin word saeculum meaning ‘of the age’),40 the globalisation of this vernacular, and in some cases of the secular/religious binary itself, has involved local appropriations, contestations, transformations, and even head-on collisions. Although expanding the range of secularisms with which we are familiar is a critical step in de-centering Eurocentric visions and versions, it is even more important to go beyond merely cataloguing the variety of secularisms. There is a need for fresh thinking about the interface of the religious and the secular within and between different countries. There is a need to understand the ways in which secular power shapes religious and political possibilities in particular contexts. Although we remain sympathetic to calls for secularism in certain historical epochs and situations, we are faced with the challenge of developing concepts, coining terms and identifying practices that work outside of limitations imposed by claims to the secular or the religious as oppositional constructs. To foster new thinking that goes beyond the terms of current debates and received understandings about these categories is our larger aim. Key to this process is rethinking academic disciplinary divisions that reflect and reproduce a rigid secular–religious divide. 72

Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity

Bridging the academic religious–secular divide Cross-disciplinary work is essential to moving beyond the constraints of the disciplinary specialisations of the modern university, which in many instances reflect the institutional habits and traditions that our work problematises. These disciplinary divisions, their assumptions and methods are all deeply implicated in the religion/secular discursive formations that we historicise and politicise. For instance, in Europe the emergence of the social sciences in the latter decades of the nineteenth century reflected the university’s institutional embodiment of the Western narrative of secularisation, with its emphasis upon the differentiation of the spheres of the market, society, and politics, separating from the dominance of religion. Economics, sociology and political science developed as academic disciplines devoted to theorising these newly secularised domains. These disciplines, as Tomoko Masuzawa explains, took Western societies as the object of inquiry and in many ways as the norm, while anthropology and Orientalism arose to study ‘the rest’.41 A religion/secular fault line is expressed and reproduced through the disciplinary divide, reflecting European struggles to define what it means to be modern and secular in relation to a complex and multifaceted cultural and religious inheritance. Anthropology and Orientalism ‘promoted and bolstered the presumption that this thing called “religion” still held sway over all those who were unlike them: non-Europeans, Europeans of the premodern past, and among their own contemporary neighbors, the uncivilized and uneducated bucolic population as well as the superstitious urban poor, all of whom were something of “savages within”.’42 In contrast, political science, sociology and economics promoted a model of the modern secular self and society in the West, screening out or compartmentalising what they defined as ‘religion’ from their studies and theories. Secularisation theory attained paradigmatic status within the social sciences in the twentieth century, imprinting these disciplines with ideological and prescriptive features that were hidden within purportedly objective categories and explanatory frameworks.43 These disciplines, working with a liberal model of the human, as independent and rational, and aspiring to be a science, privileged law-like generalisations regarding human behavior. Pursuing objective knowledge, premised on the view from nowhere, eclipsed attention to the inter-subjective meanings, visions and values that constituted human experience for both individuals and societies. Religion, identified with 73

Religion and Politics

the parochial and the private, was essentially kept off the radar screen, as was recognition of the manner in which a particular and historically contingent religion/secular classification helped to make this so. Although the study of religion can redress up to a point this lack of attention to secularism’s ‘other’, it is essential to recognise the extent to which it also bears the imprint of the same secularist academic tradition. This is a function of the modern configuration of its organisational principle and focus. ‘The modern discourse on religion and religions was from the very beginning,’ as Masuzawa observes, ‘a discourse of secularization,’ a ‘discourse of othering.’44 The move to define religion was in large part to demarcate and contain it, separating it from the domains of power, politics and scientific knowledge. In tracing the emergence of the modern understandings of religion and the secular, Talal Asad calls attention to their co-constitution. The secularising of the state and scientific study occurs with the ‘construction of religion as a new historical object: anchored in personal experience, expressible as belief-statements, dependent on private institutions, and practiced in one’s spare time. This construction of religion ensures that it is part of what is inessential to our common politics, economy, science, and morality.’45 This trajectory did not preclude participants within the diverse religious traditions, Western and non-Western, from making religious discourse their own, and finding their own motivations for reforming and advancing it. The move to corral and contain religion also makes possible its privileging and defense.46 The secularist imprint on the field of religious studies is evident in the manner in which religious studies has secured academic legitimacy through opposition to theology, an older, once central discipline that self-consciously retained its roots within the Christian tradition.47 By positioning itself as objective and public over and against theology, which was deemed confessional, parochial and bound to a single religious tradition, religious studies secured entry into the modern university – and in the American context theology was relegated to seminaries and divinity schools charged with the training of ministers. One feature of this disciplinary formation, at least until quite recently, has been the tendency to essentialise and decontextualise religious traditions, evident in the configuration of world religion courses that focus on the sacred texts, doctrines and rituals of religious traditions in abstraction from their appropriation by participants in particular places and times. This methodological angle adopts an external view from nowhere that flattens and homogenises the insider’s lived 74

Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity

experience. It reflects the modern liberal move to isolate and depoliticise religion. Hence bringing religious studies into the mix of the social sciences does not necessarily counter the limitations and constraints of the modernist disciplinary mould, as this field in some of its tributaries reflects similar distinguishing features. For this reason it is important to interrogate the modernist disciplinary mould from more religiously diverse standpoints, with approaches that counter its proclivity to fix and homogenise religion. This may involve paying close attention to alternative worldviews that do not fit neatly in either liberal humanist or conventional ‘religious’ categories and assumptions. In so doing, the ahistorical reification of conceptual frames that blind us to the lived realities of other ways of being in the world is tempered. Gauri Viswanathan has argued that thinking about the secular through the frame of heterodoxy, and specifically spiritual movements outside mainstream religion, makes it possible to see the limits of the modern secular-religion dichotomy in a new light by drawing attention to what is ignored or suppressed by both secular philosophies and religious orthodoxies. ‘The degree to which religion and secularism coincide in their inability to acknowledge alternative spiritual practices,’ she observes, ‘is matched only by the scholarly complicity in homogenizing religious histories to fit a composite profile of religious belief.’48 As Viswanathan concludes, ‘How differently would secularism be understood if it was seen through a history omitted from its own narrative?’ Excavating the diversity within religious traditions can yield similar interpretive gains. Linell Cady draws on the work of H. Richard Niebuhr to consider a variety of ways in which the Western Christian tradition has envisioned and enacted its relationship to the broader world.49 It is clear from this exercise that no single model can illuminate the range of positions, from withdrawal, to the privatisation of faith, to its reformist and even radical expression in social and political life. Exploring these alternatives, and the conflicts and theological conundrums they have generated, offers theoretical and normative insights for moving beyond the static picture of the religion–­ secularism dichotomy. Abdullahi An-Na’im has explored forms of secularism from an Islamic theological perspective, distinguishing between ‘assertive’ and ‘weak’ versions.50 He argues that the former, that seeks to privatise religion, is antithetical to Islam, whereas the latter that promotes a neutral state that mediates diversity is fully compatible, if not essential, for Muslim subjects. An-Na’im rejects the theological 75

Religion and Politics

coherence of the notion of the ‘Islamic state’, as he makes room for the ongoing contributions of Muslims to shaping public and political life. As these various approaches suggest, interpreting secularism from a broader spectrum of religious and theological positions offers resources for transcending the limitations of the reigning secularist paradigm. Thinking globally about secularism The global dimensions and implications of the politics of secularism are inescapable, and should not be sidelined in favour of a methodological and epistemological nationalism that prioritises the domestic politics of individual states. Particular Christian and post-Christian categories (secular, religion) have become globalised, hybridised and transformed through interactions with and impositions on other societies. According to José Casanova, ‘the very fact that the same category of religion is being used globally across cultures and civilisations testifies to the global expansion of the modern secular-religious system of classification of reality which first emerged in the modern Christian West.’51 At the same time, and to challenge the other side of the methodological nationalist coin, different forms and tendencies of secularism also co-exist within single states. Just as secularist templates for regulating religion move across national boundaries as part of the dynamics of global politics, it is also the case that no single form of secularism can be mapped cleanly onto a single nation-state. Rather, multiple traditions collide and cohabitate with varying degrees of tension both within and between states. The close relation between secularism and international power and authority suggests that claims to the secular in Europe, India, Turkey, the US or elsewhere cannot be fully understood without reference to both European and global history. Secularisms are created through actions and beliefs and cannot be abstracted from the dynamic global historical contexts and circumstances in which they have emerged, and in which in recent centuries Europe has played a formative and often violent role. For example, while on the one hand French laïcité emerged out of (and remains indebted to) both the Enlightenment critique of religion and Christian reform, on the other hand it has been constituted through and influenced by global relationships, including colonial and postcolonial relations with religious minorities both in France and in French colonies and post-colonies.52 Secularism is 76

Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity

a form of political authority that contributes to the consolidation of inclusionary and exclusionary group identities and communities at global, national and transnational levels. Additionally, if as we suggest, claims to the secular are about defining and remaking religion, then a significant feature of such claims is that they not only rely upon, but also help to produce definitions of religion, religious resurgence, reasonable religion, normal politics, and so forth. These authoritative definitions travel across boundaries, and are brought to life differently in different contexts. As an illustration of the power of secularism to define critical terms, consider the outside limits of a term like ‘religious resurgence’ as conventionally defined. Turkish Kemalists and French laicists no longer monopolise public debate over what it means to be a secular state, yet not all challengers to Kemalism in Turkey or to laïcité in France can be described as ‘religious’ resurgents. Debates over whether the United States is Christian, post-Christian, Judeo-Christian, or something else entirely are common, and whether India is a Hindu, multi-religious, or postHindu state is contested. Yet not everyone who challenges American or Indian secularist settlements is ‘religious’ as it is conventionally understood. This suggests that religious resurgence is not simply or at least not always a rise or return of religion taken in some pre-defined sense, but represents an acceleration of challenges to dominant forms of secularism and the laws, habits and institutions that underpin and reproduce them.53 A new conceptual vocabulary is needed.

Conclusion: toward a new conceptual vocabulary At a conference held in Istanbul to discuss these matters, Charles Taylor observed that, ‘We need to take a deep breath and jump into a completely different mindset.’ We agree. Secular and religious convictions are interwoven with political authority in shifting formations of staggering variety at different levels of politics from local to national to global. These formations fail to align neatly with either state boundaries or conventional secularist assumptions of any variety, whether European, Turkish, Indian or American. A new conceptual vocabulary that is better equipped to reflect the growing array of practices that escape, circumvent and confound both Enlightenment epistemology and the constraints of traditional religious authority is needed. Such a vocabulary would allow us to analytically frame emergent alternatives to rigid secular–religious dichotomies. It would encourage us to think 77

Religion and Politics

more self-consciously about the influence of received categories that stand in the way of coming to terms with varieties of theocratic and non-theocratic political practice, both inside and outside the West. The explosion in the use of the category of ‘spirituality’, for example, captures a growing impatience with the analytic limitations of too rigid a religion–secularism divide, and the personal and political sensibilities and practices it sustains. Those claiming to be ‘spiritual but not religious’ invoke a modernist caricature of religion as authoritarian, dogmatic and static which they reject in favour of a more personalised, eclectic and journey-like approach to life. So envisioned, spirituality is not isolated from secular domains, but the rubric for a mode of being within them. This form of religiosity/spirituality is indicative of a shifting religious-secular landscape and, perhaps, can serve as a resource for rethinking its constraints. To respond to the complexities and dilemmas of contemporary religious politics requires a new approach to what Andrew Davison describes as the relation between ‘political power and matters of tradition, culture, and conscience.’54 We are certainly not the first to call for a new vocabulary.55 Afsaneh Najmabadi has gestured toward the potential of a politics that resists rigid secular-religious classifications and the exclusionary politics that follow in their wake. She cites examples of these promising alternative forms of politics among feminists in contemporary Iran.56 While we do not offer a roadmap – which would be unpersuasive and unworkable given the diversity of lived secularisms and religions in the world – we do seek to maximise conditions for discussions, arguments and forms of persuasion to take place. The idea is to create spaces for new thinking and practice to meet the challenges of a deeply pluralistic global environment. To borrow Deniz Kandiyoti’s argument about feminism, while we should be careful not to ‘jump to celebrate’ the emergence of alternatives modes of religious governance if they are anti-pluralistic or intolerant, at the same time we should not fail to interrogate the secularist discourses of modernity to which they are often counterposed.57 Disagreements will persist. We conclude by acknowledging one such productive disagreement, and the need for further conversation and debate that it signals. The point of contention involves the extent to which broadening and opening various forms of secularism to new perspectives and practices is sufficient, as contrasted with the view that a more profound set of transformations and more critical standpoint is called for vis-à-vis the assumptions and practices associated with 78

Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity

political modernity in general and secularism in particular. In other words, is a ‘better’, more diverse, and more expansive secularism the goal, or is there a need to go beyond the conceptual and practical vocabulary provided by the languages of secularism and religion toward a completely new set of linguistic, philosophical and phenomenological practices for negotiating across foundational commitments in late modern comparative and international (religious) politics? This point of disagreement exposes an unresolved dilemma, not only in the study of secularism and religion, but also in the politics of modernity more broadly.

Notes * This essay is a revised and updated version of Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, ‘Comparative secularisms and the politics of modernity: An introduction’, in Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (eds), Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age (New York: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 3–24, reprinted with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. 1. George Jacob Holyoake, Principles of Secularism Illustrated, rev. 3rd ed. (London: Austin & Company, 1871), p. 9. The book is available online at http://books. google.com/books?id=w6v5glczzmEC&printsec=titlepage&source=gbs_v2_sum mary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false. 2. Ibid., p. 10. 3. Ibid., p. 17. 4. Ibid., p. 14. 5. Ibid., pp. 27, 11. 6. Eric S. Waterhouse, ‘Secularism’, in James Hastings (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1920), p. 349. 7. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, ‘Introduction’, in Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (eds), The Crisis of Secularism in India (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 3. 8. Joan Scott, ‘Secularism and gender equality’, in Linell Cady and Tracy Fessenden (eds), Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 31. 9. Paul Rabinow, French Modern (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 9; cited in Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Introduction: Feminist longings and postcolonial conditions’, in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 7. 10. Andrew Davison, ‘Hermeneutics and the politics of secularism’, in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, p. 26. 11. Jean Baubérot, ‘The evolution of secularism in France: Between two civil religions’, in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, pp. 57–68. The following paragraphs draw on Baubérot’s account. 12. Ibid., p. 61. 13. See Joan Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

79

Religion and Politics 14. ‘Raffarin sees “river of Islam” threaten Turkey EU membership’, Expatica.com, 23 September 2004, http://www.expatica.com/fr/news/local_news/raffarin-seesriver-of-islam-threatbrin-turkey-eu-membership-12162.html (accessed 30 July 30 2009). 15. Tisa Wenger, ‘The God-in-the-constitution controversy: American secularisms in historical perspective’, in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, pp. 87–105. The following paragraphs draw on Wenger’s study. 16. Ibid., p. 102. 17. Ibid., p. 89. 18. For an analysis of this effort in two prominent American thinkers, see Linell Cady, ‘Royce, Dewey, and the religion/secular classification: Toward a kaleidoscopic model’, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, 29:3 (2008), pp. 231–52. 19. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, ‘Varieties of legal secularism’, in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, pp. 87–105. The paragraph draws on Sullivan’s account. 20. Ibid., p. 110. 21. Ibid., p. 109. 22. Ibid., p. 117. 23. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, ‘Contested secularisms in Turkey and Iran’, in Anders Berg-Sørensen (ed.), Contesting Secularism: Comparative Perspectives (London: Ashgate, 2013). 24. Markus Dressler, ‘Public-private distinctions, the Alevi question, and the headscarf: Turkish secularism revisited’, in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, pp. 121–42. 25. Hurd, ‘Contested secularisms in Turkey and Iran’. 26. T. N. Madan, ‘Indian secularism: A religio-secular ideal’, Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, pp. 181–96. 27. Ibid., p. 184. 28. Zoya Hasan, ‘Not quite secular political practice’, Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, pp. 197–214. This paragraph draws on Hasan’s case study. 29. Ibid., p. 200. 30. See, for example, Richard King, Orientalism and Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 128–42. 31. This is a point that Winnifred Sulllivan, drawing upon the work of Clark Gilpin, makes in ‘Varieties of legal secularism’, p. 109. 32. Nilufer Gole, ‘Manifestations of the religious-secular divide: Self, state, and the public sphere’, in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, pp. 41–53. The following two paragraphs draw on Gole’s account. 33. Ibid., p. 41. 34. Ibid., p. 43. 35. Ibid., p. 48. 36. Ibid., p. 47. 37. Rajeev Bhargava, ‘The “secular ideal” before secularism: A preliminary sketch’, in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, pp. 159–80. 38. Gauri Viswanathan, ‘Secularism and heterodoxy’, in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, pp. 229–45. 39. Bhargava, ‘The “secular ideal” before secularism’, p. 174.

80

Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity 40. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 12–17. 41. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 42. Ibid., p. 19. 43. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, p. 17. 44. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, p. 20. 45. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 207. 46. Asad, Genealogies, p. 28. 47. For a collection of essays exploring the history and disciplinary politics of theology and religious studies in the modern university, see Linell E. Cady and Delwin Brown (eds), Religious Studies, Theology, and the University: Conflicting Maps, Changing Terrain (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002). 48. Gauri Viswanathan, ‘Secularism and heterodoxy’, p. 243. 49. Linell Cady, ‘Reading secularism through a theological lens’, in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, pp. 247–64. 50. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, ‘Islam and secularism’, in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, pp. 217–28. 51. José Casanova, ‘Rethinking public religions’, in Alfred Stepan, Monica Toft and Timothy Samuel Shah (eds), Rethinking Religion in World Affairs (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 25–35. 52. This argument is developed in chapter three, ‘Secularism and Islam’, of Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 116–33. 53. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, ‘Theorizing religious resurgence’, International Politics, 44:6 (November 2007), pp. 647–65. 54. Davison, ‘Hermeneutics and the politics of secularism’, p. 26. 55. For other efforts, see, for example: Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008); Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (eds), Secularisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and its Critics (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 56. Afsaneh Najmabadi, ‘(Un)veiling feminism’, in Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (eds), Secularisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 39–57. 57. Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Review of Women and Gender in Islam’, Contemporary Sociology, 2:5 (1993), pp. 688–9; cited in Abu-Lughod, ‘Introduction’, p. 25.

81

5 Europe in the Global Rise of Religious Nationalism Mark Juergensmeyer

I

n Western Europe at the turn of the twenty-first century, a new wave of anti-immigrant xenophobia has provided evidence of an edgy political and cultural response to the uncertainties of a post-Cold War world. This religious rebellion in the most modern of Western societies is one of the more puzzling features of the modern era. It is readily understandable that politicised religion could emerge at this moment of history in other parts of the world – Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, for examples. In these cases religious nationalism is a lingering response to colonialism, and traditional culture becomes a resource for a revived sense of national identity. What is less obvious is the way in which the same process has been part of the post-Cold War search for identity in the more developed parts of the world, including those societies that were dominant in the colonial era. In Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in the developed world, religious activism primarily associated with Christianity has surfaced with a vengeance at the same time that anti-colonial Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim religious movements have been active elsewhere. In all of these cases, however, the reasons may have been similar. These may be instances of a global response to political uncertainty, in which religion has provided a way of thinking about public virtue, collective identity and world order in the face of a social reality that seems to be losing its moorings in a postCold War world. The Cold War era was more certain. Even though the capitalist– communist tensions created an atmosphere of suspicion and danger, with the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, it also provided a secure way of looking at the world. The dramatic political and social changes of the late twentieth century made world order seem vulnerable. No wonder that in such a context of global insecurity it would be the comforting values of religion and its certain notions of moral 82

Europe in the Global Rise of Religious Nationalism

struggle that would be implanted on social reality in order to make it seem more secure. To understand how this came about, we begin with a recent incident of violent Christian nationalism in Norway, then turn to the rise of xenophobia throughout Europe, and end with a discussion of how the European movements of religious nationalism fit into a twenty-first century global pattern of religious rebellion.

The explosion of religious nationalism in Scandinavia When Anders Breivik ignited a bomb in downtown Oslo and then savagely attacked a progressive political youth camp in 2011, killing 77 and injuring 242, most of them idealistic young men and women, he imagined that he was scoring a victory for Christendom in northern Europe. Many observers regarded this horrible rampage as stirred by motives that were secular and anti-Christian, even anti-religious, despite the strong Christian subtext of Breivik’s manifesto. In the United States, in a similar attack in 1995 by Timothy McVeigh, observers were also quick to dismiss the religious aspects of his successful attempt to destroy the Oklahoma City Federal Building, killing 168 people, including many children in a daycare center on the premises. Yet the similarities between Norway’s mass killer Anders Breivik and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh are striking, and the motivations of both revealed a political­-religious agenda. Both were good-looking young Caucasians, imagined soldiers in a cosmic war to save Christendom. Both thought their acts of mass destruction would trigger a great battle to rescue society from liberal forces of multiculturalism that allowed non-Christians and nonWhites positions of acceptability. Both regretted the loss of life but thought their actions were ‘necessary’. For that they were staunchly unapologetic. Their similarities even extend to the kind of explosive used in their actions. Both used a mixture of fuel oil and ammonium nitrate fertiliser, which Breivik said he needed for his farm operations. The farm, it turned out, was rented largely because it was a convenient place to test his car bombs. And then there is the matter of dates. McVeigh was fixated on 19 April, the anniversary of the Waco siege. Breivik chose 22 July, the day in 1099 on which the Kingdom of Jerusalem was established during the First Crusades. The title of Breivik’s manifesto, which was posted on the internet on that day, is 2083, the date that Breivik suggested would be the culmination of a seventy-year war that began with his action 83

Religion and Politics

(Berwick 2011). Yet seventy years from 2011 would be 2081. Why did he date the final purge of Muslims from Norway at two years later, in 2083? The answer can be found on page 242 of Breivik’s manifesto, where he explains that in 1683 at the Battle of Vienna, the Ottoman Empire military was defeated in a protracted struggle, thereby ensuring that most of Europe would not become part of the Muslim empire (Berwick 2011: 242). The date in Breivik’s title is the 400th anniversary of that decisive battle, and in Breivik’s mind he was recreating the historic efforts to save Europe from what he imagined to be the evils of Islam. The threat of Islam is a dominant motif of Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. The writing of a manifesto is a major difference between Breivik and McVeigh, who was not a writer; instead McVeigh copied and quoted from his favorite book, the novel The Turner Diaries written by neo-Nazi William Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald (Macdonald 1978). The novel McVeigh loved explains his motives in a manner eerily similar to the writings of Breivik in 2083: he thought that liberal politicians had given in to the forces of globalisation and multiculturalism, and that the ‘mudpeople’, who were non-White, non-Christian, non-heterosexual, non-patriarchal males, were trying to take over the country. To save the country for Christendom, the righteous White, straight, non-feminist Christian males had to be shocked into reality by the force of an explosion that would signal to them that the war had begun. These were McVeigh’s ideas from The Turner Diaries, but they were also Breivik’s. ‘The time for dialogue is over,’ Breivik writes in his manifesto, adding that ‘the time for armed resistance has come’ (Berwick 2011: 811). The enemy of this imagined cosmic war was ‘the cultural Marxist/ multiculturalist elites’ whom he regarded as the ‘Nazis of our time’, intent on ‘leading us [White Europeans] to the cultural slaughterhouse by selling us into Muslim slavery.’ Breivik says, threateningly, to the ‘multiculturalist elite’ that ‘we know who you are, where you live and we are coming for you’ (Berwick 2011: 811). The manifesto is an interesting and eclectic document, something of a scrapbook of everything from his instructions for small-scale farming to a syllabus for a course on revolution that he’d love to see taught (complete with extensive bibliography that includes authors such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Theda Skocpol and Eric Hobsbawm, and recommends as a textbook Theorizing Revolution, written by my colleague at Santa Barbara, John Foran). It also includes theoretical and historical overviews of European history and political ideas, and an attempt 84

Europe in the Global Rise of Religious Nationalism

to explain Muslim ideas and Islamic history, skewed in such a way as to make it appear as if this major religious tradition were an ideology intent on controlling the world. The manifesto also includes a manual on how to make terrorist devices and conduct acts of terrorism – a manual not unlike the ‘Army of God’ handbook created by Christian anti-abortion activists, most likely penned by Lutheran pastor Michael Bray in Bowie, Maryland. The manual advises on costumes that might be worn, such as a policeman’s uniform, and how to avoid detection. Perhaps the most interesting section is Breivik’s chronology, day by day, of the weeks preceding his bombing and massacre on 22 July. It ends the chronology with this matter-of-fact statement: ‘I believe this will be my last entry. It is now Fri July 22nd, 12.51.’ Moments later he posted the 1,500-page book on the internet. Then, presumably, he drove to downtown Oslo to detonate the bomb that killed seven and shattered major buildings housing offices of the ruling political party. Afterwards he donned his policeman’s uniform to gain entrance to the liberal party’s youth camp where he coldly murdered over seventy of the young people in a rampage that lasted more than an hour. Like McVeigh, he thought that this horrible dramatic action would bring a hidden war into the open. Like many modern terrorists, his violent act was a form of performance violence, a symbolic attempt at empowerment to show the world that for the moment he was in charge. The terrorist act was a wake-up call, and a signal that the war had begun. Behind the earthly conflict was a cosmic war, a battle for Christendom. As the title of Breivik’s manifesto indicates, he thought he was recreating that historical moment in which Christianity was defended against the hordes, and Islam was purged from what he ­imagined to be the purity of European society. Breivik detailed meticulously what he expected to be the historical trajectory of this war through four stages, culminating in 2083. He expected that the forces of multiculturalism would be tough, and would resist the efforts to combat it. ‘It will take us up to 70 years to win,’ Breivik writes, but adding that ‘there is no doubt in our minds that we will eventually succeed’ (Berwick 2011: 811). According to Breivik, in the final phase of the great cosmic war, the civil war between the evil multiculturalists and the righteous few, a series of coup d’etats throughout Europe will overthrow the liberal forces. Then, finally, ‘the deportation of Muslims’ will begin, and European Christendom will be restored. 85

Religion and Politics

These ideas are religious as well as political, and I believe justify describing Breivik as a Christian terrorist. It is true that Breivik – and McVeigh for that matter –were much more concerned with politics and history than with scripture and religious belief. But much the same can be said about Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other Islamist activists. Bin Laden was a businessman and engineer, and Zawahiri a medical doctor; neither was a theologian or clergyman. Their writings show that they were much more interested in Islamic history than theology or scripture, and imagined themselves as recreating glorious moments in Islamic history in their own imagined wars. Tellingly, Breivik writes of al Qaeda with admiration, as if he would like to create a Christian version of their religious cadre. If bin Laden is a Muslim terrorist, Breivik and McVeigh are surely Christian terrorists. Breivik was fascinated with the Crusades and imagined himself to be a member of the Knights Templar, the Crusader army of a thousand years ago. But in an imagined, cosmic warfare, time is suspended, and history is transcended as the activists imagine themselves to be acting out timeless roles in a sacred drama. The tragedy is that these religious fantasies are played out in real time, with real and cruel consequences.

Xenophobia in contemporary Europe Breivik, though extreme, is not unique. He is the most violent face of a mood of anti-immigrant religious xenophobia that has spread throughout Europe. At the end of the twentieth century, Europe faced a host of social changes, including the fall of the Berlin wall and the dismantling of the iron curtain between Eastern and Western Europe, the rise of regionalism and the political transformation of nations associated with the European Union, a remarkable economic recovery in the era of globalisation, and a new transnational social phenomenon: migration and the global diaspora of ethnic cultures. The arrival of these new ethnic communities provoked some of the sharpest social tensions that Europe has experienced in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Increased mobility and a labour shortage in economically expanding Western Europe created the conditions for an influx of new immigrants, many of them Muslim. In France, residents of former French colonies such as Algeria flooded the country, and by the turn of the century, 20 per cent of France’s population consisted of foreign-born residents. During the same period almost 10 per cent of Germany’s residents were foreign-born, many of them immigrant 86

Europe in the Global Rise of Religious Nationalism

labourers from Turkey. In England many of the new immigrants were Pakistani. The appearance of new immigrants often produces tensions wherever it occurs, and religion need not have anything to do with it. In Europe, however, most of the new immigrants have been Muslim. The established communities in Europe are largely Christian. Symbolic and ideological elements of religion have become a component of both sides of the divide. The efforts to control or suppress the new immigrants can take the form of protecting Christian values and European customs and aim at the religious symbols and practices of the newcomers – such as the attempt to ban headscarves in France. And the immigrant communities’ response to the indignities they have experienced can take the form of protecting religious values, as it did during the outcry that followed the September 2005 publication of Muslim-related cartoons by a Danish newspaper. Some of the first signs of ethnic tension in the last decade of the twentieth century were seen in Germany with the rise of young neoNazi movements – especially in East Germany after the reunification of the country in 1990. The rise of National Socialism in Germany earlier in the twentieth century, while not explicitly religious, had carried overtones of millenarian Christianity. Heinrich Himmler and other formulators of Nazi ideology relied on a mixture of religious images and ideas, including the Knights Templar symbol from the Crusades; nature worship from the German folk movement of the 1920s; the notion of Aryan superiority from, among others, the Theosophists; and a fascination with the occult from a certain strand of German Catholic mysticism. To the degree that the Nazi movement was religious, then, one could consider World War II as a war of (or from the Allies’ point of view, against) religion (Lease 1983). The neo-Nazi movement, while young and largely ignorant of the ideological elements of their namesakes, nonetheless also mimicked religion in their symbols and rituals, and mocked the Muslim religion of the Turks and other immigrants they derided. Though in Germany the xenophobic movement against immigrants never gained significant electoral strength, the situation in nearby Austria was quite different. There the fear of new Muslim immigration propelled right-wing politician Jörg Haider into the headlines in 1999, when he and his Austrian Freedom Party (FPO) received 27 per cent of the votes. But the electoral support then sharply diminished, in part because of in-fighting within his organisation. In 2005 he founded 87

Religion and Politics

a new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, which effectively split the followers of the FPO into two camps and diluted its electoral strength. In France, another right-wing politician, Jean-Marie Le Pen, received the second-largest number of votes in the 2002 presidential elections after Jacques Chirac, beating out the leader of the left party, Lionel Jospin. Le Pen was accused of Muslim-bashing when he made immigration an electoral issue. Though the surprising electoral showing of Le Pen was regarded as something of a fluke, tensions between conservative anti-immigrant elements and the expatriate Muslim community in France came to a head in the following years. In 2004 a French law banned the wearing of ‘conspicuous religious symbols’ in public places. The law outlawed the display of large jewellery crosses and Jewish skullcaps, and it applied to courts and other government offices as well as to schools. But it was largely regarded as an effort to keep immigrant Muslim schoolgirls from wearing the hijab or other headcovering associated with Muslim community practices. Even though the practice of wearing the hijab is more a matter of custom than religious requirement, the ban was taken as an insult among many Muslims (Bowen 2006; Elver 2012). In the following year a series of riots broke out throughout France. Young Muslim immigrant men torched cars and public buildings in a display of anger at the French authorities that was based in part on the headscarf issue and in part on police brutality. The uprising began when a couple of immigrant Muslim youths were chased by the police and took refuge in an electrical power station where they were accidentally electrocuted. The youths involved in the riots largely came from families from Algeria and elsewhere in North Africa. In twenty nights of fiery protests, almost nine thousand cars were burned. A more violent situation occurred in the Netherlands in 2004 when an angry Muslim youth, the Dutch son of a Moroccan immigrant, responded to a film that he thought was offensive to Muslims by killing the filmmaker, Theo van Gogh. The filmmaker, who was a descendant of the brother of the famous Dutch painter, Vincent van Gogh, had earned something of a reputation as an iconoclast by having previously insulted Jews as well as Muslims. He befriended an articulate Muslim woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was an outspoken critic of what she regarded as repressive and patriarchal attitudes of immigrant Muslim men in the Netherlands. Together they made a film that excoriated what they believed to be the Muslim attitude toward women. 88

Europe in the Global Rise of Religious Nationalism

Their ten-minute film, Submission, includes scenes of presumably Muslim women kneeling in prayer, telling stories of their abuse by Muslim men as verses from the Qur’an are displayed through lighting on their veiled but otherwise naked bodies. The Muslim community was incensed, and on 2 November 2004, the 26-year-old Mohammed Bouyeri, attacked van Gogh as the filmmaker was riding through the streets of Amsterdam on his bicycle. Bouyeri shot the filmmaker eight times with a pistol, instantly killing him. The angry youth then mutilated his body with knives, leaving two of them stabbed into his chest, one with a five-page note attached. The note condemned both the filmmaker and secular governments for allowing the Islamic faith to be publicly disrespected. The assassin was quickly apprehended and sentenced to life imprisonment. The incident prompted a lively public discussion about the immigrant Muslim communities in the Netherlands. Some thought that it showed how insufficiently they had been welcomed into the common life of the Dutch community, and called for a stricter application of laws against blasphemy. The loudest voices, however, expressed the opposite opinion: that there were too many immigrants in the country and that they needed to be carefully controlled. Some advocated the monitoring of sermons given in mosques, others proposed a ­moratorium on new immigration. The traditional Scandinavian reputation for tolerance was also tested in Denmark in the Muslim uproar against the publication of a group of cartoons in 2005 that were interpreted as mocking the Islamic faith. As in the Netherlands, the tensions between the immigrant Muslim communities in the country were already strained prior to this incident. In Denmark no permit has been authorised for a Muslim graveyard, and no building permit has been given to construct a new mosque (though some fifty mosques are functioning in the country in converted buildings). Muslim immigrants complain that they have difficulty gaining access to jobs and women wearing headscarves have been denied entry to supermarkets and public busses. The conservative Danish People’s Party proposed a ban on wearing the headscarf in schools and other public places. As in France, the ban would legally outlaw any ‘culturally specific’ headgear, but the Danish law would exempt Christians and Jews. The party claimed that the Muslim dress has a ‘disturbing’ impact on ‘ordinary people’, and inhibited the pace of assimilation. In 2004 a public debate was launched over whether the threats of reprisals from the Muslim community had intimidated newspapers and magazines 89

Religion and Politics

in terms of publishing anything that might be provocative to Muslims, and thereby had de facto placed limits on free speech. It was in this context of this discussion that a series of cartoons was published in the Copenhagen newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005. One of the cartoons portrayed the prophet Mohammad with his turban in the shape of a bomb, the fuse lit and sputtering. Most of the men were shown with large noses, and wearing beards and turbans. Leaders of the Muslim community in Denmark – responding more to their sense of having been marginalised in Danish society rather than to the issue of banning free speech – began to protest against what they regarded as a blatant slap at them and their faith. In reporting on the Danish controversy the cartoons were eventually reprinted in fifty countries, thereby vastly enlarging the potential for response. Around the world Muslim communities responded with outrage to the cartoons. They were widely interpreted as attempts not only to insult the Islamic faith, but also to defame and humiliate Muslim people. In February 2006, scores of protests erupted in such disparate locations as Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Libya, and Afghanistan. Danish embassies were set on fire in Syria and Lebanon. Over 130 people were killed in the uprisings. A boycott of Danish goods in Muslim countries reduced exports to those countries by 15 per cent, costing over 130 euro in sales. The prime minister of Denmark proclaimed it the worst ­international crisis involving his country since World War II. Other Scandinavian countries experienced their own tensions with immigrant communities. In 2006 an anti-immigration party gained electoral strength in Sweden, and in the preceding year a mosque in the Swedish city of Malmö was firebombed by an anonymous arsonist. Though the local newspapers blamed factions within the Muslim community for having attacked the mosque, the mullah who practised in the mosque told me in 2005 that he was convinced that his mosque had been torched by Swedes who disliked the immigrant community and wanted to drive them out of the country. The Malmö mosque was frequented by immigrants from Albania as well as North Africa and the Middle East; the mullah with whom I spoke was Palestinian. The widely reported terrorist attacks on Madrid’s trains in 2004 and the London Underground attacks in 2005 are usually attributed to the far-flung jihadi network often associated with Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda organisation. These incidents should be considered, not only as extensions of al Qaeda-variety extremism, but also as products of Muslim immigrant unrest and the sense of marginalisation among 90

Europe in the Global Rise of Religious Nationalism

Islamic communities in Europe, since the perpetrators of these attacks were solely outsiders, but in many cases Muslim residents of Spain and the United Kingdom, the countries in which the attacks were held. The Madrid attack occurred on 11 March 2004, as four commuter trains were heading towards the city’s Atocha station. Unknown to the passengers on the morning rush-hour trains, thirteen improvised explosive devices were also on board. Ten of them exploded, killing almost 200 commuters. After an intensive investigation, twenty-nine suspects were charged with conspiracy in the attacks. Most of them were originally from Morocco, but lived in Spain. Since the explosions were ignited three days before general elections in which one of the most contested issues was the Spanish military support for the American-led coalition forces in Iraq, the attack was widely interpreted as an attempt to force Spain to withdraw its troops from the country. In the 2007 trial of the suspects, however, statements indicated that resentment over treatment of Muslims in Spain and a lingering sense of the loss of Moorish Spain from the Muslim world were also part of their motivations. The attacks on the London Underground system were also home grown, conducted by British citizens of Pakistani origin. During the morning rush hour on 7 July 2005, four coordinated bomb blasts were ignited by suicide bombers carrying explosives in backpacks. Three of them were detonated on Underground trains within fifty seconds of each other, the other an hour later on a bus near Tavistock Square. Over fifty commuters were killed along with the four suicide bombers. The four young men were all raised in Britain but had visited religious schools in Pakistan, and according to a videotape released by al Qaeda lieutenant Ayman al Zawahiri, they had also attended al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Two of the bombers made statements videotaped secretly before the attack in which they give an explanation of what lay behind their mission. According to Mohammad Sidique Khan in an interview on the Al Jazeera television network on 1 September 2005, the British government was involved in anti-Muslim activities. It and other ‘democratically elected governments’ were responsible for ‘atrocities against my people all over the world.’ This made the British civilian population ‘directly responsible’, adding that he in turn was ‘directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters.’ Khan concluded by saying that ‘we are at war and I am a soldier’, assuring the British public that ‘now you too will taste the reality of this situation.’ Another statement released the next year on Al Jazeera showed a 91

Religion and Politics

second suicide bomber, Shehzad Tanweer, again speaking directly the British public. ‘Tell all you British citizens,’ Tanweer said, ‘to stop your support to your lying British government and to the so-called war on terror.’ He concluded with this warning to the British populace: ‘You will never experience peace until our children in Palestine, our mothers and sisters in Kashmir, and our brothers in Afghanistan and Iraq feel peace.’ In August 2006, British officials arrested dozens of Muslim activists involved in an elaborate plot to bring down a series of British and American planes. British and US investigators said that the plot was on the scale of the attacks of 11 September 2001. The planners had intended to use common electronic devices such as cell phones and iPods to detonate liquid explosives that would have brought down as many as ten planes. As in the Underground attack in London in the previous year, all of those involved directly in the plot were British citizens of Pakistani origin. From the statements of the alleged perpetrators of the attacks it was clear that their experience of being part of a marginalised immigrant community contributed to their sense of outrage and anger. Though the stated intentions of the attackers were to punish Britain for its complicity in the war in Iraq and other international campaigns they regarded as anti-Muslim, they also made a point of speaking directly to the British people for their role in supporting their government. In that sense they were implicating the non-Muslim community in Britain as complicit in the humiliation and alienation of Muslims, such as themselves. Thus they were indirectly blaming British society for their own sense of marginalisation. This is an interesting phenomenon – ethnic anger contributing to a sense of international outrage – and it is not unique to the contemporary experience of Muslim communities in Europe and the United Kingdom. It shows, moreover, that religion has played a role in the ethnic tensions of new immigrant communities on both sides of the conflict – the assertion of privilege from the dominant culture and the protest from the minority groups. In recent decades, new migrations of Muslims have placed Europe on the front lines of ethnically based religious conflict.

Europe in the global pattern of religious rebellion In a postmodern and post-Marxist world, it seems that religion has become an ideology of protest, an articulation of what is virtually a 92

Europe in the Global Rise of Religious Nationalism

global rebellion (Juergensmeyer 2008). In Europe, Christianity has been identified with anti-immigrant hostility, and Islam with the anger of immigrant resentment. Each case of religious activism around the world is distinctive, however; each group has responded to its own set of local social, economic and political factors. But in all cases there has been a common ideological component: the perception that the modern idea of secular nationalism is insufficient in moral, political and social terms. Often the effects of globalisation have been in the background as global economic and communications systems undercut the distinctiveness of nation-state identities. In some cases the hatred of the global system is overt, as in the American Christian militia’s hatred of the ‘new world order’ and the al Qaeda network’s targeting of the World Trade Center. In each case, though, religion has been the ideology of protest. Particular religious images and themes have been marshalled to resist the global secular systems and their secular nation-state supporters. There have been other similarities among these cases. Those who embraced radical anti-state religious ideologies felt personally upset with what they regarded as the oppression of the secular state. They experienced this oppression as an assault on their pride and identity, and felt humiliated as a result. The failures of the state, though economic, political and cultural, were often experienced in personal ways as humiliation and alienation, as a loss of selfhood. It is understandable, then, that those men (and they were usually men) who experienced this loss of pride and identity would lash out in violence – the way that men often do when frustrated. Such expressions of power are meant to at least symbolically regain their sense of manhood. In each case, however, the activists channeled these feelings of violence through images of collective violence borrowed from their religious traditions: the idea of cosmic war. The idea of cosmic war was a remarkably consistent feature of all of these cases Those people whom we might think of as terrorists regarded themselves as soldiers in a what they imagined to be sacred battles. I call such notions of warfare ‘cosmic’ because they are larger than life (Juergensmeyer 2003; Aslan 2013). They evoke great battles of the legendary past, and they relate to metaphysical conflicts between good and evil. Notions of cosmic war are intimately personal but can also be translated to the social plane. Ultimately, though, they transcend human experience. What makes religious violence particularly savage and relentless is that its perpetrators have placed religious images of 93

Religion and Politics

divine struggle – cosmic war – in the service of worldly political battles. For this reason, acts of religious terror serve, not only as tactics in a political strategy, but also as evocations of a much larger spiritual confrontation. This brings us to the question of whether, in these instances of religion-related violence, it is religion that is the problem. In looking at the variety of cases, including the hatred of European Christians and the anger of Muslim immigrant communities, it has been clear that in most cases there were real grievances at issue – economic and social tensions that were experienced by large numbers of people. These grievances were not religious. They were not aimed at religious differences or issues of doctrine and belief. They were issues of social identity and meaningful participation in public life that in other c­ontexts were expressed through Marxist and secular nationalist ideologies. Curiously in this present moment of late modernity, these secular ideological expressions of rebellion have been replaced by ideological formulations that are religious. Yet the grievances – the sense of alienation, marginalisation and social frustration – are often much the same. So religion is not the problem. Yet the fact that religion is the medium through which these issues are expressed is problematic. It is problematic in that religion brings new aspects to conflicts that were otherwise not a part of them. For one thing, religion personalises the conflict. It provides personal rewards – religious merit, redemption, the promise of heavenly ­luxuries – to those who struggle in conflicts that otherwise have only social ­benefits. It also provides vehicles of social mobilisation that embrace vast numbers of supporters who otherwise would not be mobilised around social or political issues. In many cases, it provides an organisational network of local churches, mosques, temples, and religious associations into which patterns of leadership and support may be tapped. It gives the legitimacy of moral justification for political encounter. Even more important, it provides justification for violence that challenges the state’s monopoly on morally sanctioned killing. Using Max Weber’s dictum that the state’s authority is always rooted in the social approval of the state to enforce its power through the use of bloodshed, in police authority, punishment and armed defense, religion is the only other entity that can give moral sanction for violence and is therefore inherently at least potentially revolutionary. The religious images of cosmic war add further complications to conflicts that have become baptised with religious authority. The notion of 94

Europe in the Global Rise of Religious Nationalism

cosmic war gives an all-encompassing world view to those who embrace it. Supporters of Christian militia movements, for instance, described their ‘aha’ experience when they discovered the world view of the Christian Identity totalising ideology that helped them make sense of the modern world, their increasingly peripheral role in it, and the dramatic actions they can take to set the world right. It gives them roles as religious soldiers who can literally fight back against the forces of evil. The image of cosmic war is a potent force. When the template of spiritual battle is implanted onto a worldly opposition it dramatically changes the perception of the conflict by those engaged in it, and it vastly alters the way that the struggle is waged. It absolutises the conflict into extreme opposing positions and demonises opponents by imagining them to be satanic powers. This absolutism makes compromise difficult to fathom, and holds out the promise of total victory through divine intervention. A sacred war that is waged in a godly span of time need not be won immediately, however. The time line of sacred struggle is vast, perhaps even eternal. So religion can be a problematic aspect of contemporary social conflict even if it is not the problem, in the sense of the root causes of discontent. Much of the violence in contemporary life that is perceived as terrorism around the world is directly related to the absolutism of conflict. The demonisation of enemies allows those who regard themselves as soldiers for God to kill with no moral impunity. Quite the opposite – they feel that their acts will give them spiritual rewards. So when Anders Breivik donned military gear in preparation for his horrible act of terrorism, it was not only an attempt to mask his intentions, but also a symbol of his imagined role as a soldier in a grand cosmic battle. In Europe, as elsewhere in the world at this moment of global transformation, religious ideas and images give expression to the hopes and desperations of those who feel buffeted by the winds of change and respond to it in anger in imagined wars.

References Aslan, Reza (2013), ‘Cosmic war’, in Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts and Michael Jerryson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, New York: Oxford, pp. 260–7. Berwick, Andrew [Anders Breivik] (2011), 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, self-published and posted on the internet. Bowen, John (2006), Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

95

Religion and Politics Elver, Hilal (2012), The Headscarf Controversy: Secularism and Freedom of Religion, New York: Oxford University Press. Juergensmeyer, Mark (2008), Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, Berkeley: University of California Press. Juergensmeyer, Mark (2003), Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violenc, 3rd ed., Berkeley: University of California Press. Lawrence, Bruce (2000), Shattering the Myth: Islam Beyond Violence, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lease, Gary (1983), ‘The origins of National Socialism: Some fruits of nationalism and religion’, in Peter Merkl and Ninian Smart (eds), Religion and Nationalism in the Modern World, New York: New York University Press, pp. 137–52. Macdonald, Andrew [William Pierce] (1978), The Turner Diaries (Hillsboro, WV: National Vanguard Books). Reprinted in 1985 (Arlington VA: National Alliance) and in 1996 (New York: Barricade Books). Weber, Max (1946), ‘Politics as a vocation’, in Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press.

96

6 The European Union’s Civil Religion in the Making? Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski

T

Introduction

here has been a long debate over the role of religion in the public sphere (for instance Bellah 1967; Coleman 1970; Casanova 1994; Norris and Inglehart 2004; Habermas 2006) as well as over the secularisation and (de)privatisation of religion in Western societies (for instance, Taylor 2007; Calhoun et al. 2011; Putnam and Campbell 2012). In this and other debates, the relationship between religion and politics has been often conceptualised as a dichotomous one, whereby these two spheres (the sacral and the political) are viewed as easily distinguished and analysed as separate sectors of a modern society, whereby only their configurations are subject to change. Against this background, scholars explore for instance the impact of organised religion on nation-building and national identity (Jakelic 2010) or develop normative ideas about religious incorporation into the political life of ­democratic societies (Bader 2011). In contrast, this chapter argues in tune with S. N. Eisenstadt’s perspective (2005: 161) that religion should not be equated with the sacral, since many central dimensions of modern states are deeply rooted in the religious components of modern civilisation, even though in a modified form and frequently with a different appeal to legitimacy and ethos. In this sense, basic social functions of religion (such as strengthening of collective bonds, promotion of collective solidarity and social control through participation in collective rituals) are transformed and can function in secular terms, as they are often constitutive of political ideologies and without straightforward religious references. It does not only apply to ideological systems such as nationalism or Marxism-Leninism (the latter being explicitly labelled ‘secular religion’ by Ernest Gellner, 1994) but also to ‘sacred’ elements of secular 97

Religion and Politics

democracies (Rosanvallon 2001). Whereas nationalism can be viewed as particularistic secular religion with exclusive and often chauvinistic features directed against the ‘others’, Marxism-Leninism espoused a strong messianic dimension as well as a teleological and apocalyptic vision of salvation of mankind in a just universal society. In contrast, the secular religion of democratic citizenship can be regarded as based on ‘sacred’ values of human dignity, freedom or equality (Luhmann 2011) or ­citizens’ obligations (Weithman 2004; Eberle 2004). Against this background, I argue that it might be instructive to apply the perspective of civil religion in order to analyse activities of political authorities attempting to bolster a we-feeling, promote allegiance and solidarity, or even to generate sacrificial impulses among its members (Kleger and Mueller 2011). In this sense, civil religion can be conceived of as a type of public policy, a ‘political technology’ or political practice. This reflects the more institutionalised and functional perspective of the religion-polity-nexus. Consequently, civil religion differs from political religions (including the political Islam or political Christianity where religious groups or churches attempt to impact political processes with reference to religious ethos and legitimacy), from religiously inspired, ‘habits of heart’ of citizens (Bellah 1967, 1992) and religious references in public life (for instance in political campaigns, Chapp 2012). For the purpose of this article, civil religion highlights the top-down perspective in which political authorities apply functional mechanisms of religion, but often in a transformed and secularised form. Against this backdrop, the religious community becomes replaced by the political ecclesia (political church or community) and a given polity (or a political leader) often aspires to become a katechon (saviour from evil – see Schmitt 2006). Thus, civil religion depicts a non-sectarian faith stabilised, for instance, with sacred symbols of the polity and foundational myths, and with a goal of generating a cohesive force regarding its citizens (Demerath and Williams 1985). In this sense, civil religion is not necessarily about explicit religious references in the public sphere or citizens’ religiosity as such, but transformed and secularised political practices. Consequently, one can argue that all polities have some ecclesiastic features, even those highlighting secularism as their primary ideology (for instance, France and the Soviet Union). Many political theorists and scholars of nationalism argue that nation-states have perfectly transformed and appropriated numerous aspects of organised religions. Whereas Carl Schmitt (1996) points out that central modern political concepts are secularised theological concepts (including the 98

The European Union’s Civil Religion in the Making?

very notion of the sovereign), Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle (1999) highlight the power of nationalism to make individuals sacrifice their lives in the name of an ‘imagined community’, which is quite similar to the workings of many organised religions. These and other aspects of nationalism as a functional equivalent for religion are quite well researched (see, for instance, Brubaker 2012). Against this backdrop, this chapter focuses on the European Union as a particularly interesting case of a supranational polity. The EU has often been described as a post-modern or post-national polity, but it increasingly promotes a sort of civil religion of European integration. It has its own founding fathers, ‘saints’ or heroes including Robert Schumann and Jean Monnet as well as an ideology of peace-making integration that links the pacific period in European history after World War II to the effects of European integration. At the same time, the EU has developed a set of symbols, rituals and practices regarding its own history, destiny and the collective ‘good self’ that are similar to the religiopolitical workings of nationalism. They address issues of political ethos, telos and collective legitimacy but are fused with neither state nor church (cf. Morawska 1984). Some scholars of the European Union have even begun using religiopolitical vocabulary in their analyses of the EU. For instance, Ian Manners (2013) introduced the term ‘European Communion’, while Viatcheslav Morozov and Bahar Rumelili (2012) speak of conversion strategies, the EU regarding neighbouring countries as potential members. This, however, does not necessarily imply that the role of religion as such increases in the EU. Even though there has also been a discourse on the religious roots of Europe, it seems currently to be of secondary relevance for the EU’s public policy. There has been a surge of interest in the Christian religion as cultural underpinning of the EU (Casanova 2006; Schlesinger and Foret 2006), but mainly in the context of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights (2001) and the European Constitution (2003). It can be argued that the EU promotes elements of its own civil religion among the citizens in an attempt to promote social cohesion and its legitimacy in times of crisis and stress. The promotion of civil religion serves the legitimacy enhancement of the EU vis-à-vis its citizenry, as the EU has been facing the so-called legitimacy deficit for years. Some authors highlight this instrumental dimension of the EU’s quest for more legitimacy. For instance, Bo Stråth (2002) argues that the idea of enhancing the EU’s legitimacy was discussed by the European Commission at the Copenhagen summit in 1973. The then challenge 99

Religion and Politics

was to find instruments to consolidate the European Community, since the oil-price crisis undermined the very belief in the EC’s political effectiveness. This and other challenges to the EC (for example, German reunification and Eastern enlargement) and the EU have led to the development of functional mechanisms resembling civil religion of the nation-state, which are aimed in a top-down manner at EU citizens. In this context, the EU imitates aspects of civil religion that may also be found in national polities, which in turn brings the EU back to the realm of the modern, rather than the postmodern. This chapter focuses on five aspects related to the EU’s civil religion: collective rituals and symbols; foundational myth-making; self-images of superiority; missionary activities towards non-members; and the sacred elements of European citizenship.

Collective totems, rituals and symbols in the EU The EU has consistently generated and promoted collective totems, rituals and symbols, which are central for many national civil religions (Marvin and Ingle 1999). The totems are tangible manifestations of the EU, including a flag, the anthem, the motto (‘united in diversity’) and the passport (Manners 2011). As François Foret (2009: 315) argues, the blue of the European flag can be viewed as an evocation of ‘the blue of the Western sky’ and ‘stars figuring peoples of Europe form the circle as a sign of union. They are invariably twelve, symbol of perfection and completeness’. The flag seems to be the most recognisable totem of the EU, both for citizens and non-citizens. The expectation of the totems is that they transcend linguistic boundaries, mainly due to their non-oral content. Other totems such as the EU passport and driver’s licence fulfil mainly symbolic functions vis-à-vis EU citizens, as they enhance the perceived tangibility of the EU. As opposed to the flag and the passport, the anthem and the motto of the EU have not achieved any wide resonance and remain unrecognisable for most EU citizens. However, even the European flag has not achieved the religiopolitical status of the US flag, whose stars and stripes are honoured every day with a ­dedication rarely found in other countries (Teachout 2006). Probably the most effective collective symbol of the EU is the common currency (Hymans 2004). The establishment of a tangible symbol of the euro and its iconography certainly raises the salience of the EU and might have significance for the development of the wefeeling in the European Union (Risse et al. 1999: 147–87). The power 100

The European Union’s Civil Religion in the Making?

of the euro lies in its everyday presence and its iconographic diversity, allowing for representation of national motives on euro notes and coins. Thus, the euro is expected to enhance the ‘realness’ of Europe by providing a tangible link between the European level and the daily lives of the citizens (Risse 2003; Cerulo 1995). In addition to a number of totems, the EU supports ritualistic practices. According to Ian Manners (2011), one such ritual relates to the Franco-German reconciliation, which is portrayed as closely connected to the ‘birth’ of the European Community/Union. Regardless of the political differences between Germany and France, the rituals surrounding celebration of the Elysée Treaty include highly visual practices of joint acts of remembrance and handholding at war memorials. Furthermore, the EU has been quite active in ritual remembrance practices, as it has attempted to establish several remembrance days: European Holocaust Memorial Day (marking the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January 1945); the European Day for the Victims of Terrorism (marking the Madrid train bombings of 11 March 2004); and Europe Day (marking Robert Schuman’s declaration on the European Coal and Steel Community on 9 May 1950) (Manners 2011). However, all these ritualistic practices have limited dramatising effects for a wider public and Europe and thus are quite ineffective. They remain ­communicative events, rather than political celebrations (Foret 2010). In contrast, Ian Manners (2011) stresses that the EU has been successful at establishing ‘symbolic taboos’ throughout recent decades, that is, concepts or phrases not only immediately identifiable as central to the European Union discourse, but also rarely questioned in the context of European integration. They include, for instance, the concepts ‘common high authority’, ‘pooling of sovereignty’ and ‘acquis communautaire’. These symbolic taboos have become increasingly sanctified, as they are essential for the rationale of European integration. More recent taboos include the ‘four freedoms’, ‘single currency’, ‘Copenhagen criteria’, ‘environmental imperative’ and ‘unity through diversity’. Even though they are less sanctified, they are essential for the construction of EU political reality. In line with Shore (2006), this list of symbolic taboos could be extended to include concepts such as ‘multilevel polity’, ‘civil tolerance’ and ‘governance without government’. Further cases of cultural symbols can be found in the EU’s cultural policies. This includes symbolic initiatives such as ‘European Cities of Culture’, with the goal of raising the visibility and identifiability of the EU but with respect for national cultures. Thus, the European 101

Religion and Politics

Union promotes commonality symbols via the symbolic diffusion into the everyday life of citizens, but without relinquishing the symbolic ambiguity of these ‘identity techniques’ (Sassatelli 2002: 435–51). As in the case of the euro, this symbolic ambiguity is a response to European cultural diversity, which in turn reflects the EU’s motto ‘united in diversity’ (Sassatelli 2002: 446). This certainly differentiates this type of practice from a common nationalism that has much stronger ­homogenising appeal. Nevertheless, I should point to a tension between the generation of totems, rituals and symbols by EU elites and EU legitimacy. On the one hand, these practices (resembling civil religion of the nation-states) aim at enhancing EU legitimacy by producing or strengthening the wefeeling of Europeans. On the other hand, the EU attempts to establish an order-creating cultural system that is not derived from popular sovereignty. This is related to the no-demos problem of the EU, since the EU is not a democratic polity and there is no European demos in sight. It poses a certain problem for the legitimacy of practices of civil religion, as they might be difficult to discern from production indoctrination or collective brainwashing contradicting the democratic aspirations of the EU. A collectivistic stimulation of citizens’ identity via production and manipulation of totems, rituals and symbols might even exhibit a predilection for authoritarian politics, since it enhances the inequality between the rulers and the ruled, and thus increases the democratic deficit of the EU (cf. Kaina 2006).

Foundational myth-making in the EU In addition to the practices related to totems, rituals and symbols, the EU has been developing its own foundational mythology for some time. Constitutive myths or ‘mythomoteurs’ have been explored mainly in nationalism research (Smith 1987: 24), where one of the most relevant aspects of nationalism is a generation or strengthening of national identity via foundational myth-making. Such foundational myth-making in the EU concentrates on narratives creating normative and cognitive foundations for the EU and thus can be regarded as part of civil religion. In the context of the EU, the main ‘mythomoteur’ is the narrative of how the integration process has been responsible for peace, prosperity and democracy in Europe. According to Vincent Della Sala (2010), this narrative went through all stages of successful national mythologising: diffusion, ritual and sacralisation. This foundational 102

The European Union’s Civil Religion in the Making?

myth has become deeply entrenched in the political discourse of European integration, and is mainly activated before important decisions with the involvement of the citizens such as in national referenda on EU issues (for instance in France, the Netherlands and Ireland) or the EU’s struggle to establish new institutions dealing with the recent debt crisis (Della Sala 2010: 11). However, the foundational myth of the European Union as a vehicle for peace, stability and economic growth has been losing its appeal in recent years, in particular concerning younger generations of Europeans. As a consequence, the EU has been at pains to establish new ‘mythomoteurs’ which would, for instance, motivate the participants of referenda to accept major European projects such as the Constitutional Treaty. One such myth relates to fundamental rights as inherent to the European project and based on a common European heritage, even though fundamental rights were not part of the initial project of European integration. However, the narrative of the EU as a guardian of fundamental rights from its very inception results from the EU’s appropriation of the fundamental rights credentials of its Member States and the Council of Europe (Simismans 2010: 62). Although fundamental rights were not in the Rome Treaty, the EU has gradually generated this fundamental rights myth, which is believed and acted upon by both institutional myth-makers and civil-society actors. It came to the fore during debates on the Charter of Fundamental Rights and is about to reach the sacralisation phase. Foundational myths are different from other political myths, which have much more in common with self-images of superiority. Foundational myths construct a ‘glorious past’ (or in same cases a past based on suffering – leading to a messianic self-image) and appeal to new generations that cannot remember the origins of the polity. In other words, foundational myths attempt to forge collective identity among citizens through creating a feeling of continuity between older and newer generations. In the case of the EU, the question of generational continuity came to the fore in the 1990s, when a new generation of political decision-makers and citizens without any World War II experience began to influence decisions on a European level. One might even argue that the appeals to foundational myths aim at a temporary re-establishing of a permissive consensus in the EU in times when it is needed, for instance before referenda. The so-called permissive consensus (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970) allowed the national and European elites to push forward with European unification without much resistance from the citizens, until the beginning of 103

Religion and Politics

the 1990s. However, as the European Community/Union has enlarged and the integration process has reached a deeper level, progress in European unification became increasingly susceptible to mood swings in public opinion that stopped or delayed some of the EU projects of the last twenty years, notably the European constitution.

Images of superiority in the EU In addition to the generation of foundational myths, the European Union engages in the promotion of positive self-images or even images of superiority. This points to an aspect of the EU’s civil religion which is based on universalist interpretation of the community values of the EU and its ethical supremacy vis-à-vis countries outside the EU. Three main types of self-image promoted by the EU can be discerned: the image of cosmopolitan Europe; civilian power; and normative power. All these self-images espouse an element of superiority highlighting the EU’s civilisational progress and thus supremacy in relation to other polities. The first type of positive self-image refers to the EU as an embodiment of cosmopolitan Europe. This self-image depicts the European Union as based on a set of abstract universalistic principles such as human rights that thicken into a sort of European constitutional patriotism (Habermas 2001; Stevenson 2006). The self-image is cosmopolitan, as the EU represents a ‘post-national constellation’, in which European citizens are likely to develop a sense of loyalty and solidarity ‘among strangers’ by abstracting from their particular national identities. This cosmopolitan Europe is anchored in a shared culture of universal and liberal values (Shabani 2006: 699–718; Lacroix 2002: 944–58; Cronin 2003: 1–28) and relates to the transformed concept of power politics, according to which the EU exports the rule of law, democracy and human rights worldwide. In this view, the EU subordinates its external policies to the constraints of a higher-ranking universal law (Eriksen 2006: 252­–69). Thus, the EU is superior to other polities in international politics, as it acts out of a sense of justice or duty pertaining mainly to human rights, rather than material interest. The EU penalises infringements of human rights and increasingly fulfils the role of the forerunner of the new more civilised international order. At the same time, the EU challenges the normative claims of other polities, for instance those of the USA. The list of the European criteria of superiority has been compiled famously by Jürgen Habermas, 104

The European Union’s Civil Religion in the Making?

including secularisation, the priority of the state over the market, the primacy of social solidarity over achievement, scepticism concerning technology, awareness of the paradoxes of progress, rejection of the law of the stronger, and the commitment to peace as a consequence of the historical experience of loss (Habermas 2003: 291–7). A further positive self-image of the EU pertains to the notion of the EU as a civilian power. The notion of civilian power refers to the methods of international politics rather than the substance (Orbie 2006: 123–8). The EU is believed to use methods of normative change rather than force. According to this image, the civilian power Europe acts principally in accordance with ideas and values, and not military or economic strength. As a result, the EU’s actions are believed to be more civilising, which reinforces the vision of the EU as post-national superior polity or a post-Westphalian more advanced political system (Sjursen 2006: 169–81). One of the main tenets of civilian power in Europe is multiculturalism, which is a form of self-binding by law. As the EU’s objective is believed to promote the advancement of a rulebased international order, the EU fosters the power of international institutions and regional organisations, which allows for an extensive coordination and cooperation of actors in international politics (Youngs 2004: 415–35). At the same time, the EU reverts to deliberative and institutionalised cooperation mechanisms of conflict resolution, rather than the military power preferred by many other international actors including the US, China and Russia (Mitzen 2006: 270–85). The third self-image of European identity is the EU as a normative power, which is directly linked to the cosmopolitan and civilian image. In this case, the EU stresses its progressive stance, for instance in rejecting the death sentence or in promoting and implementing environmental policies. By so doing the EU not only shows its moral superiority, but also asserts its leading role and depicts, for instance, the US as a laggard. Thus the EU promotes its positive image as the forerunner in the fight against climate change and refers to environmental diplomacy and bio-safety regulations as a reflection of distinctive societal values of European societies. Therefore, the ‘green’ normative power defines itself through being different to other less environment-friendly countries, such as the US (Falkner 2007: 507–26; also Lenschow and Sprungk 2010). However, cracks are becoming increasingly visible in the positive self-images generated by the EU which may have consequences for the EU’s civil religion. For instance, this image of green normative 105

Religion and Politics

power is empirically inconsistent. Robert Falkner (2007: 521) argues that the EU’s distinctive stance in environmental politics is not simply the product of a deep-rooted normative orientation but frequently the result of domestic conflicts over biotechnology. Also, the positive view of the EU as a foreign-policy actor guided by the common good does not accurately depict the foreign behaviour of the EU (Pacheco Pardo 2011). This is well documented in the case of the EU arms trade policy, as countries with poor human rights records are still frequent recipients of European weapons and military technology (Erickson 2011). A particularly instructive case is the China weapons embargo debate, where pressures on the lifting of the embargo have risen considerably, since China has become a willing supporter in the European sovereign debt crises under the condition of ending the embargo (Erickson 2011: 12). The ongoing conflicts between the leading EU member states (namely France and Germany) show the difficulty of upholding a consistently normative position within the EU. These findings are particularly striking when compared with the EU’s official discourse on European security where the cosmopolitan, civilian and normative images are not only pervasive, but also closely connected to the EU’s role claims in international relations (cf. Ferreira Nunes 2011).

The missionary drive of the EU The positive self-images of the EU are closely connected to the promotion of the EU beyond its own borders, which also can be regarded as part of the EU’s developing civil religion. In particular, the EU promotes its norms and rules within the so-called European Neighbourhood Policy that focuses on the support for human rights, good governance standards and modernisation projects in third countries. However, the EU’s external actions and programmes can be interpreted as the EU’s attempt to legitimise its own policies by shaping rules, norms and institutions in third countries in accordance with EU standards, embodied by the acquis communautaire. In this sense, the EU regards some non-EU countries as potential members and attempts to include them by using proselytisation and conversion strategies (cf. Morozov and Rumelili 2012). The inclusion can occur via a regular membership, associated status or cooperation agreements. However, the missionary strategies act also as a reassurance of the EU’s own insecure identity. As new members or quasi-members convert, it can be used as a strategy of increasing legitimacy of the EU elites. This part of the EU’s civil 106

The European Union’s Civil Religion in the Making?

religion promotes externally its ‘institutional identity’ consisting of its own procedures, regulations and institutions, which become transplanted into third countries. The missionary drive of the EU shapes ‘conceptions of the normal’ in other countries (Manners 2002) as well as conceptions of the EU as a superior polity. While ‘conceptions of the normal’ legitimise the implementation of the EU’s own institutional rules, norms and standards (as the appropriate ones) in neighbouring countries, the ‘conceptions of the superior’ promote the EU self-images of normative superiority. As a consequence, European institutions, procedures, norms and values become new rules of conduct for nonmember states: their internal institutions as well as policies are judged by the EU’s norms. However, the missionary drive of the EU poses a certain dilemma. The EU needs a demand from ‘third countries’ to join it or at least be associated. The positive feedback from this demand works mainly if the EU offers a membership perspective. In other cases (Turkey, Ukraine or Moldova), the EU expects the countries to adopt the acquis communautaire but rejects (directly or indirectly) their membership. Regardless of whether these countries are capable of joining the EU or even whether the EU is able to integrate them, the lacking membership perspective undermines the EU missionary drive. In other words, the EU shows a missionary zeal on the one hand, and refuses to grant complete conversion on the other.

The sacred elements of European citizenship As mentioned before, civil religions can also be based on ‘sacred’ elements of democracies including democratic citizenship. For instance, Pierre Rosanvallon (1992) speaks of sacred aspects of citizenship in his analysis of the history of voting rights in France. The sacred elements of democracy pertain often to certain types of norm which are more central than others for the social and political order of democratic polities. In the context of EU scholarship, the ‘Union citizenship’ is sometimes viewed as a fundamental institution pertaining to the rule of law, fundamental freedoms and human rights, and democracy (Wiener 2006, 2007: 1–7). The integrating function of Union citizenship is expected to be particularly relevant, as the EU is not only a complex organisation, but also one that encompasses highly diverse European societies. In this context, Andreas Føllesdal (2001: 315) regards European citizenship as a central measure for increasing reciprocity and trust among 107

Religion and Politics

the citizens of Europe, as it is a special institution likely to habituate individuals into citizens by redirecting their interests and perceptions towards the polity. In this sense, we could view Union citizenship as a dimension of the EU’s civil religion. However, there is a growing scepticism regarding the workings of Union citizenship in the EU (cf. Besson and Utzinger 2008; Koopmans 2012; Schmidtke 2012). The empirical research on the relevance of European citizenship points to a rather bleak picture. As Union citizenship is mainly about transnational mobility rights and new political rights, the question posed is how far citizenship leads to identification with the EU. For instance, Adrian Favell (2008) has explored the private lives of sixty ‘pioneers of European integration’ – educated and highly skilled ‘free movers’ living in Amsterdam, Brussels and London who decided to leave their society of origin in order to live in one of the Eurocities. Favell’s work not only points to the citizens’ enduring national attachment, but also shows the resilience of the national society with its exclusionary social mechanisms and institutional prejudices. The political rights guaranteed by the Maastricht Treaty do not seem do play a relevant role in the lives of mobile European citizens, as they rarely vote in their cities of residence. If they are interested in politics at all, they tend to be so concerning merely the politics of their home country. Instead, they predominantly exercise European citizenship by reaping the benefits of mobility in Europe as employees, consumers, neighbours and public-service users. Furthermore, some authors even point to an anti-civil potential of European citizenship, in particular whenever it is directed at migrants of third countries as a way of establishing outside boundaries. Rogers Brubaker argues that even democratic citizenship is a device of social closure and exclusion, as it necessarily discriminates between citizens and non-citizens and excludes the non-citizens from the polity (Brubaker 1994, 1999). This boundary-making mechanism of modern citizenship appears to be necessary, as citizenship integrates individuals within a community and excludes those outside of it. However, c­itizenship might become dominated by exclusion. In the case of the EU it becomes increasingly visible in the field of immigration policies, where images and scenarios of threat from ‘bogus asylum seekers’ are increasingly presented by EU agencies as a danger to the social integration and cohesion of the European societies (Karolewski 2012). Biometric technologies, detention facilities and new methods of surveillance are employed to establish exclusionary 108

The European Union’s Civil Religion in the Making?

and restrictive immigration policies by the EU. Instead of generating trust and reciprocity, these exclusionary practices tend to uphold or even strengthen collective feelings of insecurity, and thus are likely to promote a ‘culture of fear’ that makes citizens overreact to risks, rather than resolve problems of security. Against this backdrop, European citizenship is not only associated with transnational rights and mobility, but also becomes linked to ‘politics of insecurity’ (Huysmans 2005) and the demarcation between the citizen and the suspect, which can entail anti-civil effects. If these trends were to become the dominating aspects of European citizenship, it would certainly exacerbate the existing democratic deficit of the EU through the expansion of executive powers, escape from democratic accountability and overall secrecy surrounding security issues. The sacred aspects of Union citizenship might even plunge the EU even deeper into the democratic dilemma.

Conclusions In several respects, the EU represents both a novel system of quasisupranational governance and a novel form of polity. Still, it is a fragile construction that remains a ‘community in the making’ with an ambiguous sense of identity. The elements of civil religion of the EU discussed have the aim of cementing the EU’s fragile and ambiguous identity, but their effectiveness remains questionable. Firstly, the EU is still far from having a coherent civil religion. Even though certain aspects of civil religion (including symbolic, ritual and myth-orientated practices) are recognisable in the EU, they seem to be rather weak or unstable. The current financial and debt crisis shows how frail the European construction is and how easily it can provoke nationalist reactions of different kinds (including an exit from the EU by the UK, the removal of Greece from the EU, and the reintroduction of the national currency in Germany). In particular, the expected integrative function of the common currency has proven to be exaggerated, as the euro has become the target of attacks by a growing number of political groups in the EU. Moreover, the foundational myth-making remains unstable, whereas the self-images of superiority are beginning to look less consistent. Secondly, the EU does have some special resources at its disposal. One is the powerful instrument of EU enlargement as well as traumas of the European past. Both resources are absent in Canada (Kim 1993) to which is often attested a lack of pan-Canadian civil religion. In this 109

Religion and Politics

sense, Canada can be viewed as the opposite of the USA concerning civil religion, as Canadian regionalism and cultural difference produced regionalisation of civil religion, rather than its integration. The European Union falls somewhere between the strong civil religion of the US and absent civil religion of Canada. Thirdly, even though the EU mimics some techniques of nationalist civil religion, it fosters its civil religion in a subtler manner than nation-states. The EU promotes its civil religion as a non-nation-state polity, as it is often referred to as post-Westphalian, postmodern, postnational and multi-level polity. Hence the EU promotes a ‘quasi civil religion’, as it has considerably fewer institutional resources at its disposal than nation-states that are able to revert to traditional forms of nationalism. For instance, the EU lacks an integrated and sufficiently homogenising education system as well as integrated public space that would allow for an efficient transmission of the civil religion from the elites to the citizens. In addition, the EU has to compete with the civil religions of the nation-states and is careful not to provoke conflicts between the European and the national civil religion. In other words, it has to practise self-restraint regarding its civil religion, as aggressive promotion of European civil religion might provoke nationalist reactions. Fourthly, the main challenge for the EU’s civil religion remains a profound indifference on the part of ordinary citizens in EU societies, their political disaffection and ambivalence towards the EU. While civil religion is primarily aimed at citizens, the more critical literature on the EU (White 2010a, 2010b) shows how little Europeanisation takes place in the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. In this context, a civil religion of the EU is doomed to remain a matter of the elites or, to put it more provocatively, a religion without believers.

References Anderson, Benedict (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York: Verso. Bader, Veit (2011), ‘Religions, toleration, and liberal democracy: A theory of doctrinal, institutional, and attitudinal learning’, in M. Mookherjee (ed.), Democracy, Religious Pluralism and the Liberal Dilemma of Accommodation (Springer), pp. 17–46. Bellah, Robert N. (1967), ‘Civil religion in America’, Dædalus, 96 (1), pp 1–21. Bellah, Robert N. (1992), Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

110

The European Union’s Civil Religion in the Making? Besson, Samantha and Utzinger, André (2008), ‘Towards European citizenship’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 39 (2), pp. 185–208. Brubaker, Rogers (1994), Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brubaker, Rogers (1999), ‘The Manichean myth: Rethinking the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism’, in Hanspeter Kriesi et al. (eds), Nation and National Identity: The European Experience in Perspective, Zürich: Rüegger, pp. 55–71. Brubaker, Rogers (2012), ‘Religion and nationalism: Four approaches’, Nations and Nationalism, 18 (1), pp. 2–20. Calhoun, Craig, Juergensmeyer, Mark and VanAntwerpen, Jonathan (eds) (2011), Rethinking Secularism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Casanova, José (1994), Public Religions in the Modern World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Casanova, José (2006), ‘Religion, European secular identities, and European integration’, in Timothy A. Byrnes and Peter J. Katzenstein (eds), Religion in an Expanding Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 65–92. Cerulo, Karen A. (1995), Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Chapp, Christopher B. (2012), Religious Rhetoric and American Politics: The Endurance of Civil Religion in Electoral Campaigns, Boulder: Cornell University Press. Coleman, John A. (1970), ‘Civil religion’, Sociology of Religion, 31 (2), pp. 67–77. Cronin, Ciaran (2003), ‘Democracy and collective identity: In defence of constitutional patriotism’, European Journal of Philosophy, 11 (1), pp. 1–28. Della Sala, Vincent (2010), ‘Political myth, mythology and the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 48 (1), pp. 1–19. Demerath, N. J. III and Williams Rhys, H. (1985), ‘Civil religion in an uncivil society’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 480, pp. 154–66. Eberle, Christopher J. (2004), Religious conviction in liberal politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (2005) ‘The religious origins of modern radical movements’, in Bernhard Giesen and Daniel Suber (eds), Religion and Politics: Cultural Perspectives, Leiden: Brill, pp. 161–92. Erickson, Jennifer L. (2011), ‘Market imperative meets normative power: Human rights and European arms transfer policy’, European Journal of International Relations, 1–26, online, 27 October 27. Falkner, Robert (2007), ‘The political economy of normative power Europe: EU environmental leadership in international biotechnology regulation’, Journal of European Public Policy, 14 (4), pp. 507–26. Favell, Adrian (2008), Eurostars and Eurocities: Free Movement and Mobility in an Integrating Europe, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ferreira Nunes, Isabel (2011), ‘Civilian, normative, and ethical power Europe: Role claims and EU discourses’, European Foreign Affairs Review, 16, pp. 1–20. Føllesdal, Andreas (2001), ‘Union citizenship: Unpacking the beast of burden’, Law and Philosophy, 20 (3), pp. 313–43. Foret, François (2009), Symbolic dimensions of EU legitimization’, Media, Culture and Society, 31 (2), pp. 313–24. Foret, François (2010), ‘European political rituals: A challenging tradition in the making’, International Political Anthropology, 3 (1), pp. 55–77.

111

Religion and Politics Gellner, Ernest (1994), Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals, London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press. Habermas, Jürgen (2001), The Post-national Constellation, Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, Jürgen (2003), ‘Making sense of the EU: Towards a cosmopolitan Europe’, Journal of Democracy, 14 (4), pp. 86–100. Habermas, Jürgen (2006), ‘Religion in the public sphere’, European Journal of Philosophy, 14 (1), pp. 1–25. Huysmans, Jef (2005), The Politics of Insecurity: Security, Migration and Asylum in the EU, Routledge: London. Hymans, Jacques E. C. (2004), ‘The changing color of money: European currency iconography and collective identity’, European Journal of International Relations, 10 (1), pp. 5–31. Jakelic, Slavica (2010), Collectivistic Religions: Religion, Choice and Identity in Late Modernity, Aldershot: Ashgate. Kaina, Viktoria (2006), ‘European identity, legitimacy, and trust: Conceptual considerations and perspectives on empirical research’, in et al. (eds), European Identity: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Insights, Münster: LIT Verlag, pp. 113­­­­­­­­–46. Karolewski, Ireneusz Paweł (2012), ‘Caesarean citizenship and its anti-civil potential in the European Union’, in Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski and Viktoria Kaina (eds), Civil Resources and the Future of the European Union, London: Routledge. Kim, Andrew E. (1993), ‘The absence of pan-Canadian civil religion: Plurality, duality, and conflict in symbols of Canadian culture’, Sociology of Religion, 54 (3), pp. 257­–75. Kleger, Heinz and Mueller, Alois (eds) (2011), Religion des Bürgers: Zivilreligion in Amerika und Europa, Berlin: LIT, 2nd ed. Koopmans, Ruud (2012), ‘The post-nationalisation of immigration rights: A theory in search of evidence’, British Journal of Sociology, 63 (1), pp. 22­–30. Lacroix, Justine (2002), ‘For a European constitutional patriotism’, Political Studies 50 (5), 944–58. Lenschow, Andrea and Sprungk, Carina (2010), ‘The myth of a green Europe’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 48 (1), pp. 133­–54. Lindberg, Leon N. and Scheingold, Stuart A. (1970), Europe’s Would-Be Polity: Patterns of Change in the European Community, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Luhmann, Niklas (2011), ‘Grundwerte als Zivilreligion: Zur wissenschaftliche Karriere eines Themas’, in Heinz Kleger and Alois Müller (eds), Religion des Bürgers: Zivilreligion in Amerika und Europa, Berlin: LIT, 2nd ed., pp. 175–94. Manners, Ian (2002), ‘Normative Power Europe: a Contradiction in Terms’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 40 (1): pp. 75–95. Manners, Ian (2011), ‘Symbolism in European Integration’, Comparative European Politics, 9, pp. 243–68. Manners, Ian (2013), ‘European communion: Political theory of European Union’, Journal of European Public Policy, 20 (4), pp. 473–94. Marvin, Carolyn and Ingle, David W. (1999), Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitzen, Jennifer (2006), ‘Anchoring Europe’s civilizing identity: Habits, capabilities and ontological security’, Journal of European Public Policy, 13 (2), pp. 270–85. Morawska, Ewa (1984), ‘Civil religion vs. state power in Poland’, Society, 21 (4), pp. 29–34.

112

The European Union’s Civil Religion in the Making? Morozov, Viatcheslav and Rumelili, Bahar (2012), ‘The external constitution of European identity: Russia and Turkey as Europe-makers’, Cooperation and Conflict, 47 (1), pp. 28–48. Norris, Pippa and Ronald, Inglehart (2004), Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oddvar Eriksen, Erik (2006), ‘The EU – a cosmopolitan polity?’, Journal of European Public Policy, 13 (2), pp. 252­–69. Orbie, Jan (2006), ‘Civilian power Europe: Review of the original and current debates’, Cooperation and Conflict, 41 (1), pp. 123–28. Pacheco Pardo, Ramon (2012), ‘Normal power Europe: Non-proliferation and the normalization of EU’s Foreign Policy’, Journal of European Integration, 34 (1), pp. 1–18. Putnam, Robert D. and Campbell, David E. (2012), American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, New York: Simon & Schuster. Risse, Thomas et al. (1999), ‘To Euro or not to Euro? The EMU and identity politics in the European Union’, European Journal of International Relations, 5 (2), pp. 147–87. Risse, Thomas (2002), ‘Nationalism and collective identities: Europe versus the nation-state?’, in Paul Heywood, Erik Jones and Martin Rhodes, Developments in West European Politics 2, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 77–93. Risse, Thomas (2003), ‘The Euro between national and European identity’, Journal of European Public Policy, 10 (4), pp. 487–505. Rossanvallon, Pierre (2001), Le sacré du cityoen: Histoire du suffrage universel, Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Sassatelli, Monica (2002), ‘Imagined Europe: The shaping of a European cultural identity through EU cultural policy’, European Journal of Social Theory, 5 (4), pp. 435–51. Schlesinger, Philip and Foret, François (2006), ‘Political roof and sacred canopy? Religion and the EU Constitution’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9 (1), pp. 59–81. Schmidtke, Oliver (2012), ‘Commodifying migration: Excluding migrants in Europe’s emerging social model’, British Journal of Sociology, 63 (1), pp. 31–8. Schmitt, Carl (1996) [1932], The Concept of the Political, translated and with an introduction by George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, Carl (2006), The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, Candor: Telos Press Publishing. Shabani, Payrow Omid (2006), ‘Constitutional patriotism as a model of postnational political association: The case of the EU’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 32 (6), pp. 699–718. Shore, Cris (2006), ‘Government without statehood? Anthropological perspectives on governance and sovereignty in the European Union’, European Law Journal, 12 (6), pp. 709–24. Simismans, Stijn (2010), ‘The European Union’s fundamental rights myth’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 48 (1), pp. 45–66. Sjursen, Helene (2006), ‘What kind of power?’, Journal of European Public Policy, 13 (2), pp. 169–81. Smith, Anthony D. (1987), The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Stevenson, Nick (2006), ‘European cosmopolitan solidarity: Questions of citizenship,

113

Religion and Politics difference and post-materialism’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9 (4), pp. 485–500. Stråth, Bo (2002), ‘A European identity: To the historical limits of a concept’, European Journal of Social Theory, 5 (4), pp. 387–401. Taylor, Charles (2007), A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Teachout, Woden (2006), Capture the Flag: A Political History of American Patriotism, New York: Basic Books. Weithman, Paul J. (2004), Religion and the Obligations of the Citizenship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Jonathan (2010a), ‘Europe and the common’, Political Studies, 58, pp. 104–22. White, Jonathan (2010b), ‘Europe in the political imagination’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 48 (4), pp. 1015­­­–38. Wiener, Antje (2006), ‘Comment: fact or artefact? Analysing core constitutional norms in beyond-the-state contexts’, Journal of European Public Policy, 13 (8), pp. 1308–13. Wiener, Antje (2007), ‘Contested meanings of norms: A research framework’, Comparative European Politics, 5, pp. 1–7. Youngs, Richard (2004), ‘Normative dynamics and strategic interests in the EU’s external identity’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 42 (2), pp. 415–35.

114

7 Democracy, Secularism and Islam in Turkey Ayhan Kaya

T

his chapter aims at revealing the tension between democracy, secularism and Islam in contemporary Turkey by focusing on the Islamist, Kurdish and Alevi claims vis-a-vis the monolithical state regime, which has so far denied the ethno-cultural and religious plurality of the society. The main premise of this article is that the social and political transformation of contemporary Turkey under the reign of the Justice and Development Party (AKP, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) does not re constitute a democratic form of governance as the AKP has also proved to be bearing the authoritarian and repressive legacy of the Kemalist state tradition despite the fact that it receives its legitimation from the fight it has been performing against the Kemalist rhetoric. This chapter will claim that Turkish democracy is yet far from consolidation as the divide between laicism and Islam has so far been ideologically fabricated and exploited by both the so-called laicist and Islamist groups. Hence it will be argued that the democratic consolidation in Turkey is subject to the easing of this tension between the advocates of laicism and Islamism. This chapter substantially profited from the findings of two separate FP7 (Framework Programme 7) projects, in which I was involved between 2009 and 2012. The first research, entitled Identities and Modernities in Europe (IME), mainly dealt with the ways in which European identities and modernities were constructed in different countries. The second research, entitled Tolerance, Pluralism and Social Cohesion: Responding to the Challenges of the 21st Century in Europe (Accept Pluralism) looked into the efficiency of the regime of tolerance in resolving the tensions resulting from ethno-cultural and religious diversity in various European countries. I was particularly interested in the Turkish case in both studies, doing several in-depth interviews with state actors, civil society actors and private individuals 115

Religion and Politics

and scrutinising the relevant literature, official documents, speeches of the politicians, archival materials, and relevant websites.1 The data collected through the interviews were evaluated on the basis of the interlocutors’ reflections on some common denominators such as tolerance, Europeanisation, religion, secularism and laicism. These interviews were analysed through the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) method (Wodak 2002, 2010). CDA is a method of discourse analysis focusing on the investigation of the relations between discourse and social/ cultural developments in everyday life. It views discursive practices as an important form of social practice contributing to the constitution of the social and cultural world including social identities and relations.

Claims for democratic consolidation in contemporary Turkey There are two alternative ways of comprehending the notion of diversity in the Turkish context: diversity as a phenomenon, and diversity as a discourse. The former refers to the coexistence of different ethno-cultural and religious groups in a historical process, which comes into play either as a primordial phenomenon emerging along with the migration flows through Asia Minor, or as a politically generated phenomenon as in the settlement of various ethnic groups in Central Anatolia by the Imperial (nineteenth century) and the Republican (twentieth century) settlement laws (Kirişçi 2000; Çağaptay 2002; Şeker 2007; Ülker 2007). However, diversity as a phenomenon was not necessarily appreciated by the ruling powers; it was sometimes denied. Nation-building process in Turkey starting from the beginning of the twentieth century has developed in parallel with the attempts to homogenise the nation by denying the diverse character of the Anatolian population. This process is characterised by heterophobia resulting from the fear of losing the remaining parts of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Contemporary Turkish history is the history of homogenisation as in many other examples of nation-building. The best way to explain the sources of such a kind of scepticism among the state elite is to refer to the everlasting Sèvres Syndrome, which is based on a fear deriving from the post-World War I era characterised with a popular belief regarding the risk of the break-up of the Turkish state (Öniş 2004: 12).2 Nevertheless, there were recently strong signs of recognition of ethnic, religious and cultural differences by the Turkish state, especially in the first half of the last decade between 2000 and 2005 during the 116

Democracy, Secularism and Islam in Turkey

heydays of the Turkey­–EU relations. Diversity as a discourse gained a momentum then distinguished by the societal and official attempts to join the European Union. One could trace the signs of a political discursive shift in public space from the former ‘homogenisation discourse’ to ‘diversity discourse’ at the state level. At first glance, this shift seemed to be resulting from various external factors such as the European Union itself. But a comprehensive analysis of the issue may prompt us to reach another conclusion, i.e. the alliance of internal and external factors leading to the revitalisation of the democratic discourse of diversity at the expense of monolithical discourse of Kemalist republicanism. One could observe that the Kemalist ideology encountered various challenges in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup originating from ethno-cultural and religious groups. This was the time when the Kemalist rhetoric of homogenising nationalism, which was based on a retrospective narrative holding the Muslim origin nation together against the syndrome of common enemy of imperialist European powers, was challenged by its major taboos: Islam, Kurds, Alevis, Circassians, globalisation, liberalisation, and Europeanisation. As José Casanova (2006) put it very well, the project of constructing a nationstate from above was bound to fail because it was too laicist for the Islamists, too Sunni for the Alevis, and too Turkish for the Kurds, Circassians and Lazis. A Turkish state in which the collective identities and interests of those groups that constitute the majority of the population are not able to find public representation cannot truly be a representative democracy, though it is established on modern secular republican principles. In what follows, the discursive shift from homogenisation to multicultural diversity will be briefly displayed with the interplay of both internal and external dynamics in the background.

Islamist multiculturalism as a challenge to the Kemalist regime The emergence of the Welfare Party in the 1990s with an Islamic social base and political agenda posed a profound challenge to the statecentric, republican and secular regime in both political and cultural terms. The Welfare Party (WP, Refah Partisi) and the broader social network of the Islamist movement sought to respond to the inequalities of the global and liberal system by transcending the state and mobilising the marginalised and underprivileged social groups within an expanding Islamic civil society (umma) and the framing structure of 117

Religion and Politics

identity politics. The WP tried to generate its electoral support from a broad Islamist social network both by supporting the socio-economic opportunity structures for the social integration of the Islamist forces into the growing liberal economy and the competitive urban life, and by channelling their interests and demands to the national politics through political parties. Like the Islamist movements in the other Middle Eastern countries, Islamist communities, Sufi orders (tarikats) and Islamic welfare associations provided a network for the marginalised classes, in which they were provided with sources of social services including employment, religious and secular education, health services, food, cloth, and coal supplies which the nation-state failed to provide to a large extent thanks to the unmanaged transition to the liberal economy (Navaro-Yashin 2002; Hale and Özbudun 2009: 16–18). It should be noticed that the Islamist political mobilisation appealed both to the winners and losers of the global and liberal economy in the sense that the newly emerging Islamic bourgeoisie in the heartland of Anatolia, which had undergone a continuous integration into the liberal system since the 1980s, distributed to the poor the wealth raised from the publishing houses, private media channels, university preparation courses, Islamic banks and financial institutions and holding companies (Hale and Özbudun 2009: 13). Through its connections with these Islamist communities, the WP attracted the votes of the Islamic bourgeoisie, the upper-middle class and the marginalised lower classes of workers, peasants and unemployed masses. The Welfare Party also stimulated political mobilisation of the conservative and Islamist social forces, which dramatically challenged the republican and secular segments. With regard to the intolerance of the Kemalist regime towards the Islamist forces, the military elite and the coalition government led by the WP in 1997 confronted some crises. The WP posed some challenges to the secular regime with its demands articulating Islamic values and purposes in the political life involving the exercise of the Islamic law, the segregation of sexes in social life, religious education, and the headscarf issue. Analysing the demands of the WP for the incorporation of Islam into formal politics, it should be underlined that what the WP was seeking was the acquisition of state power and the formation of an Islamic social order from above rather than mere toleration for the recognition of freedom of religion and conscience and the protection of religious rights such as the wearing of the headscarf and religious cloths in public places (Hale and Özbudun 2009: 7–9). 118

Democracy, Secularism and Islam in Turkey

Within the legal and institutional framework, the military/bureaucratic state elite made it explicit that the WP’s Islamist demands cannot be tolerated as the military gave a harsh ultimatum to the party in the meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) on 28 February 1997 (28 Şubat) and the party was closed down on 16 January 1998 by a Constitutional Court decision in the following year (Hale and Özbudun 2009: 4). The WP and the Islamist forces constituted a religious and cultural challenge to the republican and secular dominant regime and segments of the society. Their challenge was manifested in the legal and institutional frameworks in that the WP suggested the introduction of a new legal implementation, whereby each legal community would be governed in accordance with its own religious rules. In doing so, it asserted a return to the Medina Covenant of the Prophet Muhammad’s time, the age of happiness (asr-ı saadet), whereby a kind of multiculturalism based on religious differences was experienced (Hale and Özbudun 2009: 7–8; Türkmen 2009: 91). In the social and economic spheres as an everyday practice, the WP also attempted to undermine the secular and Western order and to alter it in such a way that it could also embrace the social forces, which had a religious and Islamic way of living. Therefore, the WP and Islamist forces posed a religious and cultural diversity challenge both in their attempt to stimulate social integration and political participation of the Islamist segments in the republican and secular establishment and to Islamise the society and culture in the legal and institutional framework and everyday practices. However, the state elite and dominant secular segments immediately reacted to this challenge of the WP and showed their intolerance towards the Islamist forces by purging them from the formal political sphere. However, the WP managed to win ground through local governments in big cities as well as in many parts of Anatolia. Their populist and Islamist rhetoric based on the instruments of charity allured the poor and excluded social groups as well as Islamist groups who were not properly accommodated by the ruling governments with statist and Kemalist affiliations.

Alevi revivalism since the 1990s The other challenge to the republican state and the myth of homo­ genous nation rose from the Alevi community. After the adoption of the caliphate institution by the Sublime Port in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Sultan, Yavuz Sultan Selim, imposed the dominance of 119

Religion and Politics

the Sunni Islamic tradition over various religious groups in Anatolia (Erman and Erdemir 2005). As a consequence of these assimilationist and suppressive policies, Alevis were compelled to develop a protective attitude towards their own community and identity by living in small social enclosures in rural areas. In the millet system of the Ottoman Empire, Islam was the main constitutive element (Yıldız 2001). The millet system did not distinguish between the Muslim subjects of the Ottoman with regard to their ethno-cultural differences. All Muslims, regardless of their differences, belonged to the one and the same ‘Muslim nation’ (Yıldız 2001). Thereby, Alevis were also imagined as the integral subjects of the ‘Sunni Muslim nation’. However, this imagination was only possible if the Alevis were to be assimilated into the absolute truth of the leading Islam, which is Sunni Islam. This fault-line between Sunnis and Alevis has always been kept alive since the early days of settlements of the Turks in Anatolia in the eleventh century (Ocak 1999). Throughout the nation-state building process, the state elite also implicitly followed the Ottoman heritage of the millet system, imposing the dominance of the Sunni Islam over the other Muslims. In order to achieve the goal of the Kemalist mode of modernisation, the republican political elite implemented policies for the secularisation of the political and social life (Göle 1997). One of these policies was the abolishment of any kind of place for religious communion and practice other than mosques without taking into consideration the Cemevis, dervish lodges and special places for Alevi communion (Ocak 1999; Erman and Erdemir 2005). For this reason, Alevi communities were deprived of the places where they could be organised into a religious community as an alternative to the Sunni communities. The formation and articulation of the Alevi-Bektashi identity in Turkey has not only been through its affinity with the left. Some outbreaks of communal violence between Sunnis and Alevis in OrtacaMugla (1966), Malatya (1978), Kahramanmaraş (1978), Çorum (1980), Sivas (1993), and Gazi Mahallesi (1995) have radically shaped the formation and articulation of Alevi-Bektashi identity. Besides, the maltreatment of Alevi-Bektashi-origin citizens in the public space through the verbalisation of various stereotypes has also been repeated on many occasions in a way that shaped the Alevi identity. Some of these maltreatments are as follows: a conversation in a popular film of the 1960s, Turist Ömer, where the police asked a person who had a sexual relationship with his sister whether he was a Kızılbaş; a popular showman, 120

Democracy, Secularism and Islam in Turkey

Güner Ümit, blamed the Alevis of committing incest during a live TV show on 11 January 1995;3 another popular showman, Mehmet Ali Erbil, verbalised the same stereotype during a live TV show on 10 December 2010;4 and last but not the least is the gaff made by a popular German TV series Tatort (‘Crime Scene’) reviving a centuries-old incest libel and inflaming both diaspora Alevis and Turkish Alevis (Der Spiegel, 31 December 2007). It was actually these brutal events and stereotypes as well as the birth of organic Alevi intellectuals in the urban space5 which made Alevis more outspoken in the public space through their associations, journals, speeches, and communion houses (Bruinessen 1996; Vorhoff 1998; Kaya 2001; Bozarslan 2003). In order to overcome the marginalising discourses and practices of the dominant classes of the urban life, Alevis who migrated to the big cities attempted to reproduce their communities and to build solidarity networks through hemsehrilik (fellowship) associations and affiliations, and became intensely engaged in identity politics (Erman and Aydemir 2005). Furthermore, in the 1990s, a slight change in the state discourse towards re-alignment with the Alevis against the emerging political Islam and Kurdish nationalists also contributed to the ‘awakening of the Alevis’, who mobilised through social networks, solidarity associations and identity politics. The tolerance of official Turkish institutions regarding the crystalisation of a specific Alevi identity in the 1990s has also been aimed at the Kurdish nationalist movement, contributing to the separation of Alevi-Zaza identity from the rest of the Kirmanci-speaking Kurds (Hirschler 2001: 157). In parallel with the shift in the state discourse, one case showing the rise of tolerance is that Alevi and secular-Sunni intellectuals signed a ‘declaration of being Alevi’, which was published in the daily Cumhuriyet (Yavuz 1999). Similarly, in the 1999 local elections, the Alevis took an initiative to form a ‘democratic peace movement’ led by a businessman, Ali Haydar Veziroglu, and, later, a political party, called Peace Party (Erman and Erdemir 2005). Alevi identity became enormously publicised in the 1990s as a kind of response to the rising political Islam and irtica (reactionary Islam) in Turkey. Some segments of the Alevi elite such as the Cem Foundation circle aligned with the Military elite in their struggle against the radical Islam. This alliance became more visible in the aftermath of 28 February 1997 when the military interfered in Turkish politics to suppress growing Islamism in the country (Dressler 2008: 287). Together with the Sivas and Gazi incidences, which will be scrutinised 121

Religion and Politics

below, aligning with the military as well as the growing influence of religion in everyday life led the urban Alevi elite, particularly the Cem Foundation, to religionise and to Islamise Alevism (Dressler 2008). This was not only the case in Turkey, but also in the Alevi diaspora residing in the European countries, mainly in Germany, where Alevis started to buy old churches to convert them into worship houses (Cemevi) in an alliance with the secular European local administrations as in Berlin (Kaya 1998; Dressler 2008).6 Cem TV and Cem Radio have played an important role in the religionisation and Islamisation of Alevism through their programmess broadcasting live ayn-i cems in a similar fashion to the religious programmes of the Sunni communities.7 One could not deny that Alevism has also lately become commercialised like all the other religions. The growing number of television and radio channels as well as websites illustrates that Alevism is now also subject to a process of commodification. A similar process is also visible in the diaspora, even to a greater extent. Su TV, Düzgün TV and Yol TV are the major TV channels broadcasting for the Alevis both in diaspora and homeland. These channels were installed in Germany by individual entrepreneurs, who have successfully created a self-sustaining Alevi economy. Reaching out to a large number of Alevi populations all around the world, this sector has become very attractive to other mainstream entrepreneurs (Kosnick 2007; Dilli 2009). Sivas and Gazi incidences have a great impact on the ways in which Alevi identity has become publicly expressed. When the Pir Sultan Abdal8 Association organised a cultural festival in Sivas, which is historically divided between Sunnis and Alevis, in July 1993, numerous prominent Alevi-origin artists and authors, including novelist Aziz Nesin (not an Alevi), attended. The festival was picketed by a large group of violent right-wing demonstrators who were clearly keen on killing Aziz Nesin, who had previously provoked the anger of many Sunni Muslims by announcing his intention to publish a translation of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Throwing stones and burning rags through the windows of the hotel, where the participants of the festival were staying, the demonstrators succeeded in setting fire to the hotel. Thirty-seven people were killed in this fire, due to the indifferent attitude of the police forces of the ‘Sunni’ Turkish state. This was a crucial incident, which has led to the radicalisation of the Alevi movement in relation to the sluggishness of the state apparatus (Massicard 2007; Kaya 1998).9 122

Democracy, Secularism and Islam in Turkey

Relations between Alevis and the Turkish state reached even lower depths with clashes between the police and Alevi demonstrators in the Gazi neighbourhood of Istanbul in March 1995. Gazi suburb is a ghetto dominated by Alevi residents. The hostilities started when an unknown gunman in a stolen taxi fired a number of shots against a group of men sitting in a café, killing one Alevi. Police were remarkably slow in taking action, and the rumour soon spread that the local police post might have been involved in the terrorist attacks. The day after, thousands of Alevi people from the Gazi neighbourhood went on to the streets to protest about the murder. The police and the demonstrators clashed, and fifteen Alevi demonstrators were killed by the police (Massicard 2007; Kaya 2001; Bruinessen 1996: 9–10). These incidences have opened a new era in Alevi revivalism both at home and in diaspora in a way that has prompted Alevis to become more vocal in raising their claims about the compulsory courses on religious culture and morality, the recognition of communion houses as worship places, the allocation of resources from the Diyanet, and struggling against stereotypes. Starting in the 1990s, Alevis began to raise their cultural and religious claims revolving around four basic issues: a) elimination of the compulsory courses on religious culture and morality in primary- and secondary-school education, which are believed to be promoting Sunni Islam; b) asking the state to recognise the Alevi communion houses (Cemevi) as equal to the mosques as holy worship places; c) asking the state not to discriminate against the Alevis in allocating the resources to the Directorate of Religious Affairs attached to the primeministry (employing the Imams, hatips and muezzins in Turkey and abroad), which is believed to be only serving the interests of the Sunnis in Turkey; and d) fighting against all kinds of stereotype mostly expressed by the extreme Sunnis. From June 2009 to January 2010, the Justice and Development Party government organised seven Alevi workshops under the auspices of the Ministry of State in order to deepen the dialogue between Sunni intellectuals and the Alevi civil society leaders. At the beginning of the initiative, an Alevi-origin parliamentarian from the AKP as well as a popular novelist, Reha Çamuroğlu, was very instrumental as the key mediator starting the talks between the AKP and Alevis. However, Çamuroğlu was left out in due course as he was perceived as a traitor by most of the Alevis. These workshops were held to hear the claims of Alevis on religious- and cultural-based issues. In every workshop, Alevis raised their complaints and demands that compulsory courses 123

Religion and Politics

on religious culture and morality should be lifted, and that an elective course on the Alevi belief and practices should be introduced.10 In case their proposal for the removal of these compulsory courses was not accepted, they suggested that the content of the courses could be changed in order to give space to the Alevi-Bektashi belief and practices and to remove the stereotypes about the Alevi-Bektashis from the books. After the workshops were completed, the Ministry of State, Faruk Çelik, released a preliminary report concluding that all the citizens were in need of religious instruction (ERG, 2011). Although some Alevi representatives articulated their demands for the abolishment of the compulsory courses on religious culture and morality, the government representatives stressed that it was neither possible nor appropriate to respond to this demand in the short term ‘under the existing social and political circumstances’ (Alevi Workshop Report, 2011). Thus, it was decided that the curriculum of the compulsory religious culture and morality courses should be re-designed with a perspective which does not degrade any religious belief, and with an encompassing language recognised by all social groups (ERG, 2011). In other words, multiculturalist claims of the Alevis were partly responded to by the ruling government.

Kurdish revivalism: a search for politics At the end of 1980s, political parties which represented the Kurdish identity and defended the Kurdish cultural and political rights began to enter the formal political sphere. Under the Özal government, the abolition of the articles of Law 765 of the Turkish Penal Code, which restricted the freedom of expression, laid the ground for the formation of legal ethnic and religious parties (Şahin 2008: 134). In addition, departing from their alliances with the leftist parties of the 1970s, the Kurdish political and intellectual elite abandoned the old communist slogans, the socialist economic programmes, and the aim of forming an independent Kurdistan, and replaced them with the seizure of the cultural rights for the Kurds and democratic consolidation in Turkey. During the 1990s, the attempts of the Kurdish political elite to represent Kurdish cultural and political rights by participating in national politics through political parties were undermined by closure cases of the Constitutional Court vis-à-vis Kurdish-origin political parties and the public debates on the legitimacy of a party, which was founded on the basis of the recognition of a particular ethnic identity. 124

Democracy, Secularism and Islam in Turkey

Ever since the establishment of the Turkish Republic, the state has never been tolerant to the expression of Kurdish identity in the public space. The Kurdish population was considered by the Kemalist elite as the most formidable threat against the formation of a nation-state based on the republican, secular, modern and bureaucratic principles as well as on a homogenous Turkish national identity (Kaya and Tarhanlı 2005). First, as it was evidently revealed in the Sheikh Sait Rebellion (1925), Mount Ararat Rebellion (1930) and Dersim Rebellion (1937­–8) in the south eastern parts of Turkey, the Kurdish tribal and religious leaders, who maintained control over the local community, constituted a potential source of rivalry to the central political authority. Second, the Kurdish people were also perceived as a rigorous impediment to the project of the Kemalist form of modernisation and Westernisation due to their ‘backward, pre-modern and inprogressive’ communal and primordial lifestyle based on Sufi orders (tarikats), tribes, sheikhs, landlords, warlords and rebels. Consequently, the increasing affiliation of the Kurds with the PKK, the Kurdish Workers Party (Partia Kerkeran Kurdistan), is even making them more intolerable for the majority Turkish nation and the state (Kirişçi and Winrow 1997). Since 1984, the PKK has been leading an armed struggle against the Turkish Armed Forces in the south eastern region. In order to defend Turkish territorial integrity and national security, an urgent implementation of excessive military and authoritarian control over the governance of some cities (martial law) in the eastern and south eastern regions was introduced in 1987, and was extended fifty-seven times until its abolition in 2002. Moreover, since 1985 the military adopted another strategy, whereby they supported and armed the village guards of some Kurdish tribes, allying with them to counterattack the tribes involved in armed attacks (Olson 2009). The rise of the Kurdish ethnic nationalism, which involved the attempts of the Kurdish representation in the national politics, on the one hand, and the armed struggle, on the other, was perceived as ‘a low-intensity war’ between the Kurdish minority and the Turkish state. The armed conflict has resulted in an increasing tension between the Turks and the Kurds in a way that leads to mental division among the Kurds. Kurds are now willing to stay in their home cities despite the difficulties in getting jobs (Kaya et al. 2009). Racism and institutional discrimination towards the Kurds in the big cities and in western Anatolia is growing day by day. Since the mid-1980s, the Kurds have been coupled by the majority Turkish public with separation, division, 125

Religion and Politics

disintegration, terror, violence, drug traffinking, informal economics, and the gun industry. However, it has been a recurring pattern in Turkey since the early 1990s that Turkish political leaders have addressed the importance of the Kurdish question before the democratisation process (Watts 2009). Süleyman Demirel was the first prime minister to publicly declare that the government recognised the ‘Kurdish reality’ (1992); similarly Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the current prime minister, also stated that his government was aware of the ‘Kurdish question’ (2005). In August 2005, Prime Minister Erdoğan gave a historic speech in Diyarbakır explaining that cultural, religious and historical bonds between Turks and Kurds would provide solutions to the Kurdish question: ‘The sun heats everybody and the rain is God’s grace for everybody. Thus I address those asking, ‘What will happen to the Kurdish question?’ The Kurdish problem is my problem . . . We will solve all the problems through democracy’ (cited in Yavuz 1999: 189). Similarly, Tezcür (2009: 10) also addresses the Islamic elements raised by Erdogan in defining the bond between the Turks and the Kurds when he says ‘there is a single nation (millet) in Turkey’. Apparently what the prime minister means by the single nation is the nation of Islam, which has its roots in the Ottoman millet system. Islamist polity of the AKP has also had a remarkable resonance among the Kurds with Islamist orientations such as Med-Zehra group, Mazlum-Der, and Mustazaf-Der (Tezcür 2009). The attempt to incorporate the Kurds into the nation through religion has recently become even more evident. The Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) declared their intention to recruit Kurdish Islamic clergymen, or mullahs, called meles by the Kurds, as imams in south eastern parts of Turkey. A mele is a traditional religious figure of vital importance among Kurds, and he takes a leadership role to resolve societal issues such as tribal matters, honour crimes and blood feuds. They are highly respected community leaders, who have a great impact on the Kurds.11 In fact, it is they who contributed to the civil disobedience movement initiated by the Kurds in 2010 and 2011. They partially initiated the ‘civil Friday prayers’ within the framework of civil disobedience, rejecting the prayer of the official imams of the Diyanet leading the community of believers during the act of praying (Daily Radikal, 18 December 2011: 14). The act of toleration of the ruling party vis-a-vis the Kurds has brought about several reforms regarding the recognition of the Kurdish 126

Democracy, Secularism and Islam in Turkey

identity in a multiculturalist manner. The AKP has successfully taken further steps to extend the cultural rights of the Kurds in Turkey. TRT 6, new TV channel of Turkey’s state-run radio and television network TRT, officially started a twenty-four-hour broadcast in Kurdish on 1 January 2009. In addition, the President of the Board of Higher Education (YÖK) announced that a Department of Kurdish language and letters was established at the Mardin Artuklu University in 2011. Kurdish-language courses have also been provided by several universities in major cities since 2009. There are some other substantial changes in the mindset of the ruling political elite, which indicate that they are willing to come to terms with the past by repairing some of the damages caused by the military forces of the state in the past. Kurdish political claims have reached their climax in the last few years in parallel with their active mobilisation in local and national politics. The last stage of Kurdish nationalism could also be seen as a period of civil disobedience initiated by the PKK and other Kurdish political actors (Aslan 2009). Kurds have been going through a process of reconciliation with the Turkish state as far as unresolved murders, education in the mother tongue, civil rights, and coming to terms with the past are concerned. Since 2008, the Kurds have been taking the unresolved murders committed by the paramilitary forces into the court to find out who was in charge of the murders. This process of reconciliation has developed in parallel with the judiciary process of Ergenekon Plot, which was tied by several Kurdish intellectuals such as Ahmet Türk to the Kurdish question (Olson 2009: chapters 2 and 7; and Ünver 2009).12 Similarly, Kurds have been very active in renaming their children, their streets, villages, parks and urban quarters in accordance with the Kurdish nationalist mythology. The naming controversy underlines how formal nationalism of the state and minority nationalism mutually condition each other. The numerous interventions of the Turkish state to regulate and control the private lives of the Kurds have given new meaning and politicised many of the cultural expressions, as in the case of Kurdish naming. In a way, the official discourse on Turkishness has influenced the ways in which Kurdish activists imagined Kurdish identity and pushed them to define it in more exclusivist political terms (Aslan 2009: 13). For instance, thanks to the claims of the CHP’s new leader, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, the name of Mustafa Muglali military barracks was changed in March 2011. Mustafa Muglali was a general who killed thirty-three unarmed Kurdish villagers in the Özalp district 127

Religion and Politics

of the city of Van in 1943 (Barkey and Fuller 1998: 28; Özgen 2003). Interestingly the name was given to the military barracks in 2004, when Turkey made remarkable reforms of democratisation within the framework of European integration. Similarly, an AKP deputy, Mehmet Metiner, proposed changing the name of Sabiha Gökçen Airport in Istanbul because it is believed to be an insult to the Kurds and their suffering. Sabiha Gökçen was the adopted daughter of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who was the first female pilot believed to have dropped bombs in Dersim in 1938. These claims have been more visible in a time when Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan publicly announced his apology on 23 November 2011 for what happened in Dersim/Tunceli in 1937 to 1938. However, so far the Kurds have not found the acts of the AKP government credible enough since it is still using a religious, statist, colonial, nationalist and patronising discourse against the Kurds.

Political and societal transformation Turkey has been through a social, political, economic and legal transformation in the last decade, paving the way to the official recognition of ethno-cultural and religious diversity, which has always been the reality of this geography. The official recognition of the multicultural nature of the country could be linked to the deepening of European integration since the Helsinki Summit of the European Union in December 1999. However, this positive mood fundamentally changed after 17 December 2004 when the EU state and national government leaders decided to start negotiations with Turkey. Following the decision of the European Commission as well as various internal and external developments, tensions began to rise between nationalist, patriotic, statist, pro-status-quo groups on the one hand and pro-EU groups on the other hand. This was the time when the virtuous cycle of the period between 1999 and 2005 was replaced with the vicious cycle starting from late 2005. A new nationalist wave embraced the country, especially among middle-class and upper middle-class groups. The electoral cycle of presidential and general elections in 2007 witnessed militarist, nationalist and Eurosceptic aspirations coupled with rising violence and terror in the country. The fight between the Justice and Development Party and the other statist political parties, backed up by the army, crystallised during the presidential election in May 2007. The AKP had nominated the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abdullah Gül, as presidential candidate, 128

Democracy, Secularism and Islam in Turkey

but Mr Gül did not fit the expectations of Turkey’s traditional political and military establishment, and he failed to reach the required two-thirds majority in the assembly. This failure resulted from the fact that the presidential post has a rather symbolic importance in Turkey since it was first occupied by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. However, the establishment argued that, as someone with pro-Islamist values and a wife who wears a headscarf, Mr Gül was inappropriate for the office of president. The conflict even led to military intervention in politics, on 27 April 2007, an intervention notoriously labelled ‘e-intervention’ because of the way it was announced on the website of the military chief of staff. However, the nationalist and militarist alliance against the AKP was proved to be unsuccessful in the general election, and on 22 July 2007 the party won a landslide victory, with 47 per cent of the votes cast. Following the elections, Abdullah Gül was also elected to the presidential office. However, prior to the constitutional referendum in late 2010, minorities had become outspoken again with the intention of being more attentive to the idea of creating a completely new and democratic constitution to be prepared in the new parliament to be summoned after the general elections of July 2011, which consolidated the power of the AKP with a landslide victory of more than 50 per cent of the vote (Yılmaz 2011). Economic prosperity, growing Turkish lira nationalism, strong political determination against the traditional legacy of the Turkish army, becoming a soft power in the region, developing friendly relations with the Middle Eastern countries, Caucasus, Russia and North African countries, creating a political climate to receive the claims of several different ethno-cultural groups in the process of preparing a new constitution, and similar factors, were decisive in the consolidation of the AKP’s power in Turkey. Minorities have now become more vocal in raising their claims to see a more democratic and inclusive constitution, which should be prepared with the inclusion of all the segments of society. They express their willingness to see a country in which rights are granted to all communities in Turkey without having to resort to violence or racism. In the meetings held by various ethno-cultural and religious groups in different cities of Turkey between 2010 and 2012, it was commonly agreed that the constitution should be renewed to better ensure individual rights and to remove any mention of ethnicity, specifically referring to their wish to see a change in Article 66 of the Constitution, defining Turkish citizenship: ‘Everyone bound to the Turkish state through the 129

Religion and Politics

bond of citizenship is a Turk.’ The other claim raised in these meetings was to make sure that rights are granted in Turkey on the basis of citizenship, but not on ethnicity, favouring the Sunni-Muslim-Turks.

Is secularism anti-Islamic? The relationship between tolerance and secularism is a rather complex one. This relationship actually lays the ground on which state and church relations are regulated. In its relationship with tolerance, Charles Taylor (2007) distinguishes between three different meanings of secularism: (1) republican secularism as the complete separation of state and church, of politics and religion, of the profane and the divine as in the French laicist model; (2) atheist secularism as a general disbelief in God and religion, that is, atheism, as in the former Communist regimes; and (3) liberal secularism as religious liberty and plurality in the public sphere. It is the third conception of secularism that Taylor appreciates the most, because secularism of this type means that religious beliefs and communities are fully visible in the public space as alternative ways of life that co-exist side by side, fully visible and with remarkable mobility and interaction. This third model also harmonises well with the politics of recognition, which is his starting point in ­discussing tolerance and multiculturalism. As will be delineated further, the use of the term ‘laicism’ and the Kemalist legacy suggest a preference for the first type of secularism in Turkey. However, it appears to be a ‘false’ version that conflates state and mainstream religion with state neutrality and laicism. This ‘false laicism’ goes a long way in explaining the success of the AKP, which purports to be a less repressive champion of secularism and above all a champion of religious freedom as in the third type of secularism. But is it really so? Could we name the AKP as a political party leaning on the secularism of type three? Or is it a non-liberal version of secularism that the AKP endorses? I argue that the pluralism of the millet system offers a source of misguided inspiration to the AKP in favouring the Sunni Islam at the expense of the non-Sunnis and non-Muslims. Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic, education became an important instrument in modernising the Turkish society in line with the Western model while emphasising the role of unity and solidarity in the nation-building process (Üstel 2004). The early Republican period was a time of rapid political reformation and social transformation. In the early 1920s, the reformation of the educational 130

Democracy, Secularism and Islam in Turkey

system was one of the primary concerns of the Turkish state. Özdalga (1999) and Bayar (2009) assert that the reforms in this period focused on establishing a state-controlled form of education instead of one run by the ulema (clergy)13 and unifying education to minimise the perceived damages of foreign and Christian minority schools through the establishment of a unified curriculum, raising the level of literacy, and fostering secularist and nationalist values. To that effect, the reformation process aimed to produce a Turkish identity which eclipsed Muslim identity via the establishment of a laicist state structure (Berkes 1954, 1978; Heper 1993; Zürcher 2003). Following the French model of laïcité, the choice of the early Republicans on the integration of the principle of laicism into the Turkish Constitution in 1937 indicates that the Kemalist elite was not preoccupied at all with the elimination of religion from public space. On the contrary, they affirmed that Turkish society was religious in essence. The main rationale behind the principle of laicism was not to wage a war against Islam, but to provide the people with the power to challenge the rising authority of the Islamic clergy since the late eighteenth century. Laicism derives from the French word lai (or laïque, in contemporary usage, ‘lay people’ in English), meaning ‘of the people’ as distinguished from ‘the clergy’. Hence laicism underscores the distinction between lay members of a church and its clergy (Davison 2003). In other words, as Davison (2003: 341) puts it very well: [Laicism] ‘rescued Islam’ as a matter of ‘belief’ and ‘conscience’ by institutionally supporting, financing, and promulgating a different version of Islam and its view of relation to power and social life. The separation of religion from its previous position of influence [in the Ottoman Empire] constituted a shift in Islam’s institutional and legitimation position, not its formal, full elimination. In this sense, rather than antagonising Islam, laicism simply means to empower the individual believers vis-a-vis the clergy. Furthermore, laicist ideology has also made it possible that the Kemalist elite politically and culturally instrumentalised Islam to unify the nation through the institutions of the Ministry of Education and the Directorate of Religious Affairs. The perception that laicism was ‘antireligious secularism’ ignores the regime’s religious policy, and fails to consider the existence of different versions of political Islam in Turkey, one of them enshrined in power until very recently and others outside it. 131

Religion and Politics

The terms ‘laicism’ and ‘secularism’ are often interchangeably used in Turkey. Both terms have rather different etymologies, institutional histories, and normative theoretical implications. Secularism derives from the Latin saeculum, meaning ‘generation’ or ‘age’, and originally meant ‘of the world’ (dünyevi in Turkish) as opposed to ‘of the church’ (ruhani in Turkish). Hence, the term ‘secular’ differentiates between matters of religiosity and matters of the world. In this sense, secularisation of a society simply refers to the ‘diminution of the social significance of religion’ and ‘the growing tendency to do without religion’ (Bruce and Wallis 1994; Davison 2003). A secular state then refers to a ‘religion-free’ state – a kind of state that does not apparently comply with the modern Turkish state. Davison (2003: 344) draws attention to laicism as an obstacle to secularisation as it has so far made the state instrumentalise religion as a tool to control the masses.14 However, it seems that the most crucial impact of strict secularism in Turkey is that it polarises and diffuses the society between secularists, who conform with the state’s principles and interests, and Islamists, who challenge the state and the regime with their social and individual preferences. In fact, we find out that the state-centric process of secularisation divides the society between citizens and non-citizens. Since the state discourse of laicism imposed on the individuals, the individuals have internalised the state’s control over religious claims of individuals and groups. It is obvious that top-down simple modernisation run by the state has created believers of laicism on the one hand, and believers of Islam on the other.

Conclusion The contemporary state of Turkish democracy is giving mixed signals as far as the ongoing ethno-cultural claims of various social groups are concerned. Kurdish and Alevi claims are still waiting to be accommodated by the AKP government, which is becoming more and more oppressive and rejectionist vis-à-vis such claims. There is even criticism from among the AKP allies that the liberating and progressive party of the early 2000s is now turning into what it used to fight against. According to such critics, the AKP is now becoming a kind of ‘Kemalist’ entity as it is coupled with undemocratic, authoritarian, repressive and intolerant forms of governance. There is no doubt that it has secured the rights of its Islamist electorate, who were convinced by the AKP and its pro-Islamist predecessors 132

Democracy, Secularism and Islam in Turkey

that the Kemalist, statist, militarist and laicist republic was mainly anti-Muslim. Instrumentalising some religious matters such as the headscarf issue, the AKP and the former parties have so far invested in the laicist­–Islamist divide at the expense of a broader social cohesion. By imprisoning several high-ranking generals within the framework of the judiciary process of the so-called Ergenekon plot, accusing and imprisoning the former chief of staff, İlker Başbuğ in 2012, for his acts against Islamist groups, taking revenge on the generals who had committed the coup on 28 February 1997, controlling the judiciary power by upgrading moderate Islamist prosecutors and judges, and downgrading the militants of the Kemalist regime, the AKP government has made sure that the marginal segments of Turkish society, that is, Islamist circles, have become the mainstream, and the mainstream has been marginalised. The matter now is whether the AKP is capable of accommodating these conflicting groups in a functioning democracy. This is the test case for the consolidation of Turkish democracy. Unfortunately, it seems that the AKP is yet far from accommodating these conflicting claims of the Islamists and the laicists. What is likely to happen is the reproduction of the former divide between the clergy (ulema) and the laicist groups dating back to the late ninteenth century and the early twentieth century. This chapter concludes that the laicist–religious divide has so far been ideologically manipulated by both the pro-liaicist and pro-Islamist political elite. The political obsession with religion, as displayed by both laicism and Islamism, tends to distract the masses from social and economic problems by turning them into a rhetorical debate about existential and societal fears. One could clearly see that the theological, ethno-cultural and political debates around laicism and Islamism cannot be isolated from the socio-economic realities in which they are situated. The rise of an Islamic bourgeoisie with roots in Anatolian culture, the re-Islamisation of society and politics in everyday life through the debates on Islamic revival, Alevism, Kurdish nationalism, the emergence of consumerist lifestyles, not only among the secular segments of the Turkish society, but also among the Islamists, and finally the weakening of the legitimacy of the Turkish military as the guardian of national unity and the laicist order, are all very important aspects of the ways in which the Turkish society and politics have radically transformed in the last two decades. Thus one should certainly try to assess the social and political change in Turkey without falling into the trap of essentialising the laicist­–Islamist divide. I argue that both 133

Religion and Politics

laicist and Islamist discourses have so far been used by Turkish political elite as two different forms of governmentality (Foucault 1979), or of ideology, in order to conceal social, economic and political issues prevalent in the society by means of institutions, procedures, analyses, debates, and reflections. This chapter has also claimed that the debates about secularism, laicism and Islam have always been ideologically loaded in Turkey. The ideological nature of these debates is not because of the elimination of religion from public space by the Kemalist elite, but because of their constant attempts to instrumentalise Islam in the name of controlling and disciplining the Turkish nation. It was uncovered that laicism and secularism have always been used interchangeably by the Turkish public as well as by the elite in a way that leads to confusion. It is this confusion that has made the conservative elite portray the Kemalist principle of laicism as a negation of Islam in order to gain political ground in a revanchist manner against the statist and Kemalist elite. The political divide present at the top of the Turkish state is now being turned into a social divide between moderate Islamists and secular fundamentalists, involving a wide variety of political and non-political actors such as the political parties, parliament, judiciary, army, academia, non-governmental organisations, media, and business circles. The debates about the headscarf issue have become the symbolic fault lines epitomising this divide. Similar to the divide during and after the Democratic Party rule in 1950s, the recent social and political divide in Turkey has both internal and external sources. The divide seems to have economic reasons as the ruling party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), has so far represented the interests of newly emerging middle-class groups with a rural-origin-conservative background, who are competing against the established middle and upper-middle classes with an urban and Kemalist background. The divide also springs from the fact that the legitimate political centre is now accessible to several social groups including not only laicists, republicans, Kemalists and liberal business circles, but also Muslims, Kurds, Alevis, conservative business circles and several other groups. This ideological divide, symbolised by issues like Islamic revivalism, Kurdish nationalism and Alevi identity, is also reinforced by some international sources such as the internal crisis of the European Union, enlargement fatigue of the Union, ongoing instability in the Middle East, changing American interests in the region, the rise of political Islam as a reaction to the ongoing Islamophobia in the 134

Democracy, Secularism and Islam in Turkey

world, and the global evocative ascendancy of civilisationist/culturalist/religious discourse.

Notes 1. For further detail on the Framework 7 studies, see the relevant websites. For Identities and Modernities in Europe (IME, Contract No. SSH-CT-2009-215949) see http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/public/ime/; and for Tolerance, Pluralism and Social Cohesion: Responding to the Challenges of the 21st Century in Europe (Accept Pluralism, Contract No. SSH-CT-2010-243837), http://www.accept-pluralism.eu. 2. Sèvres Syndrome derives from the Sèvres Peace Treaty signed by the Allied powers and the Ottoman Empire in 1920 in the aftermath of the World War I, leading to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (Öniş 2004). 3. Güner Ümit encountered an immense protest from the public, and he had to end his TV career. 4. Mehmet Ali Erbil asked for forgiveness from the Alevi community, and he went to visit an Alevi communian house (cmevi) live on TV. 5. For further detail about the Alevi transnational networks, see Erman and Erdemir (2005). 6. Marcus Dressler (2008) even argues that Alevism in Germany is becoming a religion in itself. In other words, referring to Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori (1996)’s work, Dressler (2008: 301) argues that Alevism has become a self-­ contained religion that its believers can describe, characterise, and distinguish from other belief systems. The question is whether Alevism is likely to turn into a world religion in a way that defines its belief, practice, philosophy, ethics and culture in line with the politics of the modern nation-state. 7. Ayn-i cem literally means ‘face-to-face gathering’. Ayn means ‘eye’ in Arabic. The semiotics of Alevism indicates that what is celebrated in these gatherings is the power of God reflected on the face of the individuals. What is essential here is that there should not be a mediator between the individuals. 8. Pir Sultan Abdal is another legendary Alevi-Bektashi figure from the sixteenth century, renowned for his rebellious nature against the Ottoman State, as well as his humanism. 9. The repercussions of the massacre continue due to the fact that the justice system is yet far from completing the jurisdiction process. The court decided on 13 March 2012 to drop the case for five of the suspects due to the statute of limitation without any conviction. Following the decision of the Court, Turkey’s Alevi organisations staged a rally in Istanbul’s Kadıköy district to protest the dropping of the case over the Sivas massacre. See Hurriyet Daily News (31 March 2012), http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/thousands-protest-dropping-of-sivas-case-. aspx?pageID=238&nID=17351&NewsCatID=339 (accessed 6 April 2012). 10. Türkmen (2009) successfully reveals the changes made in the curriculum of the courses on religious culture and morality between 1995 and 2007–08. Referring to the changes made such as Islamisation of the human rights concept, religionisation of education, exposition of marriage as not only a precondition to establish a family but also as a remedy to adultery, and presentation of Atatürk as someone seeing secularism as the basis for living the real Islam, she concludes that the new curriculum is designed to reislamise the Turkish society in a neo-liberal fashion.

135

Religion and Politics 11. See Daily Radikal, 18 December 2011: 14–17, and the website of the World Bulletin, http://www.worldbulletin.net/?aType=haber&ArticleID=82886 (accessed 20 December 2011). 12. Ergenekon Plot is allegedly a para-military organisation constituted by state-­ centric military officers, politicians, journalists, businessmen, academics and intellectuals, whose primary motivation was the survival of the strong state vis-a-vis centrifugal forces such as Kurdish and Islamist insurgents. The term Ergenekon literally refers to a mythical, fertile valley in the Central Asian Altay Mountains, which has a symbolic sipiritual sacredness in Turkish nationalist mythology. The legend of Ergenekon is about a she-wolf called Asena who helps the Turkic tribes stranded in the Alpay Mountains by guiding them along the labyrinthine mountain passes into the flourishing Ergenekon plains, where Turks could survive and reproduce as a distinct ethnic group (Ünver 2009; Ergil 2010). 13. Ulema is an Arabic word and refers to the scholars of Islamic and Islamic law. 14. Niyazi Berkes is one of those Turkish scholars who used the term ‘secularism’ in its correct form. In his book Secularism in Turkey (1978), Berkes defines secularism as an ideology used to differentiate the matters of this world and of the other world.

References Alevi Workshops Final Report (2011), The Ministry of State, The Republic of Turkey, Ankara, http://www.devlet.gov.tr/nr.pdf Aslan, Senem (2009), ‘Incoherent state: The controversy over Kurdish naming in Turkey’, European Journal of Turkish Studies, 10 [online], available at http://ejts. revues.org/index4142.html Barkey, Henry J. and Fuller, Graham E. (1998), Turkey’s Kurdish Question, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Bayar, Yeşim (2009), ‘The dynamic nature of educational policies and Turkish nation building: Where does religion fit in?’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 29 (3), pp. 360–70. Berkes, Niyazi (1954), ‘Ziya Gökalp: His contribution to Turkish nationalism’, Middle East Journal, 8 (4), pp. 375­–90. Berkes, Niyazi (1978), Türkiye’de Çagdaslasma (Secularism in Turkey), Istanbul: Dogu-Batı Yayınları. Bozarslan, Hamit (2003), ‘Kurdish nationalism in Turkey: From tacit contract to rebellion (1919–1925)’, in Abbas Vali (ed.), Essays on the Origins of Kurdish Nationalism, Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, pp. 163–190. Bruce, Steve and Wallis, Roy (1994), ‘Secularization: The Orthodox model’, in S. Bruce (ed.), Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 8–30 Bruinessen, Martin Von (1996), ‘Kurds, Turks and the Alevi Revival in Turkey’, Middle East Report (Summer): 7–10. Çağaptay, Soner (2002), ‘Kemalist Dönemde göç ve iskân politikaları: Türk kimligi üzerine bir çalısma’ (Migration and Settlement Policies in the Kemalist Era: A Study on Turkish Identity), Toplum ve Bilim, 93, pp. 218–41. Casanova, José (2006), ‘The long, difficult, and tortuous journey of Turkey into

136

Democracy, Secularism and Islam in Turkey Europe  and the dilemmas of European civilization’, Constellations, 13 (2), pp. 234–47. Davison, Andrew (2003), ‘Turkey, a secular state?: The challenge of description’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 102 (2/3) (spring/summer), pp. 333–50. Dilli, Sirin (2009), ‘Les “médias des groupes ethniquement minorisés” en France et en Turquie: Étude comparée sur la représentativité et la citoyenneté’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Universités Paris 3 and Istanbul Bilgi University, Paris. Dressler, Marcus (2008), ‘Religio-secular metamorphoses: The re-making of Turkish Alevism’, Journal of American Academy of Religion, 76 (2) (June), pp. 280–311. Eickelman, Dale and James Piscatori (eds) (1996), Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination, London: Routledge. ERG, Education Reform Initiative (2011), Türkiye’de Din ve Egitim: Son Dönemlerideki Gelişmeler ve Degişim Süreci, Istanbul (February). Ergil, Doğu (2010), ‘Turkey’s crisis and future’, The Audit of Conventional Wisdom, 8 (11), available at http://web.mit.edu/cis/pdf/Audit_08_08_Ergil.pdf, accessed 7 January 2010. Erman, Tahire and Aykan Erdemir (2005), ‘Aleviler ve Topluma Eklemlenme Sorunsalı’ (‘Alevis and their social incorporation problem’), in A. Kaya and T.  Tarhanlı (eds), Türkiye’de Çoğunluk ve Azınlık Politikaları (Majority and Minority Politics in Turkey), Istanbul: Tesev Publications, pp. 127–44 Foucault, Michel (1979), ‘Governmentality’, Ideology and Consciousness, 6, pp. 5–21. Göle, Nilüfer (1997) ‘Secularism and Islamism in Turkey: The making of elites and counterelites’, Middle East Journal, 51, pp. 46–58. Hale, William and Ergun Özbudun (2009), Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism in Turkey: the Rise of the AKP, London: Routledge. Heper, Metin (1993), ‘Political culture as a dimension of compatibility’, in Metin Heper, Ayşe Oncü and Heinz Kramer (eds), Turkey and the West: Changing Political and Cultural Identities, London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Hirschler, Konrad (2001), ‘Defining the nation: Kurdish historiography in Turkey in the 1990s’, Middle Eastern Studies, 37 (3) (July), pp. 145–66. Kaya, Ayhan (1998), ‘Multicultural clientalism and Berlin-Alevis’, New Perspectives on Turkey, 18 (July) pp. 23–49. Kaya, Ayhan (2001), Constructing Diasporas: German-Turkish Hip-Hop Youth in Berlin, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Kaya, Ayhan and Turgut Tarhanli (eds) (2005), Türkiye’de Çoğunluk ve Azınlık Politikaları: AB Sürecinde Yurttaşlık Tartışmaları (Majority and Minority Policies in Turkey: Citizenship Debates on the way to the EU), Istanbul: TESEV Publications. Kaya, Ayhan et al. (2009), Günümüz Türkiyesi’nde Iç Göçler: Geri Dönüs mü, Entegrasyon mu? (Domestic Migrations in Contemporary Turkey: Return or Integration), Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press. Kirişçi, Kemal (2000), ‘Disaggregating Turkish citizenship and immigration practices’, Middle Eastern Studies, 36 (3), pp. 1–22.  Kirişçi, Kemal and Winrow, Gareth (1997), The Kurdish Question and Turkey: An Example of Trans-state Ethnic Conflict, London: Frank Cass. Kosnick, Kira (2007), Migrant Media: Turkish Broadcasting and Multicultural Politics in Berlin, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Massicard, Elise (2007), Türkiye’den Avrupa’ya Alevi Hareketinin Siyasallaşması

137

Religion and Politics (Politicisation of the Alevi Movement from Turkey to Europe), İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları. Navaro–Yashin, Yael (2002), Faces of the State, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ocak, Ahmet Yaşar (1999), Osmanlı Toplumunda Zındıklar ve Mülhidler: 15–17. Yüzyıllar) (Zindiks and Mulhids in the Ottoman Empire: 15th and 17th Centuries), İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları. Olson, Robert (2009), Blood, Beliefs and Ballots: The Management of Kurdish Nationalism in Turkey, 2007–2009, Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda. Öniş, Ziya (2004), ‘Turkish Modernization and Challenges for the New Europe’, Perceptions, (Autumn), pp. 5–28. Özdalga, Elizabeth (1999), ‘Education in the name of “order and progress”: Reflections on the recent eight year obligatory school reform in Turkey’, The Muslim World, LXXXIX (3–4). Özgen, Neşe (2003), Van-Özalp ve 33 Kurşun Olayı: Toplumsal Hafızanın Hatırlama ve Unutma Biçimleri (Van-Özalp and 33 Bullets Incidence: The States of Remembering and Foregetting of Social Memory), İstanbul: Tüsdav Yayınları. Şahin, Bahar (2008), ‘Türkiye’nin Avrupa Birligi Uyum Süreci Baglamında Kürt Sorunu: Açılımlar ve Sınırlar’, in Ayhan Kaya and Turgut Tarhanlı (eds), Türkiye’de Çoğunlık ve Azınlık Politikaları: AB Sürecinde Yurttaslık Tartısmaları, Istanbul: TESEV Publications, pp. 120–54. Şeker, Nesim (2007), ‘Demographic engineering in the late Ottoman Empire and the Armenians’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 43 (3), pp. 461–74. Taylor, Charles (2007), The Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Tezcür, Güneş Murat (2009), ‘Kurdish nationalism and identity in Turkey: A conceptual reinterpretation’, European Journal of Turkish Studies, 10 (online), http://ejts. revues.org/index.4008.html Türkmen, Buket (2009), ‘A transformed Kemalist Islam or a new Islamic civic morality? A study of “Religious culture and morality” textbooks in the Turkish high school curricula’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 29 (3), pp. 381–97. Ülker, Erol (2007), ‘Assimilation of the Muslim communities in the first decade of the Turkish Republic (1923–1934)’, European Journal of Turkish Studies, http://www. ejts.org/document822.html Ünver, H. Akın (2009), ‘Turkey’s ‘deep state’ and the Ergenekon Conundrum’, The Middle East Institute Policy Brief, no. 23 (April), http://www.mei.edu Üstel, Füsun (2004), Makbul Vatandaş’ın Peşinde: II: Meşrutiyet’ten bugüne vatandaşlık egitimi (In Pursuit of the Ideal Citizen: Civic Education from Constitutional Monarchy to Today), Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları. Vorhoff, Karin (1998), ‘Die Aleviten’, in Karin Vorhoff, Barbara Frischmuth, Martin Greve and Sinan Erbektaş (eds), Wie der Phönix aus der Asche. Renaissance des Alevismus – Glaubenslehre, Musik, Organisationsformen, Köln: Föderation der Alevitengemeinden in Europa, pp. 25–37. Watts, Nicole F. (2009), ‘Reconsidering state–society dynamics in Turkey’s Kurdish Southeast’, European Journal of Turkish Studies, 10 (online), available at http://ejts. revues.org/index4196.html Wodak, Ruth (2002), ‘The discourse–historical approach’, in Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (eds), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, London: Sage.

138

Democracy, Secularism and Islam in Turkey Wodak, Ruth (2010), The Discourses of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Yavuz, M. Hakan (1999), ‘Media identities for Alevis and Kurds in Turkey’, in D. E. Anderson and J. W. Anderson (eds), New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, Bloomington: Indiana University, pp. 180–99. Yıldız, Ahmet (2001), Ne mutlu Türküm diyebilene: Türk ulusal kimliğinin etmoseküler sınırları (1919–1938), Istanbul: Iletişim Yayınları. Yılmaz, Gözde (2011), ‘Is there a puzzle? Compliance with minority rights in Turkey (1999– 2010)’, Working Paper, 23, Kolleg-Forschergruppe, The Transformative Power of Europe, Free University, Berlin. Zürcher, Erick Z. (2003), Turkey: A Modern History, London: I. B. Tauris.

139

8 Orthodox Religion and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia Mikhail Maslovskiy and Nikita Shangin

I

n 2012 the issues of the role of the Orthodox Church in Russian society and church–state relations came to the fore in public discussions in Russia. It became clear that the church was seeking to exert more influence on the social and political life of the country than ever before in the post-Soviet years. The seemingly growing importance of religious matters in a society that was often regarded as thoroughly secularised needs to be discussed from a sociological perspective. Apparently we should consider the interrelation of religion and politics in Russia during the whole post-Soviet period in order to clarify the current situation in this sphere. This chapter partly draws on one of the trends in comparativehistorical civilisational analysis that focuses on both cultural and political factors of social dynamics. However, we are trying not so much to apply the theoretical perspective of civilisational analysis to post-Soviet Russia, but rather to use elements of more empirical studies which seem to be compatible with this perspective. Special attention is devoted to the impact of the Soviet imperial legacy on Russia’s political transformations. In particular, the relevance of Stephen Hanson’s concept of ‘post-imperial democracy’ for making sense of Russian politics is evaluated. We also consider several other approaches to postSoviet affairs that take into account the imperial legacy. In discussion of relationships between the Orthodox Church and the state we draw mostly on the works of Russian researchers presenting the results of empirical studies of this problematic. The most comprehensive account of the internal life of the church and its relations with the outside world can be found in Nikolai Mitrokhin’s book Russian Orthodox Church: Contemporary Condition and Actual Problems (Mitrokhin 2006). An important source is the studies of researchers connected to the Moscow Carnegie Centre including some well-known 140

Orthodox Religion and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia

experts on religious matters. Finally, the results of research of sociologists from the independent Levada Centre who have studied a wide range of problems of today’s Russian society are relevant in this case. On the basis of these studies, several stages can be identified in the evolution of church–state relations in post-Soviet Russia. In the early 1990s some Orthodox clergymen were involved in politics but mostly on an individual level while the political influence of the church as an institution remained limited. The Orthodox Church largely withdrew from political life after its failed mediation in the political crisis of the autumn of 1993. However, the church began to seek a more active political role with the accession of the new Patriarch in 2009. The trend towards rapprochement between the church and the state grew stronger in the conditions of popular protests since the end of 2011. But this new trend can hardly amount to ‘de-secularisation from above’. At the present moment Orthodoxy remains but one of the additional legitimacy sources of the Russian state.

Orthodox religion and politics from the perspective of civilisational analysis The role of the Orthodox religion in Russian society and the relationships between the Russian Orthodox Church and other religious and political institutions in the post-Soviet period attracted the attention of several scholars (Anderson 2007; Marsh 2005; Papkova 2007). It is characteristic that one of the leading figures in today’s sociology of religion, Peter Berger, has also addressed this problematic. Berger (2005) does not focus exclusively on Russian Orthodoxy but considers Orthodox Christianity as a whole. He argues that a better understanding of this religious tradition to which about 350 million people belong is important for understanding the contemporary world. In the case of Russia the issue of the relation between Orthodox religion and democracy is particularly urgent. For Billington (2007: 19), it is ‘a very central part of the broader question of where Russia might be heading’. As Berger notes, the Orthodox idea of harmonious unity between society, state and church ‘constitutes a distinctive challenge to the acceptance of liberal democracy, making it only slightly preferable to anarchy’ (2005: 442). But he points out that Roman Catholicism had similar difficulties before the Second Vatican Council. It has also been argued that the spirit of the Orthodox religious tradition seems to have no ‘elective affinity’ with any particular type of political regime but to 141

Religion and Politics

be indifferent towards all of them (Buss 2003: 56). Berger claims that in Russia there exists a chance of re-establishing the traditional church– state relationships. He refers to some ‘hesitant steps’ toward identifying the state with Orthodoxy under the Putin administration. However, Berger believes that the further course of this development will largely depend on the need of the state to legitimate itself in religious terms. According to Billington (2007: 20), the main problem in contemporary Russia is the search for legitimacy since its formal democratic legitimacy ‘is constitutionally but not emotionally established’. But it seems that the need for religious foundations of legitimacy has increased recently in the conditions of the relative decline of legitimacy of the Russian state. Although Berger is not a proponent of civilisational analysis in comparative-historical sociology, his discussion of Orthodoxy and politics is largely in line with this perspective. It is noteworthy that in his study of the cultural dynamics of globalisation, Berger refers to Eisenstadt’s theory of multiple modernities. Berger considers the phenomenon of alternative globalisations, by which he means ‘cultural movements with a global outreach originating outside the Western world and indeed impacting on the latter’ and argues that ‘alternative globalizations intend the possibility of alternative modernities’ (Berger 2002: 12). Apparently Berger’s description of the mutual cultural influences between the West and other parts of the world in the course of globalisation has some common points with the discussion of intercivilisational encounters from the civilisational perspective in historical sociology (Arnason 2006). Civilisational analysis has been characterised as a ‘paradigm in the making’ and as a part of the ‘cultural turn’ in social sciences (Arnason 2010). The most influential version of civilisational analysis, developed by Shmuel Eisenstadt, emphasises the impact of culture on the political sphere. Eisenstadt reveals the role of cultural factors for the peculiarities of political institutions in non-Western states. Eisenstadt’s discussion of modernity as a distinct civilisation and multiple modernities is particularly important for today’s political sociology (Eisenstadt 2001). The multiple modernities theory has been regarded as ‘a crucial alternative to the revived mainstream (neo)-modernisation paradigm, the predominant modes of globalisation analysis as well as the sociophilosophical discourse on modernity and postmodernity’ (Spohn 2001: 499–500). At the same time, as Wagner (2010: 55) claims, Eisenstadt’s strong idea of ‘cultural programme’ can be applied to ‘classical’ civilisations 142

Orthodox Religion and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia

but not so much to contemporary versions of modernity that emerged, for example, in Brazil or South Africa. Wolfgang Knoebl argues that Eisenstadt over-emphasises the role of cultural-religious mechanisms that programme the processes of social change and mostly follows the ‘path dependency’ thesis. Knoebl believes that civilisational analysis should be pushed more in the direction of political sociology. As he points out, Arnason’s theoretical approach, which focuses on both cultural and political aspects of civilisational dynamics, is particularly relevant for explaining civilisational persistence and change. With good reason, Arnason claims that civilisations often have been connected to imperial projects, that is, connected to a particular form of political power. Emphasising this aspect of civilisational reality not only helps to solve the problem of persistence of civilisational patterns because it thereby becomes understandable why power-holders are interested in preserving and expanding institutional arrangements, but it also helps to reintroduce the role of contingent events into civilisational thinking. (Knoebl 2010: 93) As Knoebl argues (2010: 94), an emphasis on empires and states which is characteristic of Arnason’s version of civilisational analysis helps us to understand that ‘the political elites were capable of stabilising civilisational structures in the past and that even nowadays they are still able to formulate cultural counter-projects to Western modernity in many parts of the world’. In the studies of Russian political transformations from this perspective, special attention should be devoted not only to religious traditions, but also to the Soviet imperial background. According to the multiple modernities theory, different civilisational foundations and frameworks generate different programmes of political modernity and processes of political modernisation (Spohn 2010: 60). Willfried Spohn, who devotes particular attention to the impact of world religions on political processes, emphasises that European multiple modernity should not be confined ‘to the continuing salience of the religious realm in its manifold religious organisations and actors alone but also considered in its constitutive institutional and cultural role for the secular realm of politics, states, nations and collective identities’ (2009: 360). Apparently this also applies to the forms of modernity outside the enlarging Europe. But it is important to take into account that collective identities ‘are not simply secular or post-secular but 143

Religion and Politics

consist of multiple religious as well as secular components’ (Spohn 2009: 361). While Spohn focuses on the interplay between traditional religions and the secular realm, he does not discuss communist ideology as a form of religion. Spohn (2003: 274) claims that in the USSR, ‘MarxistLeninist ideocracy replaced Orthodox caesaropapism, yet this totalitarian state secularism was unable to promote also societal secularization’. Thus he tends to emphasise the secular element of communism. At the same time it can be argued that Marxism-Leninism represented a kind of ‘political religion’ although it ‘never penetrated society to the same extent as historical religions’ (Arnason 2000: 68). On the whole both the religious and secular elements of the communist ideology should be considered. In the case of Russia the influence of traditional religions, particularly Orthodoxy, as well as Marxism-Leninism in its quasi-religious and secular components, can be traced. But our discussion will be confined to the relationship between the Orthodox religion and politics. Russian Orthodoxy has been considered recently from the perspective of multiple modernities by Stoeckl (2011), who makes a distinction between comparative-civilisational and post-secular approaches. Stoeckl tries to combine some elements of the civilisational perspective on Orthodoxy with the post-secular approach based on the ideas of Habermas. She analyses official statements of the Russian Orthodox Church on the issues of state­–church relations, secularism and human rights, particularly the Social Doctrine of the church published in 2000. Stoeckl regards Habermas’s theory of post-secular society as a valid interpretative key for the Russian Orthodox position on human rights. She quotes one of the statements of Metropolitan Kirill who later became the Patriarch of Moscow and argues that this statement resonates with Habermas’s considerations on equality and universality. Habermas described these principles as involving ‘relations of mutual recognition, mutual role-taking, a shared willingness to consider one’s own tradition with the eyes of the stranger, and to learn from one another’ (cited in Stoeckl 2011: 229). What should be clarified, however, is to what extent these principles are actually implemented in the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church. When we turn to the relationships between the Orthodox Church and the state it is also crucial not to confine our analysis to the official statements. We should be looking for empirical evidence of the actual character of these relationships. It can be assumed that a more 144

Orthodox Religion and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia

politically oriented version of civilisational analysis will be helpful in the study of this problem. While Stoeckl attempts to combine civilisational and post-secular approaches as theoretical perspectives we will try to complement the politically oriented version of civilisational analysis with more empirical approaches in political sociology and sociology of religion. First of all we will turn to a discussion of the nature of post-Soviet political regime in Russia.

Russia’s post-Soviet political transformation: an authoritarian turn of a ‘post-imperial democracy’ The political processes in Russia have been discussed mostly from the positions of transitology as a branch of political science which tends to lack the historical dimension. The new trends in historically oriented political sociology have been ignored by most representatives of this approach. It has been argued that transitological studies disregard the historical legacies that influenced the course of social and political transformations in Eastern Europe (Blokker 2005). As Spohn (2011: 32) notes, the modernisation theory which is mostly used in transition studies cannot account for reversals in economic and political liberalisation but the multiple modernities approach can add new explanatory dimensions to transformation research. It should be admitted that the limits of the ‘transition paradigm’ have been recognised by some political scientists (Carothers 2002). Attempts have also been made to move beyond this paradigm. Thus Russian political transformations have been discussed in a comparative-historical context by Stephen Hanson who regards the political regime that emerged in Russia after the collapse of communism as an example of ‘post-imperial democracy’. This concept is defined as ‘a situation in which a new democratic regime is born within the core nation of a formally imperial polity immediately after its disintegration, and where reasonably fair and open democratic elections are held for at least a decade after imperial collapse’ (Hanson 2010: xxii). However, applying this definition to Russia seems problematic since the USSR had never been a ‘formally imperial polity’. It is also noteworthy that ‘fairness’ of Russian elections was questionable even during the first post-Soviet decade. Hanson engages in a comparative analysis of political processes in the Third Republic in France, the Weimar Republic in Germany and post-Soviet Russia. According to Hanson, there were many similarities 145

Religion and Politics

between these three cases. The legacies of past imperial institutions constrained the new elites in similar ways since all three post-imperial democracies inherited semi-modernised economies and a great deal of social support for authoritarian politics. It can be assumed, however, that some other factors affected the post-imperial political transformations. In the case of Russia it was not only the imperial legacy, but also the legacy of the Soviet model of modernity (Arnason 2000). Apparently, the character of ‘cultural support for authoritarianism’ was different in the only post-communist society among post-imperial democracies. In all three cases discussed by Hanson, the imperial collapse was followed by a period of political instability and uncertainty before the consolidation of a new regime. However, the nature of this new regime was different in each case: democracy in France; dictatorship in Germany; and ‘weak state authoritarianism’ in Russia. In Hanson’s view, political ideology was the main factor leading to these particular outcomes. Hanson focuses on party formation in the three countries. He claims that in France and Germany ideological parties tended to defeat pragmatic parties and the new regime consolidated along the lines of the most successful ideology. In Russia no ideological party succeeded and all parties were finally subordinated to the authoritarian state which lacked any clear and consistent ideology. It is characteristic that Hanson criticises the civilisational approach to Russian politics and culture. He considers Richard Pipes and Samuel Huntington the main representatives of such an approach but he disregards the multiple modernities theory which focuses on the dynamics of various civilisations of modernity. Hanson’s analysis of post-Soviet Russian politics demonstrates the advantages of a comparative-­ historical perspective but his approach can be complemented with a more detailed study of cultural dynamics from the viewpoint of the multiple modernities theory. On the other hand, the concept of ‘plebiscitarian patrimonialism’ introduced by Hanson (2011) can hardly be accepted. From the viewpoint of Weberian political theory this concept combines two incompatible principles. For Weber, plebiscitary democracy represented a transitional type between charismatic and legal authority. Weber emphasised the rationalising trends in plebiscitary regimes and maintained that the first aim of the plebiscitary leader would be ‘the destruction of traditional, feudal, patrimonial, and other types of authoritarian powers and privileges’ (Weber 1978: 269). If we strictly follow Weber’s 146

Orthodox Religion and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia

own use of the concept of patrimonial domination, its applicability to the case of today’s Russia cannot be sustained. It is worth mentioning that attempts to apply Weber’s concept of patrimonialism to the USSR demonstrated that while patrimonial elements could be identified in the bureaucratic structures this concept was not sufficient for analysis of the Soviet regime throughout its history (Maslovskiy 2010: 11–12). Hanson agrees that the belief in sacred tradition as the basis of legitimacy appears to be absent in the post-Soviet states. Apparently an analytical distinction should be made between the basis of the regime’s legitimacy and the character of the administrative system. Richard Sakwa’s discussion of the Russian ‘dual state’ seems relevant in this case. In his view, a parallel system which he calls ‘an administrative regime’ emerged in post-Soviet Russia under the facade of a constitutional order. That system transcends the rules of the constitutional state. As Sakwa notes, the administrative regime ‘exhibits certain features of “neo-patrimonial” systems, and in particular the enduring systemic insecurity about whether a specific rule will be applied at any particular time’ (Sakwa 2011: 529). But in any case one can speak of neo-patrimonial elements in the administrative system rather than patrimonial legitimation of the political regime as a whole. According to Lilia Shevtsova, Putin’s regime can be described as bureaucratic-authoritarian. Such a regime is reminiscent of Latin American governments in the 1960s and 1970s: power is concentrated in the hands of the leader who relies on the bureaucracy, security forces and big business for support (Shevtsova 2007: 897). Among the factors that have affected Russia’s recent evolution are its historical legacy, institutional obstacles to change and the role of the leader and the ruling elite. Shevtsova emphasises that Russia faced serious difficulties in its transformation in the 1990s. It was necessary at the same time to create a free market, to democratise the state, to abolish an empire and to seek a new geopolitical role for the former nuclear superpower. As Shevtsova (2007: 892) notes, ‘no imperial superpower with messianic pretensions had ever successfully democratized’. But the difficulties that the imperial legacy posed for Russian democracy were appreciated only in retrospect. Although Russia is no longer an empire, some imperial features of the Soviet period continue to influence the political processes in the country. Dmitri Trenin points out that most of the post-imperial states were transformed into nation-states but in the case of Russia this process was not completed. Some researchers characterise Russia as 147

Religion and Politics

an empire that failed to dissolve completely, referring first of all to the North Caucasus. However, as Trenin notes, some other former empires including Britain and France also failed to dissolve completely and still keep overseas territories. At the same time Russia’s post-imperial agenda was to remain a great power. Several post-imperial states like Germany or Japan after World War II no longer had any great power aspirations but Russia was seeking to preserve this status even after the disintegration of the Soviet empire (Trenin 2012: 38–41). As Sakwa (2011: 522) argues, the ‘intersection of, and possibly contradiction between, the great power and democratisation agendas is one of the unique features of Russia’s transformation process since 1991’. Sakwa has also emphasised the importance of the civilisational perspective for the study of democratisation in Russia. This scholar discusses the advantages of ‘neo-modernisation’ theories over the mainstream transitological approaches in the field of post-communist studies. He considers Jeffrey Alexander’s neo-modernisation theory and Eisenstadt’s civilisational approach (Sakwa 2012: 45–50). However, Sakwa does not make a distinction between different versions of civilisational analysis. It can be assumed that the more politically oriented version of this perspective which concentrates on both civilisational and imperial aspects of the modern dynamics is particularly relevant for the study of post-Soviet Russia. The post-imperial character of the Russian state is an important factor in explaining the trajectory of its transformations. This factor helps to account for the reversal of democratisation and a new turn to authoritarianism in Russia. Nevertheless, re-politicisation of Russian society since the end of 2011 has demonstrated that a combination of imitation democracy and reliance on the imperial legacy could hardly remain a firm basis of legitimacy of the political regime. Mass protests after the parliamentary elections of 4 December contributed to delegitimisation of the existing system of power. In this situation the regime needed additional legitimacy sources and Orthodoxy turned out to be one of them.

The political role of the Orthodox Church in the post-Soviet period In the 1990s the Russian Orthodox Church remained a ‘typically postSoviet institution’ which did not have serious political ambitions and did not fully realise the opportunities of the new situation (Malashenko 148

Orthodox Religion and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia

2012: 401). In the conditions of large-scale transformation processes in Russian society, the Orthodox Church hierarchs concentrated on the church’s internal problems. The political influence of the church was insignificant in this period. Occasional attempts to act in the political sphere mostly were not successful. While Russian political leaders were ready to regard the church as a part of cultural legacy they were hardly inclined to take into account its position in political decision-making (Mitrokhin 2006: 235). In the last Soviet years and the beginning of the 1990s some Orthodox priests participated in the activities of political parties and were elected to legislative bodies of different levels. However, a small political weight of the church led to a situation when priest-politicians represented not the church interests but the interests of their parties. At the same time some popular and charismatic priests who were elected to the parliament began to annoy the church hierarchs and, finally, broke their ties with the church. At the end of 1993 the church authorities banned Orthodox clergy from joining political parties and running for election to legislative bodies. According to Mitrokhin, one of the reasons for this was disillusionment in the church’s political influence after the Patriarch’s failed mediation during the political crisis of October 1993. Mitrokhin has reconstructed the church’s ‘political platform’ on the basis of analysis of statements and publications of the church hierarchs. In his view, this platform can be characterised as anti-liberal, anti-Western and nationalist (Mitrokhin 2006: 265). Similar conclusions have been made by Western researchers. According to Anderson (2007: 189), it is difficult to speak of the church as ‘a monolithic body with a single viewpoint’ but ‘its ideological centre of gravity is much more inclined to a nationalistic and anti-western perspective’. The church supports the idea of a strong centralised Russian state. More liberal periods of twentieth-century Russian history are treated negatively by the church hierarchs. Thus perestroika and the first half of the 1990s are associated in their eyes, not with the revival of the church, but with moral decline and the spread of ‘sects’. On the other hand, there is nostalgia for the more authoritarian periods. Thus the Brezhnev period is seen as stable and quite attractive and there are hopes for Putin as a leader with a ‘strong hand’ (Mitrokhin 2006: 266). According to Mitrokhin, the church’s political programme has not been officially proclaimed and it is realised not in the sphere of public politics but by other means. On the one hand, the church relies on its 149

Religion and Politics

interaction with pro-Orthodox state officials. On the other hand, the church supports Orthodox political organisations that do not question the leading role of the church hierarchy and can influence the larger society (Mitrokhin 2006: 266). However, there are few such organisations and their political role is very limited. There was not a single instance of a politician being elected in the parliament exclusively on the basis of a pro-Orthodox political programme. As Papkova (2007: 117–19) argues, in the middle of the 1990s some of the main Russian political parties tended to overestimate the political influence of the church and included references to Orthodox spirituality in their programmatic statements. But then the leaders of these parties realised the actual electoral potential of the church and moved from a focus on spiritual values to economic considerations. The analytical Levada Centre is known as a reliable source of information on Russia’s public opinion. In studies by sociologists from the Centre, the problem of church–state relations is discussed on the basis of perceptions and attitudes of ‘ordinary’ people (Dubin 2004; Zorkaya 2009; Gudkov 2011: 376–413). It is argued that the spread of Orthodoxy in post-Soviet Russia should be seen not so much as a revival of religious faith or formation of mass religious culture, but mostly as a component of identity of subjects of the state. The Orthodox religion in today’s Russia has been characterised as ‘a label of ethno-confessional particularity that compensates the weakness of national and social identification’ (Gudkov 2011: 394). These scholars do not regard the Orthodox Church as a genuinely autonomous organisation but emphasise its dependence on the state. At the same time the results of their studies demonstrate that active involvement of the church in the political sphere is not supported by the majority of Russia’s population. Most people perceive the church as first of all the guardian of society’s moral values but are not ready to accept an increase of its political influence. The pattern of relations between the Russian state and the Orthodox Church in the post-Soviet years has been largely reminiscent of the Russian ‘old regime’ before the Bolshevik revolution. The trend to use the Orthodox Church as an additional symbolic resource of the state’s legitimisation became more conspicuous during Putin’s period. With Putin’s coming to power it might seem at first that the political role of the church would increase since the new president ‘seemed to have some sort of personal, if theologically vague, commitment to Orthodoxy’ (Anderson 2007: 187). Nevertheless, as Anderson argues, there was no serious state-led attempt to restore the political authority 150

Orthodox Religion and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia

of the church during Putin’s two presidential terms. On the other hand, ‘for all his sympathies with the Orthodoxy, there is little evidence that Putin’s thinking is fundamentally influenced by a theological ­perspective’ (Anderson 2007: 188). As Gudkov claims, the church has been used by the authorities as a barrier against liberal ideas, a symbol of ethno-confessional unity and glorious past. It has also provided with the ideas of isolationism and Russia’s specific way of development. On the whole the authorities express an instrumental attitude to the church which is supposed to compensate the lack of legitimacy of the political regime (Gudkov 2009: 13–14). State-controlled media creates the image of the Orthodox Church that corresponds to the interests of the regime. In the media the church is presented as supporting all kinds of state policies.

New trends in the political role of the church and its relationships with the state The character of church–state relationships began to change after accession of Patriarch Kirill in February 2009. Ironically, this happened during Dmitri Medvedev’s presidency, which was generally considered more ‘liberal’ and was characterised by ‘modernisation’ rhetoric. The Orthodox Church’s involvement in social and political life became much more active. Thus the Social Doctrine of the church which was adopted in 2000 and then largely put aside has been reactivated. The church has offered some commentaries and modifications to the programme of the ruling party United Russia. Under the new Patriarch the Orthodox Church has been spreading its ideological vision that has been characterised as a kind of ‘civilisational nationalism’ (Verkhovskiy 2012). It has been noted that Patriarch Kirill wishes to be not only the head of Orthodox Church in the Russian Federation, but also the spiritual leader of ‘Holy Russia’ (Trenin 2012: 300). The Orthodox Church does not support treating the Russian Federation as a nation-state. The church is not ready to confine itself in the state boundaries since the ‘Holy Russia’ includes also Belarus and Ukraine. The ‘canonical territory’ of the Russian Orthodox Church ‘roughly corresponds to the territory of the former empire’ and thus the church is ‘the last really existing structure that has been preserved on the imperial scale after disintegration of the USSR’ (Verkhovskiy 2012: 152). However, the church is not actually seeking restoration of the empire beyond Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. The imperial tradition 151

Religion and Politics

is used rather as a means of mobilising the ‘Orthodox civilisation’ in its confrontation with the secular West. The civilisational doctrine of the church has been summed up by Verkhovskiy in the following manner. A civilisation is defined by its religious tradition. The West represents an exception which is seen as non-traditionalist, secularised and liberal. Other civilisations oppose the West seeking to preserve their identities. Russia is regarded as the core of the Orthodox civilisation. The church proposes to return to the traditions of Orthodox civilisation and to reject Western secularism. It is seeking to strengthen its influence, ‘to make a thoroughly secularised Russian society at least less secular’ (Verkhovskiy 2012: 147) and to make some additional steps in the political sphere away from liberal democracy. The concept of Orthodox civilisation proposed by the leadership of the church can be regarded as analogous to the concept of ‘sovereign democracy’ supported by the state authorities (Sitnikov 2011: 98). As Verkhovskiy argues, the doctrine of the new Patriarch is aimed at constructing a national identity. This doctrine presupposes that the key trait defining the Russian nation is belonging to the Orthodox Church. The relationships of the church with other confessions can be seen as analogous to ‘identity politics’ and ‘formation of civil nationalism in a nation-state’ (Verkhovskiy 2012: 147). In this case the struggle of the Russian Orthodox Church against ‘non-traditional’ confessions can be regarded as a struggle for national unity in its confessional dimension. The Orthodox Church insists on inviolability of its ‘canonical territory’ and this is a reminder of the principle of territorial integrity of a nation-state (Trenin 2012: 302). It is characteristic that Roman Catholicism has not been given the status of ‘traditional confession’ in Russia unlike Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. It should be noted that Stoeckl makes a far-reaching conclusion that the Russian Orthodox Church regards the Catholic Church as its main ally in the confrontation with secularism. She argues that alliances can be formed irrespective of ‘deep-rooted historical divisions’ but the comparative-civilisational perspective ‘runs the risk of overlooking these alliances’ (Stoeckl 2011: 227). Nevertheless, the character of relationships between these two churches on most other issues is quite different. The Russian Orthodox Church perceives Roman Catholicism as the only serious rival on its ‘canonical territory’. From the viewpoint of many Orthodox clergymen, conversion of an Orthodox Christian to Catholicism is perceived as ‘betrayal’ and ‘spiritual death’ (Mitrokhin 152

Orthodox Religion and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia

2006: 427–8). Apparently the deep-rooted historical divisions between the two churches can hardly be overcome although tactical alliances between them on some issues are still possible. At the same time there are significant differences between the Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church as far as their treatment of the issues of human rights and democratisation is concerned. As Casanova (2011: 262) argues, ‘sacralization of the modern discourse of human rights by the church was the single most important factor in the mobilization of Catholic resources for democratization’. On the other hand, the Russian Orthodox Church does not seem ready to accept a policy analogous to the Catholic aggiornamento proposed by the Second Vatican Council. Thus the present Patriarch of Moscow formulated his attitude to the issue of human rights a few years before his accession. He argued that the idea of human rights was born in Western countries with their ‘particular historical and cultural fate’ and that idea was hardly applicable to all cultures (Mitropolit Kirill 2006). The position of the Orthodox church on the issue of democracy and human rights is similar to that of the social doctrine of the Catholic Church before the Second Vatican Council (Sitnikov 2011: 212). Further changes in the church–state relations took place after the wave of protests against falsification of the parliamentary elections results in December 2011. As the protests showed, the political regime had alienated many members of the educated middle class in Russia’s big cities, particularly in Moscow and St Petersburg. In the situation of substantial decline of legitimacy of the regime, ideological support from the Orthodox Church became very relevant. During the presidential election campaign, Patriarch Kirill demonstrated unconditional support for the regime. In his public statements he called for Vladimir Putin’s election as president. It is not surprising that the Patriarch became a target of critical attacks on the part of the radical political opposition. In the opinion of more liberal segments of Russian society, close relations between the church hierarchs and the state authorities are perceived as a kind of ‘indulgence for corruption, violation of the law, inability to solve social problems’ (Malashenko 2012: 405). Activists of the pro-democratic movement mostly do not accept growing ideological influence of the Orthodox Church. State-imposed de-secularisation leads to the spread of anti-clericalism among the more modernised strata of Russian society. However, it may turn out that in 2012 we were witnessing not a genuine attempt at de-secularisation from above 153

Religion and Politics

but rather its imitation in order to distract public attention from more urgent political issues. The Russian authorities apparently over­ estimated the threat of an ‘Orange revolution’ in the aftermath of the parliamentary elections. Their more strongly marked reliance on the church as a legitimacy source during the protest wave might prove to be a tactical move rather than a long-term trend in church–state relations.

Conclusion From the viewpoint of the multiple modernities approach in contemporary sociology, post-Soviet Russia can hardly be considered a distinct civilisation. The idea of ‘Orthodox civilisation’ shared by Samuel Huntington and the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church seems to be ill-founded. In the case of Russia not only the Orthodox tradition but also the legacy of the Soviet model of modernity in both its secular and quasi-religious aspects should be considered. Apparently the politically oriented version of civilisational analysis is more appropriate for explaining that constellation than Eisenstadt’s original version of this approach. The Soviet imperial legacy forms an important component of political processes in Russia. The political transformation in the country during the last decade represents an authoritarian turn of a postimperial democracy which can be analysed in a comparative-historical perspective. However, what makes the Russian case historically unique is the fact that Russia was the only post-communist state among postimperial democracies. Intersection of the legacies of imperial great power and the Soviet model of modernity strengthened the authoritarian trends in Russian politics. On the other hand, the imperial tradition is important for the Orthodox Church which remains the only institution that has been preserved on most of the territory of the former USSR. In the post-Soviet period various political forces in Russia were seeking to use Orthodox religion as a source of legitimacy. But until recently the political influence of the Orthodox Church was generally perceived as insignificant. However, after the accession of the new Patriarch in 2009 the church claimed a more active role in the country’s social and political life. At the same time, the changing political situation caused the Russian state authorities to re-evaluate the importance of Orthodox religion for legitimisation of the existing regime. It 154

Orthodox Religion and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia

remains to be seen what results this situation will yield. But in any case, the internal split of society along the ‘civilisational’ lines is likely to influence the political processes in Russia in the near future.

References Anderson, J. (2007), ‘Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church: Asymmetric symphonia?’, Journal of International Affairs, 61 (1), pp. 185–201. Arnason, J. P. (2000), ‘Communism and modernity’, Daedalus, 129 (1), pp. 61–90. Arnason, J. P. (2006), ‘Understanding intercivilizational encounters’, Thesis Eleven, 86 (1), pp. 39–53. Arnason, J. P. (2010), ‘Introduction: Domains and perspectives of civilizational analysis’, European Journal of Social Theory, 13 (1), pp. 5–13. Berger, P. (2002), ‘Introduction: The cultural dynamics of globalization’, in P. Berger and S. Huntington (eds), Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–16. Berger, P. (2005), ‘Orthodoxy and global pluralism’, Demokratizatsiya, 13(3), pp. 437–47. Billington, J. (2007), ‘Orthodoxy and democracy’, Journal of Church and State, 49 (1), pp. 19–26. Blokker, P. (2005), ‘Post-communist modernization, transition studies and diversity in Europe’, European Journal of Social Theory, 8 (4), pp. 503–25. Buss, A. (2003), The Russian-Orthodox Tradition and Modernity, Leiden: Brill. Carothers, T. (2002), ‘The end of the transition paradigm’, Journal of Democracy, 13 (1), pp. 5–21. Casanova, J. (2011), ‘Cosmopolitanism, the clash of civilizations and multiple ­modernities’, Current Sociology, 59 (2), pp. 252–67. Dubin, B. (2004), ‘Massovaya religioznaya kul’tura v Rossii (tendentsii i itogi 1990-kh)’, Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniya: Dannye, analiz, diskussii, 3, pp. 35–44. Eisenstadt, S. (2001), ‘The civilizational dimension of modernity: Modernity as a ­distinct civilization’, International Sociology, 16 (3), pp. 320–40. Gudkov, L. (2009), ‘Priroda putinizma’, Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniya: Dannye, analiz, diskussii, 3, pp. 6–21. Gudkov, L. (2011), Abortivnaya modernizatsiya, Moscow: ROSSPEN. Hanson, S. (2010), Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany and Post-Soviet Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanson, S. (2011), ‘Plebiscitarian patrimonialism in Putin’s Russia: Legitimating authoritarianism in a postideological era’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 636, pp. 32–48. Knoebl, W. (2010), ‘Path dependency and civilizational analysis: Methodological challenges and theoretical tasks’, European Journal of Social Theory, 13 (1), pp. 83–97. Malashenko, A. (2012), ‘Zaklyuchenie’, in A. Malashenko and S. Filatov (eds), Pravoslavnaya tserkov’ pri novom partiarkhe, Moscow: ROSSPEN, pp. 401–08. Marsh, C. (2005), ‘Orthodox Christianity, civil society and Russian democracy’, Demokratizatsiya, 13 (3), pp. 449–62.

155

Religion and Politics Maslovskiy, M. (2010), ‘The Weberian tradition in historical sociology and the field of Soviet studies’, in V. Oittinen (ed.), Max Weber and Russia, Helsinki: Aleksanteri Series, pp. 7–20. Mitrokhin, N. (2006), Russkaya pravoslavnaya tserkov’: sovremennoe sostoyanie i aktual’nye problem, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Mitropolit, Kirill (2006), ‘Prava cheloveka i nravstvennaya otvetstvennost’, Strategiya Rossii, 4, pp. 62–8, http://sr.fondedin.ru/new/archive.php (accessed 15 September 2012). Papkova, I. (2007), ‘The Russian Orthodox Church and political party platforms’, Journal of Church and State, 49 (1), pp. 117–34. Sakwa, R. (2011), ‘The future of Russian democracy: Review article’, Government and Opposition, 46 (4), pp. 517–37. Sakwa, R. (2012), ‘Modernization, neo-modernization and comparative democratization in Russia’, East European Politics, 28 (1), pp. 43–57. Shevtsova, L. (2007), ‘Post-communist Russia: A historic opportunity missed’, International Affairs, 83 (5), pp. 891–912. Sitnikov, A. (2011), Russkaya pravoslavnaya tserkov’ i sotsial’no-politicheskie transformatsii v rossiiskom obshchestve, Moscow: Vash poligraficheskii partner. Spohn, W. (2001), ‘Eisenstadt on civilizations and multiple modernity: Review essay’, European Journal of Social Theory, 4 (4), pp. 499–508. Spohn, W. (2003), ‘Multiple modernity, nationalism and religion: A global perspective’, Current Sociology, 51 (3/4), pp. 256–86. Spohn, W. (2009), ‘Europeanization, religion and collective identities in an enlarging Europe: A multiple modernities perspective’, European Journal of Social Theory, 12 (3), pp. 358–74. Spohn, W. (2010), ‘Political sociology: Between civilizations and modernities: A multiple modernites perspective’, European Journal of Social Theory, 13 (1), pp. 49–66. Spohn, W. (2011), ‘World history, civilizational analysis and historical sociology: Interpretations of non-western civilizations in the work of Johann Arnason’, European Journal of Social Theory, 14 (1), pp. 23–39. Stoeckl, K. (2011), ‘European integration and Russian Orthodoxy: Two multiple modernities perspectives’, European Journal of Social Theory, 14 (2), pp. 217–33. Trenin, D. (2012), Post-imperium: evraziiskaya istoriya, Moscow: ROSSPEN. Verkhovskiy, A. (2012), ‘Natsionalizm rukovodstva Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi v pervom desyatiletii 20 veka’, in A. Malashenko and S. Filatov (eds), Pravoslavnaya tserkov’ pri novom partiarkhe, Moscow: ROSSPEN, pp. 141–70. Wagner, P. (2010), ‘Multiple trajectories of modernity: Why social theory needs historical sociology’, Thesis Eleven, 100 (1), pp. 53–60. Weber, M. (1978), Economy and Society, Berkeley: University of California Press. Zorkaya, N. (2009), ‘Pravoslavie v bezreligioznom obshchestve’, Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniya: Dannye, analiz, diskussii, 2, pp. 65–84.

156

9 Religion and Politics, Church and State in Chinese History John Lagerwey

W

hen I began to study Chinese history in 1968, the standard understanding was that China had no native religion, that Confucianism was not a religion, and that Buddhism, a religion of foreign origin, had long since gone into terminal decline. Studies over the last half century have demonstrated that, on the contrary, there was a native religion, Daoism, Confucianism was a religion, and Buddhism has continued to thrive right down to the present. Together, these ‘three teachings’ (sanjiao) as they were called in Chinese received ongoing state support throughout imperial history (220 bce–1911 ce). Often, moreover, they would band together to oppose a fourth form of religion, one founded on mediums (wu) who spoke for the gods enshrined in local temples. To be complete, a history of Chinese religion must therefore describe these four religions and their interactions. What such a description would lead us to discover is that the ultimate arbiter between these four religions was the state itself. Headed by a Son of Heaven who possessed the Mandate of Heaven to rule, the state in fact functioned like a church. That is, there is nothing really comparable in Chinese history to a conflict between church and state because the Chinese state was a church-state. To explain what this affirmation means in concrete historical terms, we must begin with Confucianism, for it is chronologically speaking the first of the three teachings to emerge. Confucius (551­–479 bce) himself had no intention of founding a religion. He saw himself as a transmitter, one who carried on the ritual traditions of the Zhou dynasty (1050–256 bce). He is also traditionally credited with editing the texts which embodied those traditions and came to be called the Classics (jing). During the Warring States (481–221 bce), these ritual traditions were rethought less as a means to communicate with the world of the gods and the ancestors than as a means of self-cultivation: 157

Religion and Politics

by practising the various rites, especially those addressed to the ancestors, elite members of society could learn the meaning of reverence (jing), awe (wei) and sincerity (cheng).1 The emphasis, in other words, came to be on the living practitioner of rites who through them learned appropriate attitudes, rather than on the ‘real presence’ of the gods. Indeed, when asked by a disciple whether the ancestors were present at the sacrifices, Confucius is said to have told him to do ‘as if’. The five ‘Confucian’ Classics had achieved sufficiently universal recognition as foundational to the Chinese state for them to be carved in stone in the year 175 ce.2 It is because these Classics provided both the justification for and basic outlines of sacrificial rites addressed to gods and ancestors that it is not just legitimate – imperative – to speak of Confucianism as a religion. That is, insofar as animals were slaughtered and offered in the context of these rites addressed to invisible entities, it is hard to know what else we could call this other than a religion. The gods were generally defined as humans who deserved to be remembered for their contribution to public or state welfare, and throughout Chinese history the state expended considerable time deciding which gods were deserving of such recognition, and then considerable expense making the sacrifices: Some staggering statistics give perhaps the best measure of the Han imperial investment in religion: in 31 bc the chief minister Kuang Heng reduced the number of officially supported sites of worship from 683 to 208 and also eliminated 200 of 373 sites for Han ancestor worship. He was, however, removed from office the following year, and by the end of Wang Mang’s reign, the number of cult sites had soared to 1700.3 In addition, when in 197 bce the Han founder’s father died, he decreed the creation of sites of worship for him throughout the empire, ‘and the same was done for him when he died two years later. This explains why, at the time of the failed reforms of Kuang Heng, there were 167 shrines in the provinces and 176 in the capital city, plus 30 sites dedicated to the memory of various empresses.4 As important as these individual sites and foci of worship were, as expressions of dynastic legitimacy they paled in importance next to the sacrifice to Heaven first performed by Wang Mang (r. 9–23 ce) and regularly thereafter until 1914. It was there that the emperor illustrated what it meant to be the Son of Heaven and to hold its Mandate: 158

Religion and Politics, Church and State in Chinese History

it meant a magnificent parade to the southern suburbs of the capital to sacrifice a buffalo, a goat, and a pig, first to Heaven and then to the imperial ancestors. Anyone wishing to imagine the scale and solemnity of this sacrifice need only visit the Altar of Heaven (Tiantan) in Beijing, and the Daoist temple in the park nearby where the emperor prepared for this sacrifice by a period of fasting. Some decades before the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 ce, the Daoist religion was born and Buddhism entered China. The question of the relation between the pre-imperial Daoist philosophy of Laozi (fl. fifth century bce) and the Daoist religion is a fraught one. Put in the simplest possible terms, Laozi, who in the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce) was thought to have been a specialist of rites from whom Confucius sought instruction, was deified in the second century ce as the divine Lord Lao, embodiment of the cosmic Dao.5 Throughout the Han his ‘five-thousand character text’ (Wuqian wen) was read as a book on self-cultivation that led to immortality, and it was recited and taught in the context of the new Daoist religion. Daoist self-cultivation consisted in meditation on internal gods understood as ‘vital energy’ (qi), and Daoist ritual in using these internal energies to heal the sick and to send memorials to external gods understood as officials. The period between 220 and 589, when the Sui dynasty reunified China, is perhaps the most fertile in Chinese religious history. We shall here retain only four facts. First, Buddhism presented a huge challenge to the Chinese state because, coming from India, where the priestly was superior to the warrior (royal) caste, Buddhist monks at first refused to bow before the Son of Heaven. But ‘the head of the monks at the court of the Northern Wei, Faguo (fl. 396–409), explained that he was “paying homage, not to the emperor but to the Buddha.”’6 Second, together and separately each of the three teachings, all based on textual traditions requiring a high degree of literacy, defined itself in opposition to the religion of the mediums and their gods – the religion of the people –and participated in its occasional suppression or partial incorporation. Third, starting in the year 431, ‘altars were created with Daoist priests to serve them in every provincial capital. This is the first recorded unified system of state-supported religious institutions in Chinese history.’7 In the Tang dynasty (618–907), both Buddhism and Daoism had state-financed monasteries implanted throughout the empire. Fourth, during this period the state often sponsored debates between the three teachings in order to decide which should be ranked first. The definitive answer was given by Emperor Xuan (r. 578–80) 159

Religion and Politics

when he sat on his throne flanked by the images of the Buddha on his right and the Daoist Heavenly Worthy of the Primordial Beginning on his left:8 as the Son of Heaven who sacrificed to Heaven, he embodied in the first place the Confucian tradition, to which he had added the cosmic Buddha and Dao. All subsequent dynasties pursued similar policies of support of the three text-based teachings, their institutions and their rites. That is, as regards the Confucian religion, the register of sacrifices (sidian) in which were recorded all local cults deemed worthy of state recognition continued to be regularly updated, and the sacrifice to Heaven practised. Debate about the sacrifice to Heaven led in the Tang to its being defined not in terms of the ‘dynastic family’s possession of the empire’ but of the ‘public nature’ of the empire: New reliance on Haotian shangdi [Emperor on High of Bright Heaven] at the expense of other deities intensified the ruler’s identification with all-powerful Heaven and enhanced his standing as the one man and so improved cosmological grounds for an enhanced absolutism.9 The imperium sought basically to provide balanced support to Buddhism and Daoism. Thus in 738 Xuanzong decreed the selection of one temple each in all 331 districts. But a decree dated 637: gave formal precedence to Daoism over Buddhism on the grounds the latter was a foreign religion, while Daoism derived from the nameless Origin of the universe, and Laozi was the origin of the imperial clan. When the monk Zhishi protested, he was whipped to death . . . Imperial dreams of Laozi in the years 740 and 741 led to the unearthing of a statue of Laozi near Pavilion Hermitage – imperial confirmation that this was indeed the subject of Xuanzong’s dream – creation of a new temple to house it, and distribution of painted copies throughout the empire. The name of this new Daoist temple in Chang’an was Palace of Great Clarity (Taiqinggong 太清宮), and in it the statue of the emperor was placed next to that of Laozi.10 The Song dynasty (960–1276) also found for itself a Daoist ancestor and, therefore, continued the institutional favoritism shown to the native religion. But something radically new also took place under what was probably the most Daoist of all Chinese emperors, Huizong 160

Religion and Politics, Church and State in Chinese History

(r. 1101–26). Not only was he one of four emperors to write a commentary on the Laozi, he also became convinced that he was himself a high Daoist god, Changsheng dadi or Great Emperor of Long Life. He then ordered the creation of a whole new network of Daoist temples throughout the empire, each with the image of the divine emperor on a central altar: ‘They manifested to visitors, especially scholar-officials who were required by imperial order to pay their respects, the divinity of their current emperor.’11 An 1117 edict explained he felt he had ‘a mission of saving China from the foreign religion and returning it to the correct way.’12 The same emperor, in 1111, eliminated 1500 ‘illicit cult sites’ (yinsi) in the capital and, in 1117, prohibited male and female mediums: his creation of a Daoist theocracy went hand-in-hand with his attack on the religion of the people. But, as already suggested, suppression was only half of the story; the other half was to incorporate selected gods in the state registry of sacrifices. Such incorporations, done by giving the gods official titles and signboards, go back to the pre-imperial period, but they gained a new intensity under the Northern Song, especially under the two emperors – Shenzong (r. 1068–86) and Huizong – associated with ‘New Policies’ that increased central control and direct links between the centre and local society. Huizong’s divine Daoist identity and the unprecedented number of suppressions and incorporations are clearly three related expressions of these New Policies. Moreover, insofar as the procedures of incorporation were very reminiscent ‘of the way the medieval Catholic church vetted candidates for sainthood, it also reminds us that, in China, the real church was the state.’13 To complete our historical survey of the Chinese church-state, we must look briefly at the last native dynasty, the Ming (1368­–1644). Its founder, Taizu (r. 1368–99), decreed the creation of a network of territorial gods for all China: earth gods for every group of 110 families and city gods for every county and prefecture. The third emperor, Yongle (r. 1403–24), completed the network by placing at its pinnacle a god who had first gained state recognition in the Tang, Zhenwu (True Warrior). Not long after he had built a Forbidden City in Beijing containing a temple to Zhenwu, Yongle built a Forbidden City for the god at the top of the 1,700-metre Peak of the Celestial Column on Mount Wudang in Hubei province, where Zhenwu was said to have ascended to heaven. If an incoming county magistrate or prefect had to begin his tour of duty by reporting to the local city god, each Ming emperor after Yongle had, upon ascending the throne, to send a ‘sacrificial writ’ 161

Religion and Politics

to Zhenwu on Mount Wudang, to ask for his protection and help. This meant, in effect, that the administrative divisions of the empire had a parallel division into parishes, each centred on the worship of an official, state-designated ‘saint’: state officials, including the emperor, were subordinate to and dependent on a ‘church’ whose gods were ­dependent on state recognition. While the True Warrior was a vegetarian, many of the new Daoist martial gods that emerged in this period were meat-eaters, meaning that Daoism, which had begun life as a religion that rejected the blood sacrifices of popular religion, was engaged in a process of incorporation that paralleled and no doubt aided that of the state. The Buddhists, meanwhile, who had been forced by the Ming founder to regroup in large, state-recognised monasteries, were also increasingly allotting separate, entry-level halls to local gods. Local Buddhists and Daoists came also, especially in the Song, to be worshipped as local gods in their own right. Like the emerging national pantheon, emblematically represented by the gods of war and letters – Guandi and Wenchang –recognised by the state but also by the people, popular forms of Buddhism and Daoism – source of their elite reputation as ‘decadent’ and ‘in decline’ – were in fact contributing to the creation of a single Chinese religion, a religion whose time- and space-specific forms of institutionalisation had always to be negotiated anew with the state. But our story would not be complete if we did not evoke the parallel changes in Confucianism in the period from the Song to the Ming. Starting in the eleventh century, certain Confucians undertook to thoroughly refashion Confucianism by incorporating into it aspects of both Buddhism and Daoism and creating for it a philosophical genealogy very much like that of the Chan school of Buddhism. According to their view, the ‘transmission of the Way’ (daotong) had come to a halt with the pre-Qin philosopher Mencius (372­–289 bce), and the emperors of the Han and Tang did not qualify as embodiments of the Dao/ Way. That is, whereas the Confucians had hitherto seen themselves as ‘serving when the Way was practised and withdrawing when it was not’, they now saw themselves as the true depositories of the Confucian Way – and denied this role to the emperor. This startling new development, which came down to saying, like the Buddhists, that the state was no longer the church – to making a distinction between political and spiritual power – while it had a pre-history in the Han-era idea that Confucius was an ‘uncrowned king’ (suwang), was no doubt related to a key fact about the Song from the very start, namely, that it had to 162

Religion and Politics, Church and State in Chinese History

negotiate its status with tribal empires to the north and, in a word, recognise the existence of a second Son of Heaven who, to make matters worse, was the ‘elder brother’ of the Song. Throughout the Northern (960–1126) and Southern (1127–1260) Song, these ‘neo-Confucians’ as they are often called in English constituted a ‘war party’, while successive emperors and their hated prime ministers negotiated peace with non-Chinese regimes to the north. In the end, one of those regimes, that of the Mongols, extinguished the Song and ruled all China as the Yuan dynasty (1260–1368). The Mongols, themselves adherents of Tibetan Buddhism, began by abolishing the Confucian Classics-based examination system and relying heavily on Daoists and Buddhists to rule. But in 1314 they reinstated the examination system, using, for the first time as the basis for these exams, the so-called Four Books: the Lunyu of Confucius, the Mengzi (Mencius), and two separate chapters of the Classic Book of Rites (Liji), the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean) and the Daxue (Great Learning). The creation of what was in effect a new set of foundational Confucian scriptures was the work of Zhu Xi (1130–1200), and the new form of the exams was based not just on the Four Books, but also on Zhu Xi’s commentaries on them. In making neo-Confucianism official state orthodoxy, the Ming founder Taizu was thus following the Mongol lead. The consequence of bringing neo-Confucianism ‘in from the cold’ was that Taizu saw himself as a sage-king ‘who had united politics and morality’.14 He even went so far as to order the excision of 85 passages in the Mencius ‘that he saw as undermining the ruler’s authority’ (they were reinstated in 1414, under the Yongle emperor).15 He also wrote a commentary on the Laozi, in which he insisted on the idea that the sovereign’s body was coterminous with the body politic. That is, he took quite literally the ancient Daoist adage to the effect that ‘governing the state is like governing the body’. But, whereas this phrase was traditionally used by Daoists to explain to the emperor his need for Daoist self-cultivation so that the order which would then reign within his person would extend spontaneously to the empire, in the emperor’s commentary it became a different matter altogether: because he embodied the Dao, the state was in effect his Body. In short, Ming ‘absolutism’ was founded on Daoist ontology (ti) and expressed pragmatically in the form of Confucian orthodoxy (yong). The Jiajing emperor (r. 1522­ –67), who likewise saw himself as 16 ‘uniting politics and morality’,’ has with reason been called ‘the most 163

Religion and Politics

Daoist of the Ming emperors’.17 But, as the result of a rites controversy in which he insisted, against his Confucian counsellors, on making sacrifices to his biological father rather than to the previous emperor as adoptive father, he made a decisive change in state policy that would lead to the transformation of China into a lineage society built around sacrifices to ancestors. Until his reign, in accord with the Book of Rites, ordinary people had only parents and grandparents: legally, they were not allowed to have ancestors because ancestors and their worship were, from the beginning of Chinese history, directly associated with political power. ‘The rites [of ancestor worship],’ the Book of Rites famously stated, ‘do not go down to the people.’ Already one of the Confucians of the early Song whose thought would become central to Zhu Xi’s synthesis, Cheng Yi (1033–1107), had said that all people should have the right, indeed the obligation, to worship their ‘founding ancestor’ (shizu), that is, the individual, however far removed in time, that a given local family group saw as its origin. But in Cheng Yi’s time and for long after, one had to be a high official in order to worship anyone beyond one’s grandfather, and the founding ancestor was off limits to all but the imperial family. The neo-Confucians had continued to chip away at these ritual/legal interdictions, but it was not until 1536 that the Jiajing emperor ‘finally gave to the commoners the right to have ancestors.’18 This gradually led to the utter transformation of Chinese society by the creation of ever-bigger and more powerful lineages, with ancestral halls (citang) and genealogies (zupu). As David Faure has written: The lineage villages built around their ancestral halls that Maurice Freedman wrote about were few and far between in the early Ming era. Had Freedman visited the Pearl River Delta in that period, he would have seen the remnants of the Buddhist monasteries that had served as focal points of local organization in an earlier age . . . The administrative transformation of county government and the ritual reforms that ushered in the family temple together promoted the lineage society that lasted from the sixteenth century until the nineteenth.19 This is the Chinese society encountered by the Jesuits when they arrived in China in the late Ming, and that enabled them to more or less plausibly describe China as a society governed by a Confucianism which was not a religion but a philosophy. 164

Religion and Politics, Church and State in Chinese History

The Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1911), like the Mongol Yuan before it, practised a form of Tibetan Buddhism. With regard to Daoism, they shifted their patronage away from the Heavenly Master tradition supported by the Ming to the Integral Perfection tradition first supported by the Yuan. But, above all, ‘the three great Qing emperors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries claimed to have ended the distinction between politics and morality and the tension between literati and rulers by uniting the ‘succession of the Way’ and political power in their own person.’20 Ming and Qing emperors, in other words, saw themselves as pope-sovereigns of their church-state. After the fall of the Qing in 1911, successive governments sought to modernise China, in part by destroying its traditional religious culture, classed as ‘superstition’ (mixin) in the Republican (1912–49) and as ‘feudal superstition’ (fengjian mixin) in the Communist period. All through the Republican era, temples were confiscated and turned into schools, or simply destroyed. The height of the destruction occurred during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). But what needs to be underlined is that, however radical twentieth-century destruction was, it built on millennia-old elite, essentially Confucian attitudes and assumptions. In the past, episodic destruction of temples of the people’s religion had been supplemented by occasional suppressions of Buddhism, Manichaeism, and multiple rebellions characterised by the same mix of religion and politics as the state itself. Legitimacy was totally bound up in the religious self-definition of the state and its ruler, meaning that, in matters religious, the church-state was the final arbiter and brooked no opposition. At the same time, the ongoing reverence, for Sun Yatsen in Taiwan and for Mao Zedong in China, while it may look to a Westerner not unlike American reverence for George Washington, must also be understood in terms of the millennia-old worship of dynastic founders, as what can only be characterised as the divinisation of Mao can be made sense of only if the divine status of the Son of Heaven is factored in – divine status which moved, as we saw above, from mere association of ancestors and Heaven or the Dao to the self-definition of the Song emperor Huizong as a Daoist god to the Ming founder’s conviction he embodied the Dao. The divinisation of the ruler of a religious state is not an occasional aberration but an intrinsic part of its foundational logic. In contemporary China, which has moved decisively away from the disastrous personality cult of Mao, as did Song China from that of Huizong, what remains unchanged is that ideological orthodoxy and orthopraxy – things associated by Westerners with religions – continue 165

Religion and Politics

to be determined by the state. If in the past it was the emperor, today it is the Party that functions like a church. Over the last decade, as China has risen to world power status, it has begun to redefine itself. If, in the Maoist era, it challenged Moscow as the centre of world communism, the soft power it now exports is embodied in some 350 Confucius Institutes implanted in universities throughout the world. Indeed, one could legitimately say that, under Hu Jintao (r. 2002–2012), with his ‘harmonious society’ (hexie shehui), the revolutionary page was definitively turned, and the Restoration begun. But had Confucianism ever died? As a religion of blood sacrifices to Heaven, the gods, and the ancestors, yes. But as a patriarchal, elitist, and hierarchical ideology of power, in becoming ‘secular’, it became an even better foundation for a church-state in which orthodoxy had only one legitimate form of institutionalisation. That is, by delegitimising all forms of sacrifice other than that for Party and State, it effectively abolished all religious challengers. This alone can explain the paradox that the ‘people’s government’ acted so decisively to realise the millennial dream of Confucian orthodoxy to eliminate the religion of the people’s gods. To this day, long after the national Institute for the Study of World Religions in Beijing had recognised Daoism, Buddhism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism as the five world religions worthy of study, the people’s religion – insofar as it has been allowed to reoccupy the space the empire had begrudgingly conceded to it – is still classified not as a ‘religion’ but as a ‘belief’ (minjian xinyang). And Confucianism? Why is it the only one of the traditional three teachings not to be studied in the Institute? Surely because the idea it was and is a ‘purely secular’ political and ethical philosophy – not a religion – has prevailed. That, precisely, is what makes it an ideology made to order for inspiriting the practice of a modern church-state.

Notes 1. Mark Csikszentmihalyi (2009), ‘Ethics and self-cultivation practice in early China’, Early Chinese Religion Part One: Shang through Han (1250 bc–220 ad), Leiden: Brill, vol. 1, pp. 525–7. Because ancestors represented political power, only the elite had the right to sacrifice to ancestors. 2. Michael Nylan, ‘Classics without canonization: Learning and authority in Qin and Han’, Early Chinese Religion Part One: Shang through Han (1250 bc–220 ad), vol. 2, p. 748. 3. Cf. John Lagerwey (2010), China: A Religious State, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, p. 26.

166

Religion and Politics, Church and State in Chinese History 4. Ibid. 5. See Anna Seidel (1969), La divinisation de Lao Tseu dans le taoïsme des Han, Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient. 6. Leon Hurvitz (translator), Wei Shou Treatise on Buddhism and Taoism, an English translation of the original Chinese text of Wei-shu CXIV and the Japanese annotation of Tsukamoto Zenryû, reprint of Yün-kang, the Buddhist Cave-Temples of the Fifth Century ad in North China, vol. 16 supplement (Jimbunkagaku Kenkyusho, 1956), p. 53. 7. Lagerwey, China: A Religious State, p. 32. 8. Lagerwey, China: A religious state, p. 35. 9. Howard Wechsler (1985), Offerings of Jade and Silk: Ritual and Symbol in the Legitimation of the T’ang Dynasty, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. x. 10. Lagerwey, China: A Religious State, pp. 33–7. 11. Shin-yi Chao (2006), ‘Huizong and the Divine Empyrean Palace Temple Network’, in Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics, ed. Patricia Ebrey and Maggie Bickford, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 349. 12. Patricia Ebrey, ‘Huizong’s stone inscriptions’, in Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China, p. 257. 13. Lagerwey, China: A Religious State, p. 43. On the procedures, see Valerie Hansen (1990), Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127–1276, Princeton: Princeton University Press, ch. 4. 14. Peter Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008, p. 146. 15. Bol, Neo-Confucianism, p. 147. 16. Bol, Neo-Confucianism, p. 151. 17. Pierre-Henry de Bruyn (2004), ‘Wudang shan: The Origins of a Major Center of Modern Taoism’, in John Lagerwey (ed.), Religion and Society in Chinese History, vol. 2, Taoism and Local Religion in Modern China, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Chinese University Press, p. 573. 18. Lagerwey, China: A Religious State, p. 50. 19. David Faure (2007), Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 14. 20. Bol, Neo-Confucianism, p. 151. Bol is referring to the emperors Kangxi (r. 1661– 1722), Yongzheng (r. 1723–35), and Qianlong (r. 1736–95).

167

10 Religion and the State in Contemporary Japan Elisabetta Porcu

T

Introduction

he relationship between religion and the state in Japan has been the object of investigation in an increasing number of scholarly works in the last decades (for example, Hardacre 1989, 2006; Kisala 1994; Nakano 1996; Forfar 1996; Mullins 2010; the contributions in Porcu and Watt 2012; Isomae 2012; Klein 2012; Fisker-Nielsen 2012; Kleine 2013; Dessì 2013). One of the most intriguing and debated issues in this regard has been the separation of religion and state (Jp. seikyō bunri) as legally sanctioned by the Japanese Constitution (1947), in particular by Articles 20 and 89. Article 20 sanctions freedom of religion for all, prohibits state privileges for religious organisations, and specifies the non-interference of the state into religious education or other religious activities. Article 89 is more related to the financial aspect of this matter and states that no public money should be used for religious activities. Both articles are included in the post-war Constitution of Japan, which was strongly influenced and demanded by the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP) after the defeat of Japan in World War II. Historically, it was preceded by the Shintō Directives in 1945 issued by SCAP and was conceived as a way to bring an end to what is known as State Shintō, that is, a system where state support was granted for Shintō from the beginning of the Meiji period until the end of World War II (1868–1945). During this period, Shintō was elevated to the position of the state religion while a series of directives and regulations were issued to ensure its privileged status over other religious organisations. Among the measures taken in this regard, of mention are the compelled participation in shrine rituals for all citizens, a strong presence of Shintō-related activities and teachings in the field of education, the priestly role of the emperor, the building of Shintō 168

Religion and the State in Contemporary Japan

shrines in Japanese colonies, the propagation of wartime ideology, and the repression of other religions,1 such as Buddhism and new religious movements. Buddhism was particularly affected by these developments. It not only lost the state patronage it had until then, but also suffered persecutions through what is known as the haibutsu kishaku (literally, ‘abolish the Buddha, destroy Shakyamuni’) campaign, during which many temples were destroyed. This followed the decrees issued by the Japanese government in 1868 enacting the separation of Shintō and Buddhism (Jp. shinbutsu bunri),2 two religious systems with many internal differences that had coexisted until then. Before 1868, the strong ties between Buddhism and the state were visible, for example, in the Edo period (1600–1868) and the state-sponsored temple registration system (Jp. terauke seido), through which the government was able to control the population, while the banning of Christianity started in the sixteenth century. Buddhism also had a strong position during the more ancient Ritsuryō system (645–1185). This centralised governmental system, based on penal and administrative codes (thus the name ritsu-ryō), saw the establishment of provincial Buddhist temples (Jp. kokubunji) that functioned as protectors of the state (see also Hardacre 2006: 277–8). As we can see from this very cursory glance, the relation between religion and the state in Japan is a complex one and over the course of its history it went through several developments. In this chapter, I will concentrate on contemporary developments in this relationship and on how the two spheres of religion and the secular overlap and compete in various fields. In particular, I will focus on the relation of religion with different aspects of politics in Japan, including political agendas and strategies undertaken by religious institutions to play an active role in public life, as well as sensitive issues connected to the separation of state and religion as expressed by the Japanese Constitution.

The separation of state and religion in contemporary Japan The role of religion in public affairs As mentioned at the beginning, Articles 20 and 89 of the Japanese Constitution legally sanction the separation of state and religion in society. This separation is, however, subject to different interpretations and has raised legal questions that are often difficult to solve. Such interpretations, together with the fact that support for candidates and 169

Religion and Politics

the formation of political parties by religious groups are not disallowed by the Japanese Constitution, have contributed to the involvement of various religious institutions in politics. Establishing political parties is in particular evident with reference to new religious movements. A famous example is the creation in 1964 of the Kōmeitō, or the Clean Government Party, which was founded by the largest new religious movement in Japan, Sōka Gakkai.3 In the 1970s the Kōmeitō became one of the three major parties and its establishment was met with criticism by other religious organisations and by a public opinion preoccupied with the intrusion of religious groups into public affairs. Such criticism was particularly linked to the party’s reliance on the fusion of Buddhism and politics (Jp. ōbutsu myōgō) as well as its idea of establishing a national ordination platform (Jp. kokuritsu kaidan),4 which was seen as a clear infringement upon Article 20. Sōka Gakkai renounced this idea in 1970, when the independence of the political party from the religious group was declared. The strong link between Sōka Gakkai and Kōmeitō (since 1998, Shin Kōmeitō or New Kōmeitō), however, still remains and the support for candidates by the religious group continues.5 Such a situation is made possible because Article 20 does not deny the possibility of a religious organisation forming a political party, which is seen as an expression of religious freedom by those religious groups involved in politics. Sōka Gakkai was not the only religious organisation that created its own political arm. In 1989 the controversial new religious movement Aum Shinrikyō, after receiving legal recognition as a religious body, created the Shinrintō (Supreme Truth Party). In 1990 they ran for the first time in elections, but none of the candidates won a seat in the Lower House. Various observers have seen this defeat, together with strong media criticism, as a further reason for Aum Shinrikyō’s withdrawal from society and its rise in violence that culminated in the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in March 1995.6 This was also a turning point in the revision of the Religious Corporations Law (Jp. Shūkyō hōjinhō), which regulates religious groups in Japan. Approved in December 1995, the revision was based on the aim of reinforcing the control over religious groups by the state.7 More recently, another new religious movement, Kōfuku no Kagaku (Happy Science), founded in 1986, established its own political party, the Happiness Realization Party (Kōfuku Jitsugentō), in 2009. The political party was formally initiated during the crisis caused by the North Korean nuclear missile tests. Its 2009 election campaign was 170

Religion and the State in Contemporary Japan

characterised by very aggressive stances against North Korea, the necessity to revise Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution and to establish armed forces.8 These themes were promoted again during following campaigns together with the necessity for Japan to possess nuclear weapons (see Tsuiki 2012a). Since its creation, the party has experienced a series of changes in its leadership and both Ōkawa Ryūhō, founder of this religious movement, and his then wife, Kyōko, had been party leaders.9 The Happiness Realization Party ran for elections between 2009 and 2012 but won no seats in the Parliament.10 Interesting in this regard is the response given to the 2012 election result by the then party leader, Tsuiki Shūgaku, on the political website. The Happiness Realization Party’s conservative stance, its nuclear energy policy and the wish to ‘overcome the current national crisis by “restoring the spirit of religion” in Japan’ clearly emerges in one declaration made by Tsuiki in December 2012: With the escalating military threats from neighboring countries, prolonged economic recession, the campaign to abandon nuclear power generation, and other developments, Japan is truly facing a dangerous situation. The Happiness Realization Party is thus fighting to restore Japan based on the three elements of defensive strength, economic strength, and nuclear energy. (Tsuiki 2012a) Further on, the contribution of the Happiness Realization Party to ‘“a resurgence of conservatives” among voters’ is proudly declared. In the case of the Happiness Realization Party, the borders between politics and religion clearly vanish while the religious organisation does not make any secret of its aim to create a state where religion plays a fundamental role in every aspect of society. In Ōkawa’s words, this is referred to as a ‘religious state’ (Jp. shūkyō kokka), which would be the starting point for the realisation of ‘the utopia of a Buddha land’, destined to encompass the whole world (Dessì 2013: 112). In all this, Japan is seen as the centre of civilisation and plays a leading role in the global world. According to the Happiness Realization Party’s online profile, ‘Japan should offer a model of a religious nation’ for the rest of the world.11 This role is, however, impeded by the separation of religion and state sanctioned by the Japanese Constitution, which is seen as an external imposition by the Western powers following the defeat in World War II. Religion and politics, according to the Happiness Realization Party, ‘should be integrated’, and Article 20 of 171

Religion and Politics

the Constitution is interpreted to guarantee any freedom of choice, including the possibility for religious groups to undertake political activities.12 While having referred to a few examples related to new religious movements and politics in Japan, these are not the only religious groups involved in public affairs. Well-established Buddhist denominations and Shintō-related groups have always attempted to find their place in public life, as we will see below. Facets of secularisation Various scholars have recently highlighted several aspects of secularisation in Japan, such as the institutional decline of religion13 as well as the difficulties faced by temples and shrines in contemporary Japan, in particular in rural areas (see, for example, Reader 2012; Nelson 2012); the role of global dynamics in determining religious institutions’ strategies towards pressing problems, such as those linked to secular education, politics and the economics (see Nelson 2011; Dessì 2013); the separation of the religious and secular spheres in pre-modern Japan from the point of view of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory (Kleine 2013); and secularisation seen as ‘privatisation’ and the processes of ‘deprivatising’ Shintō and Buddhism in the public sphere (Mullins 2012; Shimazono 2012).14 The debate over the separation of the religious and the secular is very often linked to another sensitive issue, the concept of religion itself in the Japanese context as exemplified by the word shūkyō (religion). This discussion is vast and surely deserves much more space than a few lines; here I can only briefly mention a main point at stake in this regard. Christoph Kleine, countering Timothy Fitzgerald’s claim that the dichotomy religion-secular was first imported in Japan in the Meiji period – together with the word shūkyō – and was thus alien to the Japanese before that period (Fitzgerald 2003),15 argues that these two categories can be seen at work also in pre-modern Japan, even though, he adds, ‘this distinction was not terminologically represented by terms entirely equivalent to “our” terms “religion” and “secular”’ (Kleine 2013). Fitzgerald’s article has been criticised by Ian Reader as well, who almost a decade ago highlighted that the two categories of religious and non-religious have been separated at different levels in Japanese history from ancient times, for example, in the ōbō-buppō, or imperial law and Buddhist law divide (Reader 2004). In this context, Isomae Jun’ichi has recently analysed the term shūkyō as a Western import influenced by 172

Religion and the State in Contemporary Japan

Protestantism and imbued with Eurocentrism and the ways it became embedded in the Japanese context (Isomae 2012). With the debate continuing and more works on this topic being published, we should surely expect the publication of other studies in the near future. At this point, given the history of Shintō, and its long-standing and strong involvement in state affairs from the Meiji period until the end of World War II, it is worth dedicating some space here to see how this has developed in the post-war period and in contemporary Japan. We have already mentioned that the Shintō Directives and the postwar Constitution legally abolished State Shintō and separated religion from the state. As Mark Mullins has noticed, ‘The Occupation policies clearly “secularized” Shintō by removing it from the public sphere.’16 Drawing from what José Casanova has called a process of ‘deprivatisation’ of religion, meaning a refusal by religious institutions to remain confined to the private sphere ‘which theories of modernity as well as theories of secularisation had reserved from them’ and the need to play a role in societal issues (Casanova 1994: 5–6), Mullins analyses the attempts of Shintō-related groups and associations to restore the authority of Shintō in the public sphere, in particular in relation to politics and education (Mullins 2012). He sees these attempts as the ‘Shintō-related neonationalistic response to the imposition of a “foreign” social order on Japan.’ He highlights how with the end of the occupation (1952), ‘religious and political leaders quickly mobilised forces to restore Shintō to public life and institutions’ (Mullins 2012: 72). The motivation for such a re-engagement arose from a feeling of having been ‘colonised’ by the Allied powers and of a loss of influence in the public sphere (ibid.). Among the organisations that have worked in the direction of ‘deprivatising’ Shintō, we find the Jinja Honchō (Association of Shintō Shrines, that is, the umbrella association that includes the great majority of shrines in Japan) and its political arm, the Shintō Seiji Renmei (Shintō Association of Spiritual Leadership), which was established in 1969 and has since closely collaborated with the Liberal Democratic Party.17 Among the aims of the Shintō Association of Spiritual Leadership are a revision of the Constitution, the re-nationalisation of rites for ‘glorious war dead’ (Jp. eirei) at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo and an education system based on pre-war moral and religious principles.18 In this regard, the Yasukuni Shrine is one clear example of how the borders between state and religion blur and poses interesting questions that are relevant to our discussion. In this shrine, since the Meiji period, military personnel who died in 173

Religion and Politics

Japanese wars have been enshrined, and among them are also Class A war criminals (from 1978). The Yasukuni Shrine was a powerful tool for propagating wartime ideology and remains a controversial site that aims to revive nationalism and the role of Shintō in public affairs. As Helen Hardacre noticed, it ‘occupies a central position in government revival of prewar Shintō symbolism, and the shrine in turn is central to an emerging myth of the national identity, encompassing the legitimation of the state’ (Hardacre 1989: 145). From 1969 to 1974, the Liberal Democratic Party made several attempts to pass a bill to reinstate state support for the shrine, but due to strong criticism by various religious groups and activists such plans failed (Mullins 2012: 75). Yasukuni is also a site and a symbol for power struggles. Various Japanese Prime Ministers, including Nakasone Yasuhiro and Koizumi Jun’ichirō, made ‘official visits’ to the shrine, raising harsh protests from religious groups and individuals concerned with the violation of the separation of state and religion. These visits have been severely criticised by countries that suffered under occupation by imperial Japan, such as China, Korea and Taiwan, and legal battles have been initiated in Japan, both against the Yasukuni Shrine and the government. Other lawsuits have been undertaken by members of the bereaved families who strongly objected the forced enshrinement of their relatives in Yasukuni, be it for religious reasons (adherents of Christianity and some schools of Buddhism), or because they did not want to be associated with the colonial past (for example, Taiwanese people).19 All these have condemned such actions as an infringement of Article 20 of the Constitution and of religious freedom.20 While some of these lawsuits were successful, others failed. It has been noted that in the Japanese judicial system it is very difficult for a citizen to ‘successfully sue the government for breaches of the Constitution in relation to the separation of state and religion’ (Forfar 1996: 270). Although a prominent example, Yasukuni is not the only site or reason for citizens to initiate a lawsuit against the state with reference to Articles 20 or 89. Other legal battles include those against the use of public funds for performing Shintō rituals – such as the ground-breaking ceremony (Jp. jichinsai) and a state funeral for a soldier who died in an accident (despite his Christian wife’s opposition) – as well as protests at the community level against the interference of the government within the so-called neighborhood associations (see below).21 All this speaks of how the sensitive borders between religion and the state in Japan have raised not only criticism but also intricate legal questions. 174

Religion and the State in Contemporary Japan

Shintō is not the only tradition that has tried to re-establish its role in society. With reference to the concept of Casanova’s ‘public religion’, Shimazono Susumu has recently analysed the active participation of Buddhism in the public sphere. In particular, he noticed that the terrible earthquake, tsunami, and the nuclear power plant accident in Fukushima that took place in March 2011 ‘have raised the visibility of activities carried out by religious organisations, in particular Buddhist organisations, in the public sphere’ (Shimazono 2012: 214). Through the 1990s the common view was that Buddhism, and religion in general, had abandoned the public sphere and became a private matter. The situation became more critical after the sarin gas attack in 1995, which increased this view, and few people, according to Shimazono, at that time expected religion recover its public role (Shimazono 2012: 206). After the 2011 disaster, Buddhist groups have tried to get their voices heard in society, in particular with regard to the nuclear power policy pursued by the government (Shimazono: 218 ff.). However, such an involvement of Buddhist denominations in politics, according to Shimazono, does not necessarily mean ‘a return to the age when religion and politics were integrated’. He comments further by writing that today this ‘is based on the full understanding of the multiplicity and relativity of religious denominations and freedom of individual thought and beliefs’ (Shimazono 2012: 212). As for other cases, he refers to Article 20 of the Japanese Constitution that, as mentioned above, guarantees freedom of religion while not condemning the involvement of religious groups in public issues (Shimazono 2012: 213). These few examples show the subtle and complex dynamics at work when considering the separation of religion and the state and the participation of religion in public affairs. At another level – that of community life and cultural activities – this issue can be seen at work, although in a more veiled and less apparent way. In the following section, before heading to a conclusion, I will briefly illustrate how this emerges in the case of neighborhood associations as well as the promotion of religious activities also through UNESCO campaigns.

The separation of state and religion in community life and culture The blurring of the secular and the religious can be seen at work in relation to culture, as I recently pointed out with reference to the activities at the community level and the case of the Gion festival in Kyoto, where 175

Religion and Politics

the intermingling of religion and local government, as well as religion, business and tourism comes to the fore (Porcu 2012).22 Japanese towns and villages are divided into neighborhoods (Jp. chō), and many of them are linked to a Shintō shrine.23 Each neighbourhood is organised through what are called neighbourhood associations, or chōnaikai in Japanese. These associations play a pivotal role in community life, and the boundaries between the religious and the secular very often vanish. Present-day urban neighbourhood associations are said to have their origin in the Edo period when legally recognised administrative units, the gonin gumi (five-household group), served as powerful means for governmental control and played a relevant role in controlling the system of temple registration as well as the ban on Christianity (Bestor 1989: 52–3, 294 n. 6; and Williams 2009: 18, 142 n. 37). These organised groups, which were abolished by the Meiji government in its efforts to modernise Japan, later developed into chōnaikai during the 1930s, with their establishment being made compulsory at the national level in 1940 (Steiner 1965: 219). Neighborhood associations were thus transformed into governmental agents (Aoyagi 1983: 96), consolidated into a ‘nationally centralized system’ (Bestor 1989: 70), and as such served the Japanese war effort and militarism through a massive mobilisation of the population until the end of World War II. In 1947 they were formally dissolved by the Japanese government under the direction of SCAP. However, they remained active under new guises until 1951 when the ban was abolished. So many new associations appeared that by 1956 they were active in 86 per cent of the municipalities in Japan (Bestor 1989: 75–6). This brief description shows the relevance of the neighbourhood associations within Japanese society and their involvement in governmental affairs. An aspect that is worthy of mention here is that the SCAP directives limited the links between the neighborhood associations and Shintō organisations, including festivals, which were among the activities carried out by the former (see also Aoyagi 1983: 96). Some activities carried out by the neighborhood associations today are related to religion, such as organising festivals at the local level. Funding for such festivals, as well as various religious activities, many of which are linked to Shintō, come also from monthly fees paid by the residents of the neighbourhood.24 This has brought about criticism from adherents of other religious traditions, who have refused to join the association, paid the required fees for Shintō festivals, or complained with the local government because circulating information about religion at the community level was violating Article 176

Religion and the State in Contemporary Japan

20.25 The case of the neighbourhood associations is borderline because officially they are no longer governmental institutions. However, the link with governmental offices remains and is visible, for example, in communications and items that are distributed to the residents.26 In addition to this, these associations play a pivotal role in the organisation of festivals, which from an emic perspective are very often considered not religious but cultural activities, and their organisation seen as a part of their civic role. At this point, it is interesting to see how – at the governmental level and in promotional campaigns, such as UNESCO campaigns that promote national identity at the global level – religious events such as festivals and pilgrimages are promoted as cultural events while their religious aspects are very often overlooked. Because of the separation of religion and state, the government is not legally authorised to promote religious rituals and therefore in its campaign to gain UNESCO World Heritage recognition it may not list religious activities on the Japanese inventories, but may promote them as cultural pursuits.27 Similarly, religious sites like those related to pilgrimages have undergone this process. In this context, Reader has shown how the Shikoku pilgrimage has been ‘reformulated in public representations as a “brand”, . . . a holiday, hiking and heritage trail’ by one of the organisations involved in the UNESCO campaign, and how, in order for pilgrimages to be successful, the focus has been shifted from their religious character to tourism and heritage. This shifting is seen as a further sign of an increasing secularisation in Japan (Reader 2012: 29). UNESCO campaigns related to festivals and pilgrimages, which aim at promoting religious events as exclusively cultural events, can be also considered an attempt to circumvent the constitutional regulations as expressed by Articles 20 and 89, and thus to overcome the thin line of separation between the religious and the secular spheres.

Conclusion The complex relationship between religion and the state in Japan can be seen at work in various fields, such as politics, academic debates, and cultural activities, as we have explored in the discussion above. In particular, in this chapter I have examined the complex issue of the separation of religion and state as sanctioned by the Japanese Constitution and its connection to legal issues, the involvement of religious groups in politics – and in the public sphere more in general 177

Religion and Politics

– and the rise of a vivid debate within the academic world. We have seen the establishment of political parties by new religious movements, such as Sōka Gakkai and Kōfuku no Kagaku; the role played by Buddhism in the public sphere, in particular after the 2011 disaster; and that of Shintō over the course of Japanese history. Shintō acquired the status of state religion during the period 1868 to 1945, thus being closely connected with governmental affairs, lost this status after World War II and since then has tried to re-affirm its authority in society through politically oriented activities. The case of the Yasukuni Shrine has been a relevant example shedding light on the sensitive issue of the separation of state and religion as well as its implications both at the national level and in the political relations between Japan and its neighbour countries. The separation of state and religion has been highlighted at the community level as well with an examination of the neighbourhood associations, which, although officially no longer governmental institutions, maintain their close connection with the government. This has brought about complaints by residents who consider some of their activities related to religion as an infringement upon Article 20 of the Constitution. In sum, the subtle line of separation between religion and the state in various aspects presented in this chapter reflects only a small part of a sensitive issue that surely deserves academic attention and raises relevant points of discussion for a better understanding of today’s society, both within and outside the borders of a single country.

Notes 1. A useful overview of the relationship between state and religion in Japan is Hardacre (2006). Hardacre (1989) provides an insightful analysis of the relationship between Shintō and the state from the Meiji period to the late 1980s. Please note that taking into account the nature of this chapter and of this volume, I do not refer in this article to sources in Japanese, but only in English. 2. An analysis of the persecution of Buddhism in the Meiji period is provided in Ketelaar (1990). 3. Sōka Gakkai is based on the teachings of the Nichiren school of Buddhism founded by the medieval monk Nichiren (1222–82). The main scripture of this school is the Lotus Sūtra. 4. For an introduction to these issues, see Kisala (1994), which deals in particular with the reactions of other religious groups toward the involvement of Sōka Gakkai in the Kōmeitō. See also Dessì (2013: 107). 5. In this regard, see Kisala (1994) and Dessì (2013: 106–9); for a recent contribution on Sōka Gakkai and politics, see also Klein (2012) and Fisker-Nielsen (2012).

178

Religion and the State in Contemporary Japan 6. See, for example, Repp (2005; 2011); and Baffelli and Reader (2012). 7. In this regard, see the special volume ‘Revising the Religious Corporations Law’ of the journal Japanese Religions, 22 (1) (1997). 8. Article 9 (Renunciation of War) prohibits Japan from having a military force. Japan has only Self-Defence Forces. 9. For an analysis of the relationship between religion and politics in Kōfuku no Kagaku as related to globalisation issues, see Dessì (2013: 109 ff.). 10. One exception can be seen in the fact that a member of the Democratic Party of Japan at the House of Councillors, Ōe Yasuhiro, joined in 2010 the Kōfuku Jitsugentō. However, later in December he withdrew from the party (Dessì 2013: 110). 11. http://en.hr-party.jp/profile (accessed 24 January 2013). 12. See the section ‘Separation of state and religion’ in ‘Our philosophy (official website in English of the Happiness Realization Party http://en.hr-party.jp/ philosophy (accessed 24 January 2013). 13. This is only one interpretation of the secularisation theory. Due to limits of space and the nature of this book chapter, it is not my intention to delve here into details regarding the secularisation debate and the definition of secularisation. The literature in this regard is vast, but for a recent overview of this debate, see, for example, Gorski and Altinordu (2008). 14. I am referring here to the most recent scholarship in English related to Japan. In 1979 a special issue of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies was dedicated to the issue of secularisation in Japan. However, a detailed analysis of the secularisation debate in Japan goes beyond the scope of this chapter. 15. Fitzgerald has argued for casting aside the term ‘religion’, be it an ideological construction derived, among others, from the Western imposition of the separation of religion and secular in Japan. He also called for a deconstruction of the academic study of religion as an independent discipline, be it an ideological construct, and that it should be rethought as cultural studies (Fitzgerald 2000: 181, 10). 16. Mullins (2012: 68). At the same time, the Japanese Constitution and its guarantee of freedom of religion allowed for the creation of hundreds of new religious movements that were able to exist without interference from the state (Mullins 2012: 68). 17. Apart from a few defeats (1993 and 2009 elections), the LDP has been the ruling party in Japan since the 1950s. 18. See the official website (in Japanese) at http://www.sinseiren.org/shinseirentoha/ shinseirenntoha.htm (see also Mullins 2012: 73; Dessì 2013: 103). 19. Enshrinement in the Yasukuni is not a free choice. 20. Space does not permit for the analysis of this issue in detail. In this regard, see Hardacre (1989); Dessì (2007); and Mullins (2010, 2012). 21. See Hardacre (1989: 149–52); Forfar (1996: 265–6); Nelson (2012: 44–6); Porcu (2012: 93–4). 22. The intermingling of religion and the secular, both in the form of entertainment, business and tourism, in the case of festivals is not new as we can see in the Edo period. In this regard, see, for example, Hur (2000). 23. This is the so-called ujiko-ujigami system, where uji means ‘clan’ and ujiko literally means ‘children of the clan’, that is, the ‘children of the clan kami’, the

179

Religion and Politics ujigami. The latter ‘denotes the clan’s guardian kami, the kami who look after family and community life. The ujigami symbolises the superordinate system of the community’ (Sonoda 1975: 104). 24. For a more detailed analysis of the neighborhood associations’ activities and their link with religion and the secular, see Porcu (2012). 25. Cf. Forfar 1996: 248–9. 26. A clear example of the link between neighbourhood associations and local authorities are the procedures for renting flats that are administered by the city government of Kyoto. Among the documents necessary for the rental contract, residents are required to sign an agreement through which they commit themselves to enter the neighbourhood association and actively participate in its activities. 27. See Porcu (2012: 95–6). Here, I analysed the case of one of the major festivals in Japan, the Gion festival. In 1979 its main event, the float ceremony (Kyōto Gion matsuri no yamahoko gyōji), was designated as an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property and in 2009 it was inscribed in the inventory of the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

References Aoyagi, Kiyotaka (1983), ‘Viable traditions in urban Japan: Matsuri and Chonaikai’, in Town-talk: The Dynamics of Urban Anthropology, ed. Ghaus Ansari and P. Nas, Leiden: Brill, pp. 96–111. Arnason, Johann (2002), The Peripheral Centre: Essays on Japanese History and Civilization, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Baffelli, Erica and Reader, Ian (eds) (2012), ‘Impact and ramifications: The aftermath of the Aum Affair in the Japanese religious context’, special issue of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 39 (1). Bestor, Theodore C. (1989), Neighborhood Tokyo, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Casanova, José (1994), Public Religions in the Modern World, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Dessì, Ugo (2007), Ethics and Society in Contemporary Shin Buddhism, Berlin: Lit Verlag. Dessì, Ugo (2013), Japanese Religions and Globalization, London and New York: Routledge. Fisker-Nielsen, Anne Mette (2012), Religion and Politics in Contemporary Japan: Soka Gakkai Youth and Komeito, London and New York: Routledge. Fitzgerald, Timothy (2000), The Ideology of Religious Studies, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fitzgerald, Timothy (2003), ‘Religion and the secular in Japan: Problems in history, social anthropology and the study of religion’, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/discussionpapers/Fitzgerald. html (accessed 25 January 2013). Forfar, David (1996), ‘Individual against the state? The Politics of opposition to the reemergence of State Shintō’, in Roger Goodman and Ian Neary (eds), Case Studies on Human Rights in Japan, London: Routledge, pp. 245–76.

180

Religion and the State in Contemporary Japan Gorski, Philip S., and Altinordu, Ates (2008), ‘After secularization?’, Annual Review of Sociology, 34, pp. 55–85. Hardacre, Helen (1989), Shintō and the State 1868–1988, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hardacre, Helen (2006), ‘State and religion in Japan’, in P. Swanson and C. Chilson (eds), Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 274–88. Hur, Nam-lin (2000), Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensōji and Edo Society, Boston: Harvard University Asia Center. Isomae, Jun’ichi (2012), ‘The conceptual formation of the category “Religion” in modern Japan: Religion, State, Shintō’, Journal of Religion in Japan, 1 (3), pp. 226–45. Ketelaar, James (1990), Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and its Persecution, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Kisala, Robert (1994), ‘Sōka Gakkai, Kōmeitō, and the separation of religion and state in Japan’, Bulletin of the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, 18, pp. 7–17. Klein, Axel (2012), ‘Twice bitten, once shy: Religious organizations and politics after the Aum Affair’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 39 (1), pp. 77–98. Kleine, Christoph (2013), ‘Religion and the secular in premodern Japan from the viewpoint of systems theory’, Journal of Religion in Japan, 2 (1). Mullins, Mark R. (2010), ‘How Yasukuni shrine survived the occupation: A critical examination of popular claims’, Monumenta Nipponica, 65 (1), pp. 89–136. Mullins, Mark R. (2012), ‘Secularization, deprivatization, and the reappearance of ‘public religion’ in Japanese society’, Journal of Religion in Japan, 1 (1), pp. 61–82. Nakano, Tsuyoshi (1996), ‘Religion and state’, in Noriyoshi Tamaru and David Reid, Religion in Japanese Culture: Where Living Traditions Meet a Changing World, Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International, pp. 115–36. Nelson, John (2012), ‘Japanese secularities and the decline of Temple Buddhism’, Journal of Religion in Japan, 1 (1), pp. 37–60. Nelson, John (2011), ‘Global and domestic challenges confronting Buddhist institutions in Japan’, Journal of Global Buddhism, 12, pp. 1–15. Porcu, Elisabetta (2012), ‘Observations on the blurring of the religious and the secular in a Japanese urban setting’, Journal of Religion in Japan, 1 (1), pp. 83–106. Porcu, Elisabetta and Watt, Paul (eds) (2012), special issue on ‘Religion and the secular in Japan’, Journal of Religion in Japan, 1 (1). Reader, Ian (2004), ‘Ideology, academic inventions and mystical anthropology: Responding to Fitzgerald’s errors and misguided polemics’, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/discussionpapers/Reader.html (accessed 25 January 2013). Reader, Ian (2012), ‘Secularisation, R.I.P.? Nonsense! The “rush hour away from the Gods” and the decline of religion in contemporary Japan’, Journal of Religion in Japan, 1 (1), pp. 7–36. Repp, Martin (2005), ‘Aum Shinrikyo and the Aum Incident: A critical introduction’, in James R. Lewis and Jesper A. Petersen (eds), Controversial New Religions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 153–94. Repp, Martin (2011), ‘Religion and violence in Japan: The case of Aum Shinrikyo’, in James R. Lewis (ed.), Violence and New Religious Movements, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 147­–72. Shimazono, Susumu (2012), ‘Japanese Buddhism and the public sphere: From the end

181

Religion and Politics of World War II to the post-great East Japan earthquake and nuclear power plant accident’, Journal of Religion in Japan. Sonoda, Minoru (1975), ‘The traditional festival in urban society’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 2 (2–3), pp. 103–36. Steiner, Kurt (1965), Local Government in Japan, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tsuiki, Shūgaku (2012a), ‘Party statement concerning the launch of a missile by North Korea – calling for the nuclear armament of Japan’, 12 December, http://en.hrparty.jp/blog/550.html (accessed 24 January 2013). Tsuiki, Shūgaku (2012b), ‘Response to the results of the election of the House of Representatives and the Tokyo Gubernatorial election’, (17 December), http:// en.hr-party.jp/blog/556.html (accessed 24 January 2013). Williams, Duncan Ryūken (2009), The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

182

11 Arab Revolutions and Political Islam: A Structural Approach Karel Černý

1. The Middle East and the modernisation process: too rapid, too slow, or rather uneven?

T

his chapter builds upon an alternative notion of a modernisation process which stresses the uneven character of social change in the Middle East and its political consequences in the second half of the twentieth century.1 From this perspective, the proposed chapter deals with (1) the root causes of the rise of social and political tensions leading to the so-called ‘Arab revolutions’ and with (2) the origins of the rise of mainstream political Islam. That is, it addresses the roots of the conflict between a corrupt and highly unpopular political and ­economic elite and its challengers recruited from various social and political groups, first of all mainstream Islamic movements. Regarding the root causes of the growth of political Islam and the rise of social and political tensions in the Middle East, at least three different explanations related to the modernisation process, its character and consequences can be identified: that they are (1) the unintended consequence of rather too rapid social change and modernisation (see for example Arjomand 1986, 1995, 2006), (2) the result of unsuccessful and failed modernisation projects or development strategies usually pushed from above by secular governments (for example Lewis 2003a, 2003b), or (3) that they are the result of rather too slow modernisation, and thus the persistence of problematic religious traditions and old-fashioned ways of thinking (for example Lerner 1964, AHDR 2002). All of those approaches mentioned above are partly right, but in focusing on selected aspects of the Middle Eastern change, they miss the overall picture. Some aspects of social change seems to be too rapid, some others too slow, and the modernisation projects pushed 183

Religion and Politics

Political modernisation: stagnation, rigidity, no changes Economic modernisation: slow changes or stagnation Social and demographic modernisation: rapid changes

←→ ←→ ←→

←→ ←→ ←→ ←→

International context (post-colonialism, relations with Israel, support for dictatorship, control of oil)

Cultural and historical context: pre-modern substrate and Islam (sources of political symbols, meanings, language, imagination)

Figure 11.1  Theoretical framework of the essay: complex interactions of independent variables.

by governments often fail. That is why this essay tries to build upon an alternative notion which stresses the uneven modernisation process in the Middle East and its interaction with Islamic religion and its p­olitically relevant imaginary (for example see Hoffman 1995). We can see highly uneven and non-synchronised Middle Eastern social change and its various dimensions: (1) very rapid social and demographic changes (urbanisation, the expansion of the educational system and the greater reach of media, demographic transition and the growing proportion of the younger generation); (2) slower and unstable economic development (gross domestic product, labour market, investments); and (3) the unchanging and rigid political subsystem (lack of democratisation or integration of most emerging political actors, ineffectiveness and low capacity to govern, failure of states to provide basic services for citizens and to fulfil basic state functions). This highly uneven pattern of modernisation is under way in the broader context of partly discredited secular ideologies and in the context of Islamic religion with its strong, politically relevant imagery, concepts and symbolism. Additionally, the post-colonial international context must be understood; it is characterised by long-standing support for dictatorships by world powers and the ongoing ArabIsraeli conflict in this oil-rich world region. The basic roots of the long-term growth of social tensions, the rise of political Islam and the Arab revolutions are thus seen as consequences of multiple and highly complex interactions among (1) various aspects of the uneven modernisation process, (2) historic and religious social and political imagination, and (3) the unfavorable international context (see the arrows in Figure one). 184

Arab Revolutions and Political Islam: A Structural Approach

2. Rapid demographic transition: being young and Muslim in the Middle East The Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) has been going through rapid population growth since the 1960s, especially compared to other regions. As a result, the total population of the region has nearly quintupled in the past fifty years, from about 100 million in 1950 to more than 440 million at the end of 1990s (Richards and Waterbury 2008). Not only has the total population grown, but also the relative proportion of the younger generation has been rising (about 30 per cent of the total population are aged between 15 and 29.). Contemporary Arab youths are part of the most numerous, most educated, healthiest, most ambitious, most informed and probably most globally interconnected generation in Arab history (Herrera 2009). The lost generation and the collapsed labour market Personal websites and blogs of young Egyptian Muslim Brothers show that they have dreams and problems similar to those of young people anywhere else in the world. Apart from discussing religion, the only sharp difference is their strongly expressed concerns about the poor economic situation and unemployment (Lynch 2007). Surveyed Arab youth see the unemployment as the single most serious problem of their societies and it is apparently the single most serious long-term political problem of the region (AHDR 2002). The most numerous cohorts of graduates are entering the weak labour market today. Compared to 1990, from 40 per cent (Tunisia) up to 125 per cent (Syria) more job applicants are entering the labour market. We can see huge discrepancies between slow labour market development and slow economic growth on the one hand, and rapid population growth and a quantitative expansion of educational systems on the other hand, and a very recent trend of young educated women searching for careers2 or middle-class women entering the overburdened labour market because their husbands’ incomes do not ensure their families’ middle-class status any longer. As a consequence, the level of youth unemployment in the Middle East is the highest in the world. It is estimated to be around 25 per cent, compared to the global average of 14 per cent.3 Whereas for their parents and grandparents, secondary school or a university degree had been a guarantee of a successful career in the public sector and 185

Religion and Politics

at least middle-class status, for today’s youths this is not the case; however, expectations of future success stemming from educational ­qualifications are just as high today. The situation is further complicated by the dual character of the Middle Eastern labour market. The graduates are pushed out of the formal labour market and seek jobs in the informal or shadow economy on the edges of illegal economic activities, as was the case of Tunisian street vendor Muhammad Bouazizi whose self-immolation sparked the Arab revolutions (Richards and Waterbury 2008; Herrera 2009). As a consequence, we can see the growing desires of frustrated Arab youth, both for emigration (individual strategy) and regime change (collective strategy). Political Islam can be attractive in this context for different reasons. In general, it offers vague solutions and hopes (see the slogan ‘Islam is the solution!’). In particular, it condemns women competing with men on the labour market, it regulates and sanctions unclearly defined relations and transactions in the shadow economy on the community level (in contrast to state organisations, which tend to ignore or criminalise these transactions), it offers jobs and practice for young professionals inside its charitable organisations (teachers, doctors), and its Islamic banking can offer interest-free credits on starting small businesses for those who are not eligible for commercial bank loans (Hoffman 1995; Lubeck and Britts 2002). The marriage crisis and demographic marginalisation Pre-revolutionary Egypt had been angrily discussing this societywide issue, popularly voiced in the bestseller I want to get married!, written by the blogger and pharmacist Ghada Abdel Aal (2010). The book illustrates a fundamentally new, historically unparalleled, and mass experience of Arab youths in their late twenties and early thirties, who are longing to marry. Not only can today’s Arab youths not achieve upward inter-generational social mobility in terms of career and middle-class status, but also their desires are not met even in terms of typical traditional aspirations taken for granted by previous generations. The Middle Eastern youth today do not face only a labourmarket crisis and social marginalisation, but also a related marriage crisis and serious demographic marginalisation. In conservative societies with the highly recognised value of a numerous family and the unambiguously positive social status of both children and adults, being a teenager represents a risky transitory life 186

Arab Revolutions and Political Islam: A Structural Approach

period (Juergensmeyer 1994). Thus family has the second highest value among the Arab public, coming only after God. Arab youths long to start a family as the most important goal in life and the most significant criterion of life success. Social status and personal prestige is first of all based on one’s own family and number of children, and marriage is seen as a basic and necessary transitional ritual between childhood and adulthood. While until recently it was common that most people married at a young age, shortly after reaching sexual maturity, the Middle East today has discovered the youth years on a massive scale for the first time in its history. Many young people in their late twenties and early thirties are trapped in a ‘no man’s land’ between childhood and adulthood because of economic strains (unemployment, lack of housing, inflation devaluing savings for marriage), and deep social (prolonged education) and cultural changes (middle-class youth tend not to accept arranged marriages, turning wedding ceremonies into costly shows, growing expectations about mahr).4 Their social status and social roles are ill-defined, and especially in the case of young women, even stigmatising (Booth 2002). Arab youth face serious difficulties in terms of self-concept, lacking clear recognition from ‘significant others’, and are dissatisfied with their life. The position of youth is further complicated by sexual frustrations because all pre-marital and extra-marital sexual relations are forbidden (Kholoussy 2010). The Islamists offer various alternatives for the empowerment of the marginalised youth, finding meaning in life and building a positive self-identity by participating in the movement’s activities. Mark Juergensmeyer (1994) defines symbolic, social, psychological and gender empowerment in this respect. Additionally, political Islam criticises the trend toward costly marriage ceremonies, and through its charity contributes financially to poor couples seeking to marry. Finally, the movements can even fill the role of dating agencies for its internal networks of member ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’. Leisure and the Arab street The popular Egyptian TV preacher Amr Khaled (Khaled 2011: 69) sums up the issue of unwanted spare time among youths: ‘Nobody listened to them. Nobody gave them hope. There is so much unbridled energy and talent, but nothing to do. No jobs. There is not even any place to play football.’ Together with discovery of the socially and culturally defined 187

Religion and Politics

category of youth, for the first time in its history the Middle East is discovering the concept of spare time on a massive scale, although the culture of youth leisure time is still underdeveloped. First, it is critical to note whether the spare time is involuntary, and thus frustrating and not seen as leisure. Second, it is important how it is filled: is it with sport, consumerism, or is it rather filled with ‘opposition’ activities? While Westernised Middle Eastern elites until the late 1960s saw the youth as the vanguard of the nation, the revolt of the youth in the context of growing Marxism and Islamism later caused the youth to be redefined as a high-risk group and a national security threat. At least since the 1990s, alarmed governments have been founding departments of youth and sport in an attempt to organise and control young people’s spare-time activities and redirect their focus away from politics (Swedenburg 2007). However, this governmental shift came too late and was inadequate. In contrast, political Islam has appealed to youth from the very beginning. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 and was partly inspired by the Western youth organisation YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association). Islamists have been organising trips, summer camps, tutoring, Koran study circles or sport courses for decades and governments have never been able to compete with them (Kepel 2002). The generational alienation of the ageing power elite The average age of Mubarak’s ministers was 62, while half of the Egyptian population was younger than 25. The most influential men of his inner power circle were born in the 1930s and established their political positions after the 1973 war. Middle Eastern ruling elites were thus alienated from the youth, not only because they were not democratically elected and because they could not solve their problems, but also due to the extremely large generational gap, perhaps the largest in the world. Not only were the age differences large, but there was also an immense difference in experience between the generation that spawned the rulers and the majority of their citizens. Arab revolutions emerged especially in those countries where the rulers and the ruling elites were in power for lengthy periods, such as Qaddafi in Libya (from 1969), and bin Ali in Tunisia (1987), Mubarak in Egypt (1981), or Saleh in Yemen (1978). The parents and grandparents of today’s youth have tended to support or at least tolerate corrupt and unsuccessful authoritarian regimes. They have benefited from post-colonial reforms and the 188

Arab Revolutions and Political Islam: A Structural Approach

building of the nation-states, can remember the more successful beginnings of the regimes or the national liberation struggle ethos. However, these older generations make up less and less of the Middle East’s population today, and for younger generations this is just an ‘old story’ that has nothing to do with the problems they are currently facing. As a consequence, in contrast to older generations, they tend to be more open toward messages from opposition leaders (Kepel 2002). Alongside the alienation of the power elite and rapid modernisation, since the 1970s we have seen a Middle Eastern generation gap growing between semi-educated, rural-born parents and grandparents practising local traditional Islam and their well-educated, city-raised offspring, who have high career expectations and are searching for new interpretations of Islam as well as for a new sense of belonging. Islamic movements address this new need for belonging as well as the need for new interpretations of Islam, and imitate an extended family in its structures and functions (see the Muslim brotherhood cell designation ‘usra’ meaning a family, with members addressing each other ‘brothers’ or ‘sisters’) (Roy 2004).

3. The rapid expansion of education systems: the birth of Islamic lumpen-intelligentsia5 Since the 1960s, the Middle East has been going through extraordinarily rapid educational change. An absolute majority of today’s youth is literate, about 80 per cent of them study at a secondary school, and about one-third continue on to college. However, the rapid educational change is in striking contrast to the slow economic development and to rigid political systems in the region. Schooling Islam: secular schools and religious revival Middle Eastern dictatorships have made an attempt to control religious discourse via national religious curricula and use these curricula to justify various policies and to legitimise their power. The use of established post-colonial centralised nationwide school systems to promote official notions of Islam has, in the long-term, changed people’s approach to their religion. But it has changed it in ways completely ­different to those expected by the regimes. First, through the use of these curricula, Islam has become something that must be explained, studied, reflected, adopted, understood 189

Religion and Politics

and even tested. It is neither an unreflected-upon ritual, nor thoughtlessly memorised texts as it had been for most Arabs only until recently. Second, as these religious curricula have stressed the role of Islam in explaining various policies and justifying particular preferred norms (obedience to authorities, hard work, modesty, tolerance, and so on), they have made Islam into something from which we could – and even should – draw ethical conclusions regarding all aspects of life of ­individuals as well as of societies. Instead of the intended promotion of a particular interpretation of culture, the regimes instead created an uncontrollable culture of interpretation that turned against its creators. They have awakened and stimulated growing demand for the further study of Islam, for the search for unofficial and alternative views, and for the discussion of various aspects of Islam related to society, economy and politics. The regimes have become the target of criticism primarily based on religious discourse, and while trying to defend themselves using religious terms and claims of being Islamic, they consequently strengthened and popularised such discourse. It is not networks of madrasas but rather state-run secular schooling that has created new religious discourse and thus the grounds for religious revival and the rise of political Islam (Starrett 1998). Secondary-school political chemistry Secondary-school ‘political chemistry’ is a result of the interaction between discontented teachers and rebellious youths. Teachers tend to be dissatisfied with their income and status as well as the educational and political system, which results in their sympathising with opposition movements, including the Islamists, who strive to penetrate schools with their ideology. Secondary-school students are frustrated for two reasons: first, while most of these students wish to continue on to university, only about one-quarter will enroll in tertiary education because of the limited number of places; and second, because secondary school graduates are the most vulnerable group in the labour market. Finally, as there is usually a lesser age difference between students and their teachers, they tend to have similar life experience. Secondary schools are in the context of repressive regimes one of a few favourable environments for spreading opposition ideologies, because people can freely assemble and exchange ideas there (Richards and Waterbury 2008). 190

Arab Revolutions and Political Islam: A Structural Approach

Campus as a propaganda centre In addition to secondary schools and cyberspace, university campuses are also favourable environments for the spread of different competing movements, as they are locations in which young people can legally gather comparatively freely under the Middle Eastern dictatorships. The first generation of the Islamists drew inspiration from Marxists at the campuses, some of them being ex-Marxists themselves. Since the 1970s, universities have been centres from which political Islam has been spreading into the rest of Middle Eastern societies. Early on, Islamists were even supported by various oppressive regimes which were more concerned with leftists in the campuses. So, while Islamists were at least tolerated, secular dissent was harshly persecuted. As a result, the Islamists gained majorities in elected university senates during the 1970s and 1980s. Later on, as the Islamists have been graduating and entering the labour market, they have gained control over professional associations (engineers, physicians, merchants, and so on). As failed secular ideologies, suppressed leftist movements and corrupted regimes have been losing popularity and mass support in the region since the 1970s, the ideological and organisational vacuum has been gradually filled with political Islam constituting a new protest discourse (Lubeck and Britts 2002; Kepel 2004). Growing expectations, growing frustrations Rising education levels encourage growing career, consumer, and political aspirations: university graduates demand more than secondary-school graduates, just as secondary-school graduates ­ demand more than e­ lementary-education leavers or illiterate members of society. After World War II, the reference group of Middle Eastern university graduates was the Western middle class or the local economic and political elite. Later, the reference group became whitecollar workers in state bureaucracy and public-sector management or professionals. Since the late 1970s, the speeding university education expansion has collided with slow economic growth and public-sector saturation, and thus the usual vertical mobility channels have become overstrained; consequently university graduates are no longer guaranteed middleclass status. Unemployed members of the intelligentsia, who have high expectations, yet are excluded from consumption, economic 191

Religion and Politics

opportunities and politics, have become deeply frustrated and turned into ‘lumpen-intelligentsia’, questioning the status quo and searching for alternative ideologies, among others political Islam (Roy 1992). The new ‘lumpen-intelligentsia’ and the decline of traditional religious authorities Fathi Shiqaqi, Palestinian physician, mathematician and a founder of the Islamic Jihad organization in Gaza, once stated: ‘I have read and enjoyed Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Sartre. And I have found a particular pleasure in reading Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus, always bursting into tears after finishing reading the story.’ Shiqaqi is a striking, however rather extreme, example of Islam’s new interpreters (Pipes 1996). Through the history of Islam, in short, two poles of religiosity and religious authorities have crystallised: the sharia-minded orthodox Islam of Islamic scholars based primarily in cities and the traditional sufi-minded mystical Islam of non-literate rural authorities and most of the population. Both had a monopoly on lecturing, explaining and interpreting Islam based on their evident knowledge accepted by the rest of the (mostly illiterate) people in a community (Hodgson 1974; Turner 2007). The historical significance of the new Islamic intelligentsia in general and supporters of political Islam in particular is that they represent lay Islam interpreters who started to compete on the religious market, and thus challenged and pulled down the historical monopoly of traditional religious authorities. The most significant and influential segment of these new interpreters are the leaders and ideologues of Islamic movements (Banna, Turabi, Ghannouchi, and so on). In contrast to traditional ulama or more sophisticated, however incomprehensible, Islamic intellectuals, they offer a new and attractive political reading of the Koran and the Sunnah to the Middle Eastern mass audience which challenges positions of both the traditional ulama and the ruling regimes. Becoming literate, people in the Middle East could read the Koran by themselves on a massive scale for the first time in the history from the second half of the twentieth century; they no longer needed anyone to mediate the revelation of God. And political Islam encourages people to read the Koran and discuss it with like-minded others in organised small Koranic study groups. Later on, by gaining university diplomas, self-confident engineers, natural scientists and physicians assumed on a massive scale that they are able not only to read but even to interpret 192

Arab Revolutions and Political Islam: A Structural Approach

the Koran equally as well, or even better, than the traditional Islamic scholars learned to do in madrasas (Anderson 2003; Berkey 2007). These self-proclaimed self-taught lay sheikhs have started to combine fragments of formerly separated sources like orthodoxy and Sufism together with various other sources like secular doctrines and ideologies, Western philosophy, science, European writers, and international news media. They see Islam as a source of hidden answers to whatever contemporary problems we are facing (from gender relations to the topics of democracy). However, the biggest interpretative clash with the ulama is not over such particular issues, but the dispute over who has the authority to interpret them. That is, who can employ ijtihad, the personal and independent interpretation of problems not precisely covered by the Koran, sunnah (hadith) and ijma (scholarly consensus). Political Islam has always argued that the once-closed ‘gates of ijtihad’ have to be re-opened and that not only ulamas but also educated lay Muslims are authorised to re-interpret Islam while primarily stressing its social, economic and political dimension (Eickelman and Piscatori 1996).

4. Rapid urbanisation and Middle Eastern moral panic Until the 1960s, only about one-third of the population lived in urban areas, but since the 1990s, the majority of Middle Easterners now live in cities. The rate of the rural exodus has been the highest on the global scale for several decades. Today’s Middle Eastern urbanisation is comparable to that in the West. However, urbanisation rates have been in profound contrast to the dynamics of slow industrialisation and poor labour-market development, so cities have not been able to absorb the rural migrants. Also, the speed of rural exodus is inconsistent with slow housing development and inadequate urban planning (Lubeck and Britts 2002; Chekroun 2005). Islamic charity: the poor and the middle class A jobless young Algerian man explained shortly before the civil war in the early 1990s: ‘We have only four options in our lives. To be jobless and celibate, because without having a job you can never provide housing and get married; to make money in the shadow economy running the risk of 193

Religion and Politics

detention; to emigrate to Europe and sweep up streets in Paris; or to join the Front of Islamic Liberation, and thus vote for Islam.’ (Booth 2002: 235) Middle Eastern unemployment is higher in cities than in the countryside, as it is effectively ‘exported’ through migration to urban areas. However, urban unemployment has different political consequences than rural joblessness. The city poor and young graduates, both threatened with unemployment, are often said to be the main target groups of political Islam and its main social base. The Islamists can use the broadly respected language of Koran to frame their experience with long-term unemployment and social exclusion (for example the Koranic concept of mustadafin, which means downtrodden, oppressed people), as well as to provide hope and various ideological solutions for the future (Dekmejian 1995). In addition to revolutionary and radical ‘re-Islamisation from above’ (via seizing state power and controlling its institutions, whether via revolution or ballot boxes), the Islamists also offer a gradual ‘re-­ Islamisation from below’, creating a parallel polis on the local level independent from the state institutions, part of which is Islamic charity, education activities for children, missionary work (dawa) or the regulation of shadow-economy obligations (see Kepel 1996). The expansion of traditional Islamic charity has emerged and strengthened on a mass scale in response to unmanaged rapid urbanisation. Specifically, it has emerged as a consequence of Middle Eastern governments’ retreat from fulfilling their welfare functions and obligations. Islamic charity found a boom in the neo-liberal economic reforms seen in the region in the 1980s and 1990s. As these economic reforms threatened the precarious situation of the urban poor and the middle class, the Islamists found an ever more interested audience (Lubeck and Britts 2002). Of course, along with the distribution of charity, the ideology of political Islam tends to be distributed to its urban clientele. And in general, the whole alternative of Islamic order seems to be more credible to the public, because the Islamists do not offer only political slogans, populism and abstract ideas as do the competing secular opposition as well as the ruling regimes themselves. For the Islamists themselves, the charity is not only an effort to become closer to God or a manifestation of the social sensitivity of Islam, but also the first step in their long-term project building an Islamic order (Clark 2004; Chekroun 2005). 194

Arab Revolutions and Political Islam: A Structural Approach

The modern city seen as a new jahiliya? Unrestrained and anonymous metropolises, with all their apparent contradictions, contrasts and visible social or moral deviations in the context of predominantly conservative values, can provide the Islamists with endless evidence, not just of the failures of corrupt regimes, but also of the serious moral degeneration of the whole society, which is fatally betraying the last revelation of God. And thus, all of humankind is running the risk of wasting the last opportunity for salvation forever. This moral panic and the moralising reaction of contemporary political Islam is, however, analogous to former Western philosophical anti-urbanism, which emerged together with the growth of European cities during the Industrial Revolution. Thomas Jefferson’s conservative and puritanical criticism of Paris or London is strikingly similar to the Egyptian Sajjid Qutb’s criticism of decadent American cities, which has become part of the Islamist ideology some 150 years after Jefferson’s European diplomatic mission and his subsequent culture shock there. Such criticism of amoral cities has lately emerged in all urbanising societies in developing countries. At the same time, the negative attributes of the city are identified with the assumed characteristics of the West, which is thus seen as a negative point of reference that should not be imitated (White and White 1962; Buruma and Margalit 2005). In the traditional Islamic imagination, a modern city can easily evoke images of barbaric pre-Islamic jahiliya, when people did not know or follow God’s revelation. Such ignorance caused chaos, injustice, intrigues and endless fighting, and thus life used to be brief, cruel, and lacking meaning and direction. Figures such as Mawdudi and Qutb in contemporary moralising political Islam tend to re-invent the notion of a new jahiliya and to popularise a similar notion of disruptive chaos (fitna) or eschatological visions. And they try to use this notion to critically describe today’s declining and only nominally Muslim Middle Eastern societies, as they see them. The impious city environment tempts and diverts people from ‘the straight path of Islam’ and disorientates them. An interaction between the accelerating urbanisation (and its negative consequences), on the one hand, and the religious imagination, on the other, leads to moral criticism of the contemporary social order. The solution provided by Islamist ideology is a return to God, implementation of Islamic law (sharia), and building a city ­parallel to the prophet Muhammad’s idealised Medina community. 195

Religion and Politics

The experience of alienation in an anonymous and seemingly hostile city environment, a strong cultural shock, can result in conversion toward political Islam. This sort of experience is common among students with rural backgrounds and also among leaders of moderate Islamist movements. Part of their ‘conversion’ toward political Islam is the gradual recognition or deduction of the social and political dimension of Islam, as a response to the culture shock. Only in the disturbing city environment does the formerly apolitical and ritualistic Islam of the rural periphery transform into activist Islamism, which stresses its social and political aspects that must be spread into the rest of society as a therapy for the corrupted city. Therefore, the first generation of city dwellers has always been the main target group of political Islam (Ibrahim 1980; Hoffman 1995; Dekmejian 1995). Two historical poles of Islam: urbanistion and a pendulum swing Within Muslim societies, there is a permanent, however usually latent, tension and opposition between two styles of religious life: the rural and urban form of Islam.6 First, there is varying, locally specific, rural, folk Islam as well as rather apolitical mysticism, and second, urban, strict, and orthodox Islam. In this respect, Ernest Gellner (1983) is known for drawing his famous, however controversial, sharp distinction between the urban, scripturalist, puritanical (fundamentalist), egalitarian Islam of literate ulamas, and rural, ecstatic, ritualistic, hierarchical, oral Islam of local saints. This historical pattern is radically changing in connection with the Middle Eastern urbanisation today, and thus the ‘pendulum’ is now significantly swinging in favour of its urban pole for the first time in quite a long history. Islam was originally born in an urban environment. Towns soon became centres of congregational orthodoxy stressing literary erudition, literary reading and understanding of the Koran, and strict modes of behaviour following the pattern of life of the Prophet Muhammad and his devout community of early followers (salaf). In contrast, rural folk Islam and local Sufism have been prevailing at least since the eleventh century until the 1960s. The pre-Islamic local traditions often penetrate it, and as a result, the Islam of the periphery has sometimes been beyond the edge of heresy or apostasy. As a response to this, there have periodically been attempts pushed by the orthodox urban ulama (fundamentalists) to purify the only true and authentic Islam from these contaminations (bida). As a consequence, the whole history of 196

Arab Revolutions and Political Islam: A Structural Approach

Islam from the very beginning can be, in short, described as a story of long-term conflict of the two competing poles. However, the recent rapid urbanisation has resulted in the unprecedented prevalence of city dwellers over the rural population. It leads to a disruption of the fragile historical balance, as well as the empowerment of the traditional pattern of fundamentalist reformation and the attempts to spread pure Islam. The contemporary swing of the pendulum toward the more urban and more orthodox (fundamentalist) pole of Islam is probably favourable for the Islamists too, as this interpretation seems to be more compatible with the Islamists’ stance, due to the emphasis placed on reasoning and rational interpretation (Arjomand 1995). Peasants into Islamists: from folk Islam toward a political Islam Islamic movements based in cities can substitute for cohesive rural communities, which are typified by their close attachments, strong sense of security as well as belonging, strong ethnic, community or tribe solidarity, strong family and social control, and the clearly defined authority of elderly people, local religious leaders and parents. City-based Islamic networks organised around mosques and charity activities have been absorbing recently urbanised country dwellers and replacing the former rural communities in their functions, offering them their desired sense of belonging and security, solidarity, social control, and authority on the local level of newly emerging neighbourhoods. The new city dwellers are thus not left alone in an anonymous city, while their former forms of rural and folk Islam can be transformed into new notions and practices of Islam. Political Islam is one beneficiary of these displaced new city-dwellers and is much stronger and more successful in urban areas compared to rural ones (Arjomand 1986; Chekroun 2005). In addition to fulfilling social needs, political Islam can substitute for the rural Islam in terms of psychological needs too. Newly urbanised masses seek a new orientation in life and in the real world, while being disoriented, due to facing fundamentally new problems and situations in the cities. Again, rural forms of Islam and traditional religious leaders do not provide satisfactory answers for the new questions, while political Islam is more successful in this respect, stressing the social, economic and political dimension of Islam. However, secular ideologies can provide new interpretations of the world too, and thus 197

Religion and Politics

compete with the Islamists on ideological grounds. But the Islamists can express themselves in a religious language and symbolism that is closer to the imagination of the uprooted conservative masses with a rural background; of course, the Islamists also offer a ‘bonus’ in the form of promises of salvation, which the secularists cannot offer (Dekmejian 1995). However, the Islamists’ propaganda and re-socialisation itself contributes to the accelerated disintegration of rural and traditional structures and to Muslims’ deculturation, since the Islamists actively question local Muslim cultures, local religious authorities, and local notions of Islam (including local saints, or the mixing of pre-Islamic traditions with orthodoxy). The uprooted newly urbanised Muslim is thus becoming a tabula rasa, and subsequent acculturation, resocialisation and conversion toward political Islam is thus more probable. Probably the most extreme illustration of such mechanisms is the war-driven rapid urbanisation and subsequent large-scale relocation of uprooted peasants in refugee camps, as was the case of Afghanistan after 1979 (Roy 2004).

5. The media and a new religious-political market place While the Egyptians were watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Beijing, they probably could not have avoided comparing the Chinese economic miracle with the Egyptian economic nightmare. However, the two countries were at the same level of socioeconomic development only some forty or fifty years ago. While comparing the underdeveloped Arab states with the developed Western countries has always been frustrating, more recent comparisons of the contemporary Arab world with neighbouring Turkey, or with the success stories of Malaysia, Indonesia and China, is even more frustrating, because the original starting line for these countries, in terms of economics or ­politics, was more or less the same after World War II. Since 1996, the famous Qatar-based satellite television station Al Jazeera has been bringing detailed and fascinating images from Israeli domestic politics next door into Arab living rooms. It has shown, for example, that high-ranking politicians can be publicly criticised, judged by independent courts, and even sentenced to imprisonment for offences such as corruption or the abuse of public office. And since 1995, when the internet quickly entered the Middle Eastern public sphere, it has become even easier to document the unjustice of the 198

Arab Revolutions and Political Islam: A Structural Approach

ruling regimes, as well as to spread critical messages in public. Such facts have led many to question what went wrong, and to consider whether today’s Arab monarchies or secular regimes are responsible for the Middle East’s long-term lack of success (Friedman 2011). Both old and new mass media like the press, radio, satellite television, mobile phones or the internet have spread rapidly and significantly in the Middle East in recent decades. As a consequence, it has linked the region yet more firmly into the global world, especially in terms of culture, consumption and politics. But it has also strongly interconnected the Middle Eastern region itself, and as a consequence we saw a domino effect of ‘TV revolutions’ after the Tunisian revolution sparked the so-called Arab Spring in this culturally, historically and linguistically related, though not fully homogeneous, region. Mass media expansion has also increased existing career and consumer aspirations and has created a lot of new ones. Apart from encouraging desires for a high-consumption, Western lifestyle – desires that usually cannot be fully satisfied – the spread of the media facilitates the spread of various political ideas in the Middle Eastern societies, creates modern public opinion, and enables more effective political organisation and mass mobilisation of its citizens. Finally, it enables the masses to compare their unsatisfactory economic and political situation with the standard of living and political freedoms in other societies, both in developed and developing countries. Media in the service of political Islam Starting from the nineteenth century, as much of the Muslim world was colonised by European powers, Islamic movements were emerging and growing in response to the foreign subjugation and humiliation. Part of their success was based on skilful use of the media of the time, which they made use of to fight back against the colonisers. Shortly after book printing was introduced in the region by the Europeans, it was used by Muslim activists for publications and translations of the Koran or for printing politically relevant opposition writings and fatwas on a significant mass scale (Arjomand 1986). Later on, audio cassettes (famously in the case of the Iranian revolution in 1970s) and messages spread by fax and copy machines (for example in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s) ­followed as carriers of political Islam’s ideology. Recently introduced satellite television stations have made a big difference in the region as well, because they are a way to circumvent 199

Religion and Politics

governmental censorship and thus disrupt the long-term state mono­ poly over information and reporting. Some of these stations, such as Al Jazeera or BBC Arabic, have been indirectly supporting political Islam, just by offering more balanced coverage. That means covering oppos­ition movements’ opinions too, thus giving voice to the Islamists. Other stations, like Lebanese Al Manar, which is connected to Hezbollah, have been supporting the spread of the Islamist agenda directly. An expansion of Islamic radio, multimedia, books, leaflets, comic books and internet sites has played a significant role in spreading the message of political Islam too (Eickelman, Tessler and Anderson 2003; Hashem 2007). Media and a vibrant religious market place Drawing inspiration from the theory of a religious market (see Hamilton 2001; Inglehart and Norris 2004), we can say that the growing plurality of mutually competing notions of Islam promoted by various media is one of the root causes of the contemporary Islamic renaissance. In this context, Turner (2007) claims that the emerging and expanding new public sphere based on the new media is a challenge to the existing exclusive authority of secular intellectuals, authoritarian regimes and traditional religious scholars. In fact, the growth of this public sphere is a result of interaction between traditionally non-hierarchical, and highly heterogeneous Islam, which has always been open to various interpretations (in contrast to Catholicism), on the one hand, and the new modern media on the other hand. As such, it is just an upgrade and newer, more dynamic version of the old traditional pattern. Whereas even in the past, everyone could theoretically become an imam and gain authority based on his erudition among worshippers in a given community, the internet has allowed anyone to be a mufti. The internet has made the sacred texts, as well as the 1,400 years of Islamic tradition, seemingly easily accessible for everyone online. Every citizen online, thus, can join the past several centuries of efforts of thinking the religious tradition over, interpreting it, talking on behalf of it, and issuing online fatwas on various subject matters. On various satellite channels and especially in cyberspace, if anybody attracts his own audience and followers, he becomes a new mufti. An expansion of education systems, new media and a new religious market has created a new audience, a new class of mutually competing interpreters of Islam, and 200

Arab Revolutions and Political Islam: A Structural Approach

made the sacred texts and their various rival interpretations accessible on a mass scale. While Roy (1992) notes that the Middle East today has been failing in integrating the expanding, well-educated and ambitious lower middle class in terms of politics and economics, it is not a surprise that the new Islamic intellectuals (‘lumpen-intelligentsia’) primarily focus on politically and socially relevant issues. They tend to be critical toward the existing social order, tend to be close to the Islamists, and they compete with traditional and official ulamas in the newly emerging and expanding religious market, as well as with secular intellectuals.

6. The democracy deficit: a frozen political modernisation Middle Eastern societies, in many regards fully modern or going through a rapid social transformation, are ruled by political systems that have not changed significantly in the past fifty years. The ruling regimes have not been able or willing to co-opt and integrate the newly emerging political actors. Middle Eastern public opinion supports democracy, the rule of law, political rights and civil liberties, just as is the case in other world macro-regions, including the West. Also, the notion and understanding of ‘democracy’ is in general similar to the West. And so democracy and civil liberties are not strictly Eurocentric and alien concepts to Middle Easterners. As a result, in the Middle East, we can see the world’s largest gap between a strongly pro-democratic public and highly repressive regimes (Inglehart and Welzel 2006). However, the public in most Middle Eastern countries tends to be split between those who prefer Western-style secular democracy and those who prefer a rather unclear notion of ‘Islamic democracy’, stressing some constitutional role for Islamic principles, law, and scholars, as well as demanding eligibility for holding public offices based on the candidate’s devoutness (for sociological surveys done by The Pew Center, Gallup World Poll, World Value Survey and Arab Baromete see Braizat 2010; Jamal and Tessler 2008; Esposito and Mogahed 2007). The end of secular doctrines: the ideological vacuum and political Islam as an alternative The path of the Middle Eastern secular ideologies was one of a rapid rise, crisis and a gradual fall. Middle Eastern secular ideologies promised modernity and prosperity similar to that of the West, but rather 201

Religion and Politics

brought widespread poverty, or stagnation at the best. Instead of the promised freedoms and democracy, they led rather toward oppression, state terror, and widespread fear. Similarly, instead of the promised social justice and national unity, they led toward class, regional and ethnic polarisation, obvious inequalities, growing social tensions, and widespread corruption. And finally, instead of the promised early significant military power and a respectable position on the global political stage corresponding with the legacy of the great Islamic civilisation, they led only toward a series of military débâcles and complete insignificance in international affairs. In short, the core root of such a multiple-pronged crisis and wide-ranging failures was the uneven character of Middle Eastern social change. Additionally, the discrediting of secular doctrines in the Middle East was facilitated by their foreign (Western) origin and by the unfavourable historical circumstances of their introduction into the region jointly with European colonisation and domination. Finally, the fall of Western-brand secular ideologies was also spurred by the falling appeal of the West itself since the 1970s (economic crisis, materialism, crime, family crisis, disrespect for old people, the Cold War arms race, and even the spread of left-wing terrorism). The vacuum left behind by the fallen secular doctrines has gradually been filled by political Islam, which is seen as a viable alternative. The multiple failures are interpreted by the Islamists as a logical consequence of the deviation from the ‘straight path’ of Islam. According to the Islamists’ view, some Western ideas (especially science) and technologies are still seen as foundations for future development, but must be adopted together with stronger emphasis on the Islamic tradition (they tend to see it as compatible). And thus, cultural decolonisation is seen as an inevitable step toward completing political and economical decolonisation. Political Islam claims that Muslim societies must be re-Islamized to foster their development, and that their prospective success would be a sign of the recovered faith of their members (Dekmejian 1995; Juergensmeyer 1994 and 2008). The fall of authoritarian rulers and the moral dimension of Islam A famous hadith of the prophet Muhammad claims that it is possible to learn how much God is satisfied with Muslims according to the character of their leaders. If God is satisfied, they are ruled by the best among them. If dissatisfied, the worst men are the leaders. 202

Arab Revolutions and Political Islam: A Structural Approach

Middle Eastern rulers are in general perceived as corrupt, unjust and impious tyrants, who do not rule in conformity with Islamic principles. Therefore, the Islamists claim, this implies that something is wrong with Muslims in general and with the ways they practise and implement religion in their everyday lives in particular (Esposito and Mogahed 2007). The interaction between the immoral political systems personified by their leaders and the politically relevant Islamic worldview is critical. The crucial point is not that there are competing interpretations of Islam here, but mutually competing interpretations of the social and political reality through the prism of Islamic religion and its imagination. The more widespread and accepted such a religious-political reading of the Middle Eastern reality becomes, the stronger and more successful Islamic movements become. For example, through the lens of political Islam, leaders and their politics can be endlessly examined and evaluated, usually using black-and-white dichotomies (fake–­ truthful; forbidden–allowed). Furthermore, contemporary authoritarian regimes are failing, particularly when compared with the idealised rulers that are promised by the Islamists. Political Islam thus tends to reduce political theory to issues connected with the appropriateness of a leader’s (emir’s) personality traits, tracing these back to the presumed characteristics of the prophet Muhammad and the first caliphs (Juergensmeyer 2008). Dictators’ scramble over Islam On the eve of the Iranian revolution (1978), the American embassy in Tehran had elaborated twenty-six possible scenarios of developments threatening the power of the pro-American, secular shah. None of them had taken into account the possible revolutionary role of Islam. In the context of the Cold War and the predominant secular thesis, leftist or nationalistic coups were seen as the most probable scenario. In contrast, the Islamists had been originally seen as rather an apolitical force, or even as an effective counterweight to the leftists. And as such, they had not been heavily persecuted in many Middle Eastern countries until the 1970s and 1980s, in many cases even supported by the regimes. That had contributed to a weakening of their secular opponents and to easier consolidation of political Islam at the beginning. The authoritarians’ scramble over using and controlling Islam continues; however, their main enemy is political Islam now. Just as the 203

Religion and Politics

Islamists try to use Islam to discredit dictators, the dictators try to fight back using Islam to legitimise themselves, and to discredit the Islamists. The dictators have, since the 1970s, tended to shift from stressing their secular legitimacy or the pre-Islamic legacy of their states, toward Islam. The propaganda tends to depict dictators as pious leaders. The governments build new mosques on a mass scale and stress the role of official, pro-regime ulama, who issue fatwas justifying the regimes’ rule. At the same time, the regimes support partial Islamisation of the state laws, however minor and symbolic. The devoutness of regimes facing legitimacy crises is sometimes demonstrated by ad hoc crusades against alcohol or adultery, accompanied by exemplary severe Islamic punishments and wide publicity. However, an unintended consequence of such an approach is the promotion of the Islamic discourse in general and its political dimension in particular. The regimes are then seen as un-Islamic, illegitimate and hypocritical, because they cannot match their own Islamic rhetoric and promises. Oppressive regimes and a political wasteland The more oppressive the regime, the stronger is its political opposition and support of the opposition among the public. Long-term bans on political parties, no rights to assemble in independent bodies, no freedom of speech and censorship have weakened or eliminated most opposition groups in the Middle East. One of the few platforms under the Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes where people can relatively freely assemble, carry out public activities, communicate, and organise themselves is the mosque and religious life. Thus, mosques became natural and core centres, not only of religious and social, but also of political life for the Middle Eastern general public. And opposition groups have widely developed on the platform of religious life. Moreover, political Islam, owing to the governmental repressions of secular opposition movements, which cannot organise themselves on the basis of religious life, has gained a semi-monopoly on criticising the regimes. In the context of the Middle Eastern political desert, political Islam thus does not have to face any serious ideological rivals, and does not have to compete with any significant opposition challengers. Dictators’ attempts to silence the Islamists, who consistently criticise the authoritarian regimes, serve only to increase the Islamists’ prestige, make them even more popular, or fabricate new martyrs (Lewis 2003b). 204

Arab Revolutions and Political Islam: A Structural Approach

Postcolonial Middle Eastern political conflict is also characterised by cumulative, rather than cross-cut, political cleavages. Ethnic, tribal, religious (confessional), regional, cultural (Westernised), and linguistic (French- or English-educated/speaking elite) divisions overlap with power and socioeconomic ones, which fundamentally affect political allegiances and conflicts. Middle Eastern cumulative cleavages thus pit the same groups of people against one another on many issues. The narrow Middle Eastern power elite, often described as a pyramid or as three concentric circles (Gombár 2001, 2004, 2007), control both the political and economic power. Authoritarians thus monopolise the incomes from the rentier economies under their command (gas, oil, phosphates, the Suez Canal toll, and so on), build historically unparalleled repressive and loyal apparatuses, and distribute the scarce resources among their loyal clientele. However, the clientele forming the bases of the regimes usually come from the same ethnic, tribal, regional, religious, linguistic, and cultural background as the power elite itself and thus multiply the effects of intense political and socioeconomic polarisation. In such a context, the Islamists focus on the unjust nature of the multiple divisions and inequalities in their societies. While inspired by Marxist concepts like oppressed vs. oppressors (mutakbarun vs. mustadafun), they criticise the Western character of the distinct power elite, and stress social unity instead (new understanding of the tawhid principle6), without any class, tribal or other distinctions, which are seen as completely incompatible with the God’s revelation (see Burgat 2003).

7. Conclusion: political awakening under the banner of political Islam While traditional societies are (still) politically stable, and advanced modern societies are stabilised (again),7 modernising and developing societies tend toward conflicts and destabilisation. This is the case especially because of the rapid disintegration of stabilising traditional structures (authorities, communities, norms, value systems, and so on), because of gradually emerging new and more numerous political actors (students, intellectuals, middle class, labour, and so on), because of escalation of conflict about control over and redistribution of growing wealth and growing state power, and especially because of the huge discrepancy between the rates of (rapid) social, (slower) economic and (slow) political modernisation (Huntington 1968). As a consequence, 205

Religion and Politics

we can see a growing public perception of both a deficit of prosperity (well-educated, well-informed, city-raised, and ambitious youths unsuccessfully seeking a career) and a deficit of democracy (welleducated public seeking to employ their voice and reclaiming their rights) in the Middle East in the past decades, which has reached its peak during the Arab Spring. But why has political Islam become the main political actor of the Middle Eastern contentious politics in the era of the uneven modernisation, growing destabilisation, gradual political mobilisation of new societal segments, and intensifying political conflict between the power elite and its various challengers? The answer lies in the complex interactions between the timing (discrediting of the initially dominant secular ideologies and movements) and the uneven character of the Middle Eastern postcolonial modernisation pattern. At the same time, it is important to recognise the time­–space dimension of the relevant social developments, and to identify parallel, interacting and overlapping processes. In this region, between the 1960s and 2010s, we can see geographical overlappings (layerings), interactions and mutual collisions of (1) the cultural substrate in the form of heterogeneous Islamic religion and its various possibly politically relevant imagery, (2) the rapid social and demographic change, (3) the unstable and slower economic development, (4) the slow political modernisation and insignificant change of political systems, and (5) strong interference of international actors and world powers in the strategic region. The result of reciprocal interactions and time­­–space overlapping of these phenomena and processes in the past five decades is not a gradual secularisation and privatisation of Islam in agreement with the secularisation thesis, but on the contrary, a transformation, de-­privatisation, and re-politicisation of Islamic religion. The rise of political Islam, which has replaced formerly dominant secular ideologies and successfully addressed gradually emerging political actors and newly politically aware masses, is thus seen as a result of a concatenation of factors connected to the uneven modernisation process, the geo­ political constellation and the Islamic political imagination. However, the Arab revolutions have so far brought regime changes, rather than economic changes, development and social justice. It will be interesting to see how this structural change in terms of political systems and possible democratisation affects the future position of and support for political Islam. 206

Arab Revolutions and Political Islam: A Structural Approach

Notes 1. This chapter is partly a result of research project ‘GAČR no. 13-35717P Arab Revolutions and Political Islam: A Structural Approach’. 2. This cultural shift is going to outweigh the impact of population growth on the overstrained labour market. 3. Official statistics are probably undervalued; in fact the unemployment rates are higher. 4. Mahr is a mandatory required amount of money or possessions, paid by the groom to the bride at the time of marriage. 5. That is, people who have been cut off from the socioeconomic class with which they would ordinarily be identified. Lumpen intellectuals are usually unable to find work in their fields and shift their intellectual capacity and grievances against the dominant order. They challenge the power elite in terms of ideology first of all. 6. Tawhid means oneness of God, in the sense that he is one and there is no God but Him. Tawhid further refers to the nature of that God, that He is a unity, not composed, not made up of parts, but simple and uncompounded. 7. However, the sociology of contemporary modern (or, as some authors would have it, postmodern) societies tends to focus on new sources of instability, especially in terms of environmental, technological, financial, industrial, and military risks and uncertainties.

References Aal, G. A. (2010), I want to get married, Austin: University of Texas Press. AHDR (2002), Arab Human Developmen Report 2002: Creating Opportunities for Future Generations, New York: UNDP. Anderson, J. W. (2003), ‘The internet and Islam’s new interpreters’, in D. Eickelman and J. W. Anderson (eds), New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 45–60. Arjomand, S. A. (1986), Social Change and Movements of Revitalization in Contemporary Islam, in J. A. Beckford (ed), New Religious Movements and Rapid Social Change, Paris and London: Sage/UNESCO, pp. 87–112. Arjomand, S. A. (1995), ‘Unity and diversity in Islamic fundamentalism’, in M. E. Marty and R. S. Appleby (eds), Fundamentalisms Comprehended: The Fundamentalism Project, Volume 5, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 178–98. Arjomand, S. A. (2006), ‘Thinking globally about Islam’, in M. Juergensmeyer (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berkey, J. P. (2007), Madrasas medieval and modern: Politics, education and problems of Muslim identity’, in R. Hefner and M. Q. Zaman (eds), Schooling Islam. The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 40–60. Booth, M. (2002), ‘Arab adolescents facing the future. Enduring ideals and pressures to change’, in B. Brown, R. W. Larson and T. S. Saraswathi (eds), The World’s Youth: Adolescence in Eight Regions of the Globe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 207–41.

207

Religion and Politics Braizat, F. (2010), ‘What Arabs think: The meaning of democracy’, Journal of Democracy, 21 (4), pp. 131–8. Burgat, F. (2003), Face to Face with Political Islam, London: I. B. Tauris. Buruma, I. and Margalit, A. (2005), Okcidentalismus. Západ očima nepřátel, Praha: Lidové noviny. Chekroun, M. (2005), ‘Socio-economic changes, collective insecurity and new forms of religious expression’, Social Compass, 52 (1), pp. 13–29. Clark, J. (2004), ‘Social movement theory and patron-clientelism: Islamic social institutions and the middle class in Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen’, Comparative Political Studies, 37 (8), pp. 941–68. Dekmejian, H. (1995), Islam in Revolution, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Eickelman, D. and Piscatori J. (1996), Muslim Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Eickelman, D. and Anderson, J. W. (2003), New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Esposito, J. L. and Mogahed, D. (2007), Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, New York: Gallup Press. Friedman, T. L. (2011), ‘This is just the start’, The New York Times, 1 March 2011, available online at www.nytimes.com. Gellner, E. (1983), Muslim Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gombár, E. (2001), Dramatický půlměsíc. Sýrie, Libye a Írán v procesu transformace, Praha: Karolinum. Gombár, E. (2004), Kmeny a klany v arabské politice, Praha: Karolinum. Gombár, E. (2007), Kmeny a klany v arabském Maghribu, Praha: Karolinum. Hamilton, M. (2001), The Sociology of Religion: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives, London and New York: Routledge. Hashem, M. (2007), ‘Contemporary Islamic activism: The shades of Praxi’, Sociology of Religion, 67 (1), pp. 23–41. Herrera, L. (2009), ‘Youth and generational renewal in the Middle East’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 41 (3), pp. 368–71. Hodgson, M. (1974), The Venture of Islam, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hoffman, V. (1995), ‘Muslim fundamentalists: Psychosocial profiles’, in M. E. Marty and R. S. Appleby (eds), Fundamentalisms Comprehended, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 199–230. Huntington, S. P. (1968), Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven: Yale University Press. Ibrahim, S. E. (1980), ‘Anatomy of Egypt’s militant groups’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 12 (4), pp. 423–53. Inglehart, R. and Norris, P. (2004), Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inglehart, R. and Welzel, C. (2006), Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jamal, A. and Tessler, M. (2008), ‘Attitudes in the Arab world’, Journal of Democracy, 19 (1), pp. 97–110. Juergensmeyer, M. (1994), The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, Berkeley: University of California Press. Juergensmeyer, M. (2000), Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, Berkeley: University of California Press.

208

Arab Revolutions and Political Islam: A Structural Approach Juergensmeyer, M. (2008), Global Rebelion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to al Qaeda, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kepel, G. (1996), Boží pomsta: Křesťané, židé a muslimové znovu dobývají svět, Brno: Atlantis. Kepel, G. (2002), Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kepel, G. (2004), The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Khaled, A. (2011), ‘Faith and hope in Egypt’, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, spring 2011, pp. 68–73. Kholoussy, H. (2010), ‘The fiction and non-fiction of Egypt’s marriage crisis’, MERIP, December 2010, available online at www.merip.org. Lerner, D. (1964), The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, New York: The Free Press and Collier–Macmillan. Lewis, B. (2003a), What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, New York: Oxford University Press. Lewis, B. (2003b), The Crisis of Islam. Holy War and Unholy Terror, New York: The Modern Library. Lubeck, P. M. and Britts, B. (2002), ‘Muslim civil society in urban public spaces: Globalization, discursive shifts, and social movements’, in J. Eade, and Ch. Mele (eds), Understanding the City: Contemporary and Future Perspectives, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 305–35. Lynch, M. (2007), ‘Young brothers in cyberspace’, Middle East Report: The Politics of Youth, winter (245), pp. 25–34. Pipes, D. (1996), Západní smýšlení radikálního islámu, Proglas, 3, pp. 20–5. Richards, A. and Waterbury, J. (2008), A Political Economy of the Middle East, Boulder: Westview Press. Roy, O. (1992), The Failure of Political Islam, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Roy, O. (2004), Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, New York: Columbia University Press. Starrett, G. (1998), Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt, Berkeley: University of California Press. Swedenburg, T. (2007), ‘Imagined youths’, Middle East Report: The Politics of Youth, winter (245), pp. 3–11. Turner, B. S. (2007), ‘Religious authority and the new media’, Theory, Culture and Society, 24 (2), pp. 117–34. White, M. and White, L. (1962), The Intellectual vs. the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright, New York: Oxford University Press.

209

12 Beyond Post-secularism: Religion in Political Analysis (Review Chapter) Michał Matlak

Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun (eds) (2010), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds) (2011), Rethinking Secularism. Olivier Roy (2010), Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways.

T

Introduction

he 1960s initiated the era of the secularisation paradigm in the social sciences. It was on a presumption that was close to certainty that religion will gradually lose its social significance, as an effect of the process of modernisation. The most famous example of this paradigm is the seminal book by Peter L. Berger The Sacred Canopy (Berger 1967), that was strongly influenced by Max Weber’s notion of modernisation and disenchantment. The popularity of the secularisation paradigm is no surprise in the light of the recent book by Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960’s (McLeod 2007), which is the thorough analysis of a dramatic decrease in religious practices and beliefs in God among the West European and North American societies in the 1960s. This trend has been reflected by political and social scientists who relegated religion from the scholarly debate. However, the secularisation paradigm itself came under attack and has been repeatedly revised by social scientists during the last two decades. Interestingly, also Peter L. Berger has changed his position entirely. After years of neglect, the study of religion moved to the forefront of the research agenda in political science. This shift in attention has been, in part, a reaction to the changes in social reality, including the World Trade Center attacks in 2001 and the subsequent resurgence of 210

Beyond Post-secularism: Religion in Political Analysis

religious conflicts, the rise of religiously motivated neoconservative politics in the USA, and the crisis of multiculturalism in Europe as a policy aiming at integration of immigrants with different cultural and religious backgrounds. Against the backdrop of these events, some scholars argue in favour of the ‘post-secular paradigm’, claiming the comeback of religion in different forms (Kepel 1994; Casanova 1994; Berger 1999) or the need to incorporate religion into the public sphere (Rawls 1997; Habermas 2006). The books I am dealing with in this chapter present a perspective that shows little enthusiasm towards the notion of post-secularism. The authors tend to point out that although secularism is a problematic term, it is less misleading than the notion of post-secularism. Nevertheless, the debate on post-secularism led to the renewal of the scholarly reflection on secularism, which consequently changed and broadened this term in many ways. Furthermore, the debate has shown that religion is still an important phenomenon, even if many agree that we live in a secular age. In this chapter I will briefly review three books published in recent years on religion, secularism, and post-secularism. The first is an edited volume that recapitulates the debate after publication of Charles Taylor’s work A Secular Age. The second volume deals with different faces of secularism in the Western and non-Western world, whereas the third explores the interplay between religion and culture in a globalised world.

A secular age and its reception Probably the deepest analysis of the phenomenon of religion in the modern world is the aforementioned Charles Taylor’s seminal book A Secular Age (Taylor 2007). Taylor offers the master narrative of secularisation, as his book is a long story of reforms of the Western Christendom that started in the late Middle Ages, while Reformation was only a part of the process. An effect of that reform was the Entzauberung (disenchantment) of religion from the magical elements that led to various changes in the social imaginary of Western societies. The most important outcome was, however, a change in the conditions of belief for people living in the West. Nowadays religion is just one option, since different beliefs as well as disbelief are equally acceptable. However, we can better understand the significance of Taylor’s analysis when we look at the volume Varieties of Secularism in a Secular 211

Religion and Politics

Age reflecting on his book (Warner et al. 2010). It consists of twelve articles with revised texts presented first at Yale University in 2008. As the editors of the volume point out in their introduction, Taylor goes beyond the differentiation between secular and post-secular. He neither overrates the significance of change in religiosity in the West, nor neglects the importance of religion for many people in the USA or Europe. At the same time, he concentrates his work on the change of ‘the immanent frame’ that is ‘the sensed context in which we develop our beliefs’. Therefore, the authors of the volume put Taylor’s work in the broader context of the Western thought. Robert Bellah makes an insightful comparison with Jürgen Habermas and Masao Maruyama and shows the differences in a way these three leading scholars saw pre-modernity and modernity. For Maruyama, pre-modernity is not an epoch that we can learn from, which is generally shared by Habermas. In Taylor’s case it is quite different. On the one hand, he affirms the ethical project of modernity as the two thinkers do. On the other hand, Taylor as practising Catholic regrets the obliteration of the spiritual past. Bellah recalls Taylor’s lecture from 1999, during which the latter compared himself to Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit missionary to China in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As Ricci tried to bring insights of his Christian faith to China under the late Ming dynasty, Taylor tries to bring the same insights to the modern Western and secular world. In many respects, a similar approach to A Secular Age is proposed by Colin Jager (2010) who claims that Taylor is a Romantic thinker and that this Romanticism ‘shapes and colors the pictures of secularity drawn in “A Secular Age”’. Jager argues along the lines present in the Bellah’s: Taylor is ambivalent about modernity that brought gains but also deprived us of spiritual dimension in our lives. In the concluding remarks, Taylor agrees with this opinion saying he is a ‘­hopeless German romantic of the 1790s’. Although Taylor’s book was generally admired among scholars, it has also been criticised. Jonathan Sheenan (2010) expressed his scepticism towards the historical dimension of the book (which constitutes the vast majority of it), pointing out that it presents a conjectural history rather than a thorough analysis of historical facts. Sheenan shows that Taylor’s picture of the past often does not match the empirical record. It is an important voice in the discussion on the book, but it does not devalue the most important arguments of the book and Sheenan’s criticism is rather an invitation for historians to research the Western history of disenchantment. 212

Beyond Post-secularism: Religion in Political Analysis

Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age highlights firstly that Charles Taylor’s book will be a basis for debates on the ‘conditions of belief’ in modern times for many years to come. Second, it offers a highly insightful panorama of the scholarship on religion and secularism in the Western world.

Rethinking secularism (and rejecting post-secularism) The authors of the volume Rethinking Secularism concentrate on the political dimension of the issue. José Casanova analyses the current meaning of the terms related to the word ‘secular’. He points out that the best analysed issue in social sciences is the very process of secularisation (or secularisations) that means basically three things: institutional differentiation; religious privatisation; and religious decline (Casanova quotes here his influential book Public Religions in Modern World, 1994). In contrast to secularisation, the term needing further analysis is, according to Casanova, the category of ‘the secular’ that was constructed in order to represent the reality different from ‘the religious’. However, the boundaries between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ are constructed differently, for instance due to multiple ­secularisms. Secularisms are for Casanova: different worldviews and ideologies which may be consciously held and explicitly elaborated into philosophies of history and normative-ideological state projects, into projects of modernity and cultural programs, or, alternatively, it may be viewed as an epistemic knowledge regime that may be held unreflexively or be assumed phenomenologically as the taken-for-granted normal structure of modern reality. (Casanova 2011) An in-depth analysis of the liberal version of secularism is the main subject of Craig Calhoun’s text in the same volume. Calhoun (2011) analyses the relationship between liberal secularism, public sphere and citizenship. His point of departure is a secular understanding of citizenship, which shifts religiosity into the private sphere. However, he criticises this idea as too exclusionary vis-à-vis many people living in Western democracies. He also discusses scholars trying to incorporate religion into the public sphere including John Rawls or Jürgen Habermas, who previously neglected its role. Calhoun seems not to agree with Habermasian reflection that we live in the post-secular era 213

Religion and Politics

and suggests that it ‘may be a bit of red herring’. He shares with Charles Taylor the position that our times are deeply secular, implying that for the first time in the long history of the West, belief is just an option. Nevertheless, Calhoun agrees with the call for the recognition of religious contribution to public discourse and believes that it is possible to translate these views into a language comprehensible also for nonbelievers. That is why Calhoun is in favour of ‘rethinking secularism’, especially regarding citizenship. This is to prevent a cleavage between citizen-believers and citizen-nonbelievers. Other authors of the volume elaborate on different aspects of secularism: Rhajeev Bhargava defends the doctrine of political secularism as the only solution to the problem of religious diversity. Bhargava draws on the Indian example and shows that it is possible to reconcile the inclusion of different religions in the public sphere and at the same time the ‘principled distance’ of the state towards different religions. Peter Katzenstein analyses the role of religion and secularism in international relations and rejects the liberal and realist approaches to the question of religion. Instead, he proposes the concept of ‘civilizational states’ (driven by different cultural programmes and institutions) that shape the contemporary process of globalisation. One of the key components of the analysis of such a state would be undoubtedly religion. In sum, Rethinking Secularism reveals the weakness of many definitions of secularisms embedded in Western thinking and shows the need for reconsideration of secularism without over-simplifying the term ‘post-secularism’, which in turn assumes that we entered a new era in the history of Western societies. The social and political reality is much more complex, since Western societies are still for the most part secular and religious.

Secularisation or deculturation? A further book that can be interpreted as a voice against the notion of post-secularism (although from a very different angle) was written by Olivier Roy. In Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways, Roy shows how secularisation and globalisation have changed religion. What was perceived as a religious revivalism is for him a product of secularisation. Religion, in Roy’s eyes, reformulates itself in a ‘secularized space that has given religion its autonomy and therefore the conditions for its expansion’. There are two important processes that Roy describes as central to religion in a contemporary world: 214

Beyond Post-secularism: Religion in Political Analysis

de-terrorialisation and deculturation. The first one is associated above all with movement of ideas and people in a non-territorial space. This goes together with the latter: ‘secularization prompts religion to distance itself from a culture now perceived as indifferent, even hostile’. The culture from the perspective of religious fundamentalists becomes pagan. Roy describes these processes with the example of Pentecostalists (and other evangelical churches), Talibans, Wahhabis and many other faces of Christianity and Islam. Many established Christian and Muslim churches are now faced with the dilemma between ‘fundamentalism’ (a result of deculturation) and accommodationism – a position that assumes embodiment of religion in a culture. The only basis for the fundamentalists is faith – and that is the only criterion of being a member of the same community. The accommodationists have a different attitude: believers and nonbelievers can share common culture and values, as culture here is not an alien body for religion. With this background idea one can speak about ‘Jewish atheist’ or ‘Christian non-believer’ (what obviously does not exclude the possibility of Jewish or Christian fundamentalists). This dilemma reveals a relevant insight into today’s world: religion has lost its original link with culture. I decided to incorporate Roy’s book into this review because it provides a non-teleological conceptual framework to describe the religious situation in the modern Western world without concentrating only on secularisation. Roy prefers rather to speak of deculturation and it may be a very useful complementary term, since it does not assume any demise of religiosity (which is a tacit meaning of secularisation), but at the same time he is able to conceptualise the dramatic change of religious situation in the West. What might be perceived as a weakness of the book is that the author does not intervene in the debate on different kinds of secularisation discourses. Yet it does not change the fact that Roy offers one of the most insightful voices in the discussion on religiosity in modern societies.

Conclusion It is virtually impossible to discuss and appraise all the subjects and discourses presented in the reviewed books. Nevertheless, there are some general remarks that can be drawn. Firstly, the notion of post-secularism is highly criticised by the majority of authors. It is mainly criticised for its wishful thinking as well as faulty description of the actual state 215

Religion and Politics

of religiosity. It seems oversimplified to argue that ‘a secular age’ is simply over; it is also generally rejected that some forms of secularism are not needed. At the same time, there is a general agreement that the very concept of secularism needs refinement (in both a theoretical and normative sense), as religion has become a persistent element of our social reality. An interesting proposal comes from Olivier Roy, who stresses the broken relationship between religion and culture and in this way broadens the traditional social scientific perspective that has rather concentrates on the relationship between religion and politics.

References Berger, Peter (1967), The Sacred Canopy: Elements of Sociological Theory of Religion, New York: Doubleday. Berger, Peter (1999), Desecularization of the West: Resurgent Religion and the World Politics, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Calhoun, Craig (2011), ‘Secularism, citizenship and the public sphere’, in Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds), Rethinking Secularism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 75–91. Calhoun, Craig, Juergensmeyer, Mark and VanAntwerpen, Jonathan (eds) (2011), Rethinking Secularism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Casanova, José (1994), Public Religions in Modern World, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Casanova, José (2011),‘Secular, secularism, secularization’, in Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds), Rethinking Secularism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 54–74. Habermas, Jürgen (2006), ‘On the relations between the secular liberal state and religion’, in Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (eds), Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 251–60. Jager, Colin (2010), ‘This detail, this history: Charles Taylor’s romanticism’, in Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun (eds), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 166–92. Kepel, Gilles (1994), The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. McLeod, Hugh (2010), The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, John (1997), ‘The idea of public reason revisited’, University of Chicago Law Review, 64 (3), pp. 767–807. Roy, Olivier (2010), Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways, New York: Columbia University Press. Sheenan, Jonathan (2010), ‘When was disenchantment? History and secular age’, in Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun (eds), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 217–42 Taylor, Charles (2007), A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Warner, Michael, VanAntwerpen, Jonathan and Calhoun, Craig (eds) (2010), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

216

Notes on the Contributors

Johann P. Arnason is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and visiting professor at the Faculty of Human Studies, Charles University, Prague. His research interests centre on historical sociology, with particular emphasis on the comparative analysis of civilisations. Recent publications include: Civilizations in Dispute (2003); Axial Civilizations and World History (edited, with S. N. Eisenstadt and Björn Witttrock) (2005); The Roman Empire in Context (edited, with Kurt Raaflaub) (2011); and The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy (edited, with Kurt Raaflaub and Peter Wagner) (2013). Linell E. Cady is founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Religion and Conflict and Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on modern Western religious thought and the interrelations of religion, politics and public life, with primary attention given to the American context. She is the author of Religion, Theology and American Public Life (1993) and co-editor of several volumes, including most recently Religion, the Secular and the Politics of Sexual Difference (2013). Karel Černý holds a doctoral degree in sociology (2011) and currently is a PhD candidate at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies of Charles University in Prague. He focuses on historical sociology and the Middle East. He is a Fulbright fellow (University of California) and researcher at Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Humanities. His recent publications include A World of Political Islam: Political Awakening in the Middle East and the Arab Revolutions 1960–2011 (2012). Jeffrey Haynes is Director of the Centre for the Study of Religion, Conflict and Cooperation and Professor of Politics at London 217

Religion and Politics

Metropolitan University. His most recent books are: An Introduction to International Relations and Religion (2013); Religious Transnational Actors and Soft Power (2012); Routledge Handbook of Democratization (editor) (2011); Religious Actors in the Public Sphere: Means, Objectives, and Effects (co-edited with Anja Hennig) (2011). Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She teaches and writes on the politics of religious diversity, law and religion, US foreign relations, and contemporary politics of the Middle East. Hurd is the author of The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (2007) and co-editor of Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age (2010). She is co-organiser of the research project ‘The Politics of Religious Freedom: Contested Norms and Local Practices’. Mark Juergensmeyer is Professor of Sociology and Global Studies and director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author or editor of over twenty books, including the award-winning Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence and Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State (2008). He is editor of the Oxford Handbook of Global Religion (2006) and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Global Studies (2012).  Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski holds the Chair of Political Science at the Willy Brandt Centre for German and European Studies, University of Wrocław. His main areas of research are European integration and political theory including citizenship, civil society and nationalism in Europe. His publications include: Civic Resources and the Future of the European Union (2012); The Nation and Nationalism in Europe: An Introduction (2011); Citizenship and Collective Identity in Europe (2010); and Multiplicity of Nationalism in Europe (2009). Ayhan Kaya is Professor of Politics and Jean Monnet Chair of European Politics of Interculturalism at the Department of International Relations, and Director of the European Institute, Istanbul Bilgi University. He is a member of the Science Academy, Turkey; worked and taught at the European University Viadrina as Aziz Nesin Chair in 2013; worked and taught at Malmö University, Sweden, as the Willy Brandt Chair in 2011; and received his PhD and MA degrees at the University of Warwick, England. His latest books are Europeanization and Tolerance in Turkey 218

Notes on the Contributors

(2013) and Islam, Migration and Integration: The Age of Securitization (2012). John Lagerwey is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has recently published China: A Religious State (2010) and articles on religion in Huizhou (Anhui), including the Wuchang exorcisms characteristic of Mulian plays in that region. He is chief editor, with Wang Zhenzhong of Fudan University, of a new ethnographic series on Huizhou and is also presently editing, with French partners, four volumes to be published by Brill on modern Chinese religion (Song-Yuan and 1850 to present). In the latter he continues his focus on the periods of paradigm shift in Chinese religious and cultural history. Mikhail Maslovskiy is a Senior Researcher at the Sociological Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences and a Professor of Politics at the Higher School of Economics (St Petersburg). His publications include ‘The Weberian tradition in historical sociology and the field of Soviet studies’, in V. Oittinen (ed.), Max Weber and Russia (2010) and ‘Civilizational analysis in contemporary historical sociology and Russia’s political transformations’ (in Russian), Mir Rossii (no. 3, 2012). Michał Matlak is a PhD researcher at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence working on the role of religion in the process of European integration. He studied at the Willy Brandt Centre for German and European Studies, University of Wrocław and the Humboldt University in Berlin. He was a visiting student at the University of Montreal and Catholic University of Leuven and published a book Poland in Europe, Europe in Poland (2011), which examines the results of the rapid Europeanisation of Poland. Elisabetta Porcu is a senior researcher on Japanese religions at the University of Leipzig, Centre for Area Studies, and currently a Visiting Research Scholar at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. She has worked at several universities in Japan (between 2004 and 2010) and has been a Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Hawaii (2013). Among her recent publications are Pure Land Buddhism in Modern Japanese Culture (2008) and ‘Observations on the blurring of the religious and the secular in a Japanese urban setting’, Journal of Religion in Japan (2012). She is the founding editor and co-editor of the Journal of Religion in Japan. 219

Religion and Politics

Nikita Shangin is a PhD student at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. He is currently working on his dissertation on new religious movements in post-Soviet Russia. He has published several articles in Russian on religion in the conditions of globalisation.

220

Index

Note: names of people or organisations prefixed by ‘Al’ are indexed under the following letter; thus al Qaeda is found under Q Aal, Ghada Abdel, 186 absolutism, 35, 160, 163 accommodationism, and secularism, 64–5, 66–7, 215 Afghanistan, and growth of political Islam, 198 Akhenaten (pharoah), 20 AKP see Justice and Development Party (AKP; Turkey) Alevism, Turkish, 67–8, 70, 117, 119–24, 132, 134 Alexander, Jeffrey, 148 An-Na’im, Abdullahi A., 75–6 ancestor worship, China, 164, 165 Anderson, J., 149, 150–1 Annual of European and Global Studies (AEGS), 1 anthropology and civilisational approach, 13–17 and religion, 23, 73 Arab revolutions see Arab Spring; Egypt; Tunisia Arab Spring, 183–4 and democracy, 49–50, 54–5 and media, 199 and political Islam, 6, 49, 54–5, 183, 186, 206 see also Egypt; Tunisia Arab–Israeli conflict, 184 Arnason, J. P., 143, 144

Asad, Talal, 74 assimilationism, in Turkey, 119–20 Assmann, Jan, 33 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 128, 129 Augustine of Hippo, St, 34 Aum Shinrikyō, 170 Austria, and Islam, 87–8 authoritarianism in MENA states, 188–9, 202–3, 203–5 in Russia, 145–6, 148, 149, 154 authority in Chinese religion, 25 religious, 94–5, 192 and secularism, 76–7 state, 94 in stateless societies, 14–15, 19, 22 autonomy and politics, 21, 22 and religion, 24–5 Axial Age, 2–3, 29–31, 33 China, 23, 25–6, 27–8, 29–31 and civilisational approach, 12–13, 23 Greece, 24–5, 26–7, 31–2 India, 2, 18, 24, 26 Israel, 2, 18, 24, 26, 33 and religio-political nexus, 17–18, 23–8 and secularism, 27–8

221

Religion and Politics Basbuğ, İlker, 133 Baubérot, Jean, 63–4 Bayar, Yeşim, 131 Bellah, Robert, 24, 212 Berger, Peter L., 141–2, 210 Berkes, Niyazi, 136n14 Bhargava, Rajeev, 71–2, 214 Billington, J., 141–2 Bin Laden, Osama, 49, 86, 90 Blumenberg, Hans, 1 Bouyeri, Mohammed, 88–9 Bradlaugh, Charles, 60 Bray, Michael, 85 Breivik, Anders, 4, 83–6, 95 Brubaker, Rogers, 108 Buddhism and Chinese state, 6, 29–31, 157, 159–60, 162, 165 in India, 2 in Japan, 169, 170, 175, 178 Cady, Linell E., 75 Calhoun, Craig, 213–14 Calhoun, Craig, Juergensmeyer, Mark and VanAntwerpen, Jonathan, 213–14 Cameron, David, 54 Çamuroğlu, Reha, 123 Canada, and civil religion, 109–10 Carnegie Moscow Centre, 140–1 Carothers, T., 52–3, 145 Casanova, José, 40, 41, 76, 117, 153, 173, 175, 213 Castoriadis, Cornelius and power, 19–20, 22 and religion, 20–2 Çelik, Faruk, 124 Cem Foundation (Turkey), 121–2 censorship, in MENA states, 200, 204 change, social, in Middle East, 183–7, 201–2, 205–6 charity, Islamic, 119, 186, 187, 193–4, 197 Cheng Yi (Confucian scholar), 164 China Axial Age, 23, 25–6, 27–8, 29

church and state, 5–6, 23, 28–9, 157–66 Communist Party rule, 6, 30, 31, 165–6 compared with Europe, 28 Han dynasty, 29, 159, 162 as lineage society, 164–5 Ming dynasty, 31, 161–2, 163–5 Qing dynasty, 30, 165 and religio-political nexus, 24, 25–6, 27–8, 29–30 and religion of the people, 159, 161, 165 Song dynasty, 160–1, 162–3, 165 Sui dynasty, 29, 159 T’ang dynasty, 29, 30, 159–61, 162 Yuan dynasty, 163 Zhou dynasty, 25, 28–30, 157 see also Buddhism; Confucianism; Daoism Christendom, Western empire and papacy, 27, 29 and religious nationalism, 83–6 Christianity and democracy, 45, 141–2 and European identity, 1–2, 27, 82 and European Union, 99 and Islam, 46–7, 87, 92–3 in Japan, 169, 176 and nationalism, 82–95 and philosophy, 27, 28 political, 98 and Roman Empire, 33–5 Church and state in China, 5–6, 23, 157–66 in France, 64–5 in Japan, 168–78 in Roman Empire, 34 in Russia, 5, 140–55 and secularism, 130–2 in United States, 65–6 cities, as new jahiliya, 195–6 citizenship European Union, 107–9 and secularism, 213–14 Turkish, 129–30

222

Index civil society, Islamic, 118–19 civilisation and Axial Age, 12–13 civilisational approach, 12, 13–18, 141–5, 146–8 clash of civilisations thesis, 8, 40, 44–6, 62, 68 and religio-political nexus, 3, 9, 10–13, 17–23, 97–8, 140, 141–5 and revolutions, 18 Russian Orthodox, 152, 154 and sacral rulership, 13, 21, 25 Clastres, Pierre, 3, 14, 15, 18, 21 clientelism, 53, 205 Cold War, and religious nationalism, 82–3 colonialism and Orientalism, 44 and religious nationalism, 82 and secularism, 61, 65, 71, 76 communications see media communism see China; MarxismLeninism conditionality, political, 51–3 Confucianism, 28 Book of Rites, 164 and Chinese state, 5–6, 29–30, 162–3 and Mandate of Heaven, 25, 30–1, 157, 158–9 neo-Confucianism, 163–4 as religion, 157–8 and sacrifice, 158–60, 164, 166 and secularism, 25, 166 texts, 159, 160, 163 Confucius Institutes, 166 Constantine (Roman Emperor), and Christianity, 33–4 Crawford, G., 52 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), 116 culture and politics, 142–3 and religion, 7, 198, 214–15, 216 culture wars, 62 currency, European Union, 100–1, 109

Daoism, 28 and Chinese state, 5–6, 25–6, 29, 157, 159–62, 165 and sacrifice, 161, 162 Davison, Andrew, 63, 78, 131, 132 deculturation, 7, 198, 214–15, 216 Della Sala, Vincent, 102–3 Demirel, Süleyman, 126 democracy and absolutism, 35 and Arab Spring, 49–50, 54–5 and Christianity, 45, 141–2 and civil religion, 107–9 and European Union, 102, 107, 109 external promotion, 50–4 and Greek tragedy, 27 and Islam, 42, 45, 47 low intensity (LID), 53–4 in Middle East, 50, 54–5, 184, 201–5 and religion, 40–1 Russian post-imperial, 140, 145–51, 154 and secularism, 60, 201 Turkish, 5, 49, 115–35 Democratic Party (Turkey), 134 demography, and Middle Eastern modernisation, 185–9, 205–6 Denmark, and Islam, 87, 89–90 diversity as phenomenon and discourse, 116–17 see also pluralism, cultural; pluralism, religious Dressler, Markus, 67–8, 135n6 Dumont, Louis, 23–4 Durkheim, Émile, and religio-political nexus, 12–14, 16, 17–21 economies authoritarian control, 205 and globalisation, 39, 48, 55, 65, 93 liberalisation, 51–2, 117–18, 194 modernisation, 184, 206 see also labour market education in Japan, 172, 173

223

Religion and Politics education (cont.) in MENA, 185–6, 189–93, 205–6 in Turkey, 118, 123, 127, 130–1 Egypt and ageing political elite, 188–9 and Arab Spring, 49, 55 and economic crisis, 198 and marriage crisis, 186–7 and Muslim Brotherhood, 185 Eickelman, Dale and Piscatori, James, 135n6 Eisenstadt, S. N. and Axial Age, 12–13, 23, 24, 26, 30 and civilisational approach, 11–12, 17–18, 142–3, 148, 154 and multiple modernities, 9, 142 and religio-political nexus, 3, 18, 24, 97 England immigrant population, 87 and terrorist attacks, 90–2 Enlightenment, 27, 76, 77 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 126, 128 Ergenekon Plot (Turkey), 127, 133 euro, 101, 102, 109 Europe compared with China, 28 as cosmopolitan, 104–5 and Islam, 2, 10, 65, 83–7 modernity and secularisation, 1–2, 71–2 and pluralism, 10 and religious nationalism, 82–93 and religious rebellion, 92–5 European Charter of Fundamental Rights, 99, 103 European Constitution, 99 European Neighbourhood Policy, 106 European Union and Christianity, 99 and citizenship, 107–9 and civil religion, 4–5, 97–110 as civilian power, 105 foundation myth-making, 98, 102–4, 109 images of superiority, 104–6, 107, 109

legitimacy deficit, 10, 99–100, 102, 106–7 missionary drive, 106–7 as normative power, 105–6 and political conditionality, 52 as post-national polity, 99, 104, 110 rituals and symbols, 99, 100–2, 109 and Turkey, 49, 107, 117, 128, 134 Falkner, Robert, 106 family of Islamism, 189 and social status, 186–7 Faure, David, 164 Favell, Adrian, 108 Finley, Moses, 25 Fitzgerald, Timothy, 172 flag, European Union, 100 Føllesdal, Andreas, 107–8 Foran, John, 84 Foret, François, 100 foundation myths and absolutism, 35 and European Union, 5, 98, 102–4, 109 French, 63–4 and Greek polis, 31–2 France and Islam, 65, 70, 86, 87–8 and secularism, 62, 63–4, 70, 76–7, 98 Third Republic, 145–6 freedom of religion in Japan, 168, 174, 175 in Turkey, 118 freedom of speech, 204 Fukuyama, Francis, 45 fundamentalism Christian, 215 Islamic, 45–6, 196–7, 215 Jewish, 42, 215 Gauchet, Marcel, 1, 3, 14–16, 18, 21 Gazi Mahallesi incident (Turkey), 120, 121, 123 Gellner, Ernest, 196 Germany immigrant population, 86–7, 122

224

Index and neo-Nazism, 87 as post-imperial state, 148 Weimar, 145–6 Girard, René, 23 Giscard d’Estaing, Valérie, 45 globalisation alternative, 142 and communications, 39, 93, 198–9 and democratisation, 40–1 economic, 39, 48, 55, 65, 93 as international cooperation, 37–9 and Islam, 3, 39–40, 43–9, 56–7 and Islamism, 39–40 and religion and politics, 3, 37–57, 117–18, 214–15 and secularism, 76–7, 93 as Westernisation, 37 globalism, 39 Godelier, Maurice, and religio-political nexus, 3, 15–17, 18 Gökçen, Sabiha, 128 Göle, Nilufer, 71 Greece, ancient polis religion and society, 19–20, 21, 24–5, 26–7, 31–2 and religio-political nexus, 24–5, 26–7 Gudkov, L., 151 Gül, Abdullah, 128–9 Habermas, Jürgen, 104–5, 144, 212, 213 Hague, R. and Harrop, M., 50–1 Haider, Jörg, 87–8 Han dynasty (China), 29, 158–9, 162 Hanson, Stephen, 140, 145–7 Happiness Realisation Party (Kōfuku Jitsugentō; Japan), 170–2 Hardacre, Helen, 174, 178n1 Hasan, Zoya, 69 headscarf controversy Denmark, 89 France, 64–5, 87, 88 Turkey, 67–8, 118, 133, 134 Heristchi, C. and Teti, A., 44 heterodoxy and revolution, 18 and secularism, 75

heteronomy, and religion, 20–1 hijab, ban on, 64–5, 67–8, 87, 88 Himmler, Heinrich, 87 Hinduism, and secularism, 69–70, 77 Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, 88–9 Hobsbawm, Eric, 84 Holland, M., 52 Holyoake, George, 59–60, 61 homogenisation, and nation-building, 116–17, 119–20, 125 Hu Jintao, 166 Huizong (Song Emperor), 160–1, 165 human rights, and Russian Orthodox Church, 144, 153 Humphreys, S. C., 26 Huntington, Samuel, 8, 40, 44–6, 146, 154 identity, 177 and foundation myths, 103 and religion, 1–2, 4, 8, 65–6, 69, 82, 97, 131, 150, 152, 174 and territory, 16 IMF see International Monetary Fund immigrants and European citizenship, 108–9 and European xenophobia, 4, 82, 86–92, 93 and multiculturalism, 211 India and Axial Age, 2, 18, 24, 26 and Buddhism, 2 and Islam, 70 and religious minorities, 69–70 and religious pluralism, 68–9, 214 and secularism, 62, 68–9, 71–2, 76–7, 214 Indonesia, and democracy, 49 institutions, and power, 11–12, 18, 19–20 integration, European, 4, 10, 65, 99, 101, 102–4, 107–8, 128 intelligentsia, Islamic, 191–2, 201, 206 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 37, 51, 55

225

Religion and Politics Iran Islamist revolution, 41, 203 and Saudi Arabia, 55, 56 Islam and Alevis, 67–8, 70, 117–24 and anti-Muslimism, 40 and charity, 119, 186, 187, 193–4, 197 and Christianity, 46–7, 87, 92–3 and democracy, 42, 45, 47, 201–5 and education, 189–93 in Europe, 2, 10, 65, 83–7 folk, 196, 197–8 and globalisation, 3, 39–40, 43–9, 56–7 interpretations, 192–3, 200–1 and nationalism, 9, 48 and Orientalism, 43–6 and politics, 3, 6, 98, 121–2, 131, 134, 183–206 radical, 121 and religious pluralism, 2, 43, 47–9 resurgence, 39–40 and sectarianism, 54–5 and secularism, 75–6 Islamism and Arab Spring, 6, 54–5 and charity, 193–4 and democratisation, 42, 54–5 and globalisation, 39–40, 198–201 in Iran, 41, 203 and marginalised youth, 187, 188, 189–91 and multiculturalism, 117–24 and new media, 198–200 radical, 46 and response to urbanisation, 193–8 and secularism, 130–2 Turkish, 5, 115, 117–24, 126, 129, 130–2, 133–4 Isomae Jun’ichi, 172–3 Israel Arab–Iraeli conflict, 184 and Axial Age, 2, 18, 24, 26, 33 see also Judaism

Jackson, R., 51 Jager, Colin, 212 Japan and concept of religion, 172–3 Constitution (1947), 168, 169–72, 173–5, 177–8 Edo period, 169, 176 Meiji period, 168, 172, 173, 176 and nationalism, 9–10 neighborhood associations, 175–7 new religious movements, 169, 170–2, 178 as post-imperial state, 148 and religio-political nexus, 169–75 Ritsuryō system, 169 and secularisation, 172–5, 177 state and religion, 6, 9–10, 168–78 and State Shintō, 6, 168–9, 173, 178 and UNESCO campaigns, 177 Al Jazeera, 198, 200 Jefferson, Thomas, 195 Jiajing (Ming Emperor), 163–4 Jinja Honchō (Association of Shintō Shrines), 173 Judaism, and emergence of monotheism, 2, 33 Juergensmeyer, Mark, 187 Jullien, François, 28 Justice and Development Party (AKP; Turkey), 5, 115, 123, 126–7, 128–9, 130, 132–4 Kandiyoti, Deniz, 78 Karl, T. Lynne, 53 Katzenstein, Peter, 214 Kemalism, 5, 67–8, 77, 115, 117–19, 120, 130–4 and Alevis, 117, 119, 120 and Kurds, 125 Keohane, R., 39 Khaled, Amr, 187 Khan, Mohammed Sidique, 91 Kiliçdaroglu, Kemal, 127 kingship Hellenistic, 22, 32–3 sacral see ruler, sacral

226

Index Kirill, Metropolitan, later Patriarch of Moscow, 144, 151, 152, 153, 154 Kleine, Christopher, 172 Knights Templar, 86, 87 Knöbl, Wolfgang, 143 Kōfuku no Kagaku (Happy Science; Japan), 170–1, 178 Koizumi Jun’ichiro, 174 Kōmeitō (Clean Government Party; Japan), 170 Koran, interpretation, 192–3 Kurdish Workers Party (PKK; Turkey), 125, 127 Kurds, Turkish, 117, 121, 124–8, 132, 134 labour market, in MENA, 185–6, 190, 191–2, 193–4 laicism, Turkish, 5, 67–8, 70, 115–17, 130–2, 133–4 laïcité, French, 63, 76–7, 130, 131 laiklik see laicism, Turkish Lantos, Tom, 45 Laozi, and origins of Daoism, 159, 160 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 88 Leftwich, A., 53 legalism, Chinese, 26 legitimacy and civil religion, 10, 97–8, 99, 102 and religion, 16, 34, 41, 94, 141–2, 147, 148, 150–1, 153–4, 165 and secularism, 43, 53, 61, 69, 204 Levada Centre (Moscow), 140, 150 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 22–3 Liberal Democratic Party (Japan), 173, 174 liberalisation, economic, 51–2, 117–18, 194 liberty, and secularism, 65–6 Libya and ageing elite, 188 and Arab Spring, 49 Luhmann, Niklas, 172 Macdonald, Andrew (William Pierce), 84

Macedonia, and sacral ruler, 22, 32 McLeod, Hugh, 210 McVeigh, Timothy, 83–6 Madan, T. N., 68, 69 Malashenko, A., 148, 153 Manners, Ian, 99, 101 Mao Zedong, 165 marriage crisis, in Egypt, 186–7 Maruyama Masao, 212 Marvin, Carolyn and Ingle, David W., 99 Marxism-Leninism and Islamism, 188, 191, 205 as secular religion, 97–8, 144 Masuzawa, Tomoko, 73, 74 Mauss, Marcel, and civilisational approach, 12, 14 Mawdudi, Abu’l-A’la, 195 media and Arab Spring, 199 and globalisation, 39, 93, 198–9 and growth of political Islam, 198–201 and religious market place, 200–1 Medvedev, Dmitri, 151 Meier, Christian, 31 MENA see Middle East and North Africa Mencius, 162 Metiner, Mehmet, 128 Middle East and North Africa and democratic deficit, 201–5, 206 demographic transition, 185–9, 205–6 and education, 185–6, 189–93, 205–6 and globalisation, 3, 50 and marginalised youth, 185–9 and media, 198–201 and modernisation, 183–4, 201–5 and religio-political nexus, 54–5, 185, 190–3 and secularisation, 190, 201–2 and urbanisation, 193–8 millet system, Ottoman, 120, 126, 130 Ming dynasty (China), 31, 161–2, 163–5 minorities and secularism, 69–70, 76, 129–30, 131 see also Alevis; Kurds Mitrokhin, Nikolai, 140, 149–50, 152

227

Religion and Politics modernisation in Middle East, 183–4, 201–5 neo-modernisation theory, 148 rapid, 183–4 and religion, 210–13 slow, 183–4, 205–6 and social change, 183–7, 201–2, 205–6 uneven, 184, 205–6 modernity and multiple modernities, 2, 9, 142–4, 145–6, 154 and secularisation, 1–2, 8–9, 40–1, 62, 120, 210–13 and secularism, 3–4, 63–4, 71, 74–5, 213–14 Soviet, 146 Mongols, in China, 30, 163, 165 Monnet, Jean, 4, 99 monotheism and orthodoxy, 18 and politics, 2, 20, 33 see also Christianity; Islam; Judaism Morozov, Viatcheslav and Rumelili, Bahar, 99 Moscow Carnegie Centre, 140–1 mosques, as centres of political life, 204 Mubarak, Hosni, 188 Muglali, Mustafa, 127–8 Mullins, Mark, 173 multiculturalism in Europe, 105, 211 opposition to, 83–4, 86 in Turkey, 117–24, 126–7, 128 see also pluralism, cultural; pluralism, religious Museveni, Yoweri, 53–4 Muslim Brotherhood, 185, 188, 189 Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 78 Nakasone Yasuhiro, 174 nation-building and ageing elites, 188–9 and education, 130–1, 189 and homogenisation, 116–17, 119–20, 125

nationalism and absolutism, 35 and foundation myths, 102 and Islam, 9, 48, 50 Japanese, 9–10 Kurdish, 121, 124–8, 134 Pan-Arab, 9 and religion and secularism, 9–10, 68, 97–9, 110 religious, 82–95, 152; in Norway, 4, 82–6 Turkish, 68, 116–17, 128 Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney and Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder, 62 neo-Confucianism, 163–4 neoconservatism, and US politics, 210–11 neo-modernisation theory, 148 neo-Nazism, in Germany, 87 Nesin, Aziz, 122 Netherlands, and Islam, 88–9 neutrality, and secularism, 3, 60–1, 65, 75, 130 nexus, religio-political, 2–3, 4–5, 8–35 and accommodationism, 64–5, 66–7, 215 and anthropology, 13–17, 23 and Axial Age, 17–18, 23–8, 29–31 and civilisation, 3, 9, 10–13, 17–23, 97–8, 141–5 and Durkheim, 12–14, 16, 17–21 and Eisenstadt, 3, 18, 24, 97 and Gauchet, 14–16, 18, 21 as meta-institution, 17–18, 98 and separationism, 60–1, 63–7, 69–70 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 75 Norway, and religious nationalism, 4, 82–6 Noyon, J., 49 Nye, J., 39 Ōkawa Ryūhō, 171 opposition, in MENA states, 204–5 Orientalism, 43–6, 73 Orthodox Church, Russian, 5, 140–55 canonical territory, 151–2, 154

228

Index

and civilisational analysis, 141–5 and democracy, 141–2, 153 and human rights, 144, 153 involvement in politics, 141–2, 148–54 Social Doctrine, 144, 151 orthodoxy, and monotheism, 18 Osborne, Robin, 24–5 Ottoman Empire and Alevis, 119–20 collapse, 48 Özdalga, Elizabeth, 131 Papkova, I., 149 parties, political in Japan, 170–3, 178 in MENA, 204 in Turkey, 5, 115, 117–19, 121, 123, 126–7, 128–9, 130, 132–4 path dependency thesis, 143 Patočka, Jan, 27 patrimonialism, plebiscitarian, 146–7 Peace Party (Turkey), 121 philosophy Chinese, 28 in Greek polis, 21, 24, 26–7 Pierce, William (Andrew Macdonald), 84 Pipes, Richard, 146 pluralism, cultural, 10, 12, 115, 116–24, 128 pluralism, religious, 6, 78, 115–16 in India, 68–9, 214 and Islam, 2, 43, 47–9 in Japan, 6 in Turkey, 5, 115, 116–24, 128, 130 Poggi, Gianfranco, 18 Poland, and Roman Catholic Church, 41, 42 politics and autonomy, 21, 22 and civil religion, 98 civilisational, 8 and globalisation, 3, 37–57, 117–18, 214–15 identity, 117–18, 121, 124–5, 152

influence of new media, 198–201 institutional alternatives, 19–20, 21, 26–7 and Islam, 3, 6, 98, 121–2, 131, 134, 183–206 and marginalised youth, 185–9 and monotheism, 2 and philosophy, 21, 24, 26 political transformations, 145–8, 149, 154 in primitive societies, 13–17, 18, 21 and religion and secularism, 63–70, 214 in secondary schools, 190 and statehood, 19–20, 22 see also democracy and individual states polytheism, ancient Greek, 24–5 population, growth, 185–9 post-colonialism, and Middle East politics, 184, 205 post-secularism, 7, 144, 210–16 power and bureaucracy, 147 civilian, 105 ground/explicit, 19–20, 21, 22, 23 institutional, 11–12, 18, 19–20 negative, 51 social, 19 Pridham, G., 50 Protestantism, in United States, 65–6 public sphere creation, 72 religion in, 43, 66, 97, 130–1, 134, 172–5, 200–1, 211, 213–14 Putin, Vladimir, 147, 149–51, 153 al Qaeda, 46, 49, 86, 90–1, 93 Qing dynasty (China), 30, 165 Qutb, Sajjid, 195 Rabinow, Paul, 2 rationality see reason Rawls, John, 213 Reader, Ian, 172, 177 reason, and secularism, 59, 60, 64, 71

229

Religion and Politics rebellion, religious, 92–5 religion and autonomy, 24–5 civil/secular, 97–8; and democracy, 107–9; and European Union, 4–5, 97–110; in France, 64; and nationalism, 8, 97–9, 110; and symbols and rituals, 99, 100–2, 109 and culture, 7, 198, 214–15, 216 de-privatisation, 40, 41–3, 97, 172 and democratisation, 40–1 and European secularisation, 1–2, 3, 97 and globalisation, 3, 37–43, 117–18, 214–15 as ideology of protest, 92–5 as meta-institution, 17–18, 98 and nationalism, 4, 8, 82–95 new religious movements, 41–2, 75, 169, 170–2, 178 and philosophy, 26, 28 privatisation, 60–1, 66, 73–5, 172, 213 resurgence, 3, 5, 8, 40, 56, 77, 211 and secularism, 59–62, 140–55, 210; comparative studies, 62, 63–75, 140, 146, 152–3; cross-disciplinary studies, 73–6 see also nexus, religio-political Religious Corporations Law (Japan), 170 religious studies, and secularisation theory, 74–5 revolution, and heterodoxy, 18 rights, fundamental, and European Union, 99, 103 rituals of civil religion, 4–5, 99, 100–2, 109 Confucian, 158–9 and power, 21, 28–9, 30 Shintō, 174 Roman Catholic Church and democratisation, 41, 42, 153 and French laïcité, 64 and human rights, 152–3 and Russia, 152–3 Roman Empire and Christianity, 33–5 and Hellenistic kingship, 32–3

Rosanvallon, Pierre, 107 Roy, Olivier, 7, 201, 214–15, 216 ruler, sacral, 13–15, 20, 21, 25, 28–35 in China, 28–9 Russia, post-Soviet and Orthodox Church, 5, 140, 141–2, 148–54 political transformation, 145–8, 149, 154 and post-imperial democracy, 140, 143, 145–51, 154 sacrifice and Confucianism, 158–60, 164, 166 and Daoism, 161, 162 Said, Edward, 43–4, 46 Sakwa, Richard, 147–8 Saudi Arabia, and Iran, 56 Scandinavia and religious nationalism, 4, 82–6 and xenophobia, 89–90 Schmitt, Carl, 98–9 Schuman, Robert, 4, 99, 101 secondary schools, and politics, 190 sectarianism, Islamic, 54–5 secularisation and de-privatisation of religion, 40–3, 56, 97, 172 de-secularisation, 153–4 European, 1–2, 3, 10 and Islam, 2, 75–6, 189–93, 206 in Japan, 172–7 secularisation theory, 73, 206, 210 secularism and Arab Spring, 6, 190 early China, 25 and Enlightenment, 27, 76 and globalisation, 76–7, 93, 214–15 and modernity, 3–4, 8–9, 40–1, 63–4, 71, 120, 201–2, 210–14 multiple secularisms, 213 and nationalism, 9–10, 68, 97–8 and neutrality, 3, 60–1, 65, 75, 130 political, 63–70, 214

230

Index and religion, 59–62, 140–55; comparative studies, 62, 63–75, 140, 146, 152–3; conceptual vocabulary, 77–9; cross-disciplinary studies, 73–6; and Islamism, 130–1, 190 state, 144 as Western construct, 71–2, 73, 152 separationism, and secularism, 60–1, 63–7, 69–70 Sèvres Syndrome, 116 shamanism, 15 Sheenan, Jonathan, 212 Shevtsova, Lilia, 147 Shimazono Susumu, 175 Shinrintō (Supreme Truth Party; Japan), 170 Shintō and neighborhood associations, 176 secularisation, 173–5 State, 6, 168–9, 173, 178 Shintō Seiji Renmei (Shintō Association of Spiritual Leadership; Japan), 173 Shiqaqi, Fathi, 192 Shore, Cris, 101 Sivas incident (Turkey), 120, 121, 122 Skocpol, Theda, 84 social sciences, and secularisation theory, 73, 74–5 societies, stateless and civilisation, 22–3 and politics, 13–17, 18, 19, 21–2 and religion, 21, 22–3 sociology civisational approach see civilisation transitological studies, 145 Sōka Gakkai (Japan), 170, 178 Song dynasty (China), 160–1, 162–3, 165 Soviet Union and secularism, 98, 140, 144 and state authoritarianism, 145–6, 149 Spain, and Islam, 90–1 spirituality, resurgence, 41–2, 78 Spohn, Willfried, 1, 8–10, 35, 142–4, 145 state Islamic, 76 and power, 19–20, 22

and primitive societies, 14–17, 21–2 and sacral ruler, 15, 20, 21, 25 and writing, 13, 15 see also church and state; politics status, social and education, 191–2 and marriage, 186–7 Stoeckl, K., 144–5, 152 Stråth, Bo, 99 Sufism, Kurdish, 125 Sui dynasty (China), 29, 159 Sullivan, Winni, 66–7 Sun Yatsen, 165 Sunni Islam, in Turkey, 67–8, 117, 120–3, 130 Sweden, and Islam, 90 symbols of civil religion, 4–5, 98, 99, 100–2, 109 religious, 64, 87 Syria, civil war, 49–50, 55 Taizu (Ming Emperor), 161, 163 T’ang (Tang) dynasty (China), 29, 30, 159–61, 162 Tanweer, Shehzad, 92 Taylor, Charles, 77, 130, 211–13, 213–14 territory and globalisation, 38, 39, 214 and identity, 16 terrorism and cosmic war imagery, 83, 84–6, 93–5 and religious nationalism, 83–6, 89–92, 93 Tezcür, Güneş Murat, 126 theocracy in China, 161 in Israel, 33 theology and religious studies, 74–5 and secularism, 60 tolerance, in Turkey, 115–16, 126–7, 130–2

231

Religion and Politics totems, collective, 100–2 tragedy, Greek, and politics, 26–7 transitological studies, 145 Trenin, Dmitri, 147–8 Tsuiki Shūgaku, 171 Tunisia and Arab revolutions, 186, 188, 199 and Arab Spring, 49, 55 Türk, Ahmed, 127 Turkey and Alevis, 67–8, 70, 117, 119–24, 132, 134 Constitution (1937), 129–30, 131 cultural and religious pluralism, 115, 116–24, 130 democracy and religion, 5, 49, 115–35 education, 118, 123, 127, 130–1 and European Union, 49, 107, 117, 128, 134 and Kurds, 124–8, 132 and secularism, 62, 67–8, 70, 71, 76–7, 117–18, 130–2, 133–5 Türkmen, Buket, 135n10 Turner, B. S., 43, 200 unemployment in MENA, 185–6, 191–2, 193–4 in Turkey, 118 UNESCO, and Japan, 177 United Russia Party, 151 United States and democratisation, 52 and globalisation, 93 and neoconservatism, 210–11 and religious minorities, 70 and religious nationalism, 83–6 and secularism, 62, 65–6, 76–7 universities, and politics, 191 urbanisation, in MENA, 193–8 and folk Islam, 196, 197–8 and modern city as new jahiliya, 195–6 USSR see Soviet Union

Van Gogh, Theo, 88–9 Verkhovskiy, A., 151–2 Viswanathan, Gauri, 72, 75 Wagner, P., 142–3 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 84 Wang Mang (Han emperor), 158–9 war, cosmic, 83, 84–6, 93–5 Warner, Michael, VanAntwerpen, Jonathan and Calhoun, Craig, 212–13 Weber, Max and civilisational studies, 12–13 and patrimonialism, 146–7 and secularisation, 210 and state power, 94 Welfare Party (WP; Turkey), 117–19 Wenger, Tisa, 65 Willy Brandt Centre for German and European Studies (Wrocław), 1 women, in labour market, 185–6 World Bank, 37, 51 writing, and state formation, 12, 15 xenophobia, European, 4, 82, 86–92, 93 Xuan (Tang Emperor), 160–1 Xuanzong (Tang Emperor), 160 Yasukuni Shrine (Tokyo), 173–4, 178 Yemen, and ageing political elite, 188 Yongle (Ming Emperor), 161–2, 163 youth, Arab and ageing elite, 188–9 and Islam, 188 and marriage crisis, 186–7 and unemployment, 185–6, 191–2, 193–4 and unwanted spare time, 187–8 Yuan dynasty (China), 163 al-Zawahiri, Ayman, 86, 91 Zemni, S., 40 Zhou dynasty (China), 25, 28–30, 157 Zhu Xi (Confucian scholar), 163, 164

232