Religions in International Political Economy [1st ed.] 9783030414719, 9783030414726

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv
The Religious Resurgence and International Political Economy (Sabine Dreher)....Pages 1-18
Religious Fundamentalism and the Neoliberal Turn (Sabine Dreher)....Pages 19-49
Business Fundamentalism and US Hegemony (Sabine Dreher)....Pages 51-74
The Spirit of Capitalism and the Question of Development (Sabine Dreher)....Pages 75-100
Toward Multipolarity Through Religious Nationalism? (Sabine Dreher)....Pages 101-127
Households in the Global Economy: Religious Feminism Against Neo-Patriarchy (Sabine Dreher)....Pages 129-154
Progressive Religious Activism and Global Governance Reform (Sabine Dreher)....Pages 155-179
Global Imaginaries: From the Economy of Death Toward an Economy of Life? (Sabine Dreher)....Pages 181-208
Beyond Neoliberal Theocracy? (Sabine Dreher)....Pages 209-215
Back Matter ....Pages 217-225

Citation preview

Religions in International Political Economy Sabine Dreher

International Political Economy Series

Series Editor Timothy M. Shaw University of London London, UK University of Massachusetts Boston Boston, MA, USA

The global political economy is in flux as a series of cumulative crises impacts its organization and governance. The IPE series has tracked its development in both analysis and structure over the last three decades. It has always had a concentration on the global South. Now the South increasingly challenges the North as the centre of development, also reflected in a growing number of submissions and publications on indebted Eurozone economies in Southern Europe. An indispensable resource for scholars and researchers, the series examines a variety of capitalisms and connections by focusing on emerging economies, companies and sectors, debates and policies. It informs diverse policy communities as the established trans-Atlantic North declines and ‘the rest’, especially the BRICS, rise.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/13996

Sabine Dreher

Religions in International Political Economy

Sabine Dreher International Studies York University Glendon Campus Toronto, ON, Canada

ISSN 2662-2483 ISSN 2662-2491 (electronic) International Political Economy Series ISBN 978-3-030-41471-9 ISBN 978-3-030-41472-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41472-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © RBFried/iStockphoto This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This book is the result of my bewilderment when a student came up to me during an exam in Nicosia at Near Eastern University in 2003 in the not widely recognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus to tell me that he could not answer my exam question. I had asked if Cola Turka is an expression of national opposition against globalization. A heavily broadcast advertisement for Cola Turka that year showed a character being transformed from a white urban Turk into a “real Turk” by drinking Cola Turka who now likes arabesque music. The student explained that Cola Turka was produced by Islamic capitalists and is equally an expression of globalization, so my question did not make sense. I had just defended my dissertation and was open for a new topic. One of the interesting insights coming out of this inquiry concerned the politics of food production and consumption in Turkey where there were then separate products and shops for the pious (or black) Turks that bought Cola Turka (or Ülker products), and the secular (or white) Turks that bought Coca Cola (or Eti products). Religious affiliation also influenced career trajectories: Erdogan worked for Cola Turka at some point whereas a prominent secular politician was employed by Coca Cola. The most consequential insight was the realization that the attack on the “secular Republic” by the Islamists was a sort of “trope” that hid a power struggle among elites over access to state resources and was only indirectly concerned with secularism or Islamism. The reverse is true as well, the defense of secularism was a defense of specific patronage networks. v

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This question set me onto a path of trying to understand “Islamic capitalism” and “secularism.” It then morphed into an investigation on how to make sense of the religious resurgence that scholars had observed worldwide and of which the Turkish case was only one example. The key problem was how to deal with the politics of the religious resurgence where adherents often dismissed criticism as assertive secularism or as anti-religious and thus made themselves immune to critical political analysis. Likewise, there was and still is a tendency to pretend religious traditions are all about peace and cooperation. The discovery of the critical theory of religion by Timothy Fitzgerald and his criticism of world religion and the cultural studies approach in religious studies such as exemplified by Diana Moore opened my eyes that there is a way beyond the simple dichotomy of good versus bad religion, and that it is possible to be critical of both the religious adherents and their secular counterparts if the criticism is framed in a specific context. For example, with regard to democracy, both fundamentalism and repressive secularism create problems for the freedom of expression and need to be carefully evaluated. A religious activist may be either promoting neoliberal globalization or actively working toward a heaven on earth where there are no homeless people and no hunger. Cultural studies, the critical theory of religion, the neo-Gramscian perspective, or interpretivism were eye-opening in terms of how they can be a useful tool for the study of religion and this book is “empirical research” to the extent that I have shown the usefulness of such an approach to the study of religions in International Political Economy. The conclusion I have reached is that each religious tradition contains within itself the same divisions that can be found in secular politics when they enter the public sphere and that there is, as Gramsci put it, a religion for the poor, the rich, the intellectuals, and for women. Religious thought is a reflection of class positions (in a wider sense). The more depressing insight was that the reason for the prominence of reactionary or rightwing fundamentalist religious expressions within the religious resurgence lies in the fact that they are part and parcel of the neoliberal revolution itself that dismantled the biggest victory of progressive politics— states geared at least somewhat toward moderating the inherent tendencies toward extreme inequality and instability within capitalism even while demonstrating many short-comings. Toronto, Canada December 2019

Sabine Dreher

Acknowledgments

York University and CUPE 3903, the union representing adjunct faculty, are both responsible for the financial support I received for the writing of this book. Specifically, the research leave that I was awarded in 2017– 2018 was instrumental in getting started. Regular conference funding allowed me to present my work at the ISA and elsewhere. The major and several minor research grants allowed me to organize a summer at Bielefeld University, and engage The Editing Company, where Jonathan Adjemian was instrumental in transforming the manuscript into more beautiful prose and made many good suggestions in the process. Of course, he is in no way responsible for any mistakes I made after he corrected the chapters. In the process of writing the book I incurred many debts. At York, Mike Palamarek and Ryan Toews made writing more fun during our writing workshops in 2017, cut short by the longest university strike in Canadian history. With Nicola Short I have ongoing discussions regarding neo-Gramscian theory and IPE more generally. With Julie Dowsett there were many conversations on capitalist feminism. Thanks to Hani El Masry for ongoing encouragement and feedback. Adrienne Roberts was instrumental in getting me started on neoliberal feminism. My colleagues Elaine Coburn, Stanislav Kirschbaum, Hossam Ali-Hassan, Aymen Karoui, Jean Michel Montsion, Greg Chin, and Elisabeth Abergel wrote several reference letters for the CUPE/York competitions and gave feedback on

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presentations and grant applications. A big thank you to Christina ClarkKazak for her comments on my grant application and for giving me the opportunity to present my work within the department. Barbara Falk and Miloud Chennoufi have been instrumental in sharpening my understanding of the global structural changes in which we are living, and I am grateful for their ongoing invitations to present my insights on globalization in the Canadian Forces College in Toronto. My Religious Activism and Global Economy discussion group—especially Jay Smith, Elizabeth Smythe, Aikande Kwayu, and Ed Webb—was very helpful in clarifying many of the issues raised here when we organized our ISA panels. Specifically, Jay was crucial for organizing the edited volume (Religious Activism in the Global Economy) on which this book is built. My Islam and Neoliberal Capitalism group, especially Lena Rethel, Ed Webb, and Travis Selmier but also Özlem Madi-Sisman and Omer Awass, likewise have dispelled many myths and misunderstandings about how to conceptualize Islam, capitalism, and their relationship. Feyzi Baban and Kim Rygiel: thanks for many conversations about Turkey, the crisis of the university, and cosmopolitanism. I am deeply grateful to Cecelia Lynch for her support over the past years but especially for insightful discussions regarding constructivism and interpretivism. Radhika Desai and Alan Freeman have developed their own fantastic Geopolitical Economy group in Manitoba and are excellent conference organizers. Side discussions about religion with Jayant Lele during the revolutions conference were extremely important. Beate Jahn has consistently kept me up to date with IR theory discussions. Maryam Khan was vital in guiding me toward progressive Muslims and their interpretation of the LGBTQ+ community. To Rowan I owe many insights regarding the LGBTQ+ community more generally. Thomas Faist and his research team in Bielefeld were crucial in the summer of 2018 for the discussions around transnational social spaces. While in Bielefeld Levent Teczen explained his idea of “administered religion” to me and Mustafa Sen highlighted that the story of suppression as told by the various Islamic movements in Turkey overlooks the manifold ways how religious practice was made possible in the supposedly secular Republic. Thanks to Hakan Yavuz and Bayram Balci for the invitation to the workshop on the Gülen movement, and to Joshua Hendrick and Kristina Dohrn for insightful discussions during the workshop. Justin Rosenberg’s and Milja Kurki’s workshop on “Multiplicity in International Relations” re-ignited my interest in disciplinary questions. Elisabeth Abergel was crucial in

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terms of intellectual development when she asked me to teach Religion and International Relations as a course in 2011 based on my research on religious civil society movements in Turkey. That was a summer full of revelations since until then I had not really considered the larger disciplinary context. I still think I have only scratched the surface with this book, and I am very appreciative for the invitation from Timothy Shaw, the editor of the IPE series, to write it. Most of the problems in the book are the result of my precarious situation that limits thinking and research time while much of the positive aspects are due to help and support. I am deeply grateful to all those who helped, directly or indirectly.

Contents

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The Religious Resurgence and International Political Economy

1

2

Religious Fundamentalism and the Neoliberal Turn

19

3

Business Fundamentalism and US Hegemony

51

4

The Spirit of Capitalism and the Question of Development

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Toward Multipolarity Through Religious Nationalism?

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6

Households in the Global Economy: Religious Feminism Against Neo-Patriarchy

129

Progressive Religious Activism and Global Governance Reform

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Global Imaginaries: From the Economy of Death Toward an Economy of Life?

181

7

8

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xii

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CONTENTS

Beyond Neoliberal Theocracy?

Index

209 217

Abbreviations and Acronyms

AGAPE AKP AWID BDS BJP BRICS CADTM CEDAW CIA EU FARC GATT GDP GFC GPE HIPC IMF IPE IR ISI ISIS LGBTQ+ NAFTA NAM NGO

Alternative Globalization Addressing People and Earth Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, Turkey) Association for Women’s Rights in Development Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Bharatiya Janata Party (India) Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa Committee for the Abolition of Debt Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women Central Intelligence Agency (United States) European Union Armed Revolutionary Forces of Columbia General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Gross Domestic Product Great Financial Crisis Global Political Economy Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative International Monetary Fund International Political Economy International Relations Import Substitution Industrialization Islamic State in Iraq and Syria Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer + North American Free Trade Agreement National Association of Manufacturers (United States) Non-Governmental Organization xiii

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ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

NIEO OPEC TNC UK UN UNCTAD UNDP USAID WCC WLP WLUML WSF WTO

New International Economic Order Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries Transnational Corporation United Kingdom United Nations United Nations Conference on Trade and Development United Nations Development Program United States Agency for International Development World Council of Churches Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace Women Living under Muslim Laws World Social Forum World Trade Organization

CHAPTER 1

The Religious Resurgence and International Political Economy

Since the 1980s, International Political Economy (IPE) as a discipline was preoccupied with how international economic organizations—such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the OECD—facilitated and imposed an ambitious project of creating a global economy in which states would be mere locations for global commodity chains, and be at the mercy of institutional investors who are able to transfer money across borders instantaneously, destabilizing whole societies (Gélinas 2000). The organizations referred to the process as “globalization” and as a reflection of traditional free trade theories and promised that the proposed policies such as deregulation, liberalization, austerity, tax cuts, privatization, and capital mobility would solve the debt crisis and economic stagnation (Paquin 2008). Given that the main goal of these policies has been to shift power from the public to the private, the neo-Gramscian perspective used the term “project” to describe neoliberal globalization (Carrol 2007, p. 36; Gill 1994; Gélinas 2000; Overbeek 2004). That there was a coherent and interrelated set of policies has now been recognized even by IMF economists (Ostry et al. 2016). The key goal of this project was to reduce state intervention in markets and to encourage deep integration into the larger global economy based on existing economic specialization (Rodrik 2011). While earlier, states were encouraged to improve their standing in the global division of labor through more protectionist industrial and welfare © The Author(s) 2020 S. Dreher, Religions in International Political Economy, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41472-6_1

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policies, now these were denounced as inefficient and responsible for stagflation and debt. As neoliberal globalization was resisted by a whole array of counter-hegemonic movements but also took hold in countries at different times (Carroll 2007; Munck 2006), the project shifted in scope and ambition. All of which explains the unevenness of its application and the different national trajectories. The main story of this ground-breaking book is that the neoliberal globalization project was not only facilitated or supported by economic but also by religious actors while other religious actors resisted or at least sought to mitigate some of the more egregious effects of neoliberal globalization. The crucial and important insight of the book is that it shows how religious activists are a constitutive part of neoliberal globalization but also of its contestation. While most religious studies researchers analyze how neoliberalism has changed religion (see for example Martikainen and Gauthier 2016) the novel proposition of this book is that religious activists were central to the very creation of neoliberal globalization, especially in the United States. A further major argument is that a large majority of religious activism is actually geared toward the direct or indirect support of a market economy. Following a cultural studies perspective from religious studies, an interpretivist and neo-Gramscian approach from IPE, “Religions in a global economy” proposes the disaggregation of religious traditions into reactionary fundamentalist vs reformist and progressive religious activism as a starting point for the study of religions in IPE. This perspective was crucial for the research in this book in that it allowed me to highlight how religious activists align with the political force field of their respective societies, and their global and national context when they enter politics and make claims based on specific interpretations of their own religious tradition. After forty years of neoliberal globalization, we need to distinguish different periods (Davies 2016, p. 124ff). There was an initial preparatory stage between 1971 and 1989, when the project was pushed onto societies by the Thatcher and Reagan governments, and through structural adjustment policies in the Global South due to the debt crisis often after military coups. The second period was the globalization and full-scale application of neoliberalism after the end of the Cold War (1989). This period culminated with China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. In this period, a more “progressive” neoliberalism under Clinton and Blair emerged which was more focused on creating global governance mechanisms to manage globalization (Fraser 2016) but the new

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constitutionalism according to Gill (1995) still implemented a disciplinary form of neoliberalism even under this more “progressive” version. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (created in 1995) were all focused on implementing different aspects of the neoliberal agenda—to create equal access for goods and services and to create common standards for firms and banks in order to fashion a global marketplace (Wade 2003; Rodrik 2011). These processes generated a planetary economic system, and a limited form of political integration governing it, based not only on great powers but also on international organizations and a host of civil society organizations (McGrew 2014). In the history of state-building, this is a tremendous achievement, given that the political and economic integration of the whole world in one economic system had never before been attempted. It created a global middle class, increased economic power in Asia, and to a lesser extent in Africa and Latin America, leading to speculation about a multipolar order. The third period of neoliberal globalization started in 2008 and saw austerity now also applied to countries of the center. There was something paradoxical after the Great Financial Crisis: while the general sense was that the economic model had failed, the political responsibility was put on the states that had to bail out the banks; bail-outs that were financed by austerity programs for the general population while the bonus payments for bankers were largely left untouched; a fact commented upon critically even by conservatives (Moore 2011). Today, the problems and contradictions involved in creating a truly global economy threaten to undermine the project in its entirety, as happened already in the 1930s. Inequality, both globally and within nations, is at levels not seen since the 1930s, when the first market-based globalization came to an end and led to the Great Depression, the Second World War and genocide (Milanovic 2016; Ruggie 1982). Financial crises have increased in number, severity, and geographical scope, with the 2008 financial crisis nearly threatening the survival of the global economy itself (Tooze 2018). Despite progress in terms of poverty reduction and other measures through the United Nations’ Millennium Goals, there is now evidence of backsliding, with extreme forms of poverty increasing again. The high or even increasing number of fragile and failing states has led to an increase in migration, especially refugee migration; and there are still about 800 million starving people worldwide. In the developed world, the increase in inequality has been accompanied by wage stagnation since the 1970s and a rise in household debt, leaving many people poor despite

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working full-time. Suicides among older white men and mental health problems are on the rise while life expectancy in the United States is declining—symptoms of inequality and its consequences (Wilkinson and Picket 2011). In addition, the climate emergency, the extinction crisis, and the job crisis created by the fourth industrial revolution which will also increase inequality, add several additional layers of complications (OECD 2014, p. 18). Global governance mechanisms have not developed to deal with these complex issues and at the national level, the political processes have been captured by the power elites and democratic processes are under threat (Shipman et al. 2018; Engelen et al. 2012; Moore 2011). Since the 1980s, these dysfunctions in the global economy have led to the creation of left- and right-wing populist movements. The left populists were first to protest against global economic restructuring; their protests culminated in the creation of the World Social Forum (WSF) in 2001 in a challenge to the Davos World Economic Forum (Ayres 2004). The latter is a meeting place of the global power elite (Carroll 2007). The creation of the WSF came after a decade of realization among activists that economic globalization creates problems for all new social movements and is an obstacle to women’s rights, the peace movement, the environmental movement, and the civil rights movement (Lynch 1998). These movements consequently demanded that the rules governing the economy be reformed with regard to trade, debt, investment, and the environment. Their protests led to the creation of debt forgiveness programs by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, but otherwise were largely ineffective. The 2008 financial crisis led to a revival of the progressive movement in the Occupy Wall Street protests, which pushed the idea of a wealth tax onto the larger agenda. In addition, the Green New Deal may be sign of things to come. Today, even defenders of the globalization project question whether it might have gone too far (Rodrik 2011; Soros 1997). Economists from the IMF have admitted that neoliberal policies contributed to financial instability and increasing inequality, which lowered growth (Ostry et al. 2016). Fractions of the ruling elite are now openly criticizing capitalism (Chapter 9). According to the latest power elite research, this means that one precondition for system transformation—intra-elite struggle—is now in place (Shipman et al. 2018). However, for the moment, the main momentum of the protest against globalization has now moved toward right-wing populists and the far

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right often funded by wealthy speculators and investors—the funding of Cambridge Analytica by Mercer’s hedge fund (who also financed Breitbart) is one of the more notorious examples (Harrington 2019; Hendrikse 2018). This has led to electoral successes in the center of the global economy itself, in the form of Brexit and Trump. Even though Trump and Brexit appear on the face of it to be anti-globalization, the reality is that they are an expression of a different form of neoliberal globalization. The advantage of a globalized free market as a part of a sovereign state system has been recognized by Friedrich von Hayek, one of the core neoliberal intellectuals. He argued that a global free market makes it impossible for states to uphold welfare rights and wage and working standards or taxation because they are unable to do so at the national level due to the mobility of capital and they are also unable to agree on a global standard as each nation benefits differently from global standards. For this reason, the ideal situation is to have a sovereign state within a global free market economy as this would increase the freedom of maneuver for business (Hayek 1980, p. 258ff). From this perspective, the right-wing populist leaders in the center and in states such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Brazil, Russia, and India are not necessarily a threat to key aspects of economic globalization given that they mostly go against migration or may be threaten some form of trade protectionism but leave the most important aspect—financial globalization and capital mobility—in place. The question is how to account for this staying power of neoliberal policies such as deregulation, liberalization, austerity, tax cuts, privatization, and capital mobility—all geared toward a power shift away from the public to the private? The argument is that the resurgence of religion, specifically of a fundamentalist or right-wing form of religion, is a large piece of the puzzle, so far unaccounted for in the IPE discussion. The book here is therefore ground-breaking because it sheds new light on neoliberal globalization. In the process, it disaggregates religious activism and allows a more nuanced discussion of “religion” in IPE.

Religion and Neoliberal Globalization in International Political Economy The rise and potential fall of the neoliberal globalization project is not the only ongoing global transformation. Religious scholars and sociologists have noted the demise of one of their most cherished assumptions—the ongoing secularization of the world, and the accompanying disappearance

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of religion. One of the key proponents of the secularization thesis, Peter Berger, argued in 1968 that in “the 21st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture” (cited in Stark 2015, p. 9). Berger has since recanted and is now convinced that the “assumption that we live in a secularized society is false” (Berger 1999, p. 2). As religious scholars point out, there has been a process of religious resurgence since the 1970s with consequences for the orientation and legitimization of political and cultural activism worldwide (Riesebrodt 2014; Eisenstadt 1999; Berger 1999). One very blunt indicator of this process is that the number of people indicating some type of religious practice increased from 73 to 79% between the late 1980s and the year 2000, according to Toft et al. (2011, p. 2). A large majority of the global population thus practices some type of religion and is increasingly outspoken about it. The Iranian Revolution in 1979, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in the 1980s, the rise of the Mujahideen and later the Taliban in Afghanistan, evangelicalism within the Republican Party and Christian terrorism against abortion clinics in the United States, the role of Gush Emunim in Israel, the Buddhists monks against the Rohingya in Burma, Hindutva in India, the strengthening of traditionalist subcurrents within the Catholic Church and, of course, the attacks of 9/11, are some of the key examples. Within International Relations, this has led to a new area of specialization, and a Religion and International Relations section was established within the International Studies Association in 2013 (Fitzgerald 2011; Petito and Hatzopoulos 2003; Robertson and Chirico 1985; Thomas 2005; Sandal and Fox 2013; Toft et al. 2011). This has now morphed into several different strands of research and argumentation (for an overview, see Badie and Smouts 1992; Thomas 2000; Haynes 2014). Researchers have pointed out a necessity to conceptualize a non-Western form of pluralism in International Relations. In their view, the religious resurgence represented a more authentic local practice than the secular state that had suppressed religious activists (Thomas 2005; Petito and Hatopoulos 2003). Many political conflicts and changes can be attributed to religious activists (Johnston and Sampson 1994; Juergensmeyer 2008). Philpott (2002) claimed that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 against the United States definitively ended the Westphalian state system, because they were committed by a non-state actor. Many now problematize secularization as an argument and postulate the need to conceptualize the current period

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as a post-secular age (Habermas 2008; Mavelli and Petito 2012; Wilson and Steger 2013); even the founding myth of the discipline, the idea of the secular Westphalian state system (Valaskakis 2010), is now queried as a story of origin of the modern state (Kayaoglu 2010). It is therefore surprising to discover mostly silence when trying to figure out how religious activism relates to the creation and contestation of the neoliberal globalization project from within the discipline of International Political Economy. This is all the more astonishing given that there is a long-established tradition within sociology, based on the work of Max Weber, of inquiring into the relationship between religion and capitalist development (see Chapter 4). However, within International Political Economy (IPE) there does not really exist a body of literature tying together neoliberal globalization and the question of religion, let alone a systematic reflection on how to study religion from within the discipline, with the exception of Tétreault and Denemark (2004) and Elsenhans et al. (2015). Reflecting on this is increasingly a must: 81% of evangelical Christians voted for Trump. Given the important role of the United States in the global political economy, IPE needs to understand the potential implications of this type of fundamentalism for the study of US hegemony. More and more leaders—like Modi in India, Putin in Russia, or Erdogan in Turkey—are instrumentalizing religion for their own nationalistic political projects. Furthermore, there are also religious activists involved in protests against neoliberal globalization. Meanwhile, households, who through migration and consumption determine many of the underlying structural changes of the global economy, are under pressure from fundamentalist religious activists to minimize changes in the gendered and racial power balance. As Development Studies has become more post-modern, many individuals have adopted the most pro-market stream of religion in the form of the prosperity gospel or market Islam, which are unashamedly consumerist and wealth-oriented; but the opposite, the re-creation of monastic communities, or an ecological kosher movement, can also be found. These are complemented by liberationist or progressive forms of religious activism within the World Social Forum or the Occupy movement. Theoretically, religious activists could mobilize about 79% of the world’s population (Toft et al. 2011, p. 2). Consequently, IPE needs to understand how these activists interpret and organize around neoliberal economic globalization. My book answers Bellin’s (2008) call to integrate the study of religion into the central questions of the field. I

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intend to show how religious activism is relevant for International Political Economy as a discipline, with a focus on the history, governance, contestation, and potential transformation of the neoliberal globalization project.

Structure and the Argument of the Book In the contemporary moment, the study of International Political Economy should be a good way to help us understand the changing nature of the global political economy. Unfortunately, the discipline, especially in the United States, has chosen to retreat into specialized subject matters; some observers even claim that it has become boring (Cohen 2010). Still, now is an opportune time to reconsider some of the original insights that came out of IPE research, especially in its constructivist or interpretivist (Ruggie 1982; Lynch 2013) and neoGramscian version (Overbeek 2004; Carroll 2007: Gill 1994, 1995). These approaches conceptualized neoliberal globalization as a reversal of the Bretton Woods system of embedded liberalism (1930s–1070s). One of the key puzzles for IPE has been how to explain the emergence and then, more importantly, the staying power of the neoliberal system in the face of its manifold contradictions and negative impact in terms of inequality, financial instability, and lower GDP growth (Rodrik 2011). While the origins and development of neoliberalism have been traced back convincingly to corporate power and their interests by Colin Crouch (2011) this book opens a new and innovative avenue of inquiry by focusing on the role of religious activism in its various forms. The structure of the book is informed by a multiplicity of perspectives. In the first instance, this means that sometimes IPE will be replaced by GPE, Global Political Economy, because from the perspectives taken by these chapters there is now a global level of analysis. Global governance processes were created to address border crossing forms of organization, mostly geared toward market creation and not market correction. Yet, states still compete in a global economy. Both levels of analysis—the interstate and the global—are therefore important. Secondly, each chapter is guided by specific theoretical perspectives or levels of analysis that will be introduced in the first part of the chapter while the second part discusses how religious activism fits in with specific reference to neoliberal globalization.

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Each chapter contains two discussions: it introduces key debates and arguments within IPE as a first step and secondly discusses religious activism. The book as a whole develops an argument of how intra-elite fractions instrumentalize religion and what this means for specific areas of inquiry and in this sense, it develops an overarching story. At the same time, the book can be read on a chapter by chapter basis and with this type of reader in mind some of the information will appear as repetitive. Chapter 2 defines the neoliberal globalization project as market creation on the one hand, and the development of a strong state on the other and presents it in its historical context. Neoliberal globalization is paradoxical from the outset: in order to have free markets one needs to limit the freedom of those who oppose deregulation, privatization, flexibilization, liberalization, and further global economic integration. At the same time, the chapter will show how religious studies present the state interventionist period as a time where secular nationalism came into its own. Integrating these two historical descriptions, the chapter will then develop a framework of analysis to understand how religious counter-elites challenged the hegemony of state interventionism by instrumentalizing religious frames. This framework of analysis is influenced by the cultural approach from religious studies (Edgell 2012), the neo-Gramscian perspective (Overbeek 2004), and interprevitism or constructivism from International Relations (Lynch 2013). The third chapter argues that hegemonic countries provide order in the global economy and introduces hegemony as a theory of global power. Researchers in this tradition study how the United States as a global superpower uses international organizations, its cultural hegemony, and its market weight to shape the global political economy in its interests. From such a perspective, the neoliberal globalization project came to prominence because it originated in the United States and was then projected outward. The chapter shows that the religious resurgence was important in bolstering two major policy shifts: the turn toward neoliberalism itself, and the creation of “political Islam” as a global enemy and the increased use of violence to achieve foreign policy objectives with especially negative consequences for Iraq. The key story in Chapter 4 is to show that there has been a paradoxical change. While Development Studies moved toward post-development and away from a focus on economic growth, there was an increase in market-friendly religiosity in the South with a focus on prosperity and free markets. Chapter 4 summarizes Max Weber’s thesis about the origin of

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capitalism and highlights how this Weber inspired research program sheds light on the development of a neoliberal form of religion. Apart from Latin America where Pentecostalism is making inroads into the hegemony of the Catholic Church, market Islam, commercial Buddhism, corporate Hinduism, and market-friendly folk religions emerged in Asia and revitalized more traditional interpretations. This “spiritual economy” acts like an industrial policy and in this way creates niches on the global or national market and may lead to some form of wealth diffusion through Islamic finance, halal food, or salvation wares bought from religious organizations (Osella and Rudnyckyj 2017, p. 2). The diffusion of neoliberal religion is changing politics and interstate competition and is influencing global power struggles in a more multipolar world order. This chapter accepts the argument by scholars who focus more on interstate competition. Both Realists and Marxists have developed explanations of how some states are contesting the power of the United States. Chapter 5 shows that states do this increasingly by drawing on religious ideas while at the same time, and paradoxically, often implementing neoliberal reforms at home. A whole set of strongmen has developed who use religious ideas in their quest for power, including but not limited to Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Modi in India, Orban in Hungary. This perspective argues that a US-centered view underestimates the role of other power centers, overestimates the power of the United States and, potentially, of neoliberal globalization itself (Desai 2013). This development has led some to speak of the emergence of a post-Western world order and calls have emerged to decolonize and globalize IPE in order to reflect this new global reality. As a consequence of the diffusion of fundamentalist right-wing religious interpretations in all world religious traditions, freedom for women and all those fighting for a more complex gendered order is under severe threat. Chapter 6 makes the case for the integration of households into the core of the IPE agenda. It was households who through their aspirations for homeownership created the debt mountain that led to the financial crisis of 2008 (and that was increased through securitization). Migrant households now send more money back to the Global South than the Global North sends in public aid. Households are also under strain due to global care chains that provide vital home services in the Global North while family needs in the Global South are neglected. Chapter 7 highlights that the current debate about the potential end of the liberal order—as for example argued by Ikenberry (2017)—is rather

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problematic. It is premised on the idea of defending a presumed “liberal” order against threats, but the discussion overlooks that this liberal order is “rigged,” something now admitted even by staunch neoliberals (Colgan and Keohane 2017). The global social justice movement tried to explain this from the 1990s onwards and with its spectacular coming out in 1999 during the “battle of Seattle.” We saw the emergence of a progressive countermovement against the globalizing Davos elite during this time, but their ideas were largely ignored. Chapter 7 explores the idea that the world could be ruled through global governance—the cooperation of civil society, states, and international organizations for the creation of common rules. This is largely a liberal notion, but critical political economy has focused on the emergence of the alter-globalization movement, including religious activists, which seeks to change key aspects of the rules for global governance with regard to trade, finance, debt, investment, and migration. The worldwide diffusion of prosperity religion bolsters US power because the evangelical right, while global, retains a strong connection to the United States. At the same time, there are also progressive religious movements emerging, especially from within the Islamic tradition. Chapter 8 considers transnational social spaces and their everyday political economy created by religious activism both from revitalized traditional movements and more liberationist forms of religion. Transnational social spaces is a concept from migration research that highlights the creation of a new space across borders created by migrants that IPE so far has largely ignored while the ambition of everyday political economy is to understand better how international political economy plays out on the ground level, away from international financial institutions. There are limits to the argument in this book: the Iranian Revolution cannot be accounted for by focusing on neoliberalism alone as it emerged in a different national and global context characterized by a highly sophisticated debate in Iran about religion, geopolitical rivalry, and competing elites (see Chapter 5 for some discussion). Furthermore, the neoliberal revolution in Britain under Thatcher was and is entirely a secular enterprise and relied on nationalism and a strict law and order agenda (Hall 1979). Yet, by explaining the neoliberal turn in the hegemonic country, and elsewhere, by highlighting the diffusion of market-friendly religions across the globe and the policy reversals that they bring with them (e.g., Brazil under Bolsonaro), by demonstrating the importance of households with regard to labor supply and care work, and of progressive religious

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activism in global governance reform and by highlighting key religious imaginaries of the global, the book develops a systematic analysis of religious activism relevant to International Political Economy and its research agenda on neoliberal globalization.

Methodological Note The book is not a critique of religion at the individual level. For an individual, religion can be a means of survival, salvation, and hope in a world turned upside down by globalization, migration, economic crisis, climate change, geopolitical changes, and the new industrial revolution centered on artificial intelligence that will make many jobs obsolete. Religion is necessary because secular ideologies do not provide solutions on how to deal with life’s uncertainties (exam stress, marriage crisis, unemployment), or major life events such as birth, marriage, and death. It is for these individual life needs that religions and spiritualities may provide solace and hope (besides self-help books or drugs). However, moving away from the individual level one needs to recognize that organized religious practice enters into contact with other interpretations and that there is a need to develop more awareness about the diversity of opinions and interpretations within a given religious tradition as the neo-Gramscian definition of religion and the culturalist perspective from religious studies point out (Chapter 2). This then allows anyone to question the word of an adherent—that whatever they believe represents sacred religious practice and cannot be criticized—by pointing out that others within the tradition disagree. Freedom of religion also needs to include freedom from religion, a freedom that is increasingly at risk, especially for all human beings disagreeing with the patriarchal interpretation of family, sexuality, and politics. We are moving toward increasingly theocratic religiosities and it is therefore important to highlight how progressive religious activists evaluate authoritarian religion from within the religious tradition itself. The predominant approach sees “religion” as “world religion” as an intrusion into the “secular,” as a separate sphere. This approach predominates in International Relations and it presents religious traditions in their essence (e.g., the five pillars of Islam, the four noble truths of Buddhism), unchanged over centuries (Fitzgerald 2011). But it does not inquire into how these ideas are interpreted over time and by different groups or classes (Moore 2007, p. 69). Often there is a hierarchy in that one is

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seen as superior over the other. However, if the twentieth century has taught us anything, both religious or secular regimes can be totalitarian as demonstrated by Saudi Arabia and Nazi Germany. In terms of political process (or politics), understood as any activity that seeks to create or proscribe rules for other people whether at the family, social or political level, it has no purchase whether an actor is religious or not. I therefore propose to see religious worldviews merely as a part of the general assemblage of ideas or frames that play a role in the power struggle between elites and counter-elites or social movements, while discarding the notion of secular vs. religious activism as not meaningful. Instead, when it comes to political economy what we need to evaluate is why does this specific type of activism emerge at this point in time or what is the context in which it emerges and in relationship to which other religious activists is it positioned. This approach leads to the constructivist or culturalist classification of religious activism as either right-wing or fundamentalist, reformist-liberal, and progressive-utopian (Chapter 2). This diversity of movements can be found within each religious tradition, as several of the chapters show. Chapter 6, for example, outlines the struggle between conservative or even reactionary forms of Islam, and Islamic feminists. The important contribution of this book is that it shows how religious activism is relevant for our understanding of neoliberal globalization in International Political Economy. Its novelty lies in the fact that it presents a typology of activism that allows IPE to move beyond the predominant world religions (or phenomenological) approach. In other words, the ground-breaking aspect of the book is that it demonstrates the usefulness of a constructivist, cultural, interpretivist, or neo-Gramscian approach to the study of religion which presents religious ideas as frames, concepts of control or oppositions or ideas and rejects the essentialist presentation of “world religion” that is employed in much of International Relations research. While this book originated largely from a neo-Gramscian perspective in IPE, Gramsci’s definition of religion in Chapter 2 reflects the concerns of interpretivist approaches and of cultural studies in religion, perspectives that were taking into account while writing the book. This framework also leads to a radical questioning of the prevailing analysis of secularism and secularization as something that is in opposition to religion (and vice versa). There was clearly a process of secularization in that educational systems, political systems became somewhat separated

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from religious influence and religious institutions retreated to core functions of pastoral care. In Turkey under Atatürk religion ceased to be a significant part of public life with a decreased role of the mosque, religious foundations and the abolition of the caliphate. However, what secularization theory does not really integrate into its framework of analysis is that religion never went away. On a closer look, even secular states “contain” religion. This is most obvious in Turkey where the Diyanet, the Directorate of Religious Affairs, is responsible for all the mosques in the country including their electricity bill, the payment of the prayer leaders, and even writes the Friday sermons (Tezcan 2003). Hunter (2015) points out that confessional religions were integrated as a vital part of the German modern state in Weimar and in the 1949 constitution, and that therefore to characterize Germany as “secular” is highly problematic. The Monarch in England is also head of the Anglican Church. Questions such as these have led to a problematizing of the notion of a secular Westphalian Peace System as a marker of modernity. The reason for this is that it does not really refer to a real historical development, but German historians and international jurists created the notion of secular Westphalia in the nineteenth century in the context of the Napoleonic Wars and specifically against Napoleonic imperial ambitions (Kayaoglu 2010, p. 198). The notion of a secular state system as a key marker of modernity therefore needs to be reconsidered and presented as a form of situated knowledge claim and less as an expression of a historical process. If secularism in the form of a strict suppression of religion is not a marker of modernity, then the outright suppression of religion can no longer be justified as a means toward modernization. The suppression of religious activists is then merely an expression of a power struggle, not of progress (see Hunter 2015 for an analysis of nineteenth-century Germany). This book thus rejects the notion that we are now, as Mavelli and Petito argue (2012), in a post-secular world because of the “deprivatization of religion” (Casanova 1994). The idea of a post-secular age fails to consider that the presumed secular age rested on a “administered religion” in which particular expressions of religion were permitted but religion was not absent (Teczen 2003). This is all the more important in the light of the fact that the recent protests in the Middle East in 2019 are all non-sectarian, religion may therefore be on the decline in the Middle East as it is in the United States (Chapter 3). The view taken here is that religious frames constitute an important explanation

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for the emergence, persistence, and contestation of neoliberal globalization but not the only one. In conclusion, ideas from religious traditions and their revival, adjustments, and modifications need to be studied as forms of ideology, worldviews alongside other worldviews, or—as the neo-Gramscians would have it—concepts of control (Overbeek 2004)— here presented as progressive, reformist and right-wing or fundamentalist religious ideologies that are developed by elite and counter-hegemonic elite fractions in their struggle for power and wealth. The book presents only a first step in such an enterprise.

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CHAPTER 2

Religious Fundamentalism and the Neoliberal Turn

The core assumption of the book is that there are different forms of economic globalizations, and that the period between 1930 and 1970 represents a decisive break in terms of how economics relates to politics. During this time, the world moved toward a state interventionist form of globalization also referred to as embedded liberalism (Ruggie 1982) or Keynesianism, while in the Global South developmental states came into being. Most accounts in International Political Economy (IPE) limit their story to the Global North and the economic theories of Keynes (e.g., Ruggie 1982). In contrast, this chapter presents a global form of IPE which integrates Raul Prebisch’s ideas on the developmentalist state (Margulis 2017). Religious scholars describe the state interventionist period as the age of secular nationalism characterized by a retreat of organized religion from the public sphere and its replacement by nationalism, or the outright suppression of religious practices in the communist states (Juergensmeyer 2008). The crisis of the state interventionist form of globalization in the 1970s led to neoliberal globalization or market fundamentalism, a revival of nineteenth-century economics, while the crisis of secular nationalism led to the resurgence of religion (Casanova 1994). The important insight of this chapter is that an international political economy of the religious resurgence based on a neo-Gramscian or cultural perspective highlights that much of what is termed “religious resurgence”

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is actually right-wing and conservative which finds itself now confronted by more liberal and progressive activists. Today, neoliberals admit that the removal of key elements of the interventionist compromise has resulted in the very things it was meant to avoid (Colgan and Keohane 2017; Ostry et al. 2016). It turns out that deregulated capital flows cause financial crises and contribute to the development of income inequality, which in turn causes political upheaval (Helleiner 1994). It is therefore important to understand the historical shift that has occurred as many operate under the impression that any intervention in the free market equals socialism. In contrast, this chapter highlights that free market systems can co-exist and have coexisted with multiple state forms. This discussion will be the focus of the first part of the chapter which integrates the rise and fall of the secular national state interventionist form of globalization with its contestation by neoliberal globalization often in alignment with religious activism. These two strands of literatures are generally discussed separately and the attempt here in this chapter to interweave one with the other will not satisfy either the political economist or the religious studies student but it is necessary to show that there are many surprising parallels between neoliberalism and fundamentalism, the most dominant version of the religious resurgence. The second part of the chapter will then outline a framework of analysis centered on elite and counter elites and social movements. This framework is inspired by constructivist or interpretivist and the neo-Gramscian perspective in IPE and the cultural approach in religious studies. The key point of this chapter is that religious frames are ideologies of order and have to be seen as an important part of the power struggles among hegemonic elite fractions, social movements, and counter-hegemonic elites.

The New Deal and Embedded Liberalism---Taming the Markets? Industrialization and capitalist development changed the nature of the global system, which is dominated by the rhythms of capitalist accumulation whereas before agricultural cycles were predominant and empires ruled separately over their respective territories. In this system, peripheral countries are impoverished through unequal exchange and unfair rules. Interdependence, hierarchy, and inequality are the key features of the capitalist system centered around a hegemonic country that contains

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the leading industrial sectors (Schwartz 2010, Chapters 2 and 3). The nineteenth century was characterized by the expansion of capitalism to other areas and the continuation of a colonial division of labor through conquest and genocide. This system then came to a halt with the Great Power struggles of the First World War and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Great Depression and the Second World War led to a complete reconfiguration of economic and political power at the global level under American leadership (Cox 1987; Ruggie 1982). In hindsight, we may indeed conclude that interventionist capitalism was an exception (Schwartz 2010, p. 2), a mere blip in history before capitalism reverted back to its “normal” course. Yet, if we see it instead as an expression of different power configurations influenced by different forms of ideas, then history becomes wide open. Central for our story is the Great Depression of the 1930s, which highlighted the need for a complete overhaul of the role of the state in the economy as the free market system nearly collapsed during the economic crisis. The development and spread of extremist ideology such as communism and fascism gave an impetus for the widespread acceptance to change the economic and political order the world over. Interestingly, it was in the United States that a compromise between the free market and some form of socialist revolution emerged with the New Deal, while other societies descended into totalitarian systems. The New Deal reflected the abandonment of the idea that the free market will find solutions to everything, and that any state intervention is necessarily harmful. From an American business perspective, the state transformation under the New Deal was a radical development that represented a real break with the past, because it changed the nature of the state by giving more power to the federal level. It also created a system of state support for a large number of citizens in the process. According to Mohandesi and Teitelman (2017), by 1982 nearly half the income of the bottom fifth of the population came from welfare benefits (p. 59). Governments became responsible for employment, market regulation, wage and working standards, and prices, and also the provision of services such as telecommunications or transportation. Welfare schemes were institutionalized or reformed, including pension funds, employment insurance, public and free education, and public healthcare systems, to name just a few. Public agencies were created to push through industrialization in areas where there was no private investment (e.g., the Tennessee Valley

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Authority). The economist associated with this revolution, J. M. Keynes, advocated for state intervention to govern and stabilize markets. At the international level, this set of interventionist policies would be bolstered by the international institutions created under the Bretton Woods system—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank—and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (Ruggie 1982; Brett 1985). In this system, corporations and banks were not able to invest or produce abroad without some surveillance by the state. To shift large sums of money out of a country was difficult because of capital controls. Fixed exchange rates diminished the ability of speculators to make profit from changes in exchange rates. Capital controls also reduced tax evasion and limited the need to institutionalize protectionist trade measures in order to safeguard the economy in the face of capital flight (Helleiner 1994). The initial mission of the World Bank was to support public infrastructure development in capital-poor countries and to transfer some of the surplus capital to capital-deficit countries through cheap loans (Rosenstein-Rodan 1943). The GATT was meant to foster trade in manufactured goods (but did not include agriculture). It also contained safeguard clauses to protect countries from a sudden increase in imports. This postwar international order was liberal to a limited degree and restricted free market forces, a combination that Ruggie (1982) referred to as “embedded liberalism.” In other words, while the postwar order clearly maintained key features of the capitalist system such as private property, it also introduced modifications, and a mixed economy developed. Globally, most countries were still under colonial domination and were not invited to the negotiations at Bretton Woods. Independent countries, such as in Latin America, developed a similar state interventionist approach in the form of the developmental state, whose goal was to change the nature of global economic integration through industrialization. While under colonization countries of the South were integrated in the world economy based on the export of commodities and raw materials, the new state interventionist project allowed for the creation of (sometimes publicly owned) industries that would produce goods for export to deal with perennial balance of payments problems, a characteristic feature of underdevelopment. The economist most associated with this approach of state-led industrialization is Raul Prebisch, whose work outlined an alternative theory of development (Margulis 2017). The interventionist state was thus not limited to the North but could be

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observed globally. Unfortunately, the Bretton Woods order ignored key needs of the Global South. For these reasons, these countries demanded reforms, culminating in the call for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) in 1974 as a part of the G77 movement (Bair 2009). In a sense, they asked for a Bretton Woods system for the South that would bolster import substitution industrialization, which was perennially at risk due to balance of payments issues, given that commodity exports tend to lead to declining terms of trade (Sapsford et al. 1992). They demanded national control over natural resources that were often in the hands of foreign corporations (or governments, e.g., France controlled Algeria’s oil resources even after independence for many years). The NIEO demands also included the creation of international agencies to regulate commodity prices. Both measures would have given secure financing to strengthen national industrial development and were a logical extension of social democracy at the global level. For this reason, the NIEO was supported by many social-democratic countries in Europe, support that was summarized in the Brandt Report (1980).

Secular Nationalism as a Precondition for Embedded Liberalism? Overall, the creation of the Keynesian welfare state and the efforts to industrialize under the developmental state led to the reduction of inequality both nationally and globally in all countries because, in those cases where the national governments were faced with a strong workingclass activism—the interventionist state was able to reduce the profits of firms through higher wages, capital controls reduced speculative outflows, progressive tax systems financed development and a welfare system, and economic resources were partially brought under national control, while industrial policies created national industries. The state interventionist period was also characterized by higher growth rates than the current neoliberal system (Rodrik 2007). It is for this reason that it is vitally important to understand the changes in the global political economy since the 1970s that have taken place. But before this can be discussed, an equally important development that accompanied the interventionist period, or in some cases made it even possible, needs to be explained: the development of “secular” nationalism. For example, in Turkey, secular nationalism emerged in resistance to the Sultan’s acceptance of foreign

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domination. In this case, secular nationalism was the precondition for the interventionist state. While International Political Economy has presented an analysis of the creation and development of embedded liberalism as a key form of economic globalization between the 1930s and 1970s, religious studies focused on the expansion of the secular nation-state during the same time period. As Juergensmeyer describes it, secular nationalism developed during this period with a program to create a new citizen that would be inspired by the idea of the nation as opposed by loyalty to the Sultan or the empire. During this period, scholars of nationalism observed a decline of the importance of religious institutions that accompanied the emergence of nationalism and instead national institutions or symbols such as the flag or the army became more important (Juergensmeyer 2008, p. 13). Turkey and Iran are paradigmatic examples where a religious regime was replaced with an explicit secular form of state that suppressed national religious traditions or brought them under state control (Atabaki and Zurcher 2004). With the exception of Saudi Arabia, all West Asian states (Middle East and North Africa) created some form of secular states, communist states banned most forms of religious expression, while India developed its own form of secularism. One noteworthy exception to secular nationalism needs to be noted at this stage. As described in Chapter 3, in the United States religious nationalism actually increased during this time. This period saw the beginning of the national prayer breakfasts in Congress initiated by an influential group of businessmen and evangelical Christians (see the discussion of “The Family” in Chapter 8). This coalition also succeeded in having “In God We Trust” printed on US coins and bills, and the Pledge of Allegiance was changed to include a declaration of confidence in God (Kruse 2015). In Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Pascha (Atatürk), influenced by his understanding of the French form of secularism (laicism) during his education as a soldier, abolished the Caliphate, outlawed religious orders and their institutions, brought the mosques under strict state control and proclaimed a Republic in 1923. These reforms separated the new Turkish nation from its Ottoman past because from Atatürk’s perspective, Ottomanism or Imperialism as a state form had failed to provide national security. On the contrary, the Sultan and his allies had betrayed the nation by seeking protection from Western powers and by accepting a fragmented and occupied country. The treaty of Sevres signed by the Sultan in 1920 had left only a small portion of the former Ottoman Empire under

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Turkish control while it created a Greek, Italian, French, and British zone, a state of affairs that Atatürk compared to slavery and strongly opposed (Atatürk 1928a, p. 11). In opposition to this fragmentation, Ottomanism, and other “utopian” ideas such as a world humanitarian state (Atatürk 1928b, p. 4), Atatürk concluded that an independent national secular republic was the only realistic form of existence to secure the welfare and prosperity of the Turkish nation. In the process, he was subjected to a fetwa by the Sultan, started the War of Independence, and consolidated the new country by 1923 with the Treaty of Lausanne. This program of nation-building was sold to the public as a necessary step in modernization and the need for Turkey to catch up to Western development. As Atatürk describes it in his three-day-long speech to Parliament in 1927 (Nutuk), he had to hide most of these ideas from the people because they did not understand the degree to which the Sultan had sold out the country to foreign powers (Atatürk 1928a, p. 8). Secularism later morphed into a form of institutionalized disdain for traditional culture and religious forms of thinking that made it acceptable to poke fun at beards or poor residents of Istanbul who bathed in the Bosporus in their underwear because they could not afford bathing suits. As a result, the religious segment of the population started to perceive the Kemalist elite as westernized white Turks that suppressed the real Turks (them) whom they described as Black Turks, a form of speech often used by Erdogan (Arat-Koç 2018). This feeling of ridicule and humiliation and the sense of exclusion from their own country that was prevalent also among the small and middle-sized entrepreneurs in the Anatolian heartland created the conditions for Islam to be used in politics more explicitly from the 1970s onwards when Erbakan founded the National Outlook. While there had been earlier efforts to play the religious card, the emergence of the National Outlook movement under Erbakan represented a new step. His initial grievance was the sense that all the opportunities of industrial development were geared toward the Istanbul elites and that the Anatolian elites were neglected when it came to credits and subsidies (Barkey 1990, p. 132). From then on there was a concerted effort among the counter-elites to develop their organizations and institutions, drawing on the sense of humiliation felt by a large majority, in order to better fend for themselves. The most important and successful counterprogram was developed by the Gülen movement, one of the religious movements that emerged in the 1960s under the leadership of Fethullah Gülen (Yavuz 2003 see below, Chapter 4 and 5).

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The Religious and Neoliberal Counterinsurgency Against the Interventionist State Ultimately, the various contradictions built into the Bretton Woods order created stagflation in the 1970s leading to a widespread perception of the failure of Keynesian economics and developmental state interventionism (Harvey 2007). Furthermore, the system relied on the willingness of the United States to act as lender of last resort but when the US developed into a deficit country it created systemic pressures. Lastly, having a global monetary order based on a national currency creates problems for other states if the currency is perceived as overvalued. All of this led to Nixon’s decision in 1971 to abandon the US commitment to the system of fixed exchange rates and impose import surcharges. The unilateral Nixon decision signaled the beginning of the end of the Bretton Woods system. A decade of trial and error ensued, with various options being discussed. The relevant discussions took place within elite circles, such as the Trilateral Commission which produced a report on the crisis of democracy (Crozier et al. 1975). The report expressed concern over the governance crisis in Western democracies caused by rising new social movements and their demands on the state (Offe 1985) and it opposed the NIEO (Bair 2009). The 1960s and 1970s had led to a general perception among conservatives, especially in the United States, that the entire social order was at stake. The whole spectrum of conservative forces felt threatened: business leaders by trade unions, church leaders by more reproductive, civil and workplace rights for women that undermined the patriarchal bargain but also the refusal of the Internal Revenue Service to extend tax exemption to Christian schools. This led to a concerted effort to mobilize against what was described as an overbearing state and to restore hierarchy and order as it was before. The goal of this fraction was to return to a golden age of capitalism, a small state, and family values (Epstein 1996). In the United States, the religious resurgence was thus re-ignited at the same time as the resurgence of “market fundamentalism” that sought a return to an apparently golden age of capitalism (see Chapter 3). Both repudiated the welfare state and feminism as being in opposition to human nature and God’s order. The feminist revolution asserted more independence for women and led to the mobilization of the New Right against the destruction of the traditional family model while the welfare state had allowed more independence for workers in the form of social citizenship

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which provided them with some basic form of income in times of unemployment, old age or illness and thus reduced the need to accept any kind of job (Marshall 1977). The New Right or neoliberalism was based on “a willingness to work hard …, a respect for law, an appreciation of the merits of deferred gratification, a deference toward traditional religions, a concern for family and community…” (Kristol as cited in Ötsch and Kapeller 2009, p. 43). According to Warren Buffet, one of the richest investors in the United States, “there is class warfare … but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making the war, and we’re winning” (Stein 2006, para 6). The assault was carried out through tax reductions for the rich which created a fiscal crisis of the state forcing adjustment in spending; another was an increase in unemployment that was now normalized and creates fear and stigma in the population (Davies 2016, p. 126). Labor market flexibility, instead of the standard employment relationship, became the norm (Mückenberger 1989). People compensated the wage stagnation since the seventies through increasing indebtedness which then necessitated the entry of more family members into employment. It also left less time for community-building. Assaults on trade union rights to organize, and the longer working hours required to make a living did the rest to restore worker discipline. As Offe (1985, p. 820) describes, the neoliberal or New Right agenda was a deliberate attempt to reign in both old and new social movements. Hence the title “counterinsurgency” for this section. For the Global South, neoliberalism came in the form of structural adjustment programs in the wake of the debt crisis of the 1980s. The latter had been caused on the one hand by cheap finance in the 1970s and on the other hand by the unilateral rise in US interest rates in 1979 (Ocampo 2014). The debt crisis destroyed the basis for the NIEO negotiations; instead, countries were forced to negotiate their entry into a new system based on debt repayments. A massive wealth transfer from the Global South to the Global North occurred. The Committee for the Abolition of Debt (CADTM) has calculated that debt repayments involved the equivalent of 5.3 Marshall Plans from the South to the North (Millet et al. 2016). The crisis also buried the goal of state-led industrialization and the development of a nationally integrated economy (Ocampo 2014); instead, global integration was promoted. The creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994 was the final nail in the coffin of these dreams, as the WTO and the proliferation of bilateral

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investment treaties made the continuation of a national industrial policy extremely difficult (Wade 2003). At the national level, there was sometimes a local constituency that was able to use the neoliberal program for its own purposes. Paradigmatic is here the Turkish case but right-wing Hinduism in India follows a similar pattern (see Chapter 5). The newer Islamist movements from the 1960s onwards questioned the secular state due to its failure to rein in inflation and worker unrest (Dreher 2018). This can clearly be seen in one of the more important books on the Gülen Movement written by one of its key adherents. In the historical background section, Çetin develops a political economy critique of the Turkish state describing it as authoritarian, as a tutelary regime, and in favor of interventionist economic policy. In his view, this had led to patronage, personal fiefdoms, and a crowding out of the private sector. According to Çetin, the Kemalist elite “became a real elite, a protectionist, republican class, with a strong grip on economic and political power” (Çetin 2010, p. 53). In response to this, the Gülen movement and the other Islamists were able to portray themselves as promoting democratic reforms, and they framed the acceptance of Islam as a measure of democracy and freedom of expression (Çetin 2010, p. 56). These notions lent legitimacy to their struggle, especially after the Cold War (1989) when the “militaryindustrial-secular” complex became less useful for NATO and the more progressive neoliberalism that ruled in Great Britain (Tony Blair) and in the United States (Bill Clinton). The Islamic counter-elite was able to use the opportunities provided by the structural adjustment programs after the military coup in 1980 to expand their economic networks, increase their wealth and initiate a whole ideological counter-apparatus in the form of newspapers, radio shows, television programs, and other educational outreach financed through Islamic banks and small to medium-sized businesses (Yavuz 2003; Dreher 2016a). Neoliberal globalization through IMF structural adjustment programs reinforced the power of a religiousbusiness alliance at the national level in Turkey and created the conditions for its consolidation of power in 2002. The first stage of the neoliberal globalization project from the late 1970s to the end of the Cold War was thus carried out in the United States by a right-wing fundamentalist agenda which changed the structure of the common sense in politics. Similar developments occurred elsewhere though their speed and timing were different. Political Islam emerged as a counter-hegemonic force in West Asia (Middle East) while

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the Indian subcontinent saw the strengthening of right-wing Hinduism (see Chapter 5). In Latin America, the counter-offensive came through the campaign of the Catholic Church against liberation theology from the end of the seventies onwards (see Chapter 8). Religious reaction in the form of political Islam, Hindutva, and an anti-Communist Pope was clear politics of support for the neoliberal program as it increased their freedom of maneuver against statist elites associated with the interventionist state. As a result, even traditional social-democratic parties had to adjust and so the 1990s saw the emergence of neoliberalism with a more “progressive” face under Bill Clinton and Tony Blair seeking to make the world safe for a global and cosmopolitan form of capitalism (Fraser 2016).

Neoliberal Globalization and Inequality The 1990s were widely seen as the globalization decade. The peaceful end of the Cold War integrated the whole world into one global economy, of which the United States was the unquestioned leader. When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 it concluded two decades of regulatory global integration that had created a new form of constitutionalism that proscribed disciplinary neoliberalism (Gill 1995). Stories of the end of history (Fukuyama 1989) made the rounds and democratic capitalism was presented as the ultimate pinnacle of world historical development. This overall triumph of neoliberal globalization in the 1990s was only moderately dampened by the 1997/1998 Asian financial crisis, which led the IMF to retreat from its insistence on full capital account liberalization (Bhagwati 1998). A further blow to the neoliberal globalization project was the failure of the WTO talks in Seattle in 1999 amid widespread protests (Ayres 2004). Yet, the 2001 attacks on the “free world” in the United States gave an unexpected boost to the globalization project with President Bush encouraging everyone to go shopping in response to the terrorist attacks. He declared that there were now only two sides: citizens sided either with neoliberal globalization and US hegemony or with the terrorists. This negated a decade of activist work to reform the global economy, which had culminated in the creation of the alternative globalization forum (World Social Forum). The “War On Terror” ensured that the free market idea would be the dominant economic approach, coupled with an unbridled imperialism (Ayres 2004). Not even the financial crisis in 2008 put an end to neoliberal globalization (Panitch and Gindin 2012; Tooze 2018). Drezner (2014) argued that the 2008 Great Financial Crisis

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(GFC) was brought under control by a massive global policy effort. The neoliberal policy agenda is alive and well, and it is no longer being held responsible for the GFC. Instead, states are punished for their increased debt load (Johnson 2009; Pettifor 2014). The good news is that absolute poverty has been reduced worldwide and inequality between nations is decreasing (Milanovic 2016). However, according to Dani Rodrik (2001, 2007), this is not necessarily the result of neoliberal policies, but the result of unorthodox policies pursued by China and India. Even though global inequality is decreasing, it is currently at very high levels. Oxfam found that the richest 1% obtained 82% of the wealth generated in 2017, while the poorest half of the world saw no increase in their income (Elliot 2018). According to the World Inequality Report’s website, this has been an ongoing trend since 1980. If one looks at absolute changes in income between 1980 and 2016, then it is very clear that 90% of the world did not really experience an increase in income while all the income growth went to the 10% and more specifically 1%. This means that people earning $2.40 a day in 1980 earn today 4.36 and still live under the poverty line of $7.40, according to Jason Hickel (2019). Moreover, within countries, inequality is higher than ever. The upper 10% of a nation received 61% of national wealth in the Middle East, 55% in India, 47% in United States and Canada, and 37% in Europe (Alvaredo et al. 2018, p. 5). The capitalism that was constructed through neoliberal globalization and that promised to revive growth and reduce debt did neither. Some authors argue that capitalism is broken because profits today are a result of politics and rent-seeking not of productivity gains or innovation (Johnson 2009; Standing 2016). Even a political Marxist like Robert Brenner (2017, para 1) now argues that the world’s elites “have focused their efforts, at the levels of both the corporation and government, away from investment and growth and toward upward redistribution of the economic product,” a process described as accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2007) which is the academic’s way of describing stealing. From this point of view, the only way to maintain the current distribution of wealth is surveillance and suppression. The increase in illiberal democracies that can be observed today is thus a result of power elite fractions seeking to maintain redistribution of incomes in their favor (Hendrikse 2018). This may explain why capitalism in its neoliberal form is presented increasingly as an act of faith and defended with increased zeal.

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Is Neoliberalism Now a Form of Religion? More and more religious scholars describe neoliberal capitalism as a religion (Foltz 2007). The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben concluded that God did not die but was transformed into money (Agamben 2014). Agamben pointed out that governments and people often do not have a choice but to accept harsh austerity measures that make life more miserable. In his view, Walter Benjamin’s notion of capitalism as a religion needs to be taken seriously, given that the economy or the banks are presented as an authority that needs to be obeyed at all costs and that we are told salvation will come at the end of suffering (Benjamin 1972). Harvey Cox (1999) in his investigation of markets and religion discovered that the rise and fall of the welfare state comes across in the financial literature very much as a myth. In the financial press, there is a creation story for wealth, the creation of the welfare state let to a fall from paradise, and austerity is preached as a doctrine of sin and redemption. In this, he is joined by Fitzgerald (2011, pp. 10–11) who argues that austerity programs contain a specific soteriology based on suffering in the here and now but freedom afterward, which is comparable to some Christian belief systems. Fitzgerald seeks to uncover the “mythological nature of our belief in self-regulating markets, self-maximizing individuals and private property”; neoliberalism transformed them into common sense that can no longer be questioned (Fitzgerald 2011, p. 10). From a religious studies perspective, self-regulating markets, private property, efficiency, and other economic ideas should be evaluated as a myth similar to any creation myth analyzed in religious studies. In other words, religious studies discovered a new world religion. And they have a point. Neoliberalism appears more and more as a form of fundamentalism, a belief system adhered to against all odds. Neoliberals are like modern Jacobins (Eisenstadt 1999), insisting on imposing their understanding of the functioning of the free market based on a literal reading of texts and history that is absolutely resistant to empirical verification and rational discussion (Davies 2016). Even though prominent assumptions have been falsified, they are still being promoted as the gospel. Examples abound: austerity does not increase growth, nor does it reduce debt (Herndon et al. 2014). Labor market flexibilization and union destruction do not reduce unemployment (Storm 2019). Despite decades of austerity and structural adjustment programs, the debt stock has not decreased for most developing countries (Sassen 2014). Structural

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adjustment programs seem to be correlated to an increase in civil wars (Hartzell et al. 2010) and worsening health outcomes (Stuckler and Basu 2013). Tax cuts for the rich do not pay for themselves but increase the budget deficit according to the Congressional Budget Office (Elis 2018). There is now a whole new approach in economics based on empirical analysis that has been dismantling many of the myths spread by the neoliberal gospel (Wong 2019). If neoliberal capitalism or capitalism as such is a form of theology this would explain why, despite the manifold failures of neoliberal precepts, it remained even after the most devastating crisis since the 1930s the dominant approach to economic policy. The ongoing implementation of the neoliberal agenda could then be explained by following a faith rather than science-based policies. But presenting neoliberalism as a religion does not take us very far in terms of a better understanding of the power constellations that sustain it. The next sections develop a perspective on the religious resurgence in the context of neoliberal globalization that relies on the study of social and elite movements and their frames or religious ideas. It is in contrast to the prevalent phenomenological or world religion approach in International Relations that is unable to deal constructively with the religious resurgence where religious adherents are either singularly dismissed as terrorists, fanatics or, alternatively, praised for their manifold good ideas and where the secular is counter-posed to the religious sphere (Bosco 2009). These approaches are not useful for an International Political Economy that seeks to understand how systems develop and change.

“Secularization” and International Political Economy Secularization as a theory “may be the only theory which was able to attain a truly paradigmatic status within the social sciences” (Casanova 1994, p. 17), shared as it was across disciplines and theoretical perspectives. The resurgence of religion therefore came as a massive blow to one of the core assumptions of a variety of disciplines and has led to a reevaluation of the development of modernity and capitalism (e.g., Asad 1993; Casanova 1994; Habermas 2008). But the problem with the standard version of secularization, according to Casanova (1994, p. 19) was that it merged three separate sets of argument into one: secularization as the differentiation of the secular sphere, secularization as the decline of

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religious beliefs and thirdly, secularization as the privatization of religion which is often seen as a precondition for modern liberal democratic politics because many religious beliefs are contrary to modern human rights interpretations. According to Casanova, these three connotations need to be separated from each other. Differentiation of the secular sphere refers to the argument that the process of modernization led to the creation of state, society and economy independent from religion. Due to modernization, we now have an education system separate from the Church, a political system no longer dependent on religious authority, civil society activism independent from Church communities, economic processes free from religious restrictions such as Sunday work or just prices (Casanova 1994, p. 21). Modern society is characterized by institutions and systems that are not under a religious authority. In this sense, the process of secularization still stands in many ways, religious activists compete with other non-religious activists in these different spheres. Secondly, secularization theory assumed that religious adherents would decline in number and turn to science for help in life matters, but this assumption needs to be abandoned (Casanova 1994, p. 26). The main reason is that science does not speak to anxiety over health, relationships or financial troubles, birth, marriage, and death. Instead of disappearing, religious practice has been transformed and remains important especially during widespread processes of change. The third and last assumption is that religion would be the private affair of citizens. This is also no longer valid. Religious adherents have de-privatized religious traditions, intervene in public debates, even resort to violence to make their point. The key points that are usually mentioned are the revolution in Iran, the fatwa against Rushdie, the headscarf battles in France, and the terrorist attacks against the United States and those in the United States against abortion providers. The “deprivatization” of religion (Casanova 1994) is the main reason for a renewed discussion of religious activism today. But and this is the key question that has not been really discussed in the literature: why is it that most of the religious groups that emerged from the 1970s onwards were “fundamentalist” or, reactionary rightwing movements? As Habermas correctly pointed out, there was not just a resurgence of religion in general but specifically a resurgence of right-wing religion (Habermas 2008, p. 18). However, one would not necessarily see this from an International Relations perspective where the dominant approach is the world religion or phenomenological approach which seeks to reduce religious traditions to their essentials and introduces students

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to the Five Pillars of Islam or the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism or the Ten Commandments of Judaism and Christianity (Moore 2007, p. 69). The assumption then is that this singular type of religion intrudes into or challenges the secular nation-state as both represent ideologies of order (Juergensmeyer 2008). But from a constructivist or interpretivist perspective this does not make sense, because it assumes that a secular order existed in the first place. As Hurd (2004) argues, secularism does not stand outside of religion or politics but instead represents “a politics of religion” (p. 129) that is not necessarily tied up with democracy, freedom, or justice. Much of what the International Relations (IR) literature problematizes as “the religious resurgence against secularism” (see Introduction) is in reality a political movement of the extreme or New Right, in this book mostly referred to as fundamentalism (following Riesebrodt 1993, 2000). It is not a general “resurgence of religion” but a specific religious reaction to a perceived social crisis and an expression of the struggle for power on how to solve it. The specific crisis was the accumulation crisis of the statist form of capitalism that required a solution in the 1970s (Harvey 2007) but in many ways this crisis was also a crisis of the specific secular regime and how it integrated religion into its purview. Tezcan (2003) therefore proposes the term “administered religion” to describe how supposedly secular regimes handled religion. The history of the United States is a case in point. According to Fogel (1995, p. 33), the current religious resurgence that began in the 1970s in the United States represents a fourth awakening similar to earlier such revivalist waves. Each of them was associated with specific political projects in his view. The third awakening that occurred between 1890 and 1930 led to the split in the Christian camp with the social gospel on the one hand and the fundamentalists on the other hand. The social gospel was a more modernist interpretation of the bible which attributed poverty and inequality to structural causes whereas the fundamentalists argued that individual belief was more important. In the 1930s, the social gospel won the upper hand and underpinned the New Deal coalition while the fundamentalists retreated (see Chapter 3). The fourth awakening began from the 1970s onwards and has created a new Christian Right, and a revival of fundamentalist thought. What is actually happening is that fundamentalists object to the new social movements from the left and what they describe as an oppressive secular state but they also object to the interventionist state and they have

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joined others in an alliance to dismantle this state. Essentially, the Christian Right problematized the secular regime in the United States and described it as “liberal tyranny.” This development changed the electoral landscape because it led evangelicals to increasingly vote for the Republican party from Ronald Reagan’s election onwards (Fogel 1995, p. 31). There is now a situation where “religion” and “secularism” have become essentially contested concepts which is another way of saying that any agreement on their meaning will need a political solution, one hopefully arrived by deliberation and not imposition (Garver 1978, pp. 168–170). In religious studies, there has been some exploration of this connection between neoliberal globalization and religious activism but the way this was carried out was apolitical—it ignored the political aspect of the project. Comaroff and Comaroff (2000) argue that neoliberal capitalism needs to be seen as a Second Coming of capitalism, “a capitalism that presents itself as a gospel of salvation” (p. 292). This new capitalism is characterized by an increasing financialization with wealth being gained through highly complex and mysterious ways in the financial sector, which only employs a minority of the population. It led to new forms of religion such as occult practices where wealth is conjured up out of nothing. We correspondingly see a rise in ritual killings, witchcraft, and zombie conjuring (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000, p. 310). Less dramatic is Rudnyckyj’s (2009) proposition of spiritual economy to describe “movements that link religious practice to productivity and profit” in Islamic contexts (p. 107). In this, he was joined by Gauthier and Martikainen, who outlined in their edited volumes (Gauthier and Martikainen 2016; Martikainen and Gauthier 2016) various examples of how neoliberalism is complemented by religious practices. Their volumes also show how religion facilitated neoliberalism by creating the neoliberal subject. These forms of religiosity have also been referred to as market Islam (Hendrick 2013; Haenni 2005; Dreher 2015), corporate Hinduism (Upadhyay 2016), and prosperity gospel for the Pentecostal branch of the Christian religious tradition (Wilkinson 2016). The problem with these descriptions though is that they leave out the politics of the movements they are looking at. For example, market Islam in Turkey as exemplified by the Gülen movement (Hendrick 2013; Dreher 2015) was also an elite fraction involved in the struggle for power (Dreher 2018; Teczen 2003; Sen 2010). Ignoring politics is a luxury International Political Economy cannot afford. It is for this reason that

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the neoliberal form of religion will here also be described as fundamentalist even though the term fundamentalism has been rejected by many scholars (Juergensmeyer 2008). I am following Riesebrodt’s observation and analysis who pointed out that fundamentalism can be observed across all religious traditions (Riesebrodt 2000). It is characterized by three features (p. 272). First, the term highlights that the focus is on religion, which distinguishes the movements from fascism or populism. Fundamentalist movements display a specific ideology of social critique and present a way out, a salvation history (Riesebrodt 1993, p. 24). Secondly, fundamentalists do not represent traditional religion but a radicalized and mobilized version of tradition, as they see and experience the world as in a dramatic crisis due to society’s ignoring of key principles of order that had been realized in an earlier community (the golden age). This crisis can only be overcome by going back to the original prescriptions (Riesebrodt 1993, p. 16). Like neoliberals, fundamentalists reject government intervention in the market, promote the traditional division of labor in the family, reject (Western) liberalism, promote aggressive foreign policies, and seek to restore an imagined golden age of their tradition. They are thus on the side of the neoliberal revolution, since much of the aim of that revolution is a reduction of the scope and power of the state—a central concern of fundamentalism—while the secular interventionist state is seen as part and parcel of the crisis.

“Religions” and International Political Economy---The Framework of Analysis The analysis in this book draws on the crucial insight developed by Offe (1985) and Gouldner (1979) that there was a shift in the hegemonic project of the power elites both secular and religious in the United States in the 1970s: they abandoned the New Deal consensus and initiated a class war (see the quote by Buffet above; Harvey 2007). They became opposed to the interventionist state compromise and shifted in favor of neoliberalism in the United States. This shift within capitalist elite preferences and the increased number of right-wing evangelical activists created the basis for the neoliberal revolution (Blyth 2002; Phillips-Fein 2010; Gill 1994). This study thus presents religious activists as aligned with political and economic interests when they enter the public sphere, they are not neutral. The study of religious activism needs to be integrated into the struggle for power and wealth, and the ideas or frames that are developed

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in order to create alliances through the deliberate use of wedge issues to unify diverse groups deserve scrutiny. The preferred goal is to achieve hegemony, a situation where they can create a majority basis for their political project and so stabilize their rule, as Vainak (2018) has carefully analyzed for India but if hegemony (rule by partial consent) is impossible, domination and division through fear-mongering will be the order of the day. Hegemony necessitates the creation of alliances and compromises, leading to contradictory policy assemblages and shifting policy positions among elites and counter-elites (Rapley 2004, Chapter 2). Elite studies at the global level were until recently dominated by either journalistic accounts (Freeland 2011; Rothkopf 2008) or by the neoGramscian perspective in IPE (Overbeek 2000; Gill 1994; Robinson and Harris 2000; Carroll 2010; Magnussen 1994, p. 637; Sklair 1995; Phillips 2018). They pointed out that there is a global and national elite oriented toward the global marketplace to effectively manage their wealth in a way so as to minimize tax payments. The existence of these global elite networks and how they optimize tax payments and wealth accumulation on a global scale is one big reason for the increase in inequality as national governments are unable to address the issue. Recently, this argument has been taken up by Shipman et al. (2018) who studied the global power elite (following C. Wright Mills notion of a national power elite). They add that it is important to study conflict. Shipman et al. (2018) argue that the struggle among power elite fractions and their quest for allies among other classes such as the rising middle class determines the fate of political projects. It is important to recognize how these global elite projects are reflected in the national power struggles, how they inform national elite preferences and coalition building. Another important assumption in the book is that of the importance of US power here referred to as hegemonic because of the combination of ideas, institutions, and material capabilities that are associated with the United States (Cox 1987). A mere focus on economic or military power will miss this ideological dimension. As the United States is the hegemonic country, it is able to shape world politics in a way no other state can (see Chapter 3). According to Cox (1987), the hegemonic country leads not only in economic and military terms but also in ideological or worldviews that are diffused through the mechanisms of hegemony to the rest of the world (see next chapter). Transformations in the hegemonic country are then diffused to or imposed on other countries. Thus even if religion plays a much different role in Europe and specifically in England,

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the second home of the neoliberal revolution, had the business initiative in the United States not been joined by business fundamentalist Christians who shared their rejection of state intervention in the market, the neoliberal revolution would have taken on a different form. A similar process of the emergence of mostly right-wing counter-elites and alternative social movements has been researched for non-Western countries, where old alliances associated with the secular interventionist nation-state have been questioned by new business elites and social movements from below, using religious frames to challenge these states as Göle (1997) and Tezcan (2003) have shown for Turkey. Ahmad (2015) for Somalia, Elsenhans et al. (2015) for India, Algeria, Turkey, and Tabaar (2018) for Iran have described elite fractions in opposition to secularism and sometimes aligned with business interests. Ahmad (2015) argues that the specific business communities in Muslim-majority states were one important explanatory factor for the rise of political Islam and highlights how this played out in Somalia. Her research shows that business needs stability and security and the Islamists were best able to provide it—the interest of business explain the rise of political Islam. Elsenhans et al. (2015) argued that religious activism is developing in an arc that spans the Middle East and India and is directed against secular state classes whose development projects were based on failed import substitution industrialization. In their view, the new “cultural identitarian movements” represent an alliance between property-owning middle classes, the newly educated, often from rural backgrounds, and the marginal poor. Their study illuminates that these religious frames are tied to power struggles. There was then a global realignment of elite fractions and alliances due to the failure of the interventionist state and sometimes neoliberal globalization was one of the levers used by religious counter elites to gain power.

Religious Resurgence One or Many? A Gramscian Perspective on Religion Merging research on neoliberal globalization and religious activism will highlight that the fundamentalist or reactionary response embraces the free market as a key form of societal organization, that it stands in opposition to more reformist responses that seek a moderation of market and state and are more liberal in terms of moral issues, and that there is a tiny minority of progressive-utopian religious activists who seek an overthrow

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of the prevalent economic regime (Riesebrodt 2000, p. 272). Using Offe’s (1985) division of politics, fundamentalism represents a coalition between right-wing identarian religious movements on the one hand and neoliberal capitalism on the other hand. The reformist- or progressiveutopian religious activists in contrast are often more comfortable with the state interventionist tradition. There is then not only one form of religious resurgence. While orthodox or conservative groups have gained the most adherents since the 1960s (Habermas 2008, p. 18; Almond et al. 2003), there are also more progressive forms of religion, a fact often overlooked or reduced to the search for the “good Muslim” with regard to Islam. This has also been noted by Cloke et al. (2016), who criticized the tendency to overlook critical voices within religious activists and to assume that “the role of religion in Western Europe and America is to shore up and inspire the political right as part of the Evangelical-Capitalist resonance machine” (p. 499), which (Conolly 2005) has put at the center of his analysis. Wilson and Steger (2013) equally point out that there are religious forms of justice globalism that represent a critique of free-market globalization. These will be discussed in many of the chapters as they often play a crucial role in their respective contexts such as the anti-capitalist Muslims in Turkey, the Islamic feminists within Musawah, liberation theology in Latin America and cooperatives founded by Catholic priests such as Mondragoon from Spain that is today an inspiration for many seeking a democratic alternative to the modern firm. The plural form “religions” used in the title of the book denotes that in each religious tradition—such as Islam, Hinduism, or Catholicism—there is now a struggle for hegemony over how to define the key elements of what it means to be a Hindu, a Christian, or a Muslim. We should therefore cognizant of the fact that each religious tradition contains contradictory impulses (Riesebrodt 2014). This has been recognized by Antonio Gramsci who was deeply interested in the role of the Catholic Church in Italy. While he certainly recognized that the church was supportive of the elites and the dominant hegemonic historical bloc (Forlenza 2019, p. 9) he also points out that any religion (he was specifically discussing Catholicism) “is in reality a multiplicity of distinct and often contradictory religions: there is one Catholicism for the peasants one for the petit-bourgeois and town workers, one for women, and one for intellectuals which is itself variegated and disconnected” (Gramsci 1971, p. 420). This “sociology of religion” that Gramsci proposes here

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forms the starting point for the book. It recognizes that “religion” is a key part of the common sense and thus of hegemony (Gramsci 1971, p. 420) and therefore needs to be taken into account where relevant. The term “frame” that I will sometimes use to describe religious worldviews stems from social movement research and “refers to the interactive, collective ways that movement actors assign meanings to their activities in the conduct of social movements activism” (Buechler 2000, p. 41). Another term that will play a role is “wedge” issue. Religious issues are often used as wedge issues to separate one political fraction from another (Wiant 2002). Wedge issues are issues that create a division, a polarization of “us” vs “them” and are used in politics to split voters into groups with the actual issue often entirely irrelevant or unimportant. This book therefore proposes a critical interpretivist or constructivist social movement approach to the study of “religion,” first outlined in Dreher (2016b). This approach was most prominently developed by Cecelia Lynch (2013). She argued that both instrumentalist and worldreligion approaches are problematic as they disregard key aspects of religious activism. In her view, one needs to examine the practice of religion in terms of “how religious actors interpret it, both in everyday contexts and in situations of suffering, violence, and crisis” (Lynch 2009, p. 382). Critical interpretivism shows the constitutive nature of agents and structures, the importance and function of rules, the role of reason and persuasion, and the necessity of incorporating ethics, intersubjective factors, context, and power. But it also encourages the study of how religious frames relate to economic, social, and political processes (Lynch 2009, p. 383). In religious studies, this approach goes under the name of cultural studies (Edgell 2012) or critical theory of religion (Fitzgerald 2011). It is a recognition of the fact that cultural practices need to be seen in their relationship to power (Moore 2007, p. 78). It recognizes that religious activists participate in the creation of “situated knowledge” and therefore their thought can be evaluated to what extent they contribute to the maintenance of a given order or move beyond it. The idea of situated knowledge that was proposed by Donna Haraway accepts on the one hand that all knowledge is located in time and space and on the other hand that there are certain forms of truth claims that can be made to the extent that it is quite legitimate to ask if a certain way of thinking is racist or sexist or otherwise exclusionary and impedes the further development of democracy (Moore 2007, pp. 80–82). Specifically, it allows us to

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inquire which worldviews dominate in a given situation, what social mechanisms are in place that legitimate certain points of view over others? Are there perspectives that are missing or excluded, and who benefits from the adoption of particular ways of seeing over others (Moore 2007, p. 82). The elegance of a cultural studies approach is that it does not assume that there is one voice that can speak for a religious tradition but that each religious tradition within itself contains multiple voices, it is therefore possible to compare and contrast forms of religious activism with each other and interrogate them critically.

Conclusion This chapter has shown how Keynesian and Prebischian common sense was questioned by a small group of radical right-wing economists, whose ideas became victorious from the 1970s onwards when economic stagnation (a combination of inflation and unemployment) led to a general crisis of the interventionist state globally. Monetarism, supply-side economics, austerity, structural economic reforms, and privatization were initially individual policy elements that together formed what this book calls the neoliberal globalization project. It was diffused through advanced industrialized countries with the elections of Reagan in the United States, Thatcher in Great Britain, and Kohl in Germany, and in France through Mitterand’s volte face in the early 1980s. However, this would not have been possible in the United States without the crucial realignment of politics that had taken place where the fourth awakening led to a merging of the Christian Right with the Republican Party united in the focus on a free market, small state, and family values. This is what brought Reagan to power and enabled the diffusion of neoliberalism worldwide. Today, the neoliberal counter-offensive enjoys a majority on the US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court Judge Samuel Alito in 2019 signaled his agenda when he indicated in a judgment that he would be willing to reconsider the past 84 years of constitutional interpretation that gave broad powers to federal agencies—remarks that indicate the degree to which the counterinsurgency against the New Deal is now institutionalized and will be able to block interventionist governments (Sherman 2019; see Rosen 2009). It was this chance to change the majority on the Supreme Court that explains the high degree of support that Trump enjoyed among the evangelical voters without whom he would not be in power (see Chapter 3). Similarly, in Turkey, Erdogan often discusses

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the need to undo the Atatürk Revolution and is close to his goal, hoping to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Republic in 2023 on his own terms. The contradictions of the Bretton Woods system—due to its territorial foundation, the contradictions within Keynesian welfare states visible in increased strikes, and the civil rights movement in the United States but also in the developmental states in the 1970s—created an economic crisis and a revolt of the elites against Keynesianism and developmentalism. The 1970s therefore saw a confluence of several developments: an economic crisis that the counter-hegemonic elite fraction could use to end the interventionist state in alliance with religious movements, the 1980s debt crisis allowed the international financial institutions to restructure economies in the South, and when the Cold War ended in 1989 the stage was set for a wholesale adoption of the neoliberal policy prescription in the former communist countries. With China fully joining the WTO in 2001, we saw for the first time in the history of humankind the major countries and regions under one policy regime. The project of neoliberal globalization is largely based on the globalizing elite that seeks to develop a global marketplace in order to secure access to the global middle classes, as well as undermining national development projects. However, as this and other chapters have shown they had allies in the form of business fundamentalists at the national level who objected to the interventionist state for similar reasons. The argument of this book is that the origin and persistence of neoliberal globalization can be explained in part as a result of the fundamentalist religious resurgence that allied itself with globalizing elites in order to undermine the interventionist project and to counter the new social movements. But more progressive religious activists can be found on the front lines of the resistance to neoliberal globalization. Hence, Religions in the International Political Economy points to the multi-facetted way how religious activism is imbricated in the facilitation and contestation of neoliberal capitalism.

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CHAPTER 3

Business Fundamentalism and US Hegemony

This chapter outlines how fundamentalism has shaped the hegemonic country in the world economy. From a realist perspective in international political economy, the hegemonic country determines rules and decisionmaking processes at the global level, controls the leading economic sectors and thus determines the pace of economic development, issues the reserve currency, and acts as a lender of last resort (Schwartz 2010, pp. 64–79; Gilpin 1987; Drezner 2008; Waltz 1979). Changes within the hegemonic country will impact world politics, and therefore, the study of the hegemonic country is a precondition for the understanding of world politics as internal arrangements in the hegemonic country are diffused through its foreign policy (Cox 1987), and change policy and politics in other countries in several ways: through the power to impose rules, the structural power of the hegemon, or elite socialization (Strange 1988; Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990; Gowan 1999). Some approaches in IPE even defend hegemony as a necessary precondition for the smooth functioning of the global economy—without it, there is a risk of sliding into protectionism and a breakdown of the global system such as what happened in the 1930s (Kindleberger 1986, pp. 8–9). In this chapter, I focus on two changes in US foreign policy in which religious activism played a role. The first is the shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism, and the second concerns increased military interventions

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and the emergence of Islamophobia as a replacement for Cold War politics after 1989. These are only two examples that show the importance of Christian fundamentalism or Christian Right for US hegemony, and both deserve to be deeper investigated than can be done here. The main aim of the current chapter is merely to point out that two key policy shifts within US foreign policy have been a direct result of the New Right coalition within the Republican Party that was formed in the 1930s and emerged in full force in the 1970s. The groundbreaking contribution of this chapter is that it highlights the importance of business-oriented Christian fundamentalists for the changes observed in the nature of US hegemony.

From Benevolent to Predatory Hegemony A hegemonic country is defined by the fact that it is economically and militarily more powerful than all other states, and that it exerts global leadership. Such leadership is necessary if a global free market system is to survive because capitalism as a system is geared toward expansion (Gélinas 2000, p. 25). This was emphasized by the US Treasury Secretary Fred Winson in 1946: “The capitalist system is essentially an international system … if it cannot function internationally, it will break down completely” (cited in van Apeldoorn and de Graaf 2016, p. 46). As Johnson (2001b) points out, the United States comprises roughly 4% of the world’s population but consumes about 40% of its resources. The overall goal of US hegemony is therefore, as van Apeldoorn and de Graaf (2016) explain, to create “Open Doors”—ensuring access to foreign territory either through treaties, or, if this fails, through military intervention. In their view, what distinguishes various administrations from each other is the means used, not the ends. For now, the United States has achieved its goal of making the world safe for US capitalism through its military dominance and control of money (Panitch and Gindin 2012; Johnson 2007). Central bank cooperation throughout the GFC of 2008 was centered on the United States and has cemented the dominant position of the country in the global financial system, according to Tooze (2018; Eichengreen 2011, p. 5). Due to its status as lender of last resort and the issuer of the reserve currency, the United States enjoys an “exorbitant privilege” because it is able to use its currency in trade transactions (Eichengreen 2011, p. 4). Yet hegemony is an ongoing project; according to Hannah Arendt (cited in Arrighi 2005, p. 29): Limitless accumulation

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of capital requires never-ending accumulation of power, so the position of hegemon is never secure and is characterized by opposition and the emergence of one or several challengers (Waltz 1999) or the contestation of key ideas (Cox 1987; see also Chapter 5). The arrival of the United States as a dominant power in the international system signaled an innovation in global rule-making. The key problem for explanatory theories in International Political Economy is that the territorial reach of political power is limited, and that in order to secure the survival of a territorial unit, access to resources, markets, and manpower abroad is needed. This can be achieved through conquest, competition, or cooperation. The United States devised a particularly ingenious solution to this dilemma. Instead of pursuing an outright imperial strategy of occupation, the United States supported the juridical sovereignty of states, but within international institutions that are mostly controlled by the United States. These developed common rules to which states more or less voluntarily adhered—since in part they participated in their making, and the rules provided some benefits. Elite socialization then cemented these global institutions at the national level (Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990). Writing from a critical political economy perspective, Robert Cox (1981) summarized this development as the internationalization of the state. This phenomenon is now acknowledged even by Realist authors (Drezner 2008). Four institutions are central in this context: The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the more recently created World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Bank for International Settlement. The US dominates these organizations either through its controlling share of votes (IMF, World Bank) or through its market power (WTO). According to Cox (1981), these organizations represent a “machinery of surveillance” that institutionalizes a mechanism for the “harmonisation of national policies” (p. 145), not only for developing countries but also for advanced industrialized countries. In liberal and neo-Gramscian theory, a hegemonic system is defined as one where the dominance of the hegemon is accepted because most players perceive advantages from involvement in the system. Here, hegemony is relatively benign. It turns into predation once the hegemon exploits the system purely for its own benefit (Arrighi 2005; Brooks 2012). In the Realist view, hegemony is always about power and predominance, but even these authors distinguish more accommodating hegemons from imperial aggressors. According to Menzel (2015), there have

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been about 20 cases of hegemonic or imperial power over the last thousand years, so in his view hierarchy and not anarchy should be seen as a defining feature of world politics. Hegemonic stability theory is the underlying ideology of systems governed by a benign hegemon. According to this argument, hegemony is a precondition for stability and economic growth although in theory the tasks of a hegemon can also be carried out by a group of countries (Keohane 1984). The hegemon provides the public goods that make a global economy possible in the first place, such as financial stability, a central currency, or the guaranteeing of private property (Menzel 2015, p. 29). Whether they define hegemony as predominance or as the provision of public goods, authors in International Political Economy (IPE) tend to overlook the exercise of military power and violence to support the diffusion and maintenance of the free market. This seems to be a consequence of IPE’s emergence in opposition to International Relations (IR), and its deliberate focus on “economic” issues, leaving questions of violence to IR. Historically, however, market creation also required violence, for example if trade unions oppose neoliberal labor market policies, peasant and indigenous populations resist the creation of private forms of property on formerly communally owned land (Polanyi 1957) or resist colonization outright. Indeed, the creation of “free labour” (the ability of workers to accept an employment contract) is one of the preconditions of capitalism according to Max Weber (cited in Connolly 2008, p. 17) and is often the result of violence. One prominent example of how the development of neoliberal globalization was underwritten by considerable violence is the CIA-supported military coup in Chile against Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. The coup was accompanied by the imprisonment of thousands, the systematic torture and execution of leftist leaders (3200 were killed), and about 200,000 people were forced into exile. Only this mass intimidation of a whole population allowed the junta to accept Milton Friedman’s advice on how to carry out neoliberal reforms because it eliminated most resistance. According to Orlando Letelier, a former high-ranking official in the Allende administration, “[r]epression for the majorities and ‘economic freedom’ for small privileged groups are in Chile two sides of the same coin” (cited in Klein 2016, para 6). This discussion implies that we need to study the United States not only as a hegemon that governs the global economy through international organizations and regimes and dominates markets and production processes as much of IPE does, but consideration needs to be given how it uses violence in order

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to create and maintain markets (Johnson 2001a; van Apeldoorn and de Graaf 2016, p. 17; Harvey 2003). Even though there are persistent themes and continuities in US foreign policy according to van Apeldoorn and de Graaf (2016), there have also been major changes that highlight an overall shift from benevolent to predatory hegemony (Brooks 2012). Two examples of such changes in US hegemony will be considered in this chapter: the emergence of neoliberal globalization as a project and the creation of “Islam” as a global enemy. According to Saskia Sassen, neoliberal globalization in the form of IMF structural adjustment programs is predatory and different from the liberal interventionist Bretton Woods regime that allowed for some form of compromise between the global economy and national sovereignty (see previous chapter). Whereas Germany after World War I saw debt reductions of 80% and had to pay only a small fraction of its export service in debt repayments (3–5%), many of today’s countries in the Global South are forced to pay 20–25% of their export earnings to service their debts (Sassen 2016, p. 209), and the little debt reduction that they have received under the various IMF programs has not led to any significant decrease in indebtedness (see Chapter 7). Secondly, there is a consensus that US power is increasingly militarized (Harvey 2003, pp. 82–83). Monica Toft (2017) has shown that the number of military interventions increased fourfold between 1992 and 2017 (reaching 188 in comparison with 88 for the period of 1948–1991). This is in addition to military coups and other covert actions. According to O’Rourke (2018, p. 2), the United States conducted 64 covert interventions and six overt ones during the Cold War, not all of which were successful. Some see the 2003 Iraq invasion as a watershed development and describe it a turn toward imperialism, largely because US officials themselves discussed the notion of empire more openly than ever before (Harvey 2003, pp. 82–83; Moghadam 2009; Johnson 2004). The emergence of “Islam” as a global enemy came into its own with the 2003 Iraq war when neoconservatives that were dominant in the Bush administration used the term “Islamofascism” to create the impression of an enemy on par with Nazi Germany (Gagnon et Mascotto 2010, p. 182). This has now been consolidated by the Trump presidency as an aspect of Republican Party foreign policy (Hassan 2017). In the next two sections, I show that religious fundamentalists in the United States supported and made possible both the shift away from the

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Keynesian system to the more predatory neoliberal system and the shift to an increasing use of military force and a more assertive US foreign policy with regard to Muslim-majority countries. These two cases are meant as an example of how the study of religious activism can inform our understanding of hegemony. They complement the inquiries in Pieterse’s 1992 collection of essays on the role of Christianity and US hegemony which did not look into the question of how evangelicals in the United States were instrumental in the shift toward neoliberal globalization. A more systematic inquiry into US Christianity and hegemony today would also have to discuss the institutionalization of religious freedom as a human right within the US foreign policy framework (Sullivan et al. 2015; Hurd 2015) which is “evangelical shorthand for being able to evangelize within ostensibly Muslim countries” (Marsden 2008, p. 231). Given that US fundamentalist Christians are responsible for the diffusion of a capitalist form of Christianity (see Chapters 4 and 8), religious freedom in foreign policy also supports the diffusion of free market ideals. Another example is US foreign policy with regard to the Islamic Republic of Iran which is incomprehensible without linking it to the support for Israel among Christian fundamentalists (Mearsheimer and Walt 2006) and the larger US Middle East policy (Adib-Moghaddam 2007; Matin 2013). Hurd (2004), for example, argues that in presenting a successful religious modernity, the Islamic Republic directly challenged the secular modernity of the United States.

The Religious Origins of Neoliberalism It is commonly held that the alliance between the Republican Party and fundamentalist Christians stems from the 1970s, and that the Republican Party is interested in economic issues while the Christian Right stands for social and cultural issues. Overbeek and van der Pijl (1993) expressed this idea in the notion of a politics of support for the neoliberal program. Connolly (2008, p. 40) describes the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine” as an assemblage that defies explanation. Scholars in this interpretation present the business coalition within the Republican Party as separate from the Christian Right, with the latter seen in instrumental terms necessary to get the votes. The importance of this section is that we will see that the support for the free market and the rejection of the New Deal was an important aspect of fundamentalists already in the 1930s (Solty 2016). Indeed, the term “neoliberal” is problematic because

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it has come to be associated too much with economic policies when what actually occurred was the reassertion of a harsh law and order agenda and social hierarchies through the imposition of market discipline. For this reason, neoconservative or New Right was the term used in the 1980s in the German discussion to describe what has been known as neoliberalism in the Anglo-saxon literature (see Offe 1985; Habermas 1990, pp. 119–121). Chapter 1 settled on the term fundamentalism to refer to the rightwing segment of believers within the religious resurgence, following Riesebrodt’s (2000) argument that we need to distinguish fundamentalism from populism or fascism. Fundamentalists respond to specific cultural and social changes. They are not just a version of traditional religion but need to be seen as a “mobilized, radicalized traditionalism” (Riesebrodt 2000, p. 271). This is similar to Herf’s (1984) notion of reactionary modernity, which refers to movements that focus on a revival of the past but are at the same time thoroughly modern in their approach to politics. However, in the US context, the term fundamentalism is often used to describe only the first version of reactionary modernism that developed from the late nineteenth century, and that subsequently died down after being widely ridiculed during the Scopes trial in the 1920s. Later, the fundamentalist movement was somewhat overshadowed by the evangelicals and the broader subculture of conservative Protestantism. Starting in the 1970s, the movement morphed into the so-called Christian Right in the form of the Moral Majority (Fitzgerald 2017). Pentecostals and Charismatics are an important Protestant subgroup who dislike being subsumed under the term fundamentalism or evangelicalism (Coreno 2002, p. 339). For the purposes of this chapter, however, the broad terms fundamentalism and Christian Right will be used to denote those Christians opposed to the interventionist state and supporting pro-market policies in addition to their social conservative agenda. According to Sandeen (1970, p. 57), fundamentalism is an authentic example of a conservative tradition in American history that emerged from the late nineteenth century onward. It is characterized by a belief in the imminent return of Christ (millenarianism) and in biblical literalism. Fundamentalism emerged in response to modernization and urbanization, which, according to the fundamentalists, increased divorce rates, alcoholism, gambling, and prostitution and changed the Christian character of the American nation through the introduction of evolutionary theory, liberal theology, feminism, and Bolshevism. Even the League of Nations

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came under attack and was presented as a tool of the Catholic Church to dominate the world (Riesebrodt 1993, p. 47). In the eyes of the fundamentalists, these changes led to a fall from grace, and the chosen people needed to be rescued in light of Christ’s imminent return (though there was some dispute as to when and how this would happen). Fundamentalism was consolidated from 1910 onward through the publication of 12 volumes called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. It solidified outside established denominations and created independent institutions such as the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago or the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. The movement also set up the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association in 1919 (Sandeen 1970, p. 60) and other organizations such as the National Association of Evangelicals (1942). In economic terms, fundamentalists believe that the ideal order is built on a free market economy based on (white) individual hard-working families and entrepreneurs within a theocracy, a world ruled by God in which all believers would be obedient subjects (Riesebrodt 1993, p. 65). Fundamentalism “reflects the ideal of a preindustrial, petit bourgeois, patriarchal capitalism” (Riesebrodt 1993, p. 70) that existed in the United States in the early nineteenth century. Fundamentalists perceived this as the true realization of Christian principles and sought its re-installment. While they criticized undue accumulation and display of wealth and saw themselves as representing the little people, they also perceived poverty as an expression of unbelief and idleness, and they defended capitalism and private property. As such their theology provided a justification for capitalism in that it presented individualism, freedom, private property, patriotism, brotherly love, and moralism as the highest Christian values. It also rejected socialism and its principle of collectivity, both in economic organization and in trade unions, but also on account of its atheism (Riesebrodt 1993, p. 69). The ideal economic order was one where the pious entrepreneur would increase prosperity but live modestly; where capitalists and workers did not represent opposing classes but Godfearing individuals who cooperated in a spirit of brotherhood (Riesebrodt 1993, p. 70). Fundamentalism is thus truly a reactionary movement— harking back to an idealized golden age that resembles the communities and families pictured in the series Little House on the Prairie, books written by Laura Wilder with support from her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, both important authors in the conservative tradition in the United States (Burns 2015).

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The Great Depression and the creation of the New Deal state inaugurated a comprehensive transformation of the United States from a laissez-faire state to a social and interventionist state (see Chapter 2). This represented an important step in the history of the country and created much opposition, and it was only due to the extraordinary circumstances of the Depression and later World War II that this became possible (Mohandesi and Teitelman 2017). The New Deal itself was in line with the social gospel—a modernist and more liberal version of Christianity (Bateman 1998; Leonard 2011). The social gospel interpreted poverty as a reflection of social and economic conditions that needed to be changed (Riesebrodt 1993, p. 49). The New Deal also reflected the strength of the working class and a specific coalition of capitalists in favor of a more accommodating solution to the social question. This coalition initiated a tremendous transformation of the US state toward a more interventionist welfare state with some modest rights for labor (but not including African-American interests, nor women’s or Indigenous either). Yet, neoliberals such as Friedrich von Hayek perceived even this rather modest transformation as a first step to serfdom, socialism, and catastrophe (Cox 1987). Research by Phillips-Fein (2010) has shown that opposition to the New Deal came into being from its inception. It lived on in various organizations and think tanks to morph into a more coherent movement in the 1970s that brought Ronald Reagan to power in the early 1980s. Ronald Reagan was the first in a long line of Republican Presidents to question and unsettle the New Deal arrangement. His presidency represents the arrival in power of the new elite segments that sought to undo the New Deal (see previous chapter). While most scholarly research has focused on the secular aspects of this transformation (Phillips-Fein 2010; Blyth 2002), new research by Kevin Kruse (2015) has now unearthed that as early as the 1920s, fundamentalist Christians were key players in the crusade of businessmen against the New Deal to quote Kim PhilipsFein’s book title. This is complemented by Jeff Sharlet’s (2009) inquiry into a secretive but global network of evangelicals that also has its origin in the fight against the “socialism” of the New Deal in 1930 (see Chapter 8). Kruse details how corporations linked up with ministers in order to protect free enterprise from the encroachments of the New Deal legislation that they perceived as excessive. Businessmen formed their own association in the form of the American Liberty League in 1934 in order to teach the American public respect for rights of persons and property

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and to ensure that the government protected individuals and free enterprise. The organization was supported by many of the large names in the corporate world, such as DuPont and General Motors. Yet, their efforts to teach free market economics in the midst of the biggest economic crisis in United States history failed. In this context, businessmen concluded that they had to “try to beat Roosevelt at his own game” (Kruse 2015, p. 6). They saw how Roosevelt had made liberal use of the social gospel and that his New Deal was supported by liberal Christians as an expression of Christian values. Businessmen were thus relieved when they discovered libertarian Christians who were able to counter Roosevelt’s social gospel discourse with their own religiously charged discourse, based on a completely different interpretation of the Bible. It is forgotten today that the New Deal actually represents somewhat of a middle ground against the “fools and fascists” to the right and the left that was much stronger than is acknowledged in much of the literature on the New Deal (Sharlet 2009, p. 98). The business fundamentalism developed in response to a radical age where unionism, socialism, and labor strife were much more prominent than is often acknowledged. Business fundamentalism was an answer to the pressing issue how to confront a more radical left. James W. Fifield Jr., pastor at the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, stepped up to outline a spirituality that was more in line with business interests. Fifield’s first address to the National Association of Manufacturers in 1940 defended free enterprise and criticized government intervention as undermining American freedom. Kruse (2015, Chapter 1) tells us that his key slogan was the idea of “freedom under God.” According to Fifield, one needed to approach the Bible selectively, as not all the passages were equally important. This approach allowed Fifield to ignore many passages in the New Testament that focus on poverty (Kruse 2015, p. 10). While the Roosevelt administration had declared business responsible for many of the problems besetting the US economy and advocated for an increased role of government, Fifield confirmed the importance of business as the source of national salvation (Kruse 2015, p. 7). Fifield and the ministers aligned with him in his organization, Spiritual Mobilization, preached an early version of the prosperity gospel in that they claimed there is a natural order in which individuals rise and fall according to their own merits. In Christianity, good behavior is rewarded, and the same is true in capitalism; failure is an expression of failure to believe. Government should not intervene in this

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natural order. Worldly success was presented as a sign of God’s blessing (Kruse 2015, pp. 10–11). As Kruse shows, the slogan of one nation under God, the official motto of the country, is quite a recent idea. It became the official motto only in 1956. Earlier, in 1954, Congress had added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, which was previously secular. Kruse explains that the idea of the United States as a Christian nation is relatively new and is actually the construction of a set of rightwing businessmen in alliance with what Kruse (2015) calls “Christian libertarianism,” who “harnessed Cold War anxieties for an already established campaign against the New Deal” (p. 36). Kruse points out that religious nationalism reached its height in the United States during the Eisenhower administration, when the percentage of Americans belonging to a church or synagogue soared from 49% in 1940 to 69% by the end of the 1950s (Kruse 2015, p. xv). This means that during a time when secular forms of nationalism were consolidated worldwide (Juergensmeyer 2008, p. 12), in the United States the opposite happened—the country strengthened its form of religious nationalism. The changes of the 1960s led to a new cultural transformation in US society that altered class alliances, and the New Deal coalition unraveled. There was a revival of fundamentalism in the form of a new Christian Right galvanized by social protest. The contention surrounding the war in Vietnam, the rise of new social movements such as the civil rights movement, and the feminist movement imbued social conservatism with a new life and a new quality out of a sense of crisis and panic. Some scholars even refer to the strengthening of the fundamentalist current in the 1970s as a fourth awakening (see Chapter 2). At the same time, the majority of business elites abandoned New Deal ideas and shifted to the right as they saw their profits under attack from inflation and increased worker militancy (Offe 1985; Habermas 1990, p. 78). One crucial step was the Trilateral Commission’s report on The Crisis of Democracy (Crozier et al. 1975), which criticized the excesses of democracy which they defined as the increase in protests and mass mobilization. Domestically, this was supported by the Powell Memo which outlined a counter-strategy against civil society movements and their critique of big business that was then implemented and in which the conquest of the Supreme Court was one important part (Perrucci et al. 2014, pp. 117–118). The Christian Right developed a new narrative during this time with Francis Schaeffer’s very influential Christian Manifesto (Schaeffer and

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Kennedy 1981) and his consolidation of a new Christian Right worldview in his book and video series How Should We Then Live (Schaeffer and Schaeffer 1976). There he claimed that secular humanism had completely undermined the Judeo-Christian culture on which the United States was founded. In his view, the Supreme Court had created a form of liberal tyranny by imposing secular values such as the legalization of abortion or the abolition of school prayer onto an unwilling public. This tyranny needed to be resisted at all costs and with all means necessary although Schaeffer (1982) himself stopped short of committing to violence. One illuminating example of the liberal tyranny was the Internal Revenue Service’s removal of tax exemptions for private schools in the South that had become a way to avoid desegregation. By the 1970s, there were about 400,000 white children in these academies. This situation was framed as an attack on religious liberty; but in reality, religious freedom was used to defend white supremacy. One important element in the fundamentalist resurgence is therefore an expression of a white nationalist, masculinist, and supremacist agenda (Robin 2018, pp. 196, 241; Whitehead et al. 2018). One expression of this change within Christianity was the Southern Baptist Convention. As of 2015, it had 15 million members. It is the world’s largest Baptist denomination, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, and the secondlargest Christian denomination in the United States after the Catholic Church. Its 1972 convention endorsed biblical inerrancy and affirmed its opposition to abortion and homosexuality, while a later convention also endorsed a statement exhorting women to obey and submit to their husbands. The Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God, and other members of the evangelical right saw their membership increase beginning in the 1970s, whereas the more liberal churches saw a decline in numbers (Nabers and Patman 2008, p. 172). In other words, the composition and character of Christianity in the United States has changed dramatically since the 1970s. This led to the decline of the churches that were behind the social gospel and the rise of more socially conservative churches that became involved in politics and have formed a reliable voting block for the Republican Party since the Reagan presidency. This fusion between the Moral Majority of the Christian Right and a Republican Party under full-fledged dominance of libertarian business ideas became victorious with Ronald Reagan, and unleashed the “magic of the marketplace” onto the world (Fitzgerald 2017; Kruse

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2015). Reagan’s election was the key tipping point when the combination of a Christian social conservatism with a libertarian view of the state in the Republican Party came to prominence in the United States, and subsequently changed the ideological landscape completely (Nabers and Patman 2008, p. 183). In the process, evangelicals have succeeded in becoming a part of the American power elite that is able to influence business, culture, and politics (Lindsay 2007), while before they were ridiculed and not taken seriously due to their religious beliefs (Riesebrodt 1993). They have created their own schools, universities, business associations, think tanks, and non-governmental organizations: a counter-elite, a counter society. Many even homeschool their children. As a result, they are able to mobilize a large set of voters in favor of their agenda that are immune to critical thinking. American politics has been dramatically transformed with the Republican Party’s shift toward an evangelical-neoliberal core. As Mann and Ornstein (2012) write, “the Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition” (p. xiv). With the Trump presidency, the coalition obtained a majority on the Supreme Court, a goal they set out to achieve in the 1970s. This indicates the degree of commitment and the staying power of this network. Predictions of its demise due to population dynamics, as Fitzgerald (2017) argues, should be read with great care. Reagan won 67% of the evangelical vote (Fitzgerald 2017, p. 805). For Bush in 2004, it was 64% (Fitzgerald 2017, p. 854). Trump received 81% of the committed evangelical vote (Smith and Martinez 2016). At the same time, the power of this coalition is at its most fragile because two presidential elections since 1992 in which Republicans emerged victorious were decided by the Electoral College, and not by popular vote. Its share of the popular vote declined from 61% under Nixon, to 51% for George W. Bush while Trump was elected with only 46% of the popular vote (Robin 2018, pp. 267–268). The Republican Party is less and less able to govern through democratic means and increasingly needs to resort to gerrymandering, vote-rigging, and other vote suppressing measures to gain power (Robin 2018, pp. 269–272). The groundbreaking insight of this case study is that the fundamentalist movement entered into a coalition with right-wing business elites already during the New Deal era. Kruse’s account complements more

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secular descriptions Phillips-Fein (2010; see also Blyth 2002), who highlighted that neoliberalism is not just a result of the 1970s crisis but needs to be seen in the context of the New Deal state (see also Mirowski and Plehwe 2009; Panitch and Gindin 2012 for the neoliberal transformation of the United States).

Militarization of US Foreign Policy and “Islam” as the New Enemy Military interventions increased from 1992 onward. There were 188 between 1992 and 2017 while between 1948 and 1991 there were “only” 88 (Toft 2017). This shows that there is an empirical basis for those who claim that the nature of US foreign policy has changed. According to Walt (2001–2002), 9/11 led to the most important change in US foreign policy history, from policy as usual to the global war against terrorism and a quest for global supremacy—the hallmark of which was the Iraq war. However, the grounds for the response to the 9/11 attacks had been prepared earlier, and the crisis allowed the thinkers behind the Project for the New American Century, a right-wing think tank, to dominate the debate, as they had a clear idea of what they wanted (Bacevich and Prodromou 2004). They advocated a complete reversal of US foreign policy based on preeminence and the defense of its interests abroad through military might. Given this impact on world politics and US foreign policy, it is important to understand how the Christian Right played its part in this shift in US foreign policy. While the existence of the military-industrial complex explains the economic and political interests behind the creation of a new enemy in the form of Islam, the Christian Right needs to be seen as one of the key transmission mechanisms for this type of policy (Marsden 2008; Connolly 2008). The military-industrial complex was first prominently brought to light in President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell speech. George F. Kennan concluded that the complex had become so integral to the US economy that the nation needed an external enemy to justify its existence (cited in Roland 2007, p. 360). Initially, this was provided by communism but after the end of the Cold War in 1989 a new “other” was needed and “Islam” especially in its fundamentalist version was then constructed by the foreign policy establishment as adversary. The 9/11 attacks led to a revival of Huntington’s clash of civilization thesis from 1993 where he presented Islam as very different from the Western system, an argument in

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which he was joined by Fukuyama (Turner 2002, p. 110). The Christian Right played a key role in this development (Marsden 2008). According to Martin (1999), there is now a distinctive foreign policy agenda of the Christian Right, focused on religious freedom, unwavering support for Israel, opposition to communism, and opposition to Islam, AIDS, the persecution of Christians, and moral issues such as family planning and prostitution (see also Marsden 2008, p. 46). In a study on the perceptions of the war against Iraq and of the Islamic religion among Americans in 2002, Smidt (2005) found that high levels of religiosity were associated with more fundamentalist or right-wing views and correlated with support for the Iraq invasion and a negative view of “Islam.” One key aspect of fundamentalism is the belief in the imminent return of Christ (millenarianism) and in biblical literalism. These two beliefs inform how fundamentalists responded to the world, and they also determined their position toward Israel and the Jewish religion. Fundamentalists expected Jews to convert to Christianity and emigrate to Israel, as only then would Christ return (Riesebrodt 1993, p. 53). According to Riesebrodt (1993, p. 60), fundamentalists saw the United States as the chosen people, after the Jewish people had rejected Christ, and argued that America was the new carrier of divine providence. Today, this has led to Christian Zionism, which has become an influential foreign policy stream (Marsden 2008, p. 9, pp. 175ff; see Pieterse 1991 for a historical study). Most importantly, it led to an unwavering support toward the policies of the governments in Israel, as outlined by Mearsheimer and Walt (2006). The security interests of the US and of Israel are seen as identical from the point of view of organizations within this lobby. Many in the Christian Right believe that Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and are convinced that not supporting Israel would be contrary to God’s will (Nabers and Patman 2008, p. 174). For example, according to Mearsheimer and Walt (2006, p. 51), after 9/11 the Bush administration tried to get more serious about stopping Israel’s policies of building new settlements in the Occupied Territories and about the creation of a Palestinian state. But this initiative was quickly abandoned due to the pressure of what Mearsheimer and Walt (2006) termed the “Israel lobby,” which counts Christian Zionists among its key supporters. According to Marsden (2008, p. 62), the Christian Right has supported the War on Terror through its presentation of all Muslims and the Islamic religion in general as fanatic and intent on world domination. Pat Robertson set the tone when he argued that there is no difference between radical and moderate Islam. In this he was not alone;

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James Dobson and Franklin Graham, key figures in the Christian Right, presented similar arguments (Marsden 2008, p. 52). Tim LaHaye is the author of the extremely popular book series “Left Behind,” which promotes an end-time vision of the world with Israel at its center and dominated by anti-Islamic themes (Marsden 2008, p. 48; Connolly 2008, p. 45). The Christian Right was able to convince large numbers of the Christian public that a preemptive strike on Iraq would be a just war (Marsden 2008, p. 227). The Bush presidency thus represented another milestone in the history of the fundamentalist movement in the United States, strengthening and extending a more militant form of political fundamentalism as Bush had emerged from within the evangelical movement (Domke and Coe 2010; Bacevich and Prodromou 2004, p. 46). This led to the revival of the idea of a clash of civilizations, an analysis proposed by Huntington in 1993 but pushed aside during the Clinton years. Moreover, secularism has been redefined as an expression of “Christianism”—the notion that there is a Judeo-Christian culture that needs to be defended against the encroachment of “Muslims”—an idea which is emerging slowly as a master frame among right-wing populists (Brubaker 2016; Hurd 2004, p. 116). George Bush himself declared the existence of an axis of evil—note the use of theological language. And even though he later avoided the term, in initially describing the War on Terror as a crusade, he gave the distinct expression of fighting the Islamic religion as such (Bacevich and Prodromou 2004, p. 47). As a result, according to Hinnebusch (2012, p. 31), we now have a situation in which there is indeed a form of “clash of civilizations” against something called “Islam” that is perceived as a counterchallenge to US globalization. It has led to the securitization of Islam and the Muslim population in Europe and North America is now perceived as a threat, which, unsurprisingly, leads to processes of radicalization among Muslim youth (Cesari 2009). Paradoxically, this narrative is fed from the other side by radical Islamic movements that now spread Islam transnationally and generate a sort of alternative reactionary form of globalization in their wake, a situation that Achcar (2006) referred to as the clash of barbarisms. What is often ignored is how Islamist radicals were encouraged, financed, and trained by the United States to fight against communism, most notably in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1979 but also elsewhere. According to Hirschkind and Mahmood (2002), both secular nationalist and Islamists resisted the Soviet invasion. But as they point out,

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the majority of US aid (about 75%) was given to the most extremist of the Islamist groups, while more secular and moderate voices were ignored. From this perspective, the 9/11 terrorist attacks can thus be interpreted as what Chalmers Johnson (2001a) has famously described as “blowback”— an unintended consequence or unwanted side effect of covert intelligence operations. The 2001 attacks have to be seen as a defining moment in international political economy because they led to a reorientation of US foreign policy toward West Asia (Middle East) and away from the rise of China during a crucial period (Abu Haniyya 2018). The invasion of Iraq and the War on Terror need to be seen as the biggest and costliest policy disaster of any US administration in history, whose consequences have shaped the trajectory of a region and of world politics in many ways. Ostensibly undertaken in the name of democracy promotion (Drolet 2010, p. 95), it has led to the consolidation of new regimes equally as corrupt as those it was meant to replace. It was not the low-cost intervention that was advertised. On the contrary, $2 trillion was spent on the war and 189,000 people died, not counting those who were permanently scarred and injured. Irrespective of its impact and evaluation in terms of success or failure, the war was illegal under international law (Slaughter 2004). The invasion of Iraq has led to the destabilization of West Asia, but it did not reduce the threat of terror. On the contrary, before 2003 global suicide attacks averaged 17 a year but have now increased to an average of 370 a year, according to the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (as cited in Cammack 2016). West Asia is now destabilized, with failing states in Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, a military dictatorship in Egypt, and repressive monarchies or theocratic regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Islamophobic underpinnings of US foreign policy have been reinforced by the Trump administration through its travel ban on Muslims. In supporting the War on Terror, the Christian Right made itself complicit in how US foreign policy is going to be evaluated in the future.

Conclusion The chapter has shown how the nature of Christianity changed in the United States from the late nineteenth century. Urbanization, modernization, and immigration led to a split with some Christian denominations supporting the social gospel and the New Deal project while the fundamentalists tried to stem the tide. The New Deal coalition was thus

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opposed by evangelical pastors and business associations already in the 1930s. This coalition then created religious nationalism, not yet able or willing to directly attack the New Deal state but imbuing religion in the fabric of the nation under the Eisenhower administration in the fifties. Religious nationalism was still shared across party lines under Eisenhower, but, beginning in the 1970s, Christian activists—startled by women’s liberation, the civil rights movement, environmental legislation, and the IRS’s assault on the tax freedom of churches—became more prominent in the Republican Party and created a new religious right. The coming to power of Ronald Reagan was the first step toward undoing the New Deal legislation and putting in place a new form of economics, politics, and culture based on counter-hegemonic elite fractions supported by the Christian Right. From a more religious fundamentalist movement, the Christian Right has morphed into an explicit white Christian nationalist supremacist movement (Brubaker 2016). The second investigation in the chapter highlighted the degree of support within the Christian Right for punitive action in West Asia, and the underlying Islamophobia that bolstered the view of “Islam” as the new security threat after the end of the Cold War. This has led to a devastating War on Terror, increased terrorist attacks worldwide, a growth in the attraction of radical Islam, and increased insecurity for Muslims in advanced industrialized societies. Islamophobia is also an explicit expression of the shift toward a defense of the Christian-Judeo character of the United States. As Marsden’s (2008) study has highlighted, the impact of the Christian Right on US foreign policy has been enormous and, from a liberalprogressive perspective, negative. It is therefore encouraging to note in conclusion that many evangelicals have been questioning their own movement after the Bush years, and that there is a move toward the recreation of a version of the social gospel movement. The Network of Spiritual Progressives founded in 2005 by Rabbi Michael Lerner (2006) is actively trying to develop a counterpoint to the right-wing evangelical resonance machine (a term coined by Connolly 2008, Chapter 2). There is also the Reverend William Barber’s push for a Third Reconstruction and toward a reconciliation between black and white and poor and rich through the New Poor People’s movement that he and others initiated (Barber and Wilson-Hartgrove 2016). Within the Occupy Wall Street movement, there were progressive faith activists to be found (see Chapter 7) who challenged the free market emphasis of the fundamentalist right. According to Fitzgerald (2017), the Christian Right is slowly being dissolved by criticism from within and with the emergence of new

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and critical voices. Rosenblum (2017) has shown how clergy and other religious activists have created innovative coalitions with labor unions to bring about an increase in the minimum wage. These voices have a long and proud tradition to fall back on in the form of the social gospel (Bateman 1998; Kruse 2015). However, a new coalition cannot rely only on religious activism but needs to be broad based (Connolly 2008, p. x). New figures document the rise of the newest major religion—people who claim no official religious affiliation—the nones—are now the secondlargest religious group in North America and most of Europe. This stands in marked contrast to the rest of the planet, where due to population increases the percentage of the nones is set to decline (Bullard 2016). It is unclear at this stage if the white supremacist capitalist resonance machine can be unseated. Taking Marsden’s parameters into account that he listed in 2008 (p. 250), the Trump presidency represents the moment where the religious right has obtained its biggest victories: Trump withdrew from climate negotiations as climate change denial is an essential part of the machine; the US embassy in Israel was moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; the commitment to a two-state solution in Palestine/Israel was abandoned; Trump does not view Islam as a religion of peace; and Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal with Iran and returned to the previous confrontational approach to the country. The Christian Right would support a military attack on Iran as they perceive it as a threat to the security of Israel. The biggest victory, however, is the new majority of more conservative judges on the Supreme Court who will cement the steady dismantling of controls on firms and protections for consumers, workers, and minorities and radically diminish the reproductive rights of women. Even as popular support diminishes, the machine is now entrenched in the institutions. The next chapter shows that the shift in US religion toward a more conservative form of market religion was replicated in other countries.

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CHAPTER 4

The Spirit of Capitalism and the Question of Development

As described in Chapter 2, the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization presented neoliberal globalization in the 1980s as a way to address poverty and underdevelopment (Babb 2013). It promised a reduction of debt and a resumption of growth through the integration of the national economy into the global marketplace. This required the dismantlement of state structures and policies that were perceived as inefficient. As a result, much of the policy apparatus and policy assemblages of the import substitution industrialization project were dismantled through privatization and deregulation. The critical development literature generally presents the neoliberal globalization project solely as an imposition from outside (Peet 2009). But to focus only on outside agents when discussing development patterns and the abandonment of importsubstituting industrialization is problematic even while nothing in this chapter should be read as a negation of US and other Western interventions in the form of military coups or structural adjustment programs. However, a closer look at the type of religiosities that have come to the fore will show that there are local religious activists, in the form of social movements and counter-elites, who are clamoring for the “freedom to choose,” to use Milton Friedman’s expression. The previous chapter has shown the implication of this transformation for the Republican Party in the United States. In this chapter, we will see how market-oriented religions have been developing in Latin America, Africa, West Asia, and © The Author(s) 2020 S. Dreher, Religions in International Political Economy, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41472-6_4

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South-East Asia since the 1970s and 1990s while the politics of this transformation will be discussed in Chapter 5. The chapter starts out with Max Weber’s argument that the emergence of capitalism was facilitated by a specific religiosity. Indeed, with regard to evangelicalism or Pentecostalism, scholars today propose that there is also a causal link between the expansion of neoliberal globalization and the diffusion of specific variants of evangelicalism. However, as this chapter will illustrate, such a “spirit of capitalism” can be found among all “world religions.” This chapter shows that within Hinduism and Islam we likewise observe forms of religiosity compatible with and conducive to neoliberal free market capitalism, aptly described as the second coming of capitalism by Comaroff and Comaroff (2000a). This religiosity will be contrasted with post-developmentalism which promotes local authentic communities in opposition to westernization and capitalism. The main part of the chapter will deal with various forms of such market-friendly religions and conclude with their solution to poverty and inequality: charity and private initiatives in the form of non-governmental organizations. The importance of this chapter is to illustrate how religious practice in the form of “market religion” bolsters the neoliberal globalization project and explains much of its staying power as market religion accepts the limited idea of the state promoted by neoliberal globalization.

Weber, Capitalist Development, and Post-developmentalism The religious resurgence has been accompanied by a resurgence of a specific interpretation of Max Weber’s (2013) theory of capitalist development, according to which capitalism requires a certain set of ideas to flourish and in the absence of these ideas no capitalist development can take place. The most prominent example of this strand of interpretation is Peter Berger, whose renunciation of secularization theory was featured in the Introduction to this book. He is convinced that Max Weber’s theory of capitalist development can help make sense of the religious resurgence and the rise of a new middle class in Latin America (Berger 2010). Similarly, Coleman (2011, pp. 27–28) notes in a survey on the prosperity gospel how researchers associate it quite clearly with neoliberal globalization. In the eyes of these researchers, Weber’s argument in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is that Calvinism was a contributing

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factor or even a cause of capitalist development because it transmitted to both capitalists and workers virtues such as diligence, frugality, honesty, prudence, and sobriety and a “spirit” of capitalism (“the temper of singleminded concentration upon pecuniary gain”) embodied in a this-worldly asceticism (citations from Hudson 1988, p. 56). According to Wilkinson (2016, p. 66), Weber’s thesis is taken to mean that Calvinist virtues (ideas) led to increased capital accumulation (material consequences). Religious studies scholars now posit a similar dynamic for the prosperity gospel and the neoliberal globalization project. However, according to Turner (2010), Weber himself did not subscribe to the view that Calvinism was the singular cause for capitalism. In Turner’s view, Weber mainly studied how beliefs are shaped by their social and economic context, which is the opposite of how Weber’s thesis is generally presented. Collins (1980) shows that in the General Economic History, a later work (Weber 1961), Weber had actually developed a more complex argument regarding the origin of capitalism that included religious beliefs among many other factors. Thus, to reduce Weber’s theory of capitalist development to a question of the right ideas or attitude is extremely problematic, especially if this is then used to distract from more inconvenient issues such as tax evasion, profit transfers by multinational corporations, a dysfunctional financial system that transfers wealth from the poor to the rich or failed structural adjustment programs (Hickel 2017). The neo-Weberian interpretation is a clear case of victim-blaming to deflect attention from an unjust global economic system with rules written by the big powers and to their advantage (Rodrik 2001, p. 58). The more surprising issue is that there has been no systematic discussion of Weber’s ideas within International Political Economy. It has been left to religious studies experts (see below) to point out that global capitalism is accompanied by changing forms of religiosity. And this, irrespective of Weber’s thesis, is the more interesting aspect of the religious resurgence: There is a religious transformation occurring whereby the libertarian form of Christianity that the previous chapter discussed for the United States is becoming increasingly prominent worldwide (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000b), and similar changes can be seen in the Islamic traditions and in Hinduism. In this context, it is interesting to note the turn in development studies to what has been called “post-development.” In its original version, development was very much tied up with modernization theory and the presumption of secularism as a condition for capitalist development

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(Winfield 2004). However, according to Aram Ziai (2017, p. 3), a whole school of post-developmentalists has emerged since the 1990s that is critical of developmentalism and development aid because they see it as Eurocentric and as a form of Western neo-colonialism. They point out that the concept of development has become blurred and refers to everything from economic growth to empowering women. These approaches are critical of economic growth and economic development as promoted by the international financial institutions. Instead of one modernity or one form of development, they propose multiple forms of modernity or speak of post-modernity (Eisenstadt 2000). In this context, the religious resurgence and its accompanying notion of the post-secular are presented as one way to develop an alternative form of modernity through religious practice and re-enchantment of the world. Post-development rests on the belief that alternatives to economic development are needed, local cultures and knowledges need to be respected, and the established scientific discourse is problematic (Ziai 2004, p. 1046). Other post-developmentalists (Rahnema 1997; Esteva and Prakash 1998; Sachs 1992) have extended these criticisms to the extent that, according to Ziai (2017), post-developmentalism now dominates the developmentalist discourse. Local communities should be the focus from their point of view, as they may be more authentic and democratic (Thomas 2000). The most famous expression of this sentiment is Foucault’s support of the Islamic revolution in Iran, which highlights the problematic aspect of post-modernist thinking romanticizing religious movements and overlooking the threat to women, ethnic minorities, and the LGBTQ+ community (Afary and Anderson 2010). Here, the notion of post-development becomes synonymous with the religious resurgence, as some local communities and alternatives to development are an expression of the re-emergence of religion. Post-developmentalists defend these localisms as authentic and in need of support—even if they were to undermine women’s or LGBTQ+ rights—because postdevelopmentalists oppose universal human rights, which they see as an expression of Western imperial power (Esteva and Prakash 1998, pp. 137– 138). Iranian feminists and Islamic feminists would not agree with this analysis (see Chapter 6). The question of authenticity in the post-modern analysis needs urgent clarification. In Chapter 3, we saw that neoliberalism came about in the United States as the result of a coalition between the Christian Right and the business elites that started to dominate the Republican Party from the

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1970s onwards. This chapter traces the global impact of this type of market religiosity across several religious traditions within which new forms of religiosity have emerged. They established their own structures and networks through businesses and their products and services, schools and media organizations and created alternative spaces with a focus on morality, a strong state and the free market. Post-developmentalists therefore need to take into account that an increasing number of religious activists favor free market solutions with a strong state to support them—the very opposite of what post-developmentalism stands for. The post-development thesis should therefore be assessed more critically, as Ralph Kiely (1999) points out.

Market Islam and Development According to Timur Kuran (2012), the reason why the Middle East did not develop to the same degree as the West can be sought in religious ideas and institutions. For example, inheritance law in the Qur’an leads to fragmentation of property and makes accumulation of wealth from one generation to the next difficult. Secondly, polygamy led to an increase in children among whom wealth needed to be distributed. In the European countries where capitalism developed, inheritance laws were designed to favor the eldest son. As a result, wealth accumulation over generations was possible and durable and stable business partnerships could be formed, which developed into the modern corporation. Besides this variation on the Weberian theme, the left views political Islam as an anti-western counter-hegemonic movement (Butko 2004) and as an alternative and authentic local form of development (Marusek 2018). However, both arguments are based on a specific interpretation of the history of Islam. It is possible to show, as Rodinson already pointed out in 1966, that there is no real problem in reconciling Islam with capitalist development. Indeed, today there are forms of Islamic activism that belie the notion that it is religion that is holding back the Middle East or that the only type of Islamist activism is anti-modern or anti-capitalist. Patrick Haenni (2005) pointed out the “other conservative revolution”—largely overlooked in the majority of the literature—in which Islamic activists promote decidedly pro-market ideas. In his view, there is not only political Islam but also a market Islam similar to the Christian Right in the United States, which, in his view, represents a form of compassionate

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conservatism (2005, p. 103). Market Islam wants to move away from fatalism and to revitalize the compassion and the philanthropic spirit of the rich. This sort of conservatism emphasizes the free market but is opposed to the pluralization of ways of living. According to Haenni, American conservatism and market Islam share the same idea of state power. There is an emphasis on the free market, the success of the individual, and family values and general mistrust of redistribution efforts by the state. Both condemn the poor because of their perceived laziness and poverty in spirit. The market Islamists therefore promote the American model of secularism, under which the freedom of religion is protected, and they are opposed to the strict secularism of their own societies. This form of Islam should not be confused with what Kuran (1996) describes as Islamic economics. The latter’s more statist interpretations have been abandoned in favor of market Islam during the 1980s and 1990s. Market Islam has attracted quite a body of literature. Atia (2013) researched it in the form of charities in Egypt and labeled it “pious neoliberalism.” Another prominent case is Tunisia, which seems to manage the difficult balance between market Islam and democratic compromise (Webb 2016). The most famous case is probably the Islamic Calvinist argument in Turkey put forward by the European Stability Initiative (ESI) in 2005. Their publications and many similar ones were instrumental in making the AK Party government under the leadership of R. T. Erdogan acceptable in the wider region (the ESI report was widely shared in Europe). The central argument of the study was that the heartland of the Turkish Republic, Anatolia, was full of successful Muslim entrepreneurs who were keen to join the European Union. These entrepreneurs themselves were attributing their success to an Islamic version of the “protestant work ethic.” They organized themselves in a vibrant network of business associations and religious movements from the 1970s onwards, of which the Gülen movement was the most prominent (Yavuz 2018). This network of civil society and business associations was the economic backbone of the democratic conservatism promoted by the AK party in the early 2000s when it tried to gain the trust of a skeptic assertive secular military and elite domestically, and the European Union (Tu˘gal 2009). The Gülen movement was described as market Islam by Hendrick (2013), as a transnational non-Western form of globalizing elite by Dreher (2016a), and even as a social business enterprise (Tittensor 2014) that facilitated the AKP project both domestically and abroad. Indeed, Gülen already promoted a form of “pious neoliberalism” in his

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sermons in the 1970s. His movement, one of the most successful Islamist movements in Turkey, helped to prepare the ground for the neoliberal revolution in Turkey (Dreher 2018). In addition, Western liberals such as the European Stability Initiative and their positive reports about the change of heart and transformation in Anatolia played a major role in supporting the shift from a secular elite that dominated much of business, society, and politics to these more rural Muslim entrepreneurs. Today, much of this enthusiasm has been drowned out and Turkish studies is in a crisis, with the fall of the Turkish model during the Gezi protests and as a result of the Arab Spring (Tu˘gal 2016a) and its final burial with the failed military coup in 2016 (Yavuz and Balçı 2018). Similar developments from a promising liberal turn toward illiberal democracy have been reported for Hungary (Scheiring 2018) and will be discussed in Chapter 5. In economic terms, though, Turkey has been a success story, experiencing growth rates and stability between 2002 and 2013 that were often absent during the unstable coalition governments of the 1990s. A similar argument about a Muslim middle class and entrepreneurs has been put forward by Vali Nasr (2009). In his view, a new middle and business class in the Middle East has established alternative forms of Islamic but capitalist economies, especially with their focus on Islamic finance (see Chapter 7). This new middle class is building a new Muslim world economy. In the long run, Nasr is convinced that this will lead to peace, security, and democracy if this class increases in size, an argument also put forward by Tu˘gal (2016a, p. 29), who cautions however that failing to fulfill these demands will lead to increasing instability. In this view, it is therefore vital to support the rise of the Islamic capitalists, as they will promote democracy and other liberal values (Nasr 2009). This type of Islam was also discovered by Daromir Rudnyckyj in Indonesia. Instead of market Islam, Rudnyckyj (2009) introduces the term “spiritual economies” to describe a moderate Islamic spiritual reform movement that tries to imbue ethics into the workplace in order to fight corruption, increase economic efficiency, and prepare employees for privatization. According to Rudnyckyj (2009), spiritual economies seek to engage with neoliberal globalization and not to seek refuge from or resist it. Here, religion is not a form of resistance to neoliberal globalization but a means to engage with it in order to survive and thrive. Specifically, it combines Islamic ethics with principles of management knowledge in order to increase the competitiveness of the country. The elements of spiritual economies are threefold: a focus on work as a form

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of worship and religious duty, instilling an ethics of accountability of the individual, and presenting spirituality as a part of management (2009, p. 105). The overall effect of these spiritual economies is to increase efficiency and productivity but also to change and adjust the individual and his or her spirituality to conform with neoliberal globalization. Lena Rethel (2019) has established that a form of market Islam has developed at the global level institutionalized in the World Islamic Economic Forum and the Global Islamic Economy Summit. This economy now has reached a size of US $4 trillion, including various sectors such as tourism, food, retail, and of course finance, to develop specific “Islamic” versions of goods and services. Globally, the Islamic community represents a large and growing middle class that consumes halal food, trusts in Islamic finance, uses religion-compatible forms of dress, and seeks corresponding accommodations during its holidays. While this does not replace the free market, it makes nevertheless for a larger diffusion of its benefits given that market Islam allows Muslim entrepreneurs to eke out some market share of their own in a globalized economy against Western (and now Chinese) entrepreneurs.

Pentecostal and Prosperity Christianity Christianity is undergoing a threefold transformation: It is becoming a religion from the Global South, its content is changing with the emergence of the prosperity gospel, and some branches of the Pentecostal form of Christianity are predominantly female. Approximately, 500 million of the 2.3 billion Christians are Pentecostal with important growth rates. This has led to some spectacular changes. According to the Pew Research Center (2014), one in five Latin Americans now describes themselves as Protestant, with a majority of these being Pentecostal (Masci 2014). As a result, we see an important transformation of Latin American societies. While until the 1960s at least 90% of Latin Americans were Catholic, today this is down to 69%. There is also an increasing number of religiously unaffiliated persons on the continent. It seems new types of elites and movements are emerging based specific religiosities questioning more established social, economic, and political orders (Brusco 2010; see Chapter 5). A widespread take on the rise of Pentecostal Christianity among religious studies scholars is to see it in light of Weber’s thesis discussed above (Martin 2001; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000b). In this literature, Weber

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is interpreted to mean that there is indeed a causal relationship between Protestantism and the rise of capitalism (Meyer, 2010, p. 114). According to Bernice Martin (2001, p. 52), the growth of evangelicalism and global capitalism went hand in hand, and thus some sort of connection should not be ruled out in the sense that this new form of Protestantism is a modernizing agent that supports the poor and the middle class to adjust to the dramatic transformation of their world brought about by globalization. In her view, economic success was a result of the Pentecostal values of strict living, rejection of gambling, and support for hard work, the family unit, and the church (see also Wilkinson 2016, p. 67). Peter Berger (2010) is the most prominent representative of this literature. He postulates that key aspects of a variation of Protestant Ethic are present in Pentecostal Protestantism, which has seen a “wildfire expansion” worldwide (Berger 2010, p. 2), most importantly in Latin America. In Guatemala, for example, a quarter of the countryside and a third of the urban population is Pentecostal. According to Berger, this movement has led to social mobility and economic development: “a growing Protestant middle class, economically productive and increasingly assertive politically” (Berger 2010, p. 5). Martin (1998) concurs that the diffusion of global capitalism correlates with the diffusion of Pentecostalism. Comaroff and Comaroff (2000a, p. 314) describe how the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) from Brazil can now be found on the African continent as well. In Brazil, it has a television network and a web presence and offers cures for depression and financial advice. Adherents testify that they have been helped to become rich and healthy through the prayer meetings they attend. Some observers see a Pentecostal women’s movement because 60% of adherents are women. This has led to what Bernice Martin (2001) has termed the “gender paradox”—Pentecostalism reinforces traditional relationships between men and women as it is built upon the family as the central unit of society; yet at the same time these relationships are dramatically transformed. Pentecostal Christianity changes masculinity—the old one based on gambling and other problematic male behavior is replaced by a capitalistic form of patriarchy: The male head of the household is expected to work and earn income so that the family can live well and children can get an education (Hallum 2003). Pentecostalism helps men get rid of substance abuse problems and can be seen as one large “detox center” for Latin American men, who also stop gambling or womanizing. This leads to more stable households in which investment in children’s

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education is possible (Masci 2014), and limits forms of masculinity that are destructive to the family (Martin 2001). Pfeiffer et al. (2007) offer this, from a 2002 interview with a man from Zion Christian Church in Mozambique: “It was on a Sunday itself that I saw that it was too much, it was after I had drunk too much on a Saturday and I stayed up all night, I could see that this wasn’t okay, I felt weak, I had to go take a bath and went to church, and in truth I went to begin praying, and until today I’m not drinking or smoking, not anything” (p. 969). This is still patriarchy, but now it is one that supports thriftiness and economic advancement, with a focus on the family. Nanlai Cao (2013) makes an interesting observation on the gender dynamic in the city of Wenzhou, the most Christianized Chinese city, where about 15% of the population are now Christian. Christianity experienced an enormous increase in China with the onset of economic reforms in 1979, and it is now estimated that between 23 and 60 million Chinese are Christian. In Wenzhou, as in China more generally, there are two types of Pentecostal communities. One is based on the house church movement, carried largely by women, while the more city-based version relies on “boss Christians,” successful entrepreneurs who insist on a more bookcentered form of Christianity. They disdain the female-centered house churches based on prayer-calling mothers. These boss Christians are part of the elite in Wenzhou and seek to realize “God’s vision for China,” according to which an evangelical China will spread the Gospel: “One day China will rise, one day China will rise, break the closed door and the solid barracks, let the evangelical flag wave in China, let the church be united.” This quotation comes from a hymn called “China’s Mission” that is among the favorites in Wenzhou’s churches (Cao 2013, p. 164). Whereas the female-centered churches put more emphasis on spirituality, the more male-oriented churches emphasize health and wealth and promote a form of prosperity gospel. According to Anderson (2013), Pentecostalism is a broad movement within Protestantism that contains many varieties and grew out of a plurality of spiritual awakenings that occurred worldwide. It is thus not a Western form of Christianity but has multiple origins; it is a truly global religion in which adherents in each location craft their own forms of worship in an engagement with the texts of the Bible. There are also Catholic versions of the charismatic form of worship that integrate elements of the prosperity gospel. Katharine Wiegele (2006) has described the case of the Catholic El Shaddai movement from the Philippines, which

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has about 9–11 million members worldwide and is present in 35 countries. On the African continent, the prosperity gospel accounts for 80% of Pentecostal Christians, who represent 35% of all Christians in Africa (Ukah 2016, p. 93), and can be found in Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Congo-Zaire, Kenya, Angola, and Uganda (Obadare 2016, p. 78). Pentecostals are thus the fastest-growing denomination within African Christianity. In African revivalist churches, it is believed that Satan plunges people into poverty, and helping them is out of the question because “suffering is the reflection of the presence of an evil spirit” (Ngalula 2017, p. 233). Researchers in Mozambique have found that Pentecostal churches are attractive because they cost less than the more traditional healers and are as or even more effective in terms of their beneficial impact on health and well-being (Pfeiffer et al. 2007). The key aspect of the prosperity gospel is its optimism. It instills in the believer the conviction that obstacles can be overcome and that it lies within the power of the believer to change things. Kate Bowler (2015), an expert on the American prosperity gospel, explains its success as a result of “a sharp diagnosis of the human condition: life is pain and God is the cure” (p. 66). In her observation, the restructuring of the welfare state and the increase in inequality have meant that individuals are increasingly left alone. In this context, the prosperity gospel provides assurances that God’s blessings can be secured through concrete actions such as prayer or donations. This is the “seed-faith principle”: “The principle that giving tithes with faith will result in miracles” (Wiegele 2006, p. 498). Specifically, the prosperity gospel starts from the assumption that Christians are blessed with health and wealth according to their faith. To put it differently, Christians who are poor and suffer from illnesses are not really believers: “If you were in need for some kind of miracle, whether financial or physical, but lacked faith, you would not receive your blessing from God” (Wilkinson 2016, p. 60). In other words, poverty is a direct result of a lack of faith more than it is the result of colonial history, problematic trade rules, profit repatriation by multinational corporations or exorbitant debt payments (see Chapter 7). In a situation where neoliberal practices have increased individual precarity, practical guidance is needed to demonstrate the degree of one’s faith, and prosperity preachers provide just that: they ask for contributions to the Church. The more one gives the more one demonstrates belief and trust in God. Coleman (2011, p. 37) aptly describes this approach as a “sacrificial economy,” where the believer’s sacrifice to the

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church means that they are also taking a positive action for themselves and will feel empowered. In the process, the prosperity preachers are able to amass a fortune of their own, and ostentatious display of wealth is a key demonstration of how their faith has been vindicated by God’s blessing. According to Kate Bowler (2015), there is no control and no accountability around what the preachers do with the money received every week, and there are reports of serious fraud where church leaders siphon off money for their own personal use (p. 65). Indeed, setting up a church seems to have become a business model (Ngalula 2017, p. 233). Pastopreneurs (Ukah 2016; Wilkinson 2016) promise salvation to the believer through giving, and thus accumulate wealth for themselves. Both Wilkinson (2016) and Ukah (2016) are rather negative when it comes to the question of the distributional effects of prosperity religion. Prosperity religion may thus also be one explanation for the increasing discrepancy between the rich and the poor and increasing wealth disparity (Ukah 2016, p. 75). Wilkinson argues that the key institutions of the prosperity movement are mega-churches, which are often run like large-scale corporations with a large staff, media departments, marketing teams, and the corresponding social influence (Wilkinson 2016, p. 61), in sharp contrast with the female centered and community-based form of Pentecostal organization. This was also pointed out by Ukah (2016) in his study of the prosperity gospel in Nigeria. He describes the Redeemed Christian Church of God, which has 60,000 branches in the country and self-reports five million members. It is described as the wealthiest religious organization in the country. It has business schools that educate students on how to capture market segments through the use of Christian principles and has established its own business and firms in the financial sector. A large amount of income is made through the sale of Christian devotionals, books, and other media as “commodities of the spirit” (Ukah 2016, p. 79). It runs hospitals, primary and secondary schools, banks, insurance companies, used-car dealerships, television stations, and mortgage institutions. Through its real-estate investments after the 2008 financial crisis, it contributed to the stabilization of the Nigerian economic elite by providing a safe local form of investment with the construction of a large compound for adherents where they could buy properties. This compound is the largest private estate in Nigeria and the largest Christian estate in the world (Ukah 2016, pp. 80–86).

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Prosperity religion or sacrificial economies help believers to gain reassurance through action. The close-knit community based on family and church creates a caring and safe environment for individuals faced with structural adjustment, unemployment, and economic crisis. The church community also helps with business connections, as the Chinese case showed. Here, religion creates a spiritual economy that Rudnyckyj (2009) describes for Indonesian Islam (see the previous section). These various interpenetrations between religion and the market, through which religion provides spiritual guidance, salvation, hope, and business advice, took hold among the struggling middle classes and more successful businesspersons. The spiritual economy flourishes among supervisory-level employees where it may provide a sort of moral foundation for the neoliberal market economy for individuals and families (Rudnyckyj 2009, p. 116). A different approach is developed by individuals and communities who are excluded from the benefits of neoliberal globalization and who resort to what Comaroff and Comaroff (2000a, p. 315) have referred to as “occult economics.” Occult economy is the “deployment of magical means for material ends or, more expansively, the conjuring of wealth by resort to inherent mysterious techniques” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999, p. 297, fn. 31). These emerge because of the enormous disparities of wealth that characterize the free-floating financial system and its speculative economy which make wealth appear like magic or miracle. Occult economies are efforts to mirror the magic of the financial markets or to assign blame for unemployment. They involve witchcraft, zombies, tarot readings, and pyramid schemes. All these various expressions of religion are characteristic for a time during which capitalism has been increasingly presented as a “gospel of salvation,” and these forms of worship—whether in a more positive form as in spiritual economies or market Islam or a more negative form as in occult economies—mirror neoliberal capitalism and its disparities of wealth and health (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000a, p. 292).

Corporate Hinduism, Prosperity Buddhism, and Revival of Folk Religions Owing to Max Weber’s writing, there is a widespread impression that Hinduism lacked the spirit to develop capitalism. Weber seemed to point out that the theodicy and the social system in Hinduism would not allow

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a capitalist society to grow on the Indian subcontinent (Kitiarsa 2007a, p. 5). According to Buss (1985), such an interpretation was largely due to the severely problematic ways Weber’s writings on religion were translated. But leaving Weber aside, it is certainly the case that the corporate forms of Hinduism that Upadhyay (2016) outlines are very well compatible with neoliberal globalization and the free market and may even be reinforcing the right-wing nationalistic project of Hindutva (see the next chapter). Upadhyay describes gurus whose followers, through their free labor (seva), produce goods cheaply in ashrams. These goods can then be sold profitably on the free market established by the neoliberal reforms instigated in India since the early 1990s, thanks to a demand that has been created by the insistence of Hindutva on locally produced goods. The “salvation wares,” as he describes them, that are sold by these gurus consist of cleaning products, meditation products, and media containing their courses and lectures. In this way, these gurus support the growing middle classes living in the urban areas in their quest for stability and tranquility, and provide them with a community. One of the more prominent examples of this type of guru must be Bhagwan Shre Rajneesh, who created a multi-million-dollar enterprise based on his meditation exercises. It is possible even today to attend the ashram in Pune to study meditation (Urban 2013). He was featured in the documentary Wild Wild Country by Maclain and Chapman Way. Rajneesh was deeply critical of the socialism and asceticism of the Congress Party and of Mahatma Gandhi and advocated sexual liberation—which makes him different from the more austere forms of prosperity gospels within Christianity. He can be seen as an early expression of what Fraser (2016) describes as progressive neoliberalism, which she associates with the 1990s Labour party in Britain and Democratic party under Clinton in the United States, both more open to various forms of sexual identities. Rajneesh even went so far to write a whole book on his critique of socialism in the 1970s (Urban 2013, p. 36). In his view, there is nothing wrong with being rich and enjoying life on this planet. He believed that meditation and spiritual exercises are helpful in developing a new form of human. In the process, he made serious profits—as his followers do today—without any clear oversight on how the money is spent. It should not come as a surprise that Rajneesh was supported in the 1970s by wealthy businessmen who appreciated his antisocialist and pro-capitalist message (Urban 2013, p. 37). His community and many similar communities coming out of Hinduism are noteworthy

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for their ability to extract money in exchange for spiritual enlightenment and yoga exercises promoted by their unquestioning (Western) followers. While at the individual level meditation exercises and yoga are beneficial—as the tremendous success of programs such as that developed by John Kabat-Zinn (2009) demonstrates—without a larger change in the social structure of a society that produces depression and anxiety these programs seem to be only patchwork, given that one has to have the financial means to access yoga and wellness retreats (see Godrej 2017). It is significant that the Osho Ashram in Pune has become unaffordable to the less well off (Urban 2013, p. 40). While the focus of this section is on India, similar reports on “prosperity religions” are emerging from Thailand and China. Thailand enjoyed an economic boom in the 1980s and 1990s and during that time experienced the emergence of a variety of prosperity Buddhisms (phuttha phanit —commercialized Buddhism) whose emphasis was on the acquisition of wealth as much as on salvation (Jackson 1999, p. 246; see also Kitiarsa 2007a). They developed outside the religious establishment but became the dominant form of religious practice by the end of the 1990s (Jackson 1999, p. 248). There were several such Buddhist prosperity movements; according to Jackson the more prominent ones involved worship of the spirit of King Chulalongkorn (Rama V), devotion to the Chinese Mahayana Buddhist bodhisattva Kuan Im (Guan Yin), and movements surrounding Theravada Buddhist monks to whom supernatural powers were ascribed. Each of these movements relied on different strands of the population or speaks to different interests. The Rama V movement is concerned with the future of the monarchy and is more city-based; Kuan Im is promoted by ethnic Chinese and is concerned with how they relate to Thailand; and the magic monks indicate the continuing relevance of village-based forms of religious practice (Jackson 1999, p. 260). Together they created a new form of religious activism during a time of economic boom. These changes in religious practice allowed religious activists to adjust to and deal with transformations in a constructive way, while leading to both a spiritualization of the market and a marketization of spirituality (Jackson 1999, pp. 256–257). The result was a religious-commercial sector able to attract a significant amount of spending on temples and other salvation wares. In other words, an extremely successful version of a fee-for-services religious sector emerged that reflected the socioeconomic transformations that had taken place.

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Kitiarsa (2007b) summarizes this development as the commodification of Buddhism. The religious revival in China takes on many forms. While the various forms of Christianity, especially in its prosperity variety, are increasing dramatically (Cao 2013), they pale in comparison with the growth of what has been called “folk religions” which have seen an important growth since the 1970s and created local indigenous economic sectors within China where the modern economy is imbricated into folk religious festivities that in turn feed growth at the local level due to the demand for salvation wares (Yang 2007). The estimates reach from 30–80% of people practicing some type of folk religion. One more plausible estimate stems from an experienced researcher Yang and Hu (2012, p. 514) who report on a survey that counted 578 million (55%) practitioners of various types of folk religions. Initially dismissed as superstition, today folk religions are increasingly accepted. They include communal rituals in temples and the worship of local deities such as the city god, and ancestor worship and individuals visiting fortune-tellers, divination, numerology, and many other practices (Yang and Hu 2012, pp. 508–509). Folk religions are thus impossible to generalize. Yet they play an important function at the local level when local temples allow the creation of a community and a moral framework for individuals uprooted through the industrialization process to the cities: “they gather money from the rich and distribute it to the poor and needy (widows, orphans, disaster victims) in local communities, and finance efforts for the public good, such as building schools, roads, and bridges” (Yang 2007, p. 231). The donors are publicly honored, and, in this way, merchants gain standing in the community which in turn supports their business. This leads to the creation of local elites with party leaders and local merchants competing and cooperating with each other with respect to temple activities as described by Chau (2005). It is therefore important not to necessarily see the religious as opposed to the local state but there are interrelationships as observed by Chau (2005, p. 250). It will be interesting to see if these market religions in China will lead to similar shifts in policies and elite composition as has happened in Turkey, India, or in Brazil where power was obtained by a different elite segment based on religious nationalism (see next chapter). Given the strict regulation by the party, this may be a longer-term process. Falun Gong (Chapter 8) tried but failed while the Uighurs (Muslim minority of 80 million) are suppressed according leaked government files (see reports by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism).

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The Spirit of Capitalism and Charitable Giving One important theme in neoliberalism is the extension of private activity away from the state and the question of charity plays an important role in this context. This “spiritual economy” (Rudnyckyj 2009) is based on aspiring middle classes and management. who also a recognize that free markets require charity for the deserving poor (Hackworth 2012). Activists see this as a way how markets can be moralized and integrate ethical values that reflect religious sensibilities for justice. In these instances, religious activists seek to compensate for market failures (Osella and Rudnyckyj 2017, p. 2). Atia (2013) has outlined how in Egypt charitable organizations have developed for whom poverty is best addressed through the market system; she refers to this as pious neoliberalism. The charities under discussion are also noteworthy in how they employ their business expertise to provide solutions for questions of poverty. The literature on charity especially for the Islamic context has exploded (see Tu˘gal 2017; Benthall 2007; Petersen 2012). But there are also other interpretations of charity. Tu˘gal (2016b) points to the struggle regarding the interpretation of charity within the Catholic Church where a more neoliberal interpretation of charity has been dominant, and which is now complemented by a revival of liberation theology interpretation which conceptualizes charity as a way to address poverty at the system level and where the marginalized are being put center stage (Tu˘gal 2016b, p. 433; Chapter 8). Depending on how charity is interpreted and practiced it can either be merely complementary to or a way to go beyond capitalism. The emergence of religious development NGOs (non-governmental organizations) is another important aspect of privatization of state functions. Religious development NGOs were promoted in the late 1990s by the World Bank through conferences and later the World Faith Development Dialogue (disbanded in 2011; Haynes 2014, p. 128). Integrating questions of faith into development became more pronounced after 9/11, as faith-based organizations were made a part of policy delivery both in the domestic and in the foreign arena in the United States. Increasingly, US faith-based organizations, especially from the Christian Right, were able to obtain state financing (Hearn 2002). This process produced an extensive literature on religion and development with a specific focus on faith-based organizations and the delivery of aid (Clarke et al. 2008; Haynes 2007; Tyndale 2006; Jones and Petersen 2011). Their influence is also felt in the United Nations (Haynes 2014) and the World Bank

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(Thomas 2004). The United Nations Economic and Social Council allows consultative status to NGOs, of which 10% were faith-based in 2010, up from 9% in 2000 (Haynes 2014, p. 17). Most of these are Christian, while Muslims and Hindus are less well represented. According to Haynes (2014), faith-based organizations in the United Nations are active around three issues: religious freedom, women’s rights, and the Millennium Development Goals. The eight Millennium Goals were created as a result of the failure of the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s, which had not succeeded in overcoming poverty and hunger in many countries; accordingly, hunger and poverty reduction were one of the key goals of this UN initiative. In this situation, the UN sought to draw on the religious sector in order to work toward the Millennium Goals. (These were meant to be achieved by 2015 and have now been replaced by the Sustainable Development Goals.) Haynes uses the term faith-based organizations to take into account that the Catholic Church is not a non-governmental organization but recognized as a state. As Hackworth (2012) has argued, aid delivery through faith-based organizations is an expression of the neoliberal belief that private actors are more efficient than state actors. Faith-based non-governmental organizations can thus be seen as a version of public-private partnerships, as a perfect expression of market-based religion or religious neoliberalism, even though their actual reach may be limited (Hackworth 2012; Williams et al. 2012). They reflect the distrust religious activists hold toward the state and their conviction that they are in a better position to help. In the context of development organization, the proliferation of NGOs needs to be seen in the broader context of state transformation under neoliberalism, where the NGO sector replaces state employment as a form of advancement for elites. The case of Haiti illustrates Haynes’s (2014) and Hackworth’s (2012) arguments that the involvement of private actors in development questions is not a panacea for development problems. Before the 2010 earthquake, the Haitian people referred to their country as the republic of NGOs (Edmonds 2013, p. 440) because there were 10,000 NGOs present on the island, a number that increased significantly after the earthquake. The earthquake allowed the “most extreme neoliberal economic restructuring documented to date” according to Edmonds (2013, p. 440) and did nothing to increase self-sufficiency and state or community capacity. On the contrary, it cemented the privatization of the state in favor of NGOs and led to a serious waste of aid money. A case in point is

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the Red Cross in the United States, which collected half a billion dollars in donations with the promise of building homes for 130,000 people but only managed to build six (Elliott and Sullivan 2015). The general argument that NGOs and especially their faith-based versions will be better prepared to undertake development projects needs to be problematized (Schuller 2012).

Conclusion Chapter 2 argued that religious activism may act to facilitate and support, reform, or actively resist neoliberal globalization (see also Dreher 2016b). It described the fundamentalist religious response as emphasizing the family, hierarchy, a strong state, and the free market as the key facilitator for neoliberal globalization. This chapter has shown that the fundamentalist response comes in different varieties and expressions. The argument often attributed to Weber that there is an affinity between religious ideas and capitalist development—an argument to which he never subscribed— needs to be made more complex by distinguishing spiritual from occult economies. Spiritual economies denote one way of bringing religious ideas into the functioning of the free market, at least among the middle class. As Chapter 5 will show, there is a deep connection between religious economics and a specific type of fundamentalist conservative projects, a connection with serious human rights implications (Chapter 6). This type of middle-class approach needs to be separated from occult economics to describe religious activism driven by despair. While spirituality at the workplace and in management is possible for people who are in employment, occult economies develop in places where unemployment is high and structural change induced by neoliberal globalization looms large. As Marx put it in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Marx 1843), “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions,” and acts as a tranquilizer, much like alcohol, anti-depressants, or fentanyl (opium, Marx’s original example). Both responses, spiritual or occult economies, leave the economic structure in place while providing techniques to respond to it more or less productively. Charity and NGOs play an important role in this context. This chapter thus continued the story that emerged from Chapter 3. There we found that fundamentalist Christians in the United States

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sought freedom under God, not only in political terms but as an expression of their faith in the market economy’s potential to create a just order based on hard work and families. In this chapter, I have shown that this type of market religion is more widespread. Specifically, Gülen in Turkey and Rajneesh from India denounced the interventionist state already in the 1970s and can be seen as the expression of a counter-elite. There is therefore some evidence of a correlation between the emergence of neoliberal globalization and the fundamentalist religious resurgence promoted by counter-elites. Market religions have also been observed in Latin America and in Africa in the form of the prosperity gospel and in Asia with corporate Hinduism, prosperity Buddhism and the folk religions centered around the local economy and local elites. As the next chapter describes, in some countries religious counter-elites have emerged and been able to replace the secular-nationalist postwar elites that promoted the developmentalist state strategy. They have done this by using religion to gain power and to spread an alternative development model, often based on free market fundamentalism. The Muslim world has been at the forefront of these struggles, but the Christian world is seeing similar upheavals, with Pentecostal churches increasingly becoming a force in politics, society, and business—a process best documented in Latin America but also occurring in Africa and Asia. The election of Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2018, a victory that was made possible by the support of evangelical Christians in the country (Anderson 2019), is one of the more prominent examples. There is thus a need for comparative research on the religious origins of neoliberal globalization and how it led to the creation of counter-hegemonic elites, not only in the United States but also elsewhere.

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CHAPTER 5

Toward Multipolarity Through Religious Nationalism?

The term “Majority World” was proposed by Shahidul Alam, a photographer, artist, and activist from Bangladesh (Davis 2018) to change perceptions. It will be used interchangeably with “Global South” in this chapter to highlight the shift in thinking that is needed to move toward multipolarity and a legitimate global governance system. Some scholars argue that such a shift is inevitable in a situation of hegemony, as states will seek to balance singular power centers (Waltz 1999; Desai 2013). The question is on what basis do national elites create hegemonic projects that will succeed in bolstering their power both at the national and at the global level and allow them to challenge hegemonic states. This chapter will provide cases for the groundbreaking argument developed in Chapter 2 about elites, counter-elites, and their frames. It will illustrate that the process of global restructuring, from the interventionist state to the neoliberal globalization project, has created new elites, alliances, and hegemonic projects based on religious nationalism, bolstered or even initiated by neoliberal reforms. Religious like secular nationalism is an ideology of order, a cultural system, which provides “levels of meaning beneath the day-to-day authority that gives the social and political order its reason for being. In doing so, they define for the individual the right way of being in the world and relate persons to the social whole” but in a relationship of hierarchy (Juergensmeyer 2008, p. 20). Chapter 6 will

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discuss further the hierarchies of household, gender, and to some extent race that are part and parcel of the revival in religious nationalism. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank used the debt crisis from the early 1980s onward as leverage to restructure the role of the state in the Majority World (see Chapter 2). In the developmentalist period, states had sought to industrialize via protectionist import substitution policies, often under exploitative and/or authoritarian secular rentier states. Neoliberal globalization, in contrast, was meant to restart growth and, especially, reduce debt. It is in this context of debt restructuring, globalization, and the crisis of the secular national developmental state that we need to locate the emergence of religious nationalism (Juergensmeyer 2008) or authoritarian populism with a culturalist agenda (Chacko and Jayasuriya 2018) as a means for national counter-elites to gain power. Often, and perhaps paradoxically, religious nationalism does not call into question neoliberal globalization. On the contrary, we can observe religious nationalism alongside efforts to promote neoliberal globalization. There are, however, also signs that we are moving significantly beyond neoliberalism and toward a state-centered model of economic development. Chapter 3 described the transformation of the Republican Party in the United States. Current developments in Poland, Hungary, and Russia also signal a growing importance of fundamentalist religion infused with religious nationalism. In Hungary, for example, churches provided legitimacy for right-wing political parties, Fidesz and Jobbik, who rely on religious discourse to gain power (Ádám and Bozóki 2011; Bohle and Greskovits 2018). Viktor Orban, the current prime minister of Hungary, exemplifies the key themes in this chapter. He is known for promoting a religious nationalist form of illiberal democracy, which in his view is based on three elements: the family—based on husband and wife—in need of protection against liberal relativism; each country needing a guiding culture, which in Hungary is the Christian culture; and thirdly, the conservation of national culture against the encroachment of other cultures, especially through migration (paraphrased and translated from Patterer and Winkler 2019). These remarks serve to highlight that the religious challenge to the “secular state” is not limited to the Majority World but is a key aspect of European and US politics as well. While this chapter will be mainly concerned with the Global South or the Majority World, Hungary will pop up again below because it highlights the shift toward state-based economic development more clearly

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than any other case. This chapter will first outline the global economic and political restructuring process of the state in general before discussing case studies from the Middle East (or West Asia), South-East Asia, and Latin America. The last section will discuss the notion of multipolarity and religious nationalism in the context of the debate on decolonization and globalization of the social sciences, including IPE.

State Strategies and Transformations in a Lopsided International Political Economy Given unparalleled US power since World War I, there have been several attempts to dislodge the country from its hegemonic status. Thus far they have all failed: Germany and Japan were beaten back during World War II, Great Britain lost its great power status when it had to abandon its imperial form of trade protection in loan negotiations with the United States during World War II, the French challenge to the Bretton Woods system was diverted through the dissolution of the system in 1971, the USSR disintegrated in 1989, and the anti-globalization movement, including in its religious manifestation, has not managed to change global rules significantly (see Chapter 7). According to Wade (2017, p. 137), it is disconcerting to see how little the Majority World has caught up: In 2015 figures, “only 16 percent of the world’s population live on an income that takes them safely above the US poverty line.” Latin America, Africa, and Asia have never been accepted as equal participants into the global governance system. On the contrary, many states had to engage in armed struggles to get rid of colonial submission and are still dominated by their former colonial powers. Deneault’s (2005) claim that françafrique now morphed into a mafiafrique is one instance of dominance by a former colonial power. Real political and economic independence has often remained an illusion (Van der Pijl 1996, p. 328). As was described in Chapter 2, the newly decolonized states pushed for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) in 1974. The goal was to support their national developmental states after independence, as they endeavored to industrialize through import substitution (ISI). Much like the external support provided by the Bretton Woods system for the welfare state through fixed exchange rates and capital controls (Helleiner 1994), the NIEO was supposed to increase development aid to the South, initiate negotiations on debt, strengthen the rights of states to control multinational corporations, give access to technologies, allow for

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independent tariff politics, and create a stabilization fund for raw materials that would control the huge price oscillations for raw materials such as happened with OPEC and oil (Van der Pijl 1996, p. 329; Margulis 2017; Bair 2009). In the end, demands for an NIEO actually accelerated the development of the neoliberal agenda, as states and firms from the Minority World perceived the NIEO as a threat to liberalism and free markets (Bair 2009, pp. 348–349). The 1979 interest rate shock precipitated the 1980s debt crisis, while the election of Ronald Reagan led to an ideological turn in the international financial institutions toward neoliberalism (Van der Pijl 1996, p. 344). The 1980s and even the 1990s were lost decades in terms of development, characterized by the debt crisis, restructuring, and complete integration into the world economy on a level not seen even under colonization. Currently, there are two schools of thought on the relationship of “the rest” with regard to “the West,” according to Strange (2011). The first argues that all states are now mere locations in a global political economy dominated by the neoliberal globalization project and do not enjoy policy autonomy (Gill 1995; Soederberg et al. 2005). Another group of authors point out that this first school overlooks significant efforts to maintain some control by moving toward a post-Listian development state. “Listian,” named for the economist Friedrich List, refers to economic policies that seek to promote a national industry, although under neoliberal globalization these policies will not be the same as those List advocated in the nineteenth century (Strange 2011; for an overview, see Selwyn 2009). The post-Listian state seeks to maintain regulatory controls, for example over the types of foreign investment to be allowed into the country (Strange 2011). At the global level, this development of the post-Listian state has been bolstered by the creation of new institutions, often under Chinese leadership; among others these include the G20, the Shanghai Cooperation Association, the Asian Infrastructure Bank, and the Belt and Road Initiative (Golub 2013; Chin 2014). Thus, we may be witnessing a turn toward multipolarity and multiculturalism (Desai 2013), with China, India, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa (BRICS) trying to create independent organizational structures to capture a larger share of the benefits of the global economy for the Majority World. Specifically, China has pushed for IMF reform to account for the country’s increasing international role, has initiated more cooperative mechanisms with other countries in the Majority World, and has remained a positive developmental state, which in Strange’s view (2011, p. 548)

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differs from neoliberal globalization. It will also be interesting to see how the Belt and Road Initiative will be perceived by the market Islamists and how China will engage West Asia (Selmier 2018). Market Islamists (see previous chapter) are in the process of creating an “Islamic market economy” based on attributing Islamic features to goods and services (e.g., Islamic finance), in this way ensuring that a larger slice of the global economy ends up in Muslim-majority countries (Rethel 2018). There are therefore both political and economic trends toward a more multipolar global economy that might reverse the orientation of the global economy solely toward the United States. Central to this would be the development of an alternative global currency—such the Special Drawing Rights in the IMF, which China seeks to be strengthened (Strange 2011, p. 553). In a major contribution to this debate, Radhika Desai (2013, pp. 18, 276) argued that IPE needs to pay increased attention to the role of states in the global economy and their ability to shape economics according to their domestic preferences. In her view, the current global political economy demonstrates the relevance of geopolitical economy. But one wonders exactly what type of state transformation is occurring. Desai’s (2013, p. 276) argument of a possible return of demand management to redress inequality seems optimistic. Neoliberal globalization seems to be characterized by an increase in fraud and corruption to an unprecedented degree. The best example is the way the financial oligarchy in the United States captured the state after the subprime crisis of 2008 and forced through a bailout of the industry, as opposed to helping the homeowners who went bankrupt (Tooze 2018; Engelen et al. 2011). This development of crony neoliberalism has been extensively studied for Uganda by Wiegratz (2016), who found a wholesale transformation of society and economy based on corruption and fraud. Balint Magyar (2017), a former Hungarian education minister and a sociologist, has characterized the transformation in Eastern Europe as one from communism to “Mafia states.” These are states where there is a close cooperation between the political and economic elites to exploit the resources of the country by limiting democratic control and oversight. Hungary, Poland, Russia, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine are some examples of this type of state, where economics is governed by patron–client dependency, corporate raiding, and rent-seeking. All these states are characterized by a move toward authoritarian rule that makes it difficult to hold political elites accountable. In other words, identifying a post-Listian state or Keynesian demand

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management is an optimistic assessment that overlooks corruption and rent-seeking, monopoly power, tax evasion, and corporate scandals. This leads to the conclusion that IPE needs to give more consideration to the notion of rent-seeking, and not to leave it to neo-classical critics of the developmental state (Elsenhans et al. 1994). Rent-seeking seems to highlight a crucial tendency of neoliberal globalization and thus is a feature of the current economic system as such. Rent-seeking refers to income derived from positions of power, property, or influence as opposed to work or innovation. Traditional sources of rent income such as tariffs or oil rent are still in existence. However, rent can also refer to mineral resources such as oil income; control over public sector procurement, foreign aid, or remittances from abroad; or the power to license and regulate markets (Ouaissa and Schwecke 2015, p. 5). Regulations create markets: For instance, the size of a chicken cage determines which eggs count as being from “free-run” chickens; the political process over the freedom of the chicken determines market share for egg producers (Reich 2008); and there is therefore an interest for political actors to influence politics. According to Stiglitz (2012), the financial industry in the United States is enjoying rents of incredible proportions, and rent-seeking secured through political processes has become endemic in the economic fortunes of the “one percent.” This seems to be characteristic of neoliberal globalization in its late stage, where political and/or monopoly power is more important to obtaining profits than product innovation (Brenner 2017; Johnson 2009). This comes with a change in the nature of politics as political power becomes more important. It is in this context that Hungary is important, because its development toward “authoritarian capitalism” is exemplary for how neoliberal globalization, even within the context of the European Union, creates internal contradictions that create the conditions for the authoritarian turn as elites try to hold on to power and wealth. Hungary’s rapid transformation between 1989 and 2010 from communism, to poster child for successful democratization, and now toward authoritarian capitalism (Scheiring 2018) or Mafia state (Magyar and Vásárhelyi 2017) is astonishing. According to Scheiring (2018), authoritarian capitalism is the result of the internal contradictions of neoliberalism, which led to a disarticulated economy that left both a large number of citizens and local economic elites behind. Authoritarianism in this context is necessary to suppress the population and to capture markets for the national elite through regulation and protectionism. A case in point is the new tobacco

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law that excludes foreign tobacco firms from the Hungarian market, but similar processes can be shown for banking and the energy sector. This highlights how the state has become instrumental in wealth accumulation in a context where free market mechanisms are underdeveloped or dysfunctional. Elites or fractions of elites fight over the state in order to obtain a share of rent or control over regulations, and they use religious, nationalistic, or other rhetoric to delegitimize their opponents and gain power. This more general pattern of politics has been studied for both the Global South (Rapley 2004; Elsenhans et al. 2015) and the Global North (Shipman et al. 2018; see also Chapter 2).

Religious Counter-Elites and the Neoliberal Revolution in West Asia After independence, many Middle Eastern (or West Asian) states were governed by secular authoritarian regimes that benefitted from rent incomes such as military aid from the United States, oil and gas revenues, remittances, or income from customs. This income allowed them to insulate themselves against pressures to change. Often a state elite developed, based on the military, the security apparatus, and the bureaucracy, and usurped and subsequently defended its rent-seeking position (Henry and Springborg 2010, p. 67ff.). It is against these regimes that politically organized religious activists emerged in a contest for power, as it became visible that many of the promises of a better life after decolonization had been broken, or that secular nationalism was not able to provide a convincing political and economic strategy for state-building. These activists used cultural politics in order to demand a greater share in the economic surplus (Ouaissa and Schwecke 2015) and religious nationalism developed (Juergensmeyer 2008). The latter was able to capture the national imagination as it was able to re-connect to a more glorious past under Islamic empires on the one hand but also to present itself as a more authentic form of national culture on the other hand. In Muslim-majority countries, political Islam—the instrumentalization of Islam to pursue political objectives—has to be seen first and foremost as an alternative to failed authoritarian and often secular regimes (Colas 2004). This can also be observed in sub-Saharan Africa, as Nigeria, Mali, and Senegal show, where there are Islamist counter-elites in secular states that are developing a counter-culture to challenge established political and social norms (Pereira and Ibrahim 2010; Sow 2014). While many analysts

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try to present the Islamist challenge as a necessary step in the democratic process, a more fruitful approach is to see the Islamists as a counterhegemonic elite fraction whose interest in democracy is often as strategic as that of the regime they are replacing, and who are dependent on local, regional, and global power configurations. In some cases, such as in Turkey or Pakistan they were supported by the secular regimes to undermine trade unions and communist parties (Ayoob 2004, p. 6; Sen ¸ 2010). With the exception of Turkey, Tunisia, Pakistan, and Iran, this political Islamist challenge has been unsuccessful. For example, Saudi Arabia sent its Islamists to Afghanistan to fight the communists and was able to avoid reforms at home that would endanger the position of the monarchy against the more republican oriented Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood (Wehrey 2015). Alternatively, in some states a secular regime in power suppressed the Islamist challenge violently, as happened with the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s, or the 2013 coup in Egypt against the government led by the Muslim Brotherhood. Only the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Ennahda in Tunisia, and the AK Party in Turkey stand out in the sense of Islamists successfully participating in political power while Islamic ideas of jurisprudence have slowly been integrated in Pakistan from the 1970s onward. Iran is an outlier because of its confrontation with the United States, combined with the fact that it initiated the Islamist wave, it was able to create a more statist-oriented form of economy. But Iran’s statist approach seems to have been successful in initiating some form of industrial development where exports of petrol still make up 60% but substantial local industries can be found (e.g., automobile industry). Iran ranked among the worlds’ top 20 economies and is 17th in global scientific knowledge production (in 2012). Life expectancy has increased from 54 years in 1980 to 74 years in 2012 as pointed out by Movahed (2015). Statism works (for men, see Chapter 6). But what is often overlooked is that the Islamist challenge was not directed at the economic model. Pakistan just received its 21st standby agreement from the IMF (The Economist 2019). The Tunisian case is, as of now, unclear, with the Islamist party Ennahda so far staying the democratic course but, more importantly, faithfully implementing the reforms demanded by the EU or the IMF while it was in power (Webb 2016). Egypt under the government of the Muslim Brotherhood between June 2012 and the military coup against the government in July 2013 continued the neoliberal policies of previous governments. According to Joya, the movement was very market-oriented, and these policies were

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not going against its ideological persuasion. It passed anti-labor legislation and cut subsidies. It did not perceive neoliberalism as such as a problem but its failed implementation (Joya 2017, pp. 347–348). The exemplary case for market Islam (see Chapter 4) is Turkey. The arrival of the Justice and Development Party (henceforth AK Party, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) to power in 2002 was seen by many as a step forward for the democratic transformation process toward removing the bureaucratic authoritarian regime established under the Atatürk revolution in the 1930s, and defended by the military through three successful coups (1960, 1971, 1980) with more indirect interventions in 1997 and 2007. The judiciary, also a mainstay of the bureaucratic authoritarian regime, unsuccessfully tried to shut down the AK Party in 2007. Thus, when the party successfully overcame these challenges and was able to pass several reform packages by 2010 and significantly weakened the military and the judiciary, the general thinking was that military tutelage had been overcome, and democracy had broken out. Analysts proudly presented Turkish Islamic activists as a key factor in the country’s democratic transition (Gumuscu 2010; Tu˘gal 2016, introduction), as a form of Muslim democrats, similar to Christian democrats. And to some extent, there was a reason for this optimism: What the AK Party has achieved is historic. It has abolished the role of the military in politics, and it has been incredibly successful in economic terms: Turkey’s per capita income rose from $3570 in 2002 to $10,584 in 2011 (Gündüz 2015). The party, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, currently President of Turkey, won the general elections in 2002 in a landslide. Up until 2015, it repeatedly not only won elections but increased its voting share in the process, developing into the dominant party in Turkey and establishing an electoral hegemony (Keyman 2014). In terms of political culture, the AK Party is replacing the Kemalist regime not with a pluralistic, liberal form of democracy but with one based on their own form of religious Sunni nationalism, which—like the Kemalist regime before—excludes the Kurds, the Alevi minority, new social movements, and anyone perceived as a critic or a threat. Yet, since various election results show it is supported by about 50 percent of the population, this new model is more popular than Kemalism. A thwarted military coup in July 2016 allowed Erdogan to consolidate his power under emergency laws. As of July 2016, the Turkish system “no longer satisfies even the minimal requirements of democracy” (Esen and Gumuscu 2016, p. 1582). In short, Turkey, like Hungary,

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went from bureaucratic secular authoritarianism to majoritarian religious authoritarianism with a brief democratic interlude. The tremendous transformation of the country finds its expression in the discourse on the “New Turkey” developed by Erdogan during the 2014 elections. According to Keyman (2014, pp. 26–27), the New Turkey is a new constellation of power with a reshaped military and judiciary, and new groups of intellectuals, business leaders, and the pious segment of the new middle class. It may be a deliberate attempt to shore up the party’s support among voters, as Gündüz (2015) argues, or it may reflect a deep-seated yearning for recognition and revenge. Indeed, even today the AK Party and its voters see themselves as victims of oppression, describing themselves as “Black Turks” who had been excluded from power by the “White Turks” (Arat-Koç 2007). The AK Party has built up the religious infrastructure in Turkey since 2002. About 9000 mosques were built between 2005 and 2015, and it strengthened the Diyanet, the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Öztürk 2016). The number of graduates of Imam-Hatip schools (religious vocational schools) under the AKP increased by 90%, and in recent years, 9% of all students in Turkey are graduates of these schools (Bozkurt 2016, p. 158). There are now those who argue that the Islamization of Turkey was planned all along and that it is the religion that is the problem. Erdogan once likened democracy to a streetcar that you can get off of once you reach your stop (BPC 2015, p. 30). But it is not very helpful to “culturalize and personalize” (Tu˘gal 2016, p. 14), because the various Islamist groups themselves are characterized by rivalry. So, a simple dichotomy between religion and secularism does not explain the current context (Sen ¸ 2010). This rivalry is visible in the power struggle between the more Western and free market-oriented Gülen movement and the AK Party (Dreher 2016, 2018) which is turning toward West Asia, the Shanghai Cooperation Association, and state capitalism (Öni¸s 2019). This interIslamist rivalry was behind the failed military coup in July 2016, and it highlights how geopolitical conflicts are reflected in intra-elite struggles. The Gülen movement’s pro-American and pro-Israel stance, its support for the free market and globalization, and its interest in maintaining its own access to and control of the state bureaucracy put it in direct conflict with Erdogan, whose regime is increasingly centralizing the state and supporting more political forms of wealth creation, for example through large-scale housing and infrastructure projects (Öni¸s 2019, p. 7). For Öni¸s, Turkey under Erdogan is moving more and more toward

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authoritarian capitalism and away from neoliberalism and Western integration. The Turkish transformation from bureaucratic authoritarianism, to a successful liberal democracy in the initial phases of the AKP reign, and then toward religious authoritarian state capitalism can fruitfully be compared to Hungary, where a similar reversal of fortunes has been observed (see above). There seems to be something inherently wrong with capitalism in its neoliberal variety that explains the authoritarian turn (Scheiring 2018). In conclusion, it is worth noting that a similar religious revival from the right occurred in Israel with the emergence in the 1970s of Gush Emunim, one of many Jewish revivalist organizations that sought to recreate the biblical concept of the land of Israel (Kepel 1994, p. 141). Some argue that there is a connection between the emergence of the Israeli religious right, its Greater Israel Project, and neoliberal austerity politics (Anabtawi 2018; Maron and Shalev 2017). In this view, the Greater Israel Project and the settlements can be seen as a form of welfare politics for the poorer sections of Israeli society that were most affected by neoliberal structural adjustment. This has changed politics, economics, and the culture of Israel toward a greater emphasis on the Jewish nature of the state and is increasingly undermining any solution to the Palestinian question.

South Asian Counter-Elites In India, the postwar secular nationalist order created a version of import substitution industrialization that allowed for significant rent-seeking because of the control of import permits by the government. This led to a state class ruling the country through bureaucratic means, based on the ideology of secular nationalism (Voll 2015). The regime created effective higher academic institutions, and the public sector built capital goods industries that private investors were reluctant to initiate. In other words, the import substitution regime created the basic preconditions for later development through the creation of industrial production and services, although there were also many problems and inefficiencies associated with the interventionist state (Siddiqui 2010, p. 4). Religious politics in India were influenced by the legacy of British colonialism, which created the principle of communal representation and separate political identities according to religious affiliation (Thakur 1993, p. 647). The Indian constitution declared India a secular state, in the

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sense that there is no state religion or privileged religion in India. The constitution also limited religious freedom to the extent that public order, morality, and health may act as limits on the freedom of religious expression (Thakur 1993, p. 648). The postwar secular interventionist regime started to fall apart from the mid-1970s onward after Indira Gandhi declared emergency rule in order to stay in power, and consequently produced a crisis of the center that allowed new political actors and ideologies to emerge. By overextending the secular national state and turning it into an authoritarian state, she did not consolidate it but rather facilitated its disintegration (Van der Veer 1996). In addition, Congress, the main ruling party, retreated from secularism. One prominent example was the Shah Bano case which involved a Muslim widow to whom the courts had granted the right to maintenance after her divorce. This was in contradiction to the Muslim Personal Law in India, and the Muslim community protested the ruling. The Rajiv Gandhi Congress government then passed a law based on the Muslim Personal Law thus effectively creating a separate law for Muslim women, different from constitutional principles (Thakur 1993, p. 650). This infuriated the Hindu Right, who equally demanded an abolition of spousal support, and they cite this case as an example of how the majority is being discriminated against in their own country highlighting the real difficulties of reconciling communitybased rights with individual rights more generally, a dilemma brilliantly discussed by Okin (1999). From the 1980s onward, the crisis of the import substitution regime slowly necessitated the introduction of neoliberal reforms, but these proved to be difficult and were only really started in the 1990s. The crisis of the import substitution regime allowed new actors such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to rise and gain power from the 1990s onward through the exploitation of wedge issues such as the Shah Bano case, and what they perceived as a favoritism toward Muslims on the part of Congress against the majority Hindu population. The BJP is part of a whole network that constitutes the Hindu Right, which includes the Vishva Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a militant volunteer organization, and their various suborganizations, such as on university campuses (Jaffrelot and Therwath 2012). The network is vast and allows the BJP to recover from failures, as it did after election losses in 2004 and 2009, coming back in full strength in 2014 and in 2019 and securing the BJP under Modi a majority in parliament, a feat that had not been achieved by any

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party since 1984. Indeed, according to Achin Vanaik (2018, p. 29) “the scale of BJP hegemony today can bear comparison to that of the Indian National Congress party in the first decades after Independence … Then, too, a single party with a charismatic figurehead commanded the national scene and predominated at state-provincial level.” The demise of Indian secularism and the emergence and consolidation of right-wing Hinduism has had deadly consequences for Muslims in India. One example of this occurred in Ayodhya, where the BJP campaigned against the Babri Masjid mosque, which they claimed was built on a former temple site for the Hindu god Ram by Moghul emperor Babur in the sixteenth century. In 1990, the BJP initiated its campaign to liberate Ram from “Muslim occupation” and to start the construction of a temple on the site. A hundred thousand followers stormed the site, and 30 people were killed and many more died in the riots that occurred afterward (Thakur 1993, p. 653). At the same time, Muslim fundamentalists stirred religious nationalism among the Muslim population around the Ajodhya case to the point that no compromise was possible. Ultimately, this led to the destruction of the mosque in 1992, forcing the central government under the control of Congress to dismiss the state’s BJP government (Thakur 1993, p. 657). The BJP and the other organizations associated with the Hindu Right have changed the ideological make-up of the country completely. They threaten the position of Muslims, and other minorities and bodies in the long run due to their use of Islamophobia as a part of their policy assemblage or wedge issue (see Chapter 2). According to Van der Veer (1996, p. 274) and Vanaik (2018), the Hindu Right speaks to the sense of doom that engulfs many Hindu nationalists who feel threatened by conversions of the lower castes to other religions, especially Islam. For Hindu nationalists, the history of India is one of oppression first by Muslim rulers, then by British and Christian rulers, and then by Indian secularists. This history enhances the sense of threat that many Hindu nationalists experience as a result of the secular nature of the center, which in their view led to discrimination against the Hindu majority. In their view, independence led to a suppression of Hindu values and valor. Accordingly, the rightwing network started to promote the idea of India as a sacred Hindu space through pilgrimages and terror campaigns. However, this religious interpretation of the conflict overlooks the political economy of neoliberal globalization that created new centers of economic and political power. Privatization and other neoliberal reforms

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weakened the bureaucratic developmental state (Schwecke 2015). The Modi government and the BJP in general rests on a broad-based coalition of social forces that cannot be reduced to one caste or class but cuts across various communities. Specifically, Modi used his economic success in Gujarat, which was based on neoliberal reforms, as a general model for India while playing the culturalist card. The Modi government is a form of neoliberal authoritarian populism based on a religious and nationalistic aspect that offers an alternative to the more secular nationalism that had dominated India under Congress and religious frames are used by this alternative elite segment to gain power (Chacko 2018; Schwecke 2015). Hadiz (2018) made similar observations for Indonesia, where the New Order regime of Suharto disintegrated in 1998, leading to a semidemocratic transition where neoliberal policies are implemented based on popular Islamist support. Thus, the populist project is not solely classbased but also community-based; but the notion of community is defined by Islam. The democratic transition is limited as it is often grounded on a dismissal of a more pluralist society and outright rejects any critique of private property (Hadiz 2014). But a process of the emergence of counter-elites founded on an explicit Islamist agenda supporting a transition to a neoliberal form of economic governance can be observed in Indonesia as well. Hadiz (2014) argues that this indicates that there is a larger kind of transformation toward a specific set of right-wing politics similar to Hindutva in India and Indonesia is a specific expression of this shift.

Latin America: Evangelical Counter-Elites and the New Authoritarian Politics Latin America’s religious landscape is changing. As Chapter 4 pointed out, only 69% of Latin Americans identified as Catholics in 2014, whereas 80% did so in 1995. The main winners of this transformation have been the Pentecostal or evangelical churches and the unaffiliated, with the latter now making up about 10% of the population (Morello et al. 2017, p. 309). The religious landscape has thus become more pluralistic than ever before, as neither the Catholic Church nor the various Protestant groups are homogenous. This religious transformation has had important consequences, for example for the family and women (see Chapter 4). This transformation on the ground, a cultural revolution according to Berger (2010, p. 4), led to an increase in conservativism or even extreme

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right-wing electoral results, of which only three examples will be discussed here: Guatemala, Colombia, and Brazil. In Guatemala, the percentage of non-Catholics has increased from 2 to 40% in the last forty years, most of whom are evangelical Christians (mostly Pentecostals, but evangélicos is the term used by adherents) who can be considered as one bloc in terms of politics (Bjune 2012, p. 109). The main effect, according to Bjune (2012), has been to support the sociopolitical status quo. The context is a society riven with inequality and still reeling from civil war and a US-supported military coup in 1954 against a government that had sought to address some of the massive economic inequalities, especially with regard to the Indigenous population, through land and taxation reform (Short 2007, p. 40). These reforms were resisted by the United Fruit Company, one of the biggest landowners in the country, and the Guatemalan political and economic establishment. The coup led to increased oppression and even genocide and the formation of armed resistance. These issues have not been sufficiently addressed with the peace accords of the mid-1990s (Bjune 2012, p. 111). In 2011, 40.7% of the population was considered poor, coming especially from the Indigenous Peoples (60% of the extreme poor are indigenous). One key reason is the failure to fully implement many measures of the 1996 peace accords, including the tax-related measures (Cabrera et al. 2015, p. 263). In this context, the fact that evangelicals have a very different approach to peace is highly significant; instead of insisting on the implementation of the peace accords, they put emphasis on individual transformation. According to Philpot-Munson’s (2009) research, in the 1999 presidential elections, Mayan evangelicals in the town supported one of the main instigators of the 1980s genocide (Rios Montt, an evangelical himself). Evangelicals emphasize individual conversion and oppose any closer investigation into the genocide such as the exhumation of mass graves or tribunals. They also object to the human rights ideology coming from the UN and foreign NGOs and emphasize the need to forget rather than insisting on human rights and justice for genocide victims (Philpot-Munson 2009, p. 51). Evangelicalism in Guatemala is not only a movement of the poor and marginalized but has reached the towns, middle classes, and business sector with its own business associations; it has become an establishment religion (Bjune 2012, p. 116). In foreign policy terms, the evangelical movement in Guatemala is in contact with churches and groups in the United States (Bjune 2012, p. 113). The growing importance of evangelicals in Guatemala is

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slowly creating a new hegemonic bloc in the country while human rights considerations are pushed aside. With regard to Columbia, I will merely focus on the initial defeat of the peace plebiscite in October 2016, which nearly derailed the peace process and forced a renegotiation of the settlement. This renegotiated settlement was ultimately accepted at a later stage. The Armed Revolutionary Forces of Columbia (FARC) had waged a war of resistance against a regime that denied basic rights to parts of the population and did not address the economic and political inequality resulting from the colonial legacy. Nevertheless, after half a century and several failed attempts, FARC negotiated a peace treaty in 2016 to be ratified by a referendum. That referendum was defeated, a defeat that took everyone by surprise. This defeat was due to the mobilization of the “no” vote by the evangelical segment of the population, which makes up 13–16% of the population (Beltrán and Creely 2018). The wedge issue (see Chapter 2 for a definition) that they used to mobilize the opposition was the supposed “gender ideology” behind the peace agreement. In reality, the peace treaty was progressive because it recognized that conflicts are experienced differently by women and the LGBTQ+ community and the treaty made specific provisions for these groups (Beltrán and Creely 2018, p. 6). But to the evangelicals, this constituted an attack on the sanctity of the family in the name of gender ideology (see Chapter 6). In a context of rivalry among several elite fractions (Matanock and García-Sánchez 2017), one of the fractions used this wedge issue to mobilize a “no” vote first to sex education, then to the peace process itself—both victories that were later built upon for electoral success. According to Beltrán and Creely (2018, p. 8), the counter-hegemonic elite used gender ideology to garner votes in opposition to the peace negotiations. Religion was thus instrumentalized as a part of elite struggle and led to a change in the peace accord where the family understood as consisting of husband and wife was recognized as the key foundational element of society (Beltrán and Creely 2018, p. 13). This shows that evangelicals are now an important part of the political struggle in Colombia and need to be considered when studying the political economy of the country. Much like in Guatemala, the outward orientation of the Pentecostal community leaves it much more open to American influences than other groups. Brazil is one of the countries that is generally cited when discussing the coming of multipolarity (Stuenkel 2016). Brazil was one of the founding members of the New Development Bank, established in 2014

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by China, India, Russia, and South Africa. By developing their own international financial institutions, alternative power centers try to create their own policy space in light of the Western dominance of the global financial system, especially the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The New Development Bank’s emphasis is on infrastructure spending, whereas the Western-dominated institutions focus more on structural adjustment (Chin 2014). Support for the New Development Bank was a project of the Workers’ Party, which held power in Brazil for 14 years but was defeated in the 2018 election. The election of Jair Bolsonaro (the “Trump of the tropics”) highlights how such alternative power centers and the shift toward multipolarity can be undermined by new class fractions and alliances, such as those developed in Brazil with the rise in prominence of the US-oriented Pentecostal churches. The growing importance of Pentecostalism was one factor that explains Bolsonaro’s historic win in 2018 (for a more detailed analysis, see Anderson 2019). Twenty-two percent of Brazilians are Pentecostal Christians, and they are the fastest-growing segment of the population. With their conservative Catholic allies, they now form an important influence in the country’s politics. Seventy percent of Pentecostal Evangelical Christians voted for Bolsonaro, who is a Catholic but whose spouse is evangelical. He was publicly baptized in 2016 by a pastor from the Assembly of God, one of the largest evangelical church networks in Brazil. Pentecostal pastors provided communication channels and other support for Bolsonaro (Hunter and Power 2019, p. 77). Bolsonaro is highly supportive of Donald Trump and the United States, which marks a change from the more anti-American orientation of his predecessors in government. Bolsonaro is also skeptical toward China (Phillips 2018). These examples show how foreign policy may shift under Bolsonaro, not to speak of his domestic agenda with regard to women and the LGBTQ+ community (see Chapter 6), Indigenous Peoples, and environmental issues such as climate change.

Decolonization of IPE Through Multipolarity and Multiple Modernities? The emergence of new power centers has given rise to a debate on global institutional frameworks. Some started to discuss the idea of multiple forms of modernity (Eisenstadt 2000) and the need to decolonize not only the discipline of IPE but also actually existing power structures (for

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the discipline, see Jones 2006). This is also reflected in the world of politics. Erdogan explicitly uses post-colonial argumentation against criticism of his human rights record, which leaves post-colonial researchers who share Erdogan’s criticism of Western liberalism scrambling for an alternative ground for their opposition to his authoritarian rule (Capan and Zarakol 2017). This discussion shows that modernity as such needs to be rethought if it is to retain its initial emancipatory meaning associated with the breaking free from serfdom and the pursuit of happiness. It cannot possibly imply Erdogan’s authoritarianism. Instead, a global theory of modernity needs to be developed. Populism outside Europe feeds on a longer view of history that IPE would do well to remember. The discipline needs to increase its awareness that during most of the period of the agrarian empires (until 1700), Western Europe was only a peripheral region (Hodgson 1963). Instead, large agrarian empires in the Muslim world, in China, the Awkar (Ghana) and others on the African continent, and the Inca, Mayas, and others on the Latin American continent were prominent. This was a regional trading world, where long-distance trading through the Silk Road had created a form of globalization from the African continent to China and back. Advances in scientific inquiry in philosophy and medicine had taken place in these agrarian empires. The Renaissance in Europe and much of the European advances in the sciences that laid the foundation for the industrial revolution were due to these earlier developments. According to Hodgson (1963), Europe established a level playing field only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Subsequently, Europe was propelled to hegemony only through the industrial revolution in Great Britain from the eighteenth century onward (Senghaas 1985). Instead of beginning IPE with a history of European world domination from the seventeenth century on (e.g., Van der Pijl 1996), or the Westphalian Peace Treaty (Valaskakis 2010), it would be better to highlight the dominance of the agrarian empires and their trading systems before the advent of European hegemony in order to put the history of economic development in a larger and more balanced perspective. From such a view, countries like Iran, China, Turkey, and India are simply returning to the former prominence that they had before the onset of the industrial revolution. They also had established effective state organizations in the form of imperial administration with a centralized power center much before the Europeans were said to succeed in doing so (Valaskakis 2010). These earlier successes are still remembered in the former imperial powers. For example, Erdogan

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built his hegemony in Turkey through a deliberate use of Ottomanism in both domestic and foreign policy. Modi tries to hark back to Hindu greatness before the onset of the Moghul and British conquests, while Putin in Russia instrumentalizes the Orthodox Church and in China there is a revival of Confucian thinking. It is this perception of large-scale defeat accompanied by enormous economic inequality at the global level that fuels some of the populist rhetoric in the Majority World. Huntington aptly summarizes the sense of loss when he writes that the prevailing feeling in the Majority World is that the “West in effect is using international institutions, military power and economic resources to run the world in ways that will maintain Western predominance, protect Western interests and promote Western political and economic values” (Huntington 1993, p. 40). These concerns play out today in the context of neoliberal globalization, which has unified the world to an unprecedented degree. Never before in the history of humankind has one single civilization encompassed the whole globe and torn it apart to a degree also not seen before. Disparities in living chances and inequality abound, and have led religious, ethnic, tribal, feminist, ecological, and other movements to contest and challenge the secular national and centralized state and the Western liberal order (Badie and Smouts 1999). Unless global governance can be reformed to reverse the massive flow of capital from the poor to the rich, political instability will increase unabated. For this to take place in a meaningful way, IPE as a discipline needs to develop a more historical framework that is not built on a narrative of defeat and conquest. For example, it possible to describe the European conquests of the Americas and the creation of new spice trading routes merely as an extension and conclusion of the globalization process that the Islamic, Confucian, and Hindu civilizations engaged in for millennia before the Europeans were able to do the same. Secondly, scholars need to be clearer with regard to the onset of modernity. In IPE, the Westphalian state system and the conquest of the Americas might have to be dislodged from their position as modernity markers, since the plunder of the Americas is no different from agrarian imperialism, whereas the sovereign state was already a hallmark of the Egyptian and the Chinese state system (Fukuyama 2011). Thus, Europe was not modern when the Peace of Westphalia was negotiated (Teschke 2003) but was simply another version of an agrarian civilization. A more global theory of modernity is needed. One fruitful starting point could be the three revolutions that inaugurated

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modernity: the industrial revolution that created the working class and increased wealth dramatically; the French revolution that dislodged the monarch, created citizens and their social movements (Eley 2002); and lastly, the Haitian slave revolution under a former slave turned general, Tousssaint l’Ouverture, that led to the globalization of the notion of égalité, liberté and solidarité (James 2001).

Conclusion This chapter has shown how changing alliances and class fractions and their ideologies or frames—which may be in the form of religious beliefs—can lead to changing geopolitical situations. It is a critical assessment of the previous chapter, where theories described a world dominated by US hegemony (or imperialism). Here, I showed how the rise of the evangelical right in Latin America is in favor of the United States and is free market oriented and reverses the tide of progressive governments, the so-called pink tide (Chodor 2014). The geopolitical turn under the Bolsonaro government will be important to watch, given that he seems be more careful with regard to China and more in line with Trump’s America. Political Islam in Turkey and Tunisia turned out to be, initially at least, neoliberal in orientation. The religious resurgence, even in the form of political Islam, therefore, was quite compatible with the neoliberal globalization project, especially in the heyday of the AKP-Gülen alliance. Over the years, there has then been a dramatic change from the rhetoric of the G77 and its insistence on the New International Economic Order to the G20 and the acceptance of neoliberalism and free market ideas in the Majority World under the neoliberal revolution (Golub 2013). With the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, however, a new phase of global capitalism has started. It seems that neoliberal globalization has created dysfunctions that now require more state intervention to guarantee wealth accumulation. Turkey and Hungary, two poster children for democratic transformation, suddenly find themselves experiencing a spectacular turn toward authoritarianism that has left observers struggle for an explanation, and a similar process could be observed for India under the Modi government. While initially these religious counterelites were seen as a welcome form of democratization, they soon found themselves moving in the opposite direction. It is unclear yet what to call it. Authoritarian capitalism (Scheiring 2018), neoliberal authoritarian populism (Bozkurt 2016), neo-illiberalism (Hendrikse 2018), and state

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capitalism (Öni¸s 2019) are some concepts that have been applied to the right-wing authoritarian religious populists. But it would be a big mistake to confuse their rise with a critique of capitalism or even of neoliberalism. “What is most curious is how easily elites that have been significant beneficiaries of the neoliberal era of unrestricted capital mobility are also now leading proponents of the national cause. It is hence sadly unsurprising that the names of Trump, Xi Jinping, Boris Johnson, or Marine Le Pen made appearances in the ICIJ’s Panama Papers” (Gonzalez-Vicente and Carroll 2017, p. 11). Expert observers of the global shadow world of financial offshore centers concur. Brooke Harrington, who described the role of the wealth managers for the one percent (Harrington 2016), is convinced that right-wing authoritarian populism is elite driven in order to safeguard the wealth accumulated in the offshore world because they object to tighter rules at the global level (e.g., the Magnitsky Act, the increasing insistence of the EU toward tax harmonization, and control on capital flows are not in their interest; Harrington 2019). The return of a sort of Third World coalition may be celebrated by some as a sign of the globalization of IPE and the emergence of a postcolonial and multipolar world. But as the next chapter will show, for others, and especially for women, Indigenous Peoples, and the LGBTQ+ community, religious nationalism has been a nightmare. In the next chapter, I will discuss the impact of religious nationalism on women’s and LGBTQ+ rights and show how Islamic feminists challenge religious nationalism from within.

References Ádám, Z., & Bozóki, A. (2011). From surrogate religion to surrogate democracy: Paganized Christianity and right-wing populism in Hungary. Department of Political Science, Central European University. https://politicalscience.ceu /edu. Accessed May 30, 2019. Anabtawi, K. (2018, February 20). Neoliberalism, the rise of new powers and their impact on Israeli policies. Pal-Think for Strategic Studies. http://palthi nk.org. Accessed on May 30, 2019. Anderson, P. (2019, February 7). Bolsonaro’s Brazil. London Review of Books. https://www.lrb.co.uk. Accessed May 30, 2019. Arat-Koç, S. (2007). (Some) Turkish transnationalism(s) in an age of capitalist globalization and empire: “White Turk” discourse, the new geopolitics, and implications for feminist transnationalism. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 3(1), 35–57.

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CHAPTER 6

Households in the Global Economy: Religious Feminism Against Neo-Patriarchy

Judging from a perfunctory review of textbooks, the reproduction of life in households is not a central concern in International Political Economy. The United Nations defines a household as “a group of persons who make common provision of food, shelter and other essentials for living,” including “childbearing, education, health care, consumption, labour force participation, migration and savings” (United Nations 2017a, p. x). As feminists have long argued, ignoring households means that key developments cannot be fully understood. Given that it was US households and their debt problems that were at the origin of the financial crisis in 2008, or given that the reproductive rights of women determine labor supply, it is time to integrate households—and here especially women, but also all those struggling against patriarchal gender identities—into the analysis of global and international political economy. By doing this, IPE will be able to understand changes in gender and household relations as an integral part of transformations in the global system. This chapter continues the story told in the previous chapter where conservative counter-elites have emerged that questioned the interventionist state by employing religious nationalism as a mechanism to gain power. Religious nationalism was described as an ideology of order that creates internal and global hierarchies as a part of its effort to conjure a social whole. This chapter will discuss further the hierarchies of household, gender, and to some extent race that are part and parcel of the revival in religious nationalism. Much © The Author(s) 2020 S. Dreher, Religions in International Political Economy, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41472-6_6

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of the phenomenon labeled fundamentalism (Riesebrodt 2000) needs to be seen as a form of radical patriarchalism or neo-patriarchy, according to Riesebrodt, because these activists seek “the restoration of the universal validity of traditional patriarchal social relationships and morals in the family, in consumer and leisure-time behavior, in politics, the economy, law and culture” (Riesebrodt 1993, p. 201). There is then a congruence between neoliberal globalization and the religious resurgence as the latter provides a politics of support that make structural adjustment work by relying on women’s care work in households. Free markets, it turns out, can support various organizational forms of households and are compatible with a repressive regime bolstered by the religious resurgence that puts women in “their” place. The first part of this chapter outlines the role of households and specifically their gender arrangements in global reproduction chains under neoliberal globalization. It then shows how the human rights revolution strengthened the rights of women. Specifically, the role of the United Nations human rights regime for women (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, CEDAW) was important here. Right-wing religious activists—or radical patriarchalists, to use Riesebrodt’s term—who are trying to re-enforce more traditional notions of masculinity and femininity, resist these transformations (Riesebrodt 1993). The remainder of the chapter shows how religious feminists (specifically Islamic feminist) and LGBTQ+ activists challenge this reassertion of patriarchal values and the re-imposition of the gender binary by developing innovative readings of the sacred texts.

Households and Social Reproduction Industrialization and urbanization decreased the hold of rural, more patriarchal family arrangements worldwide and increased the autonomy of women and human beings more generally to create their own families and sexual identities, albeit in a very uneven way. According to Bergmann (2005, p. 2), there is a worldwide liberation of women from the dependence of men underway, which needs to be recognized as a revolution in human affairs. At the same time, the sexual revolution has meant that LGBTQ+ identities are more openly discussed, and efforts are underway to integrate a more nuanced understanding of gender identity into public discussion and legislation, with the United Nations taking the lead (Mulé et al. 2018). This second revolution marks a return of increased diversity

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in terms of sexuality and human relations that had been suppressed with the global diffusion of Christianity, especially under British colonialism (Wilets 2010). One effect of the global transformation processes has been the decline of fertility rates, from five births per women in 1960 to about 2.5 in 2015. The average household size across the globe varies widely, from fewer than three in most countries of Europe, North America, and Japan, to greater than five in Africa and the Middle East. Most households with children include two parents, with the lowest percentage, at 69%, in North America (United Nations 2017b, p. 2). The large majority of women and men will marry or live in a more or less consensual union. In 143 countries, 80% of women aged 45–49 had married at some point (United Nations 2011, p. 2). Households are therefore a crucial location for questions of care, reproduction of labor, sexual freedom and identity, and migration decisions, questions that are generally discussed as a part of the social reproduction of labor (Bhattacharya 2017). Social reproduction refers to the peculiar aspect of labor that before an employment contract can be issued or an entrepreneur can set up a firm, the employee or the entrepreneur needs to be birthed and cared for—a fact overlooked by most political economists, work that is still not counted as a part of the GDP. The gender and sexual identity revolution is slowly but surely dissolving the sexual contract that according to Pateman (1988) formed the basis of modern society and the state. The sexual contract describes the fact that capitalism and the modern state relied on the domination of women by men (Pateman 1988, p. 38). More precisely, Pateman points out that modern capitalist society was born twice, in freedom and unfreedom: first with the social contract that created the public sphere dominated by white male individuals able to enter into contracts (the “fraternity of men,” p. 3). But second, this public sphere is built upon and depends on relationships of subordination—of workers to employers, of all women to all men, and of racialized people to white people (Pateman 2014), and, as environmentalists might add, of nature to humanity. Even today, reproductive rights and control over the body have not been generally secured. A lack of access to safe abortion and the prevalence of sexual harassment and rape are only two examples of how the sexual contract still holds sway over women’s freedom in the public sphere. The #MeToo movement has highlighted the shocking degree to which the work contract for women is also often a sexual contract.

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There have been many structural changes at the global level since the 1970s. The severe impact of structural adjustment programs and austerity regimes in all parts of the globe since the 1980s has scarred societies such that the progress that has been made has been overshadowed by a severe economic deterioration for a large part of the global population, as the neoliberal revolution has increased economic inequality (Milanovic 2016). In addition, as Hester Eisenstein has argued (2009), the entry of women into the labor force has been accompanied by an overall decrease in wages, and there is a sense that feminism accompanied and possibly facilitated the flexibilization of labor markets. Instead of creating decent work for everyone, neoliberal globalization has led to a global feminization or precarization of work for all labor market participants in her view. This has been supplemented by the tertiarization of the economy (increasing importance of the service sector) and globally by the new international division of labor based on the relocation of labor-intensive industries such as textile and garment industries to the South (Fröbel et al. 1980). Women have become important actors in the global migration process, and it has been estimated that up to 50% of all migrants today are women. They are integrated into the lower-paying service industries in the North and are often hired to do household work, as nannies, and in the cleaning industry. While women in the North experience an improvement in labor market participation, household work is carried out by women from the Global South. As their own care work is then carried out by other family members in their home countries, a global care chain has been created (Hochschild 2000). Migrant households now send back more money than countries in the South receive through public aid. Migrant households are thus an important element in development aid and global financial flows (Sassen 2016, p. 208). Within the discipline of International Political Economy the role of households has barely begun to be integrated into the larger discussion of the field. If migrant remittances are higher than public aid, then clearly the investment decisions of households shape global development avenues (Sassen 2016). If the financial decisions of households (when transformed into asset-based securities) can trigger a global financial meltdown, as happened in 2008 with the subprime mortgage crisis, then we clearly need to understand the welfare of households to foresee and analyze key developments in the global economy (Sassen 2010, p. 36). Likewise, the reproductive decisions of women in these households determine labor supply in the long term. Given that households are responsible for most

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of care work worldwide, this work needs to be redistributed if women are entering the labor force in ever greater numbers. This may explain some of the vehemence of fundamentalism exhibited by religious activists, as men resist the redistribution of the work and as employers resist the acknowledgment of care work. The work of Robert Cox is somewhat of an exception to the tendency of downplaying gender and household questions. He based his analysis of the global economy on what he called 12 modes of social relation of production (Cox 1987, p. 32), of which households were one. While there are still many subsistence households where production of goods and services and reproduction of labor are under one roof, today’s households under capitalism are mostly responsible for the reproduction of labor (and entrepreneurs). This shift from the household as a unit of production to a unit of care represents a major transformation of the role of households themselves, even if in reality considerable side production still often takes place. Peterson has argued for an enlarged definition of household as simply a unit where resources are pooled in order to ensure the continuity of the unit (Peterson 2010, p. 271). Householding refers to strategies for the social reproduction of these units. This is achieved through the subsistence economy, unpaid domestic labor, income through work and informal activities, and welfare payments (Peterson 2010, p. 273). State policies and labor market opportunities thus shape households and their social reproduction strategies as they determine the amount of care work that will be carried out by the household. Politics also determines power relations in the family through marriage and divorce laws. Peterson’s article also discusses how the globalization of the household, in form of the migration of one or more family members, has become one important strategy for household survival due to the remittances sent back. Given this theoretical importance, it is dispiriting to discover that the work carried out by household holds no weight when it comes to GDP. Thirty years since the publication of the first systematic study of the unpaid work of women, it is still not reflected in GDP measurements (Ferrant et al. 2014). Even today, the economy relies on unpaid care work where children, the sick and aging parents are seen as a hobby. Ferrant et al. point out that unpaid work is one explanation for gender gaps in labor outcomes, labor force participation, wages, and job quality. It is thus not surprising to read that only six countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Latvia, Luxembourg, and Sweden) obtained a score of 100 on an

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index measuring women’s ability to make economic decisions, an index that did not, however, include reproductive rights such as access to abortion (World Bank 2019). The average score is 74%, which means that women on average only have three-fourths of the legal rights of men globally (in areas measured by the index). The average hides large variations; for example, in West Asia (Middle East) and North Africa women only have 47% of the rights of men. Then again, the global average has increased from 70 to 74% within ten years, which indicates that despite the religious resurgence and the backlash against women’s rights, there has been progress with regard to the areas measured by the index (World Bank 2019, p. 3). The sexual contract is in place even today and prevents women from being fully equal citizens (Pateman 2016). For Maria Mies (2014), the unpaid work undertaken in households needs to be seen as a massive subsidy for corporations, and as a form of ongoing primitive accumulation supported by state policies.

The Global Human Rights Regime At the international level, the women’s rights revolution was supported by the development of an international human rights discourse specifically geared toward women to a degree that has not yet occurred for LGBTQ+ rights. According to Susanne Zwingel (2016, p. 5), this started in 1967 and culminated in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1979. These negotiations created intergovernmental institutions that allowed activists at the national level to establish transnational connections that were helpful for further awareness raising. Women’s rights were also placed on the agenda for the discussion of how to order the world after the end of the Cold War in conferences organized by the United Nations. One of them, the 1995 Beijing conference, marked the beginning of the current phase, which is characterized by the emergence of new economic inequalities due to structural adjustment programs, increased militarization of the human rights agenda through humanitarian interventions, and the further strengthening and entrenchment of the backlash against this human rights agenda by a collection of right-wing forces, according to Zwingel (2016). The goal of CEDAW is to increase substantive equality between men and women and to establish non-discrimination as a basic concept at the national level (Qureshi 2012, p. 114). It contains provisions with regard to public office, career development, division of labor in the family

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among others and is an important step to recognize the specific barriers for women with regard to their standing in society. The Convention has an extensive surveillance regime in place that relies on the “translation” (Zwingel 2016) of norms into local contexts through activist work. In comparison with other human rights treaties, CEDAW is most severely impacted by states putting reservations in place, some (e.g., India) even against the core articles (Qureshi 2012, p. 115). For Zwingel (2016), CEDAW marked only the beginning of the long struggle to realize women’s rights. It is important to keep in mind that feminism and the notion of equality is a radical new idea that comes after thousands of years of patriarchal arrangements cemented by all religious traditions that emerged after the axial age (eighth to third century BCE). CEDAW is groundbreaking in this context because it created a universal framework that activists could use in the local context, and to build transnational networks for information sharing and alliances. The Convention is thus embedded within a transnational and national civil society network of activists who realize the goals of the Convention on the ground (Moghadam 2005). At the same time, the consolidation of the various agencies at the United Nations in 2011 in the form of UN Women has ensured a more visible status for women’s rights at the global level. The same level of institutionalization has not been achieved for LGBTQ+ rights but the Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity finalized in 2006 are a solid first starting point. They were developed to counter the vulnerability and abuse endured by the community. The severe human rights violations against LGBTQ+ community members include the death penalty in many countries for consensual same-sex practices; the criminalization of same-sex sexual relations in some 77 states today; violence against members of the community due to their sexual orientation; murder; and discrimination in employment and housing (O’Flaherty 2015, pp. 281–282). The Yogyakarta Principles established the grounds on which human rights are applicable to all people irrespective of sexual orientation or gender identity. The backlash against women’s rights and against liberty in gender and sexual orientation—first by religious fundamentalists and now through right-wing populist nationalists (Juergensmeyer 2019)—has led to the reversal of rights and an increase in sexism, homophobia, and racism. As the editors of the special issue on gender and the rise of the global

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right concluded: “it’s worse than we thought … there does exist a global antifeminism – a countermovement to transnational feminism, an internally diverse global coalition to roll back gender equality” (Graff et al. 2019, pp. 541–542). There is an interrelationship between the treatment of gender and of sexual minorities, according to Wilets (2010, p. 638): “how a society views gender role often determines how it treats sexual minorities” (This is also true for race; Wilets 2010, p. 655). The global right-wing coalition is opposed to human rights and seeks to reimpose the gender binary as well as a race-based hierarchical structuring of society. This is very much consistent with the flexibilization of labor markets, a key part of the neoliberal agenda, which generally implies lower wages, fewer benefits, and a lowering of health and safety standards. Prejudices and conservative interpretations of religious traditions make it easier to impose lower wages and working standard on women and racialized minorities.

Backlash---Religious Neo-Patriarchy Religious fundamentalism seeks to recover a traditional version of capitalist patriarchy that goes back to the breadwinner model—prevalent between the 1930s and 1970s in the Western world but more as a myth than as something fully realized in reality. The notion in this model is that women are equal but complementary to men: They look after the house and the children while men earn the income to sustain the family. Neo-patriarchy is fed by a universal longing—absolutely not limited to the Islamic world, despite some claims—for a safe haven in an uncertain environment, where the wife and mother at home would provide a stable and emotional space that helps the male worker to deal with the distress in the workplace and public sphere (Moghadam 2004, p. 139). Often, this is presented as a form of justice, as both husband and wife are equally responsible for the family, only in different spheres. Many women prefer to create a life according to this model, as they find validation in their identity as homemaker and mother (see Chapter 4 for a discussion of the Pentecostal women’s movement, which is modeled on complementarity and not equality). This patriarchal capitalist model possesses many advantages: It privatizes care work (for the young, the sick, the elderly, the differently abled) and it saves money for states in times of austerity as it makes the dismantlement of welfare institutions possible. In addition, it decreases the labor market supply and makes room for unemployed young

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males, the main element in the fundamentalist surge who, theoretically, will see their wages increase. From a male or a homemaker perspective, the fundamentalist agenda makes perfect sense. Within the Global North, the most advanced expression of the fundamentalist counter-revolution happened in Ireland, where a group of politicians and the Catholic Church abolished the right to abortion in 1983 by inserting a clause into the constitution that guaranteed the equal right to life for a mother and the unborn “child” (Field 2018). This clause did not reduce abortions, as those women who were able to afford them traveled to England. But it killed several women and hurt uncounted others and caused untold anguish in families and among individuals. In a widely reported case from 2012, Savita Halappanavar died in childbirth and, according to a report on the case, her death was a direct result of the restrictive abortion laws and could have been avoided (McDonnell and Murphy 2019). Ireland is an example of how the fundamentalist revolution institutionalized itself but was ultimately beaten back. The Catholic Church was involved in many scandals that undermined its credibility, such as money laundering in the Vatican bank (Punch 1993) and the sexual abuse of minors in its care (Keenan 2011). The latter issue has been incredibly important given the scale of the problem. The scandal first became news in the United States in the early 1980s. In Canada, for example, about 10% of diocesan clergy were faced with allegations of sexual abuse from the end of the 1990s onward (Keenan 2011, p. 18). It is therefore important to understand not only individual perpetrators and their motives but also the larger structures that made abuse on such a scale even possible, according to Marie Keenan (2011). This is even more important as more and more such abuse scandals come to light. As of February 2019, the Southern Baptist Convention stands accused of a large-scale cover-up of sexual abuse within its churches that victimized 700 persons over twenty years. While the organization refused to accept gay and lesbian people, it allowed known sex offenders to be active as ministers and in other roles (Downen et al. 2019). In Ireland, the impact of the scandals was that the Catholic Church lost much of its standing in society. As a result, it was unable to muster sufficient support for its stance in the 2018 referendum. The history of abortion in Ireland is one where the religious resurgence initially won in the early 1980s but, even if it took nearly thirty years, was ultimately beaten back. However, none of this applies to Northern Ireland where abortion laws are stricter than the punitive ones now considered for

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the United States and where women still have to travel to England to get access to abortion (McDonald 2019). The Islamic revolution in Iran severely restricted women’s rights and developed a male-centered “sexual economy,” according to Afary (2009), with complex and contradictory outcomes. While many of the country’s laws are misogynistic and restrictive, the Islamic Republic has also had to recognize realities on the ground. For example, over the years it was increasingly forced to acknowledge the realities of labor market needs. As a result, while access to contraception was initially limited in the early years of the revolution, increasing birth rates and the inability of the economy to absorb the younger generations led to the introduction of family planning and increased the freedom of maneuver for women to some degree. Yet women remain very restricted in terms of individual rights to decide on employment, marriage, and movement outside the home (Afary 1997, 2009). In terms of the LGBTQ community, there has been recent anti-gay legislation in Uganda and Nigeria, in Aceh (2014), and similar legislation already passed or in public discussion in Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Moldavia, and Ukraine. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, since 2011 hundreds of people have been killed and thousands injured, as well as facing torture, arbitrary detention, denial of rights to assembly, and discrimination in health care, education, employment, and housing (as cited in O’Flaherty 2015, p. 283). According to Wilets (2010, pp. 642– 643), over half of the countries with sodomy laws were former British colonies. For Western societies to criticize non-Western societies due to their patriarchal and homophobic assumptions is therefore problematic. There is a clear connection between the denial of equal rights for women and homophobic and racist attitudes. Wilets (2010, p. 645) argues that this is specifically true of the United States. This is a result of the history of slavery, the one area where the United States is truly an exceptional republic and with which it has not yet come to terms. For example, it was only in 1995 that the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest fundamentalist congregation in the United States (Wilets 2010, p. 656), apologized for its role in defending slavery as an institution. The Reverend William Barber has therefore been advocating for a Third Reconstruction, a national reconciliation with the fact that the country was founded both on genocide against the Indigenous population and on slavery (Barber and Wilson-Hartgrove 2016).

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As I explained in Chapter 3, the election of Donald Trump represents the pinnacle of the power of the Christian Right in the United States, because it has now obtained a majority of conservative justices in the Supreme Court. There is widespread expectation that access to safe abortion will be abolished at the federal level in the very near future, creating a patchwork of individual state regulations. The influence of the Christian Right on the regulation of abortion means that the separation between church and state has been abolished, and religious fundamentalist thinking of a specific variety is now imposed on all women irrespective of their religious convictions (Thomson 1995). While states do not (yet) currently have the right to outlaw abortion, they can regulate abortion services—and they have increasingly done so, with the effect that abortion providers find it more and more difficult to stay open (McBride and Keys 2018, p. 238). More than fifty clinics closed between 2011 and 2014. Some states, such as Kentucky, Mississippi, and Missouri, now only have one abortion provider (Horn 2019). Mandatory counseling, waiting periods, unnecessary exams, and medically unsubstantiated information are some of the additional hurdles that women face when seeking an abortion (McBride and Keys 2018, p. 241). The biggest issues are the development of Christian terrorism which led to attacks against abortion providers and the harassment of women seeking abortion. In 2016, 63% of clinics reported anti-abortion activity on a daily and weekly basis, which included the distribution of menacing leaflets with doctors’ photographs and home addresses. Thirty percent of abortion providers experienced terrorism in the form of blockades, invasions, arson, bombings, chemical attacks, stalking, physical violence, or gunfire. This is less than the figure of 50% in 1995, but up from 18% in 2005 (McBride and Keys 2018, p. 253). Phillips (2006, p. 208) argues that one needs to start using the word “theocracy” to describe the policies against women’s reproductive rights in the United States. AWID, the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, recently summarized the impact of the religious resurgence on the ability of women to make their own decisions within a household. The report starts by acknowledging that “the control of women’s bodily autonomy is a hallmark of fundamentalist ideology that crosses religious boundaries” (AWID 2017, p. 4). The report finds that women’s empowerment is under threat due to the rise of fundamentalist religious activists in all religious traditions, and reports an impact in many areas: bodily integrity due to male violence, restriction on sexual and reproductive

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rights, limits on freedom of expression and movement, reduced political and economic participation, limits on access to education, and unequal rights in citizenship, property, inheritance, divorce, and child custody. Women’s reproductive rights were first recognized as an important development goal, and as essential for women’s equal participation in society, during the human rights conference in Cairo in 1994. But since then, these rights have been at risk of being eroded instead of being strengthened. The United Nations Population Fund reported that only 57% of all women have the ability to decide about sexual intercourse, contraceptive use, and health care. Autonomy around the decision to get pregnant is the cornerstone of reproductive rights, given that it influences life chances for women dramatically in terms of education, status, participation in society, health, and well-being (Lancet 2019, p. 1773). The global backlash against abortion rights as a result of the increase in right-wing and fundamentalist governments is therefore a major setback. A paradigmatic example is the United States’ decision at the United Nations Security Council in 2019 to refuse access to safe abortions for victims of rape in conflict zones. In a separate decision, the Trump administration also banned the use of USAID for reproductive care. There are increasing efforts to ban abortion outright, such as in Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine. Even Pope Francis, generally seen to be progressive, defends the Catholic Church’s stance on abortion. There has thus been resistance in the Philippines, El Salvador, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Brazil, where the Catholic Church still has considerable influence and seeks to limit access to safe abortions for women. At the country level, the most severe examples are outright theocratic states such as Iran or Saudi Arabia, but even in more moderate states there are negative repercussions for women if religious fundamentalists or conservatives are in power. In Turkey, some of the policies of the AK Party with regard to women were initially positive: under the AK Party they gained the right to study while wearing headscarf (Bozkurt 2016, p. 158). In addition, the number of female preachers has increased (Maritato 2017). However, since 2010, the AK Party has changed. Specifically, the party has passed a bewildering array of policies all designed to push women into marriage and child-bearing. President Erdogan himself considers birth control to be a form of treason and an effort to keep Turkey down, and openly encourages women to have four children, while his health minister claimed that motherhood should be women’s sole

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career. As a result, abortion has become next to unattainable in state hospitals. Erdogan is convinced that women are not equal to men, while one of his ministers linked gender equality to high suicide rates in Scandinavian countries (see Tremblay 2015; Oztan 2014). There is now a whole set of countries governed by strongmen insisting on a religiousfundamentalist-inspired reading of gender and sexual orientation (Lyons 2019). This league of neo-patriarchal states and civil society activists cooperates globally, according to AWID. For example, in 2013, Russia, Iran, Egypt, the Holy See (Catholic Church), and some African states prevented language on intimate partner violence from being included in the Commission on the Status of Women. Thus, in terms of policy content, there is a visible impact from contestation by religious fundamentalists and the far right (Graff et al. 2019). Vuola (2002, p. 176) describes a “patriarchal form of ecumenism” developed at the international level among Islamists, Catholics, and evangelicals, the so-called Baptist-burka coalition (Bob 2012). Indeed, gender identity has become a unifying force among a diverse group of a new global right (Graff et al. 2019). The term “gender ideology” is used to combat women’s reproductive rights and the sexual identity liberation agenda. The term emerged originally from the Catholic Church’s response to the UN conferences in Cairo (1994) and Beijing (1995), where organizers used the word “gender” to point to the fact that gender is different from anatomical sex and that governments should recognize this as such. The Catholic Church, represented as a state through the Vatican, opposed this language and developed an agenda to portray itself as the real defender of women and as a form of resistance against Western ideas (Beltrán and Creely 2018, p. 6). This notion that “gender” is an attack on authentic culture and true masculinity and femininity is now a global issue pushed by the global right against what they see as a global liberal Western elite (Graff et al. 2019). There is then a gender dimension to all forms of fundamentalisms that needs to be taken seriously (Razavi and Jenichen 2010), as it prevents progress at the global level with regard to human rights for women and the LGBTQ+ community. There have been two main responses in the literature and in politics to the fundamentalist resurgence of religion that are both problematic. One was to see it as the authentic expression of local culture that would lead to multiple forms of modernity and global multiculturalism (Eisenstadt

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2000; Thomas 2005). Most famous in this context is Foucault’s praise of the Iranian Revolution. He simply ignored the systematic targeting and denigration of homosexuals and women in Iran after the Islamic revolution (Afary and Anderson 2005). Post-developmentalists also argued that local traditions are more authentic and need to be defended against the global human rights regime, even if this means that women’s rights would be undermined (Esteva and Prakash 1998, pp. 137–138). This puts postmodernism and post-developmentalism on par with the new authoritarian and patriarchal regimes, as Capan and Zarakol (2017) point out. They discuss Turkey, where Erdogan criticizes human rights as a Western form of colonialism. The second response is the anti-religious response that seeks to revive extreme forms of secularism, such as Hitchens’s work (2008). This approach has morphed into a fascinating coalition, with some elements of the far right in Western countries now using feminism to defend white women against Islamic fundamentalism, a phenomenon that Farris (2017) labeled “femonationalism.” Many liberals and those on the left equally respond with a knee-jerk reaction against the rise of religious fundamentalism and the far right. They risk, as post-modernists and post-structuralists point out, being interpreted as Islamophobic, racist, or neo-colonial. Indeed, as Mahmood (2011) highlights, there is a long history of human rights being used merely as a pretext for more intervention. This means that a critique of religious fundamentalism is difficult from a secularist perspective. The wholesale acceptance of the religious resurgence in the name of authenticity is not a productive response and neither is the wholesale rejection of any religious practice from the new atheists or the rightwing authoritarians. But then the question is how to deal productively with some of the problematic interpretations with regard to women and the LGBTQI+ community? For the cultural approach in religious studies and Gramsci’s fruitful definition of religion that is used in this book (see Chapter 2), the starting point is to understand the fundamentalist interpretation as one among many possible ways to practice any given religious tradition and that there are others. It is therefore important to highlight that there are indigenous voices from within all religious traditions that criticize neo-patriarchal interpretations of gender and develop a more progressive and liberal interpretation. Since the Islamic religion is the one that is discussed most when it comes to the development of neo-patriarchy, it will be the focus in the next section.

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However, there have been similar developments in the Christian tradition (e.g., Daly 1973; Halkes 1985), in the Jewish tradition (Zaidman 1996), and in India (Narayanan 1999). Religious feminism is ideally placed to counter religious neo-patriarchy because scholars and activists in this approach use arguments from within the religious tradition to counter misogynist interpretations.

Islamic Feminism Islamic family law regulates marriage age and marriage itself, polygamy, divorce, child custody, and inheritance, mostly to the disadvantage of women. It is widely seen as the biggest impediment for progress in women’s equality in Muslim societies and communities. This is not necessarily a result of the Islamic tradition and its texts as such. Rather, according to Shirin Ebadi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner from Iran (as cited in Badran 2005, p. 22), the reason for this has to be sought in the male-dominated culture prevalent in the West Asia (Middle East). The latter is also legacy of colonization which secularized and differentiated Muslim societies and communities and led to a decline in importance of Islamic scholarship, with family law left as the last bastion for Islamic jurisdiction (Derichs 2010, p. 417). According to An-Na’im (2002, p. 9; cited in Derichs 2010, p. 417), a modernist author of a standard book on Islamic family law, shari’a survived only with regard to family law while all other areas were increasingly governed by secular forms of law. Family law thus became the sole area of activism for Islamic scholars (until the revival of Islamic finance from the 1970s onwards; see Chapter 7), and they vehemently resisted any further encroachment as another form of colonialism. As a result, gender inequality became the norm in Muslim societies and communities. This is reflected not only in laws governing women’s decision-making, as the World Bank has documented (see above), but also at the individual level. El Feki et al. (2017) showed how in Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, and Palestine men support inequitable attitudes toward women in terms of employment, violence, and domestic decision-making, and in this they were supported by a large majority of women. A complementary sexual division of labor with the wife as a housewife and the husband as a breadwinner for the family reflects the ideal arrangement for a majority of respondents in the survey. At the same time, the same study reported that between 35 and 52% of women, and 26–38% of men were depressed.

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In response to the religious resurgence and the United Nations human rights regime, but also reflecting a long tradition of home-grown feminism reaching back to the nineteenth century (Badran 2005, p. 7), female religious activists developed a new approach to the interpretation of Islamic family law and the Islamic religion in general (e.g., female preachers). This approach has been summarized controversially as “Islamic feminism,” though many activists refuse to call themselves feminist. They are able to build on a long-standing tradition of women scholars in Islam. Preliminary research by Mohammad Akram Nadwi has already uncovered more than 8000 female scholars over the centuries (2013), a tradition that eventually declined with the onset of modernization. Islamic feminists have therefore merely restarted a long-standing tradition of female religious scholarship within the Islamic tradition. One early prominent representative was Fatema Mernissi from Morocco, whose book Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society was published in 1975 (though there were individual writers much earlier; see Badran 2005, p. 19ff.). But it was the Iranian Revolution in 1979 that sparked a more organized feminist but religious response to radical patriarchalism. The Journal Zanan was instrumental in this regard, popularizing a critical analysis of the Islamic regime and its interpretation of the sacred texts from a religious but feminist perspective (Afary 1997, pp. 105–107). By the 1990s, it was obvious that a whole new approach to the Islamic religious tradition from a feminist perspective had come into being that revived long-standing methods of Islamic scholarship within a more hermeneutic approach. Besides many individual scholars and activists in virtually all Muslim-majority countries (Badran 2005)—and increasingly in non-Muslim-majority countries (e.g., Carland 2017)—there are now several national and international non-governmental organization especially concerned with the rights for Muslim women. Sisters in Islam emerged after the reform of the family law in 1984 in Malaysia led to an increasing repression of women at home, in the street, and in the courts. The general message of the law was that “Islam demanded their [women’s] complete obedience to husbands” (sistersinislam.org, n.d.). Initially, the organization started to address law reform, but it turned into a quest to study original texts in order to understand the Islamic origins of the family law and its interpretation. As reported on the Sisters in Islam website, the women involved in the study group thus felt it necessary to start reading the original texts themselves. Today, Sisters

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in Islam trains women activists, gives legal advice to women (e.g., those seeking divorce), and challenges neo-patriarchal interpretations and laws. Another NGO is Sisterhood is Global, a network dedicated to upholding women’s human rights through the organization of training workshops, policy dialogues, manuals, and publications. This was followed by the creation of Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace (WLP), also with a focus on Muslim-majority societies to support feminist movements and to secure human rights for women (Moghadam 2009, p. 75). Its areas of concern are Muslim family law, polygamy, child marriage, moral policy, hijab, violence against women, hudud laws, fundamental liberties, and inheritance. Women Living under Muslim Laws (WLUML), founded in 1984, is an international network of scholars focusing on laws and customs and has links to individual women and organizations in seventy countries. WLUML is concerned with researching and challenging laws that violate women’s human rights in Muslimmajority countries, with a specific focus on family laws (Moghadam 2009, p. 75). It directs its activities specifically against the challenges posed by the rise of fundamentalist interpretations of the role of women since the 1970s and warned in the early 1990s about an “Islamist international” that increasingly threatens democracy and human rights (Moghadam 2009, p. 76). Since 1988, it has created several projects such as a global campaign to stop the killing and stoning of women, created an international coalition of women human rights defenders, and published a handbook on Islamic family laws that is updated regularly. Besides publications and campaigns, it is also foremost a network that builds capacity for women on the ground to develop expertise in their own contexts, where they are often very isolated. Sisters In Islam is a member of the network. The creation of these various NGOs and their networks culminated in the creation of Musawah (equality), a global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family launched in 2009 in Kuala Lumpur. Musawah intends to unify critical analysis of the gendered nature of law governing women’s bodies in Muslim-majority society at the global level and represents a new decisive step on the global stage to counter radical patriarchalism in the Muslim world. It is backed by leading Muslim reformers and was founded by eleven representatives of Islamic women’s and women’s rights movements. Its activities are geared toward the Muslim family and its reform (Derichs 2010, p. 412). Islamic feminists, queer Muslims, and progressive Muslims are outlining alternative interpretations of key verses in the Qur’an. They

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use hermeneutical approaches for their textual analysis, and they find themselves in a difficult position as they simultaneously need to confront the mainstream’s extremely conservative Islamist interpretations and antiIslamic discourse promoted by western neoconservatives and the far right (Duderija 2013, p. 67). One problem for progressive Muslims is that it is difficult to differentiate between mainstream Islam and Salafi-Jihadism because they share many interpretations and ways of seeing according to Adis Duderija (2018; see also Khorchide 2018). It is therefore difficult for progressive Muslims to make their case in the face of this dual opposition. Nevertheless, there is now a body of literature that has developed a new interpretation based on classical methods of exegesis with regard to women, same-sex unions, and queer or non-binary people. They have roundly concluded that the dominant interpretation can be critiqued through these methods and that therefore there is really nothing in “Islam” that is opposed to homosexuality, queer or non-binary identities (Kugle 2016; Khan 2016: Jahangir and Abdullatif 2018). Islamic feminists tackle the verses that are used to justify women’s oppression within Muslim-majority countries. Qur’an 4:34 is used to justify wife-beating; 2:282 is used to devalue women’s testimony in court; 4:11 is used to reduce inheritance rights for women; and 4:3 is used to allow for polygamy, among other things (e.g., not leaving the house without a guardian, not traveling without a guardian, covering the body, etc.). Ziba Mir-Hosseini’s (2015) reinterpretation of the Qur’anic verse 4:34, generally used to justify wife-beating in the traditional interpretation, is one example that demonstrates the careful method of reinterpretation used by Islamic feminists. According to Mir-Hosseini, the term for “protector” that the verse uses (qawwamun) is only used once in the Qur’an in the context of marital relations. There are two other terms, however, that appear several times when it comes to the relationship between men and women: ma’ruf (common good) and rahmah wa muwadah (compassion and love). There are other verses that assume equality between men and women. Accordingly, Mir-Hosseini asks why it is that exactly this verse is emphasized so much in the Islamic tradition, and why are others that emphasize equality neglected and not taken into consideration. In their book, Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition, Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger discuss these questions at length and provide a different starting point for Muslim family law.

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This work is possible, according to Mir-Hosseini (2015), because of the way the Muslim legal tradition operates. It separates between shari’ah (divine law) and fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). This distinction has led to the development of various schools of Islamic law and a multiplicity of interpretations. Islamic feminists are thus embedded in a long tradition of interpretation of religious texts. The notion of fiqh—which conveys the interpretative aspect around divine law—therefore allows a careful reinterpretation of texts. In addition, as Mir-Hosseini points out, the Islamic tradition recognizes the human element in law-making, and thus Islamic feminists are able to insert their interpretation into this larger ideascape and change it from the ground up. According to Mir-Hosseini, these two aspects of the Islamic legal tradition have allowed women who have been inspired by the development of human rights law and the various conferences associated with it since the creation of CEDAW in 1979 to integrate feminist knowledge and arguments into the Islamic legal tradition. As much as the emergence of Islamic feminism needs to be highlighted as an important development, it also has clear limits. According to Aihwa Ong (1999), in Malaysia, Islamic feminists represent a fraction of the state bureaucracy and the modernizing segments of the Malay elite that seek to participate in the global economy. Islamic feminism is therefore a part of what she calls “corporatist Islam,” another label for what was discussed in Chapter 4 as market Islam or spiritual economy. Ong notes that while Islamic feminists have created a real public debate, “in many ways they act as surrogates for the government, and its vision of a corporate Islamic culture that promotes self-discipline, capital accumulation, and loyalty to the state” (1999, p. 357). This is no accident and is not limited to Malaysia. In many ways, strands of feminism have become a handmaiden for global capitalism, and increasingly this neoliberal feminism is being used as a strategy of ruling elites to legitimize the free market economy. Adrienne Roberts (2015) has pointed out that in the context of the 2008 financial crisis a renewed effort was made to point to the benefits of global capitalism for women and especially for girls. In the Islamic world this has been taken up by TUSKON, an Islamic business association in Turkey associated with the Gülen movement that initiated a “women’s movement” based on female entrepreneurs that operated from 2013 to 2015, before it was shut down (Dreher 2015). Islamic feminism needs to be put into the context of the local power struggles of different elite segments and their respective agendas. This may be similar to the distinction between progressive and authoritarian neoliberalism

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that Fraser (2016) developed to distinguish between the Trump and the Clinton candidacies. In other words, feminists are increasingly confronted with a stark choice of either supporting religious radicalism or progressive neoliberalism according to Fraser. More radical alternatives are no longer even on the agenda, as they would require a serious restructuring of how work, family, the economy and society are organized to take into account questions of justice and equality.

Conclusion The focus of this chapter was on women and their rights, since they constitute 50% of the world’s population and they are one of the key victims of the religious resurgence—but also one of its main protagonists. There is also, however, an increasing transnationalization of the LGBTQ+ question both in terms of liberalization and fundamentalist backlash. There is also a clear link between fundamentalism, racism, sexism, and homophobia, especially in the United States. Thus, while discussion of the rights of women forms the core of this chapter, the general questions of the freedom of expression for all non-normative gender and racial identities need to be seen as a part of the struggle over the interpretation of religious traditions, as all of these activists are developing a vision of the future that promises to be radically different from the patriarchal past we are coming from. Unfortunately, it is not only religious activism that is threatening women’s and LGBTQ+ rights but a general tendency toward nationalism more generally. On the face of it, capitalism seems to require the reproductive and general freedom of individuals. The modern economy requires a much more diversified and flexible labor force, unencumbered by structures of compulsory reproduction and gendered or racial hierarchies, so one would have expected, for example, that women’s freedom to decide when to engage in sex and when to have children would form the core of the capitalist revolution. However, from the outset, capitalism came with a patriarchal bargain that underwent various transformations as Deniz Kandiyoti (1988) pointed out. Since the 1970s, the new patriarchy seeks to adjust to the vagaries of the neoliberal globalization project that has privatized care and created flexible labor markets by harking back to a golden age of housewives taking care of children and the elderly and at the same time decreasing competition for jobs. Fundamentalism thus makes perfect sense and complements the neoliberal revolution. As Chapter 4

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has shown, Pentecostal movements, especially in Latin America, are driven largely by women who actively seek this patriarchal bargain in order to improve their families’ survival. Islamic feminists resist the imposition of extreme versions of this framework, which has contributed to the abuse of women. Their work becomes increasingly necessary in light of neopatriarchal fundamentalist movements in the Islamic world, a statement that equally applies to other religious traditions. Moghadam’s optimistic assessment in 2004 was that patriarchy is in crisis and increasingly called into question. It is not clear if this crisis will lead to the creation of a new more progressive gender order or, and currently this seems to be the more dominant trend, signals a large-scale reassertion of toxic masculine (state) power over non-conforming bodies in order to support the current form of economic organization.

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CHAPTER 7

Progressive Religious Activism and Global Governance Reform

Far from improving economic well-being, the current economic order has brought the opposite to a majority of people living on this planet. While the neoliberal optimist school (Hickel 2018) boasts about the numbers of people rescued from absolute poverty, a more realistic view of poverty and inequality highlights that neoliberal rules for trade, investment, and migration are redistributing money from the poor to the rich in the form of profit repatriation by multinational corporations, debt payments, capital flight, and low wages and working standards (Greenhill and Pettifor 2002; CADTM 2015)—ignoring environmental degradation for a moment. Global governance reform in both an institutional and a rule-oriented sense is therefore urgently needed. The issue here is not about capitalism versus socialism as current right-wing rhetoric seems to assume, but minimally, about a more inclusive capitalism. Thus, the current tendency to posit a well-functioning liberal democratic capitalism (e.g. Ikenberry 2011) in opposition to Donald Trump and reactionary populism is very problematic. This argument completely overlooks that that neoliberal capitalism is very different from the liberal interventionist capitalism of the Bretton Woods system (Chapter 2). Global governance refers to both formal and informal rules and institutions that regulate how states, international organizations, non-state actors and firms manage global issues that create conflicts of interest (The Commission on Global Governance 1995, p. 4). The globalization decade © The Author(s) 2020 S. Dreher, Religions in International Political Economy, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41472-6_7

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of the 1990s has increased the institutional density at the global level for example around debt management, negotiations dealing with foreign direct investment and the creation of the World Trade Organizations in 1994. However, this global institutionalization has mostly supported the creation of markets and not involved politics to correct market failures (Scharpf 1997). This chapter first conceptualizes the global level of analysis, and then provides a sketch of how faith-based activism has addressed global governance problems around issues of migration, trade, finance, debt, and multinational corporations.

Globalizing Elites and Counter-Hegemonic Movements In the Introduction, I explained that this book uses both International Political Economy (IPE) and Global Political Economy (GPE) to highlight that, according to some theoretical models, there is now a global layer of politics that is different from the territorial nation-state model on which IPE is based. This discussion is a result of several structural changes. First, there is the globalization of production that created global factories and transnational commodity chains where goods are produced in a transnational or global division of labor centered on large firms (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994). The global financial system and the global system of offshore financial centers represent a second and the most thoroughly globalized layer (Hendrikse and Fernandez 2019). Thirdly, there is the idea of global elites or a transnational capitalist class promoting neoliberal globalization as a project (Sklair 1997; see Robinson and Sprague [2018] and Carroll and Sapinski [2016] for an overview). Lastly, there is also the emergence of a global civil society (Kaldor 2003), and global care chains based on migratory movement creating transnational social spaces (Chapters 6 and 8). According to research by Ayres (2004), elements of global civil society have developed a progressive master frame against the neoliberal globalization project in various rounds of protests. This master frame presents globalization as a race to the bottom which created a democratic deficit due to its hierarchical organization; globalization and global governance are not transparent; there is an emphasis on corporate rights taking precedence over citizens’ rights (key slogan: people over profits). The counter-hegemonic movements therefore proposed to significantly reform international institutions or even to repeal neoliberal trade treaties. They

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also demanded debt relief and debt cancellation, explained the need for state sovereignty and partial deglobalization and a focus on local communities (Ayres 2004, p. 24). These protests started out in the 1980s as food riots that accompanied IMF-imposed austerity programs, and were turned into a more systematic movement in the 1990s with the anti-sweatshop movement in the United States, the Zapatista movement against the North American trade and investment treaty (NAFTA) in Mexico from 1994 onwards, and the Jubilee 2000 movement against debt. These individual campaigns were then unified and entered global public consciousness with the demonstrations that shut down the WTO negotiations in 1999 (known as the Battle of Seattle). As a next step, the World Social Forum, an assembly of the various protest movements, was formed and held its first meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, with subsequent meetings elsewhere. While initially the “War On Terror” derailed a serious questioning of global economic integration as protesters were asked to choose between the current system or being considered a terrorist, protests revived after the GFC in 2008 which led to the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement. The latest incarnation is the global debate surrounding the Green New Deal. According to Robert Wade (2009), civil society activism reflects an accountability revolution that has transformed world politics since the 1980s as it has led to new actors at the global stage contesting for space in the negotiation and decision-making processes. Some see these transnational civil society groups as a counter-elite to the globalizing elite that promoted neoliberalism worldwide. It is thus possible to see world politics as a struggle between the civil society initiatives outlined here on the one hand and the globalizing elite (Gill 1994) or corporate elite organizations (Carroll 2007) on the other hand. While this study does not make a claim for an epochal shift toward world capitalism (Robinson 2017), the point of this chapter is nevertheless to highlight the global level of politics that is not clearly seen if one assumes the state as the basic unit of analysis. The term progressive counter-globalization movement hides a diversity of stances on economic globalization. Reynolds (2014, pp. 122; 136– 138) presented three different degrees of religious progressive objections in her research on Christian trade policy analysis. The least interventionist is to formulate values that guide experts but to refrain from becoming too political. These actors will emphasize the need for solidarity, and development as a way for human progress. Secondly, religious actors evaluate the economy through the lens of religion in a critical manner and intervene in

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the political process based on religious authority. These types of actors will emphasize God’s sovereignty and the Covenant with the human community. Lastly, religious actors may present religion as an economic practice on which policy should be based. There is an emphasis on solidarity with the poor who should be empowered, and the goal is to create equality; they also emphasize the sacredness of creation.

Migration, Inequality, and the New Social Question According to Thomas Faist (2019), the “social question” is back, but with a difference. Unlike in the nineteenth century, where it referred to the inequality created by the conflicting interests of labor and capital, today the main determinant of inequality is citizenship. Location of birth, much more than class, determines life chances (Faist 2019, pp. 2–3). It is for this reason that the twenty-first century is witness to an increase in migration processes. In the age of social media and widespread education it is decreasingly plausible for individuals and families to accept the situation in their home countries. In consequence, migrants have increased as a percentage of the world’s populations from 2.3 to 3.3% (IOM 2018). Most staggering are the refugee numbers. In 2018 alone, 68.65 million people were counted as forcibly displaced according to the UNHCR Web site. Most of these migrants (85%) are hosted in developing countries, with Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan, Uganda, and Turkey as the top refugee-hosting countries. Nearly 60% of refugees came from three countries: South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Syria. This list goes to show that state transformation processes—whether initiated through outside forces such as conquest or structural adjustment programs or civil war— are still an important explanation for migration flows as Aguayo et al. (1989) explained in their groundbreaking study. According to Saskia Sassen (2010), the more disturbing aspects of some of the new migratory trends are that the expulsion of people from the land seems to have reached new proportions. People are now less important than the land and are systematically evicted. Patrick Hayden (2007) has concluded that the real axis of evil that IR and IPE should be concerned with is the discrepancy between affluency for a minority that ignores the plight of the majority world where severe human rights violation go unpunished.

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The good news is that, like in the nineteenth century—where trade unions emerged to safeguard the rights of workers in the old social question against capital and succeeded in bringing about the welfare state and democracy (Eley 2002)—there are new organizations and individuals today trying to safeguard rights for migrants to be “free to choose,” to quote Milton Friedman. Friedman of course excluded the freedom to move as a part of his freedom to choose; this applies only to capital and not to people (Dreher 2007, pp. 107–113). But there are now activists who seek freedom of movement for people as well and who fight for refugee rights; some even demand the abolition of borders. There is also a new form of cosmopolitanism from below where citizens form links with migrants and provide hospitality and support even in the face of rising right-wing authoritarianism (Baban and Rygiel 2014; Dreher 2007, p. 196ff). This form of cosmopolitanism and the corresponding efforts to transform citizenship from a nation-based version to one that includes global human rights considerations also includes religious activists. Most prominently is the new sanctuary movement from among the Churches in the Global North where migrants find protection from deportation in church spaces. According to an ecumenical working group on church asylum, there were 546 people being provided sanctuary from deportation in Germany in December 2018 (Ökumenische Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft 2018). In the United States, 800 faith communities in twenty-five states signed up in 2017 to be sanctuaries for migrants threatened by deportation (Orozco and Anderson 2018). The German Catholic Bishops (Migrationskommission 2017) made it very clear that the rule of law, humanitarian considerations, and human rights always trump the urgency felt in the public to deport refugees, a tone very much at odds with an increasing number of people in Germany. Such activism from below is sorely needed, because the international migration regime— unlike the other institutions governing the global economy—emphasizes the sovereignty of states to regulate the inflow of migrants. This was recently reinforced in the Global Compact for Migration (United Nations 2018) which emphasizes the need for multilateral approaches and cooperation but at the same time “reaffirms the sovereign right of States to determine their national migration policy and their prerogative to govern migration within their jurisdiction, in conformity with international law” (point 15). It is also a non-binding agreement (point 7). Despite these deficits, migration experts evaluate it positively because it develops for

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the first time a coherent framework for international migration (Guild and Grant 2017, p. 2). Unfortunately, the current dominant response across the world is to close borders. However, it needs to be recognized that while a certain amount of migration is sustainable and even desirable (Weyl 2018), migration without local and global reforms will not solve the problem of global inequality. What is needed is a reform of the global governance rules that currently facilitate transfers from the poor to the rich in the form of unequal exchange in free trade, debt payments, a predatory financial system, and cheap labor in global commodity chains of multinational corporations that use tax evasion and transfer prices to extract profits. The good news is that religious activists have developed concrete ideas for these issues. Smith and Smythe (2016) found that the World Social Forum meetings from the first meeting in Porto Alegre in 2001 onwards were attended by many religious activists from all religions (more than 60% of participants identified as religious), though the Christian religion was predominant. One important example of religious activism at the World Social Forum is the World Council of Churches (WCC), an ecumenical movement that represents 560 Christian churches, half a billion people, mostly from the Global South, with a focus on social justice. It is one important example of religious activism in opposition to neoliberal globalization. The WCC (2005) criticizes the inequality and poverty that accompany “unfettered market forces” in its report Alternative Globalization Addressing People and Earth (AGAPE = Greek for “love”). As the WCC outlines, in order for the current economy to become an economy of life poverty needs to be eradicated, the trading system needs to reflect notions of justice, debts need to be canceled, financial speculation and tax evasion need to be made impossible, land and natural resources need to be used sustainably, public goods and services need to be provided, small farmers need to be supported, and decent jobs need to be created. To get there, churches need to “take a firm faith stance against hegemonic powers because all power is accountable to God” according to the WCC (2006, point 8).

Fair Trade Contra Free Trade According to the Prebisch and Singer thesis, the global trading system is systematically biased against economic development because of unequal exchange (Prebisch 1962; Singer 1950). Unequal exchange has two

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aspects. The first problem is that the terms of trade deteriorate over time, because the prices of primary commodity exports—that still constitute the majority of exports of far too many developing countries—decrease relative to the prices of manufactured goods imported from industrialized countries. The second problem is that wages for workers in developing countries are kept artificially low. Both aspects led to unequal exchange and to a net profit transfer through trade (Kaplinsky and Farooki 2017). Wood (1997) researched that between 1985 and 1995 developing countries experienced a 20% decline in their terms of trade. There are two exceptions to this trend: One is OPEC, a cartel of oil producing states that is sometimes able to influence oil prices (Kaufmann et al. 2004). The second is the entry of China into the World Trade Organization in 2001 which led to a commodity super-cycle that enabled many commodity producers to profit from increasing terms of trade. However, this also led to re-primarization (countries shifting back toward primary commodities), a trend that will ultimately create negative consequences once the commodity super-cycle ends (Caldentey and Vernengo 2017). Another problem for producers from developing countries is that commodity markets are highly concentrated. Countries that were forced to restructure their economies along more competitive lines after the 1980s debt crisis were confronted with a handful of buyers for food, beverages, agricultural raw materials, minerals, ore, and metals. According to Cowling and Tomlinson (2005, p. 35), “the proportion of commodity trade marketed by three to six of the largest transnationals is 85–90% for coffee, 85% for cocoa beans, 85–90% for jute, 75%–80% for tin.” Price negotiations are therefore difficult, given power differential between buyers and sellers. The global trading system was governed by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) until it was integrated in the World Trade Organization in 1994. The GATT did not accommodate developing countries sufficiently. It excluded agriculture and focused only on commodities. In addition, it incorporated protectionism against garment and textile exports through the Multifiber Arrangement and its successor, the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (only abolished in 2005). Thus, the more competitive products exported by developing countries were not part of the trade framework. For this reason, developing countries called for a New International Economic Order in the 1970s, but the neoliberal revolution quashed this movement (see Chapter 2). In this context, church groups—through their missionary

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activities but also through the emergence of liberation theology and a general concern for the poor—developed the idea of “fair trade” as opposed to “free trade.” There are various origin stories for fair trade. For example, the Quakers initiated a boycott of slave-derived goods in the nineteenth century in the United States by creating so-called Free Produce societies. “By defining slavery as immoral and unprofitable, Free Produce advocates hoped to eliminate the market for slave-produced goods” (Newman 2008, p. 266). The Salvation Army in New Zealand promotes itself as the first producer of fair trade coffee and tea under the label Hamodava (Barratt 2016). Another example is the North American Ten Thousand Villages network of the Mennonite Churches, which developed out of their work in Latin America (https://www.tenthousandvillages.com). In Europe, there were early organizations in the UK and in the Netherlands (Fridell 2004). These individual organizations gradually developed alternative trade organizations and slowly established their own networks of shops and organizations throughout the 1970s. Today they are organized in the World Fair Trade Organization. The idea of fair trade has mostly been applied to commodities such as tea and coffee (Fridell 2004). There is now some type of fair trade production system in place in 58 countries that provides a livelihood to roughly seven million farmers, workers, and family members (Doran and Natale 2011, p. 3). While this represents a clear success for fair trade, there are also very clear limits. Valiente-Riedl’s (2013) study of fair trade coffee points out that even coffee, the most successful and widespread application of the fair-trade principle, still leaves the bulk of small producers in the conventional market and subjected to market vagaries (pp. 2–3). This is a point also developed by Sylla, a fair trade insider, who concluded that “Fair Trade is based on a plutocratic logic: speaking on behalf of the poor, but really being at the service of the less poor and the richer” (2014, p. 3). As a result, today the idea of fair trade is in crisis. Nevertheless, the notion of fair trade has managed to reframe the argumentation patterns (or frames) around free trade. It has created a consciousness that prices do not always reflect considerations of justice. It led to a widespread understanding in churches in the North that there are structural reasons for underdevelopment and that the rules of the system had to be changed. Religious activists might take another look at the more radical ideas proposed by Michael Barratt Brown (1993, cited in Fridell 2004, p. 418). He argued that fair trade, if it is to be successful, needs

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to be supported by a state that is interventionist and oriented toward development and that is supported by international market regulations to limit the power of large multinational corporations. In effect, an alternative trade clearing house would have to be created that linked producers and consumers across regions and continents. Some of these ideas shine through in the AGAPE process of the WCC. The Council is critical of free trade but also of fair trade and prefers the term “just trade” (WCC 2005, p. 18). This refers to trade that includes notions of solidarity and care for the earth which cannot be addressed in the current system but requires a confrontation of “the power enshrined in unjust trade relationships and accumulated wealth” (WCC 2005, p. 18). One concern is that the current system based on the large agricultural corporations and production for exports destroys food security which has led to the demand for food sovereignty as a right (WCC 2005, p. 21). Just trade agreements therefore need to be based on the principles of the economy of life: “solidarity, redistribution, sustainability, security and self-determination” (WCC 2005, p. 24). Trade agreements furthermore must not undermine small states and the small farmers, they need to ensure food sovereignty and guarantee the necessities of life. From this perspective, the inclusion of agriculture in the WTO framework after 1994 was extremely detrimental to small peasant producers even while large agricultural producers from Brazil benefitted.

Finance as an Extractive Sector A financial market is supposed to channel funds to investors so that innovative products can be brought to the market or individuals can buy assets such as houses. To this end, banks create money and provide it as a loan (backed by an asset). This innovation—creating money out of future promises to pay—greatly facilitated the expansion of the modern market, as investors and individuals were able to draw on a larger pool of finance for investment purposes (Pettifor 2019; Sassen 2010, p. 6). However, with the neoliberal revolution, the financial sector has become an industry that seeks to make profit out of financial transactions themselves. To this end, it invents highly sophisticated products that are unrelated to the real economy but may damage it in the event of a loss of confidence, which is what happened in the GFC of 2008. Much of the current financial market is therefore not necessary for a smooth functioning of the global economy but rather needs to be seen more as a “charge upon the productive system

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than as a source of funds,” according to Gowan (1999, p. 8). The real economy serves as primary input for extraction and what is left behind are abandoned houses, regions, and communities, devastated by austerity and decades of stagnating wages while financial profits soared (Pettifor 2019). This situation is all the more undemocratic because money creation is a reflection of the state and its capacity to extract taxes. It is public debt and the central bank that backs the monetary system on which speculative finance is built (Pettifor 2019). In case of a financial crisis, austerity is then imposed to restart the financial sector and the shadow banking system. Some observers concluded therefore that austerity needs to be seen as a form of extraction that safeguards narrow financial interests over the community more general (Pettifor 2019; Gowan 1999, Chapter 2). At the global level, the system of territorial states has been complemented by a system of globalized capital that is sovereign in its own right and can no longer be regulated by any one state, because capital will simply move elsewhere. According to Hendrikse and Fernandez (2019), the system of territorial states serves as wealth creator for a global elite that systematically evades taxes and hoards its wealth outside the reach of national tax authorities, in most cases through entirely legal mechanisms. This is why the new plutocrats who govern more and more countries are opposed to global institutions and regulation: It would impede their ability to evade taxes if states agreed on a common taxation regime (Hendrikse 2018). According to UNCTAD, about 30% of all foreign direct investment is invested in tax havens (Palan et al. 2010, p. 52). Approximately 100 offshore financial centers exist as platforms to manage global wealth (Hendrikse and Fernandez 2019) and were created through more than 3000 tax treaties. The destabilization and dislocation caused by the dramatic increase in financial crisis and financial market activities is one of the causes of slow growth and wage stagnation. The GFC of 2008 should have given cause to reevaluate financial sector deregulation. According to Johnson (2009), a former chief economist of the IMF, the fact that a completely speculative sector of the economy was able to nearly destroy whole economies is a sign of the wholesale transformation of all societies, and especially the United States, into banana republics characterized by the regulatory capture of the state apparatus by the financial oligarchy. Even though the financial crisis was deep and serious, there has not been any serious effort at global governance reform nor has any significant effort been made at the national level to prevent another financial crisis of the same magnitude

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from recurring (Broome et al. 2012). It seems that democracies are paralyzed when it comes to the financial system, which is worrisome in light of the fact that the financial crisis imposed huge costs on societies. In the UK, public sector debt increased from 36% of GDP in 2007 to 63.6% in 2010. The forgone output of the crisis worldwide represents one or even up to five times the annual world GDP in 2009, an output loss of about $60–$200 trillion (Engelen et al. 2011, pp. 28–29). It is therefore important to understand if there has been religious activism with regard to financial speculation, and whether there are religious alternatives to the current forms of speculative financial markets. This would be tremendously important given that, despite the massive crisis, global social justice activism failed to implement one of the more effective measures to reduce speculative flows in the form of a tax on international financial transactions (Tobin Tax; Shawki 2010). Its European equivalent, the Robin Hood Tax, equally languishes in legislatures and has not been implemented (http://robinhoodtax.org.uk). These taxes would make it possible to rebalance tax burdens back onto capital; they could finance public deficits and reduce the need for austerity, and finance international development efforts (Wachtel 2000). Reform proposals have been developed by religious activists from the WCC, from within the Occupy movement and by Islamic financial institutions. The WCC is deeply critical of the global financial system and how it is governed. It does not “maximize progress toward justice, poverty eradication and environmental sustainability” (WCC 2005, p. 31). To this end, the voting structures in the IMF must change and the veto of the United States needs to be abolished, there needs to be a more important role for civil society, structural adjustment programs must be eliminated as they are too one-sided, the IMF and the World Bank should use more of their own resources to solve the debt crisis, and private creditors need to take responsibility for high-risk loans. The power of international financial institutions needs to be reduced and odious or illegitimate debts should not be payed (see below), and the volume of speculative financial transactions should be lowered through a currency transaction tax (WCC 2005, pp. 32–33). The Majority World (the Global South) received $927 billion from 1982 to 1990, but it paid $1.3 trillion to the minority world. Despite these payments, it was 61% deeper in debt in 1990 than in 1982 (WCC 2005, p. 30). Cloke et al. (2016, p. 502) show that religious activists were active constituents of the Occupy movement in the UK and the United States.

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The movement criticized the growing wealth inequality and the bail-outs for the financial industry during the GFC while consumer debts increased. Religious activists’ presence shaped the Occupy movement in those countries (Smith and Smythe 2017, p. 1145). Religious activists supported the general criticism of economic inequality as expressed by the slogan of the 1% versus the 99% and reinforced the message that taxes on wealth need to be increased dramatically. Jewish religious activists also emphasized the need to care for the poor. Some of them created “Occupy Judaism” and held religious services in the area, attracting over 1000 worshippers. There were also representatives from the Muslim community (Occupy Islam) who pointed out that the Islamic tradition contains an emphasis on justice, criticizes greed and seeks to create a balanced economic system with due consideration for the poor. Buddhist representatives were present for many of the same reasons as well (Smith and Smythe 2017, p. 1151). These religious activists emphasized that wealth inequality is not a partisan issue but “about the morality of our country no longer being a democracy” (Reverend Michael Ellick of Judson Memorial Church in Lower Manhattan, as cited in Smith and Smythe 2017, p. 1151). They organized an interfaith march and an interfaith service. While faith groups were of course a small minority within the larger Occupy movement, they were better equipped to deal with some of the logistics on the ground, and so their importance went well beyond their numbers. For example, one of the churches close to Zuccotti Park initially provided meeting spaces, resting areas, pastoral services, electricity, and bathrooms. The churches were also responsible for bringing in AfricanAmerican Christians into the Occupy space, which was dominated by white and middle-class people (Cloke et al. 2016, p. 502). While the Occupy movement has petered out, a more pronounced alternative to the current Western-dominated financial system is developing among Muslim-majority countries, where a concerted effort has been made since the 1970s as a part of the general resurgence of Islamic activism to provide an alternative to the banking system for the newly emerging middle class that would conform to sharia principles (Khan 2010; Rethel 2011, p. 76). The key aspect of Islamic finance in its various forms is to make sure that profits and losses from financial investments are shared between the borrower and the lender. Furthermore, interest rates should not be too excessive. In some versions, they are not even allowed, although this is a modern interpretation of the term riba. In the Ottoman Empire, it merely was meant to guard against usury, not against interest

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as such (Khan 2010, p. 810). In addition, gambling or the production and sale of forbidden goods and services should not be financed. Lastly, there should not be any profit from uncertainty (Rethel 2011, p. 78; Khan 2010, p. 807). In theory, these guidelines could be used to tame financial rentier capitalism much like Keynesianism used to do through capital controls and other measures (see Chapter 2; Awass 2019). The problem is that Islamic finance activists are often too fundamentalist in their defense of Islamic finance and portray it as an opposition between Islam and capitalism. In reality, Islamic finance exhibits many of the characteristics of the conventional markets, according to Feisal Khan, a former Islamic banker (Khan 2010; Rethel 2011). The key problem from a progressive perspective is that Islamic finance is deeply embedded in the current religious resurgence in the Islamic world, which is extremely conservative and upholds problematic values for women, the LGBTQ+ community and for religious minorities or regime critics (see Chapters 5 and 6). It is therefore questionable if its growth should be encouraged since one would also encourage repressive regimes. Chapter 8 will highlight some more progressive economic ideas from within the Islamic faith traditions.

Debt and Underdevelopment Neoliberal policies have generally failed to reduce debt which was their main justification. Long-term debt increased from $62.6 billion in 1970 to $1998.7 billion in 2000 (Soederberg 2006, p. 111). More and more countries have been drawn into the vicious cycle of borrowing and structural adjustment accompanied by austerity that leaves a majority of the population helpless to withstand diseases or natural disasters (Stuckler and Basu 2013). For Sassen (2010, p. 207ff), debt service is a form of extraction; this is visible in the fact that today’s debt repayment is set at 20 percent of export earnings, whereas Germany after World War II or Central Europe after the end of the Cold War were asked to pay only between 5–8%. As a result, the Global South paid four times its original debt between 1982 and 1998 (Sassen 2010, p. 209). We now have a situation where the poor are financing the rich through debt payments and capital outflows (CADTM 2015). Capital flight is endemic, as capital controls have been abolished in the wake of the destruction of the Bretton Woods system (Goodman and Pauly 1994; see Chapter 2). According to Greenhill and Pettifor, “for some countries, total capital flight has been

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almost as high as external debt” (2002, p. 10). This flight of elites or capital strike necessitates that the country borrows from foreign markets as opposed to increasing taxes on the local elite. More specifically, the global mobility of capital and offshore tax havens allows corrupt elites to obtain foreign loans, siphon off part of the money into foreign bank accounts, and then use the IMF and its structural adjustment programs to force the general population to pay the debt. The 1IMDB case, where a Goldman Sachs banker facilitated such a scheme in Malaysia (Gapper 2018), is only the tip of the iceberg. This type of debt has acquired its own label as “odious debt.” For example, under the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, Congo (Zaire) developed a public external debt of approximately US $14 billion while capital flight amounted to US $12 billion (Ndikumana and Boyce 1998). Unfortunately, the IMF does not recognize odious debt and thus indirectly supports local elites against their own population. The debt crisis has its structural origin in the organization of the world economy into a core and a periphery, tied together through unequal exchange. In this economy, the periphery continuously experiences balance of payments crises owing to an underdeveloped export structure (Bibeau and Corriveau-Dignard 2003). History is splattered with such crises. The latest round in this story came in the 1970s, when countries were encouraged to take on loans that were available cheaply due to the recycling of the petro-dollars from oil exporting countries. OPEC countries had accumulated large surpluses by increasing the price of oil (the “oil shocks”) but were unable or unwilling to create a support system for countries in the South that relied on petroleum imports (e.g., through Islamic finance or outright gifts, a kind of Islamic Marshall Plan). Instead, the OPEC countries were encouraged to deposit their surpluses in banks in London and New York, which then lent this money to cash-strapped economies in the South. This led to indebted industrialization (Frieden 1981), but also to a massive crisis after the United States unilaterally increased its interest rates—which function as an international benchmark—under the so-called Volcker shock of 1979 (Soederberg 2006, p. 108). Overnight, debt repayments increased dramatically. By 1982, the debt crisis was in full swing, beginning with Mexico’s near default on its debt, threatening the survival of the global banking system as a whole but especially economies in Europe and North America whose banks had overextended themselves. Instead of forcing lenders to write off bad investments, debtor countries were forced to restructure their

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economies under policies of structural adjustment to pay back the debt. These debts, it has to be noted, were created by the United States’ decision to increase interest rates to fight domestic inflation. The debt crisis was thus global collateral damage of power struggles within the United States. Banks were secure in the knowledge that, however great their follies, they would be bailed out and someone else would foot the bill. Twenty-four countries had to reschedule and refinance their loans between 1982 and 1984 (Soederberg 2006, p. 108). As Busby (2007) notes, there were several multilateral efforts to manage the debt crisis. A more concerted effort was made from 1996 onwards with the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative that offered some debt reduction. By that time, it was evident that much of the debt would never be repaid. However, for many activists the initial HIPC framework proved to be insufficient as it did not lead to significant debt reduction. In this context, the Jubilee 2000 campaign that began in 1996 was able to reframe debt cancellation into a larger issue of global justice (Shawki 2010, p. 211). The movement had earlier precedents, such as the creation of the Debt Crisis Network, but Jubilee was “one of the biggest global campaigns ever” (Mayo 2005, p. 144). The campaign originated with the organization Christian Aid (Barrett 2000, p. 18), and in the whole campaign “the role of churches [was] unique,” according to Barrett (2000, p. 19). One reason may be the strong connection to biblical scripture. According to the United Methodist Church (2008), the role of the biblical Sabbath was to limit consumption and exploitation: “In the Sabbath year, there was to be release from debts and slavery and during the jubilee year – every 50th year – a restoration of all family lands” (Leviticus 25). As the WCC puts it: “Transformation of asymmetrical and unjust relations is realized in the traditions of the Sabbath, Sabbath year and Jubilee year. They offer a powerful vision for the organization of economic life” (WCC 2005, p. 30). Debt cancellation and restitution should be the order of the day in the name of an economy of life. This image of a “Jubilee year” created a powerful resonance with churches both in the North and in the South, encouraging them to critique what they referred to as “debt bondage.” The campaign’s symbol was a chain. This was chosen both to draw connections to nineteenthcentury campaigns against the slave trade—asserting that debt is a form of slavery—and to present the image of a chain of activists linking hands in solidarity from both the North and the South (Mayo 2005,

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p. 144). Barrett explains: “The chain represents the enslaving nature of the debt burden which undermines development, dignity, and even people’s sovereignty. It is a sobering fact that in the last four years the debt crisis has led to the deaths of more people than the brutal Atlantic slave trade carried out over decades” (2000, p. 20). The debt activists thus were successful in what Busby (2007, p. 248) has called “strategic framing” and were able to convince countries to act against their material interests by reducing debt. Through its involvement in various massive protests such as the 70,000 protesters at the 1998 G8 summit in Birmingham or the 30,000 at the 1999 G7 summit in Cologne in addition to relentless individual and collective lobbying, the Jubilee 2000 campaign was able to change the G7’s rather lackluster response into something more tangible, resulting in some improvements in the HIPC. This was followed by another effort in 2005 that led to the creation of the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative, which involved genuine debt cancellation—albeit only by international financial institutions, not private banks (Busby 2007, pp. 255–258). Of course, the perception of success differed among the participants. Some viewed it as progress that debt cancellation was pursued more forcefully, while others wanted to have more serious debt cancellation and to replace the existing debt management system, specifically the notion of conditionality—something that clearly was not achieved in any way (Mayo 2005, p. 146). Conditionality refers to the fact that countries must undertake certain policy changes in exchange for IMF loans (Babb 2012). A general system of how states can declare bankruptcy is also needed. In addition to the 110 organizations in the UK there were 69 coalitions worldwide, including 17 from Central and Latin America, 15 from the African continent, and 10 from Asia that together made up the Jubilee 2000 campaign. One petition was signed by 24 million people from over 60 countries by June 1999 (Mayo 2005, p. 145). The campaign had a surprising reach within countries. A journalist from Peru was suspicious of the two million signatures from his country and went to a remote village to see for himself. “To his amazement he was immediately treated to a cogent explanation of the arguments on global debt and how this was affecting people in the area, locally” (Mayo 2005, p. 150). A treasury official in the UK had been astonished by the detailed information and questions in the many letters he received. One especially stood out: “The letter […] was written on pink notepaper, with a little posy of roses in the corner! Who are these people?” (as cited in Barrett 2000, p. 4).

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The Jubilee Debt Campaign of the 1990s should be counted as one of the most successful global civil society campaigns against the prevailing neoliberal orthodoxy that debt must be repaid. Instead activists highlight the injustice of the debt burden (given that it originated in the decision of the United States to increase interest rates). It shows that a group of activists with a captivating “frame” and broad-based support can prompt a significant change in how the world economy is run. It seems that religious ideas are vitally important, as they can mobilize more people; the frame—the chain, the notion of a Jubilee year, and slavery—proved to be more effective than anything that activists around the currency tax could mobilize (Shawki 2010).

Multinational Corporations and Corporate Social (Un-)Responsibility Multinational or transnational corporations dominate the world economy. According to a 2011 study by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Vitali et al. 2011), there is a core of 1318 transnational corporations (TNCs) with interlocking ownership structures. This justifies the term “transnational” as opposed to multinational. The latter refers to corporations active in more than one state, while transnational refers to the organizational integration of these corporations—although in reality it is sometimes difficult to establish a difference. The study found out that 737 top shareholders control 80% of the value of all TNCs in the study, based on a database with initially 30 million economic actors out of which 43,060 were ultimately identified as TNCs (p. 6). This denotes a very unequal distribution of the control of the wealth created by corporations. Some TNCs are now stronger than states. They employ large-scale tax optimization strategies (Palan et al. 2010) and are able to sue states due to investor dispute settlement clauses embedded in most trade treaties (Isiksel 2013). They dominate markets for commodities, thus putting pressures on commodity exports (Cowling and Tomlinson 2005), and they often rely on sweatshop labor (Klein 2009) and more generally fail to pay their workers adequate wages (e.g., Amazon warehouse workers). The growth of large-scale firms is now undermining democracies due to the undue influence of wealth on policies (Reich 2008, Chapters 4 and 5). Robert Reich, a former US Secretary of Labor, even went so far as to say that “capitalism is killing democracy” (Reich 2007).

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There have been various efforts to “tame” multinational corporations and make them more accountable—a movement that has emerged since the 1970s under the name of corporate social responsibility. The 1990s were characterized by a student and union campaign against sweatshops that resulted in private global standards such as the Worldwide Responsible Apparel Production certificate (Klein 2009; Dreher 2007, pp. 148–168). Only in 2011 were there successful negotiations at the United Nations on the issue, creating the Guiding Principles Reporting Framework. Although this may be a watershed event (Ruggie 2017, p. 1), it is too new to have had any impact so far. But it shows that the many pressures exerted by the global social justice movement (Ayres 2004) have had an impact, even though they stand in a long history of (failed) efforts to reign in multinational corporations, according to van der Pijl’s (1993) overview. In judging the effects of these movements, it needs to be understood that, as MacLeod (2016, p. 195) points out, neoliberalism is an extreme form of economic policy, and two of its key intellectual figures (Milton Friedman and Friedrich van Hayek) were vehemently opposed to any notion of corporate social responsibility (which they associated with socialism and communism). In this light, the UN’s Guiding Principles are progress. Global regulations are, however, only one aspect of exerting pressure on multinational corporations. More effective may be what MacLeod (2016, p. 196) describes as investor share activism, a subcategory of the corporate responsibility movement in which investors advocate for change during meetings or screen investments for ethical concerns. This type of shareholder activism takes place either during annual general meetings or through investment or dis-investment decisions. While the most prominent cases have been the boycott of apartheid South Africa (Nesbitt 2004) or the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement with regard to Palestine (Bakan and Abu-Laban 2009), MacLeod’s (2016, pp. 196–201) research on faith-based activism points to less spectacular forms of pressure. Religious institutional investors use their market power to effect changes. Examples of this include the Pax Fund founded in 1971 in the United States, the Church Investor Group (assets of $25 billion) in the UK, the Task Force on Churches and Corporate Social Responsibility in Canada (founded in the 1970s), and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Social Responsibility in the United States (Macleod 2016). Similarly, Kwayu (2016) describes how in Tanzania

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religious activists created public policy initiatives to evaluate the country’s tax policies with regard to mining companies. In 2002, they set up the Interfaith Standing Committee on Economic Justice and Integrity of Creation, which commissioned two studies on the effects of tax exemptions for mining companies. These reports highlighted the discrepancy between the increase in foreign investment on the one hand and persistent poverty in the country on the other, in part as a result of persistent tax evasion. These reports put pressure on the government and led to some legislative changes. This initiative was carried out by both Muslim and Christian groups and represents a successful cooperation across religious divides. Putting pressure on firms and governments is one way to change how economic production is organized. Chapter 8 will discuss alternative efforts by faith activists to engage in production of goods and services.

Conclusion The turn toward reactionary populism that is engulfing the planet could have been avoided had free market fundamentalism been tamed through the initiatives described in this chapter. It is indeed noteworthy that rightwing populism is able to diagnose with much clarity that globalization did not work out after all, but its solution—mostly concerned with protectionism and migration—is not dealing with the real problem: wealth inequality due to a financial system out of control and power imbalances created by the extreme inequality in wealth (Reich 2007, 2008). It is a tragedy that the alternative account—which establishes a clear connection between tax policy, the welfare state, and trade unions and the increase in inequality—is much more difficult to explain in simple terms. Some observers now pin their hopes on the Green New Deal (see Chapter 8) to capture the more progressive imaginations and turn it into a majority again. It has to be said that most of the initiatives presented in this chapter do not go beyond market correction but merely aim at providing a framework for the better functioning of markets. It is unclear if this is enough in today’s environment given the catastrophic failure of markets visible in the 2008 financial crisis, the climate crisis, the crisis of democracy, and the general problem of inequality and underdevelopment. Given that even more liberal authors note the dysfunction in the political and economic

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system (Johnson 2009), there may be a need to be bolder to deal effectively with neoliberal capitalism and its disfunctions. The next chapter will also highlight some faith-based examples that go beyond the current system.

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CHAPTER 8

Global Imaginaries: From the Economy of Death Toward an Economy of Life?

The world as a global market space is the ultimate goal of neoliberal globalization. But in the neoliberal vision, the global is limited to capital—there is no freedom of movement for people. The neoliberal globalization project creates an empire of civil society built on sovereign states (Rosenberg 1994). It is in the interest of the empire of civil society to be able to play different states against each other. This has recently come to public attention with the question of major Internet companies that do not pay their share of taxes. But global regulation will be resisted. Even the European Union has been unable thus far to create a regionwide tax system for the Internet monopolies. There is a deep connection between nationalism and neoliberalism. Insisting on national sovereignty but at the same time on deregulated markets and free capital flows, while maintaining control over people, constitutes the core neoliberal globalization project (Dreher 2007). However, despite a growing emphasis on border control since the end of the 1980s, migratory movements have increased (see Chapter 7) because of multicultural constituencies within states (Hollifield 1992), because of expulsion (Sassen 2010), and because human beings try to improve their situation. In the process, migrants have created their own globalization from below. Given that 84% of the world population is affiliated with a religious tradition broadly defined, according to the

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Global Religious Landscape Study (Iyer 2016, p. 401), the global political economy of religious groups is well worth studying as they develop an alternative “imaginary” or hope, the notion that things can get better. Religious ideas are also a form of utopian thought. This chapter merges three approaches: the idea of transnational social spaces, the notion of everyday political economy, and economic democracy. The first section explains these ideas. The main part of the chapter introduces first the global neoliberal imaginary—the economy of death—followed by propositions and projects for an economy of life to use the framing proposed by the World Council of Churches (WCC 2005).

Conceptualizing the Global Imaginary Everyday political economy is an approach that seeks to understand how everyday actions of spending, investing, buying, and producing influence markets and state action: “The political, economic and social networks with which we associate ourselves provide us not only with meaning about how we think economic policy is made, but also constitute vehicles for how economic policy, both at home and abroad, should be made” (Hobson and Seabrooke 2007, p. 1). Everyday political economy was developed to counter the elite-centered approach of much of IPE. Everyday approaches discuss financial orders, but also female labor migrants or peasant organizations. Elias and Rethel’s (2016) study of South-East Asia presents insights into trade unions, Muslim markets in Singapore, and Islamic finance in Malaysia. This perspective considers it important to understand how the global economy is reproduced on the ground. A different track has been taken by migration researchers, equally dissatisfied with individualist or state-centered approaches. They proposed the notion of transnational social spaces as an intermediary between individuals and global or national structures (Faist 2000). A transnational social space is a social formation that consists of a “combination of ties, and their contents, positions in networks and organizations, and networks of organizations that cut across the borders of at least two national states” (Faist 2010, p. 74). A defining characteristic, according to Faist, is pluri-locality—ongoing and sustained transactions across borders. This approach presents migrants as actors who create global or transnational social spaces (Faist 2000), transnational social fields (Basch et al. 1994), global care chains (Hochschild 2000), and diasporas (Portes et al.

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1999). The latter denotes the more political aspect of connections among migrants when they respond to events in the homeland. Each of these concepts expresses the idea that while living in one place migrants maintain ties to other places as well. These ties are institutionalized through migration associations, specific diaspora politics, or migration businesses. Religious traditions have moved across borders alongside the migrants. In the process, migrants are re-creating and changing religion—toward a global imaginary of religion (Glick Schiller 2009). “Imaginary” in this chapter also expresses the idea of hope, of the utopian imagination that things can be better, preferably here on this earth. Imaginary thus also refers to the “not-yet-being” (Ernst Bloch, quoted in Löwy 1996, p. 15); it highlights that religious traditions contain within themselves utopian ideas, the idea that another world is indeed possible. A transnational social space on its own terms can be found in the activism of Indigenous Peoples, where spirituality is a key expression of ecological and social relations. Resisting years of colonization and developing their own modes of thinking and infrastructure, these movements work through activism from below, through the United Nations framework (United Nations 2007) and their own diplomatic networks (Coulthard 2018; Manuel and Posluns 2018). Within the United Nations, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007, is an important step in the recognition of their rights. Since then, the four states that voted against the declaration (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and United States) have expressed their support, which has given Indigenous Peoples in those countries better grounds for argumentation and transformative processes at the national level. This process builds on the Indigenous resurgence of the 1970s, which reformulated Indigenous Peoples’ strategies of resistance through the integration of liberationist, decolonial, and Third World approaches into their frames of analysis, leading to the radicalization of some of the movements (Coulthard 2018). As a result, states such as Canada changed their approach toward Indigenous Peoples, moving toward recognition of Indigenous rights and away from overt assimilation. Nonetheless, some Indigenous authors now argue that Indigenous Peoples will not thrive through a liberal human rights framework, because the liberal politics of reconciliation do not include the recognition of land claims and thus continue the process of genocide, albeit with different means (Coulthard 2014). There is now a revival of some sorts of the more radical thinking that developed in the 1970s—though one needs to be aware that there

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are also Indigenous capitalists in support of economic development and the exploitation of natural resources. Apart from Indigenous views, none of the literatures discussed above include any imaginary of a global democratic economic space. The notion of economic democracy is not really an issue in International Political Economy, nor is it a concern in the functioning of international economic organizations, with the United States having veto power in all of them (WCC 2005). Economic democracy includes such notions as worker participation in the governance of firms via trade unions, cooperatives as alternative forms of production organization, profit sharing, land reforms, affordable housing and education, access to credit, progressive taxation and progressive management of rents from natural resources (preferably under public ownership), and in general: “universally guaranteed economic, social, and political rights” (Solimano 2014, p. 162). Instead, IPE often defends capitalism and the hierarchical organizations of firms. The glaring discrepancy between a democratic form of political organization at the national level and the highly totalitarian form of economic organization is not discussed in IPE textbooks. However, the notion of a Green New Deal may point toward a revival of such an agenda. The main goal of the Green New Deal is to deal with the climate crisis, but in the process, it will create jobs (e.g., housing and construction will require enormous investment in terms of insulation and energy management). It also promises to open up new forms of investment, reduce the power of the banking system, and ensure pension and savings security. This describes the 2008 UK version (Green New Deal Group 2008); the updated version being floated by the Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others is extremely ambitious with regard to emissions (net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030) but also addresses the job crisis and promises to secure fair wages and working standards; universal health care; free higher education; affordable, safe and adequate housing; clean-up of hazardous waste sites; access to clean water and air; universal health care; and affordable food. All of this can be easily financed by taxing economic elites and reforming the banking sector and the monetary order (Pettifor 2018). How the Green New Deal will integrate Indigenous Peoples’ demands is as of now unclear, but its origin in a Keynesian type of thinking may prevent a deeper rethinking of economic questions. This chapter distinguishes, on the one hand, an economy of life based on community, reciprocity toward people and the land, solidarity, and

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economic democracy, and on the other the economy of death that is neoliberalism—and possibly capitalism as such, though this will be left open. This dichotomy is taken from the WCC (2005), and highlights that the issues are not just about plastic straws or electric cars, but may require a profound transformation of economy, society, and politics if humanity seeks to honestly approach the climate emergency in a way that safeguards the rights of coming generations to biodiversity, food security, and safety from extreme weather events. In addition, there is a jobs crisis due to the fourth industrial revolution, which will reduce the need even for highskilled professionals; there is a crisis of masculinity due to the revolution in household composition and division of labor; lastly, inequality due to corrupt elites is leading to middle-class eruptions in one country after another (Tu˘gal 2016a, pp. 257–265).

Violence and Imperialism The actions of ISIS and other terrorists, such as those who attack abortion clinics and doctors, are expressions of a form of hyper-masculinity that still relies on the market for reproduction. There are reports that much of ISIS’s income was derived from selling antiques on the open market (Shabi 2015) and that looting occurred on an industrial scale, according to UNESCO to finance its organization (Osborn 2015). Abortion terrorists are a part of the pro-market evangelical-resonance machine, as explained in Chapters 3 and 6. Rather than creating an alternative to the market, terrorism reproduces it—ISIS even went so far as to revive the idea of slave markets. Terrorists are a clear expression of the economy of death that needs to be overcome. But Ahmad’s brilliant study of radical Islamists in Somalia and Afghanistan clearly shows that one factor that explains the rise of radical violent Islam are business interests (smugglers, criminal networks, merchants in the bazaar) who need security and finance the group that is most able to provide it (Ahmad 2017). Moghadam (2009) would argue that the never-ending US War on Terror is an expression of the same deadly hyper-masculinity that is also to be found in ISIS. War is of course an age-old solution to economic crisis; because war creates jobs, it “is useful for overcoming internal problems of economic stagnation and crisis, in addition to achieving certain geopolitical goals” (Solimano 2014, p. 187). This points to interest groups in the United States with specific foreign policy platforms such as the Christians who await the second coming of Christ and deliberately pursue aggressive

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foreign policies, especially in the Middle East (Marsden 2008; Connolly 2008). In this, they are supported by the Israel lobby (Mearsheimer and Walt 2009). There is then a complex machinery that has significant economic, political, and cultural power in the United States and that further promotes neoliberal capitalism and violence. Except for the discussion of the United States, these radical violent expressions have deliberately not been at the center of this book, as they are overrepresented in the media and research especially with regard to Islam while the ability of the United States to kill at a distance through drone strikes, its propensity to organize military coups and covert operations, and illegal invasions of countries (and how this is supported by the Christian Right) are less often subjected to discussion (for a good discussion of Islamic terrorism see Moghadam 2002; Ahmad 2017). These more violent expressions need to be distinguished from the more community-centered movements discussed in the next sections. These community-centered religious movements are often one of the few means of survival in the “planet of slums” where, as Davis put it, “Marx has yielded the historical stage to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost” (Davis 2004, p. 30). The following offers some insights into globalizing forms of spiritual economies or market religions which complement neoliberal globalization.

Global Christianities Pentecostalism was discussed in the context of Latin America and Africa. But it is even better described as a global and increasingly de-westernized form of religion (Meyer 2010). It is present in many countries, and the various churches develop independently from each other, while at the same time there are clear connections between them. In Meyer’s opinion, it should be seen as a “globalizing, religious project” (p. 114). One concrete example is Hillsong Church, originally from Australia but now a global phenomenon of singing and preaching pastors filling stadiums with ecstatic worshippers singing along (Martí 2017). There is a global imaginary in the Pentecostal worldview whereby Pentecostals perceive the world as a single place characterized by the individual believer’s engagement in spiritual warfare against demonic forces (Meyer 2010, p. 117). This war takes place within each person, but also in public spaces that need to be reestablished as sites for Christ, and evil spirits need to be cast out. Secondly, Pentecostals engage in worldwide missionary and

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networking activities which has led to a global network where English is the main language. As a result, we now find African Pentecostal churches in Eastern Europe and migrant churches in the west that build on experiences in their home countries (Meyer 2010, p. 120). Lastly, Pentecostalism as a global religion is inspiring, because it argues that it is possible to break free from the past and to be born again. These three core features of Pentecostalism have turned it into a versatile form of global religion that can adjust to new spaces and experiences. Moreover, newer research points out that Pentecostal churches actually display a wide range of political expressions, not just the market-friendly version—though this is clearly the dominant trend. But there are Pentecostal churches in Cuba that support the revolution (Medina and Alfaro 2015, p. 3). A secretive US centered but global network of evangelicals has thus far only been the object of journalistic investigation and now a movie on Netflix (The Family). The movie based on the book by Jeff Sharlet (2009) describes how right-wing anti-New Deal Christian Businessmen developed into a global network from the 1930s onwards. Set out to fight radical left-wing ideas and counter them through an emphasis on Jesus presented more as a Mafia godfather, the group regularly meets in so-called prayer breakfasts that occur in Washington and elsewhere. Those breakfasts are week-long affairs that allow for extensive networking. There is also a youth wing that grooms young people for a life of service and other networks that run parallel to the main organization. Until Jeff Sharlet’s investigation there had not really been any public acknowledgment or accountability of the network that strenuously denies having any political agenda (much like the Gülen community from Turkey discussed below). Yet, their goal, a world based on families, free markets under the authority of god are not innocent and have generally supported neoliberal globalization through the diffusion of a market-friendly form of gospel.

Meccanomics The Islamic tradition is generally portrayed by the neoconservative elite as hostile to modernity (Winfield 2016). But as I have shown in Chapter 4, there is now a global Islamic economic space—most pronounced in the form of Islamic finance but extending into food, travel, fashion, media, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics—that has been measured at US $4 trillion (Rethel 2019). It has become visible through the work of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation, the World Islamic Economic

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Forum promoted by Malaysia (Rudnyckyj 2013), and the Global Islamic Economy reports produced by Thomson Reuters. The insistence on “Islamicness” allows the carving out of a niche for Muslim entrepreneurs to capture market shares. Vali Nasr has summarized this project aptly as “Meccanomics” (2010). Two examples of a globalized version of this project are the Gülen movement and the Tablighi Jam’at. The Gülen movement from Turkey, also called Hizmet, represents a good example of how migration and movement practice create transnational social spaces (see also Chapters 4 and 5). Research that locates the Gülen movement solely in its Turkish context may thus overlook how the movement reconstitutes itself on the global level now that its Turkish space is gone after the failed coup attempt in July 2016 (Yavuz and Balçı 2018). The Gülen movement is no longer a missionary movement for Turkish Islam (Balçı 2003); instead the last ten years have seen a transnationalization that affects the consciousness and orientation of Hizmet members in ways that are not yet understood. One could study the Gülen movement as a global advocacy network for a specific type of Islam trying to establish its hegemony over other contenders—e.g., Saudi Islam or Iranian Islam; this is the preferred option of elites in advanced industrialized countries who are in need of a “good Muslim.” What is overlooked is the degree to which the movement is still extremely patriarchal (Turam 2007) and in contradiction to democratic procedures as the sect expects obedience and submission (Sen ¸ 2007). But it is possible to see it as a transnational social space in its own right, because its global ties encompass families, business networks, and schools, as well as Intercultural Dialogue Institutes. For example, Yadı˘gar, a Hizmet charity in Germany, supports schools in Kyrgyzstan (Agai 2004, p. 291). This global organization has allowed the movement to settle and consolidate itself now that its ties to Turkey are cut. The Gülen movement is a showcase for how religious activists use social capital to survive and thrive in a globalizing economy if they have a successful business model. The Gülen business model consists of creating dialogue initiatives that allow entry into local elite circles and thus provide networking opportunities for the Gülen businesspeople. In addition, as many people prefer private schools over public schools, the movement is able to expand into a country by first establishing a school which will then use only Turkish suppliers, thus providing a sort of localized industrial policy (Dreher 2016; Dohrn 2014; Hendrick 2013). In the United States, where Gülen has lived since 1999, the aversion of conservative

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voters to the public-school system has led to the creation of state financed but privately run charter schools, and the Gülen movement is one of the more prominent providers (Hendrick 2013). This highlights the fact that the Gülen movement is not challenging but rather profiting from neoliberal globalization; in fact, Gülen was pro-market and anti-statist already in the 1970s (Dreher 2018). The Western orientation was one reason for the movement’s conflict in Turkey with Erdogan and the AK Party (Tu˘gal 2016a, pp. 265–267; Dreher 2018). The Gülen movement is a study of how transnational processes clash with the system of territorial states and the needs for local accountability (see also Chapters 4 and 5). The Tablighi Jam’at is a transnational Islamic movement from the Indian subcontinent that has spread across South-East Asia since the late nineteenth century. Its size is estimated at 80 million (Taylor 2009). It is found in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malaysia and, due to migration, increasingly in Europe. It is directed at other Muslims and intends to strengthen their faith. It is a part of the Islamic revival movements that developed in the nineteenth century in response to the modernization processes in India and elsewhere. The movement has been described as apolitical and introverted, but the implications of its colonization of state, economy, and society could be far-reaching if its followers reach a critical mass, due to their strict interpretation of Islam. The movement has been implicated in terrorism, but it is unclear if this is because of Islamophobia or because there may be members of the movement who are also part of other, more radical groups, as membership in the movement is not exclusive (Noor 2010, p. 22). Members are mainly to be found among small traders but are now spreading to other parts of society due to effective missionary activities. The movement’s transnational reach allows Muslims to be mobile and settle or do business easily in other countries. It does not call for the overthrow of the state, but it seeks to develop a faith-based identity that is transnational by default and is creating a form of global “Muslimscape” (Noor 2010, p. 26).

Falun Gong China is deeply integrated in the globalization of Pentecostalism, which is one of the fastest-growing religions in the country alongside the revitalized folk religions (see Chapter 4). But there are others. One prominent example is Falun Gong, which today is a transnational network of practitioners of qigong —exercises to regulate qi, the energy that circulates

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through the body. It emerged on the national stage in China in 1992 at a time when the state socialist healthcare system was in crisis, and the Party’s official line encouraged a focus on consumption and commerce. The movement’s emphasis on health and refusal of consumerism struck a chord with many Chinese who were disillusioned with official state structures. According to Zhao (2003, p. 211), it is reflective of a “resistance identity” that is opposed to the pursuit of wealth, power, and scientific rationality and to the process of capitalist modernity more generally. It came to global attention when in 1999 it staged a demonstration in front of the Chinese government’s leadership compound in Beijing, with about 10,000 members participating. This led to the movement being outlawed by the government; since then, the practice has spread underground and abroad and is now present in major cities worldwide organizing protests in front of Chinese embassies and consular buildings and also sponsoring cultural events in the form of an opera performance for the Chinese New Year (Hodara 2010). Their persecution by the Chinese state also reflects the fact that the group viciously responded to criticism of its practices Kavan (2008). Between April 1998 and mid-1999 the movement organized more than 300 protests over negative media presentation, including harassing individual reporters (Zhao 2003, p. 215). It insisted not only on religious freedom but on the censorship of their opponent’s views of the movement. As Zhao (2003) writes, “Falun Gong, then, may be understood as a movement of resistance, but it is one that offers no resistance to either the theory or the practice of censorship” (p. 215). It is not a liberal form of religion—it is deeply opposed to women’s emancipation and homosexuality (Madsen 2000, p. 247). Kavan (2017) therefore concludes that the movement should study Gandhi’s strategy of principled nonviolence instead of relying on advice by a former US Army Colonel on how to topple dictators—one of the movement’s sources on how to engage with outsiders. The contestation between Falun Gong and the Chinese government has thus created a transnational form of politics, with contestations taking place in academic journals, conferences, universities, the news media, and in front of embassies the world over. A similar development is now occurring around the Uighur problem where national suppression will lead to the creation of a transnational activist space. Given the Turkish example though, the Chinese state seems to understand the threat created by counter-elites using alternative frames to challenge entrenched power networks which explains (but does not justify) the severe repression.

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There are other expressions of market religion from Asia, such as the Japanese Buddhist network of Soka Gakkai (Kisala 2005) or the yoga and mindfulness movement (Godrej 2017).

The World Council of Churches and the Anti-capitalist Muslims Steps toward an economy of life will have to be taken at the global level, changing global rules and regulations as discussed in Chapter 7, but these will have to be accompanied or even preceded by transformations on the ground. On the one hand, these transformations are determined by four global challenges: the climate crisis, the fourth industrial revolution and the jobs crisis, the crisis of masculinity and gender identity, and widespread government and elite corruption perpetuating systems of exploitation and dominance. On the other hand, they are determined by needs and history. They will look different depending on the perspective and the community involved. What follows can therefore offer merely some of the insights (for a more systematic overview see Duchrow and Hinkelammert 2012, pp. 177–265). One important example of religious activism at the World Social Forum (WSF) is the WCC, an ecumenical movement that represents 560 Christian churches, mostly from the Global South. The WCC criticizes the inequality and poverty that accompany economic globalization (WCC 2006). The Council seeks to challenge neoliberal globalization “by an alternative way of life of community in diversity” and to move away from the “globalized paradigm of domination” (WCC 2005, p. 2). The economy of life, a term the Council proposes, is based on the “main characteristics of God’s household of life” (WCC 2005, p. 4). God’s household is characterized by abundance for all. Believers are called upon to manage it in a “just, participatory and sustainable manner.” Key concepts of this household are solidarity, dignity of persons, love, and care for the creation. “God’s economy is an economy for the whole oikumene – the whole earth community; God’s justice and preferential option for the poor are the marks of God’s economy” (WCC 2005). To reach this goal, the WCC calls on churches to become transformative communities where an economy of solidarity and sharing is already practiced (WCC 2005, p. 5). From this perspective, economics should be “a means to make possible the healing and development of persons, societies and the earth. Such an economy translates agape into practice” (WCC

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2005, p. 7). To attribute saving powers to free markets is to commit idolatry, in the eyes of the Council; “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Mathew 6: 24). Markets need to be embedded in social obligations and communities to fulfill their functions (WCC 2005, p. 12). The WCC’s critical analysis of trade, food production (or food sovereignty), and finance has already been presented in Chapter 7. The WCC lists the struggles of Indigenous Peoples to maintain their ways of life (see further below), and real efforts toward corporate social responsibility that involve profit sharing as concrete examples of AGAPE. Chapter 5 of the WCC report (2005) also points toward the successful resistance of the people in Cochabamba, Bolivia against water privatization, the Brazilian Network for Solidarity Socio-Economy, women’s struggles for equal relationships, the African tradition of ubuntu (see below), the Christian economy of communion in the Focolare Movement, and Islamic finance as already existing examples for an economy of life. The last two examples highlight some of the tensions that will come to the fore when moving toward the economy of life. While the practice of Islamic finance may tame financial markets, it is tied to patriarchal and homophobic state projects and therefore deeply problematic (see Chapters 6 and 7). According to progressive Muslims, there needs to be a recognition that the interpretation of the Islamic tradition cannot be left to the fundamentalists alone. There is a need to revive more progressive approaches that maintain the authenticity of the Islamic tradition but reject exploitative and patriarchal interpretations (Duderija 2013; Hendrich 2018). A similar issue exists with the Focolare Movement, which is grounded in the Catholic Church whose record on progressiveness is extremely ambivalent as explained in Chapter 6. One of the examples the WCC gives of an economy of life filled with AGAPE is the shared table in the form of the Eucharist. Here “the early Christian community is depicted as a community sustained by love and life-nourishing relationship with God and with one another, a community sharing the necessities of life, exchanging stories of empowerment and hope” (WCC 2005, p. 15). How this works in practice has been dramatically and beautifully showcased by the Anti-Capitalist Muslims from Turkey. They came to public prominence when they organized Yeryüzü Sofralari (earth tables)—long tables on the ground in Istiklal Street in Istanbul to break the fast during Ramadan in an open and inclusive way during the Gezi Park protests in 2013. They broke the hegemony of the AK Party by highlighting that not all Muslims are in agreement

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with the government. Since then they have been organizing these “earth tables” every year, but with increasing difficulty. One of the intellectuals involved in the decentralized network is Ihsan Eliaçık, who said on his release that “we will never obey the Palace. We will never sit on the table of the tyrant. We will continue the tradition of earth tables, which started ˙ with Prophet Ibrahim, despite all pressures and preventions. Our path is the path of all revolutionary Prophets” (Bianet 2019). The network is part of the “Left Islam” that has emerged in criticism of the pro-capitalistic and corrupt AK Party government and its business network. Their critique of the AK Party is more impactful, so much so that Erdogan himself felt compelled to defend his credentials as an anti-capitalist Muslim and pointed to his critique of high interest rates as proof (Koca 2018, p. 148). In their manifesto, the activists declared that humanity is frustrated because it is rolling into an abyss due to capitalism, a system which is against God, humanity, nature, the poor, and the hungry. In their opinion, one cannot worship the market, property, and capitalism and worship God at the same time; rather, one needs to choose. They are also opposed to imperialism because it is unacceptable that “capitalism kills, rapes or exiles millions of people, in order to find new materials and new markets” (as translated by Koca 2018, p. 142). They are convinced that only labor, not capital, produces value, and that being religious means that one is on the side of the weak. Their goal is a revolution: “Anticapitalist Muslims call all people to a revolutionary struggle for a life devoid of luxurious consumption, which is very simple, humble, and sharing; and to a struggle against injustice shared by all prophets, to achieve a virtuous society and virtuous people” (as translated by Koca 2018, p. 143). Their main slogan is “God, bread, and freedom.” In their view, property belongs to God and therefore needs to be shared. Ali Shari’ti was one of the key influences on Eliaçık’s reading of the Koran which in his reading is an anti-capitalist text that condemns unjust accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few and calls for its redistribution (Eliaçık 2015). Similar interpretations of Islam in this more progressive direction have been formulated by other Islamic activists (for an overview, see Hendrich 2018; for Turkey, see Madi-Sisman 2017).

Liberation Theology The anti-capitalist Muslims are an example of liberationist Islam. There has been a similar form of Christianity in the form of liberation theology

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on the Latin American continent since the 1950s. This development has to be seen as “world historical,” according to Löwy (1996) because an important part of the Church supported the poor and their fight for a better world (p. 5). The counter-revolution in the Catholic Church under the Polish Pope John Paul II (1978–2005) greatly diminished the influence of liberation theology, as he rejected the movement and systematically installed reactionary bishops and priests (Kirk 1985, p. 43; Löwy 1996, p. 131). He even tried to reverse some of the more anticapitalist traditions within the Catholic Church (Tu˘gal 2016b). Liberation theology survived the onslaught, as Bertrand Aristide, the Zapatistas, and the Indigenous uprising in Ecuador in 1994 demonstrate, to name some examples cited in Löwy’s (1996) conclusion. The presidency of Lula in Brazil and the so-called pink tide were more recent expressions (Fortes 2009). There are signs that the recently elected Pope Francis is less hostile to liberation theology (Duncan 2014), and so it is important to understand at least some of its arguments, which are even more relevant today than in the 1960s. Liberation theology was not a coherent movement with a clear program, but it presented a critique of an unjust economic and political system in Latin American countries as well as a critique of the global political economy and raised hope that this could be changed. It was always a minority group within the Latin American Catholic Church, but was very influential (Löwy 1996, p. 38). Gutierrez, one of the main authors of liberation theology, developed the idea that redemption and the Kingdom of God need to be realized by believers as a part of their spiritual journey, rather than waiting for salvation in the afterlife (Gutierrez 1973). He pointed toward the story of the Exodus (of the Jews out of Egypt), which in his view demonstrates that humans can change their life circumstances. Theology and spirituality are about liberation and freedom. The poor are no longer objects of charitable giving but are agents of their own emancipation. For Latin America, this means concretely that “only a radical destruction of the present state of things, a profound transformation of the ownership system, the coming to power of the exploited class, a social revolution will put an end to this dependency, they alone will allow a transition to a socialist society, or at least will make it possible” (Gutierrez as cited in Löwy 1996, p. 46). The key point of liberation theology is the idea of a “preferential option for the poor,” which is a mainstay of Catholic social teaching but radicalized by liberation theology. As explained by another important

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author, Franz Hinkelammert (2013), the option for the poor is concerned with freedom: “From liberation theologians’ point of view, human beings cannot liberate themselves without a mutual acknowledgment between subjects. Therefore, the poor person as a subject, who is within a relationship of recognition, is the place in which it is decided whether his recognition is effective or not” (p. 26). Conversely, if there is no mutual recognition then human beings live in a relationship that is not filled with God’s presence: “The existence of the poor attests to the existence of a Godless society” (Hinkelammert 2013, p. 27). This is a very different understanding of poverty than the approach to charity by market religions outlined in Chapter 4. Central to the success of liberation theology was its organization in base communities, which allowed it to mobilize and radicalize a large number of people, many of whom were women. The base communities organized for housing, electricity, access to water, sewerage systems, and were involved in struggles over land. In Brazil, they created the Movement against the High Cost of Living, the Movement against Unemployment, the Movement for Public Transportation, and the Landless Peasant Movement, to name just a few (Löwy 1996, p. 49). Liberation theology has radicalized the critique of capitalism that had been a tradition within the Catholic Church (Tugal 2016b; Bell 2001, pp. 45–50) in that it combined moral criticism with Marxism and its theory of exploitation, focused on social justice and not on charity, opposed patriarchy, and developed specific ideas about a socialized economy (Löwy 1996, p. 55). In concrete terms, liberation theology called for the abolition of capitalism because it is a “false religion”—it idolizes money or the market and thus violates some of the key commandments of the Christian faith (Löwy 1996, p. 57). No wonder that the Pope from Poland who was raised under communism and became Pope in 1978 was radically opposed to liberation theology and the regimes it inspired, such as the Sandinistas in Nicaragua (Kirk 1985). He orchestrated the counterinsurgency against it by building on the example of the Chilean Bishops and their support for the Pinochet military dictatorship in the 1970s (Hinkelammert 2013, pp. 28–32). The Catholic Church turned extremely reactionary with John Paul II and his immediate successor and helped cement the counterinsurgency of capital in Latin America. It was also instrumental in the fight against the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland, and ultimately in the transformation toward capitalist democracy after 1989. The latter needs

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of course to be celebrated, but one is left to wonder what would have happened if the religious opposition to the communist regimes had been orchestrated by a liberation theology Pope. Instead, the Catholic Church was instrumental in bolstering neoliberal patriarchal globalization (see Chapter 6 for the case of Ireland).

Occupy Pentecostal Style, Alternative Forms of Productions and Communal Living Arrangements Another example of a religious movement that challenges capitalist property relations are the Pentecostal squatters in Venezuela who occupy houses, as they see this as a part of how to create “Christian territories” on the ground, and claim that the seized property was given to them by God (Sánchez 2008, p. 270). These Pentecostal squatters not only occupy empty buildings but do not shy away from taking property outright from owners making no use of their space (Sánchez 2008, p. 275). Another method of occupying spaces is to hold processions through the neighborhood accompanied by prayer to reestablish a street as a “Christian territory.” In Venezuela, this practice is referred to as invasiones or tomas, according to Sánchez (2008, p. 273), a Christian version of “Occupy.” Other Christians developed new form of monasteries or local communities living together to recreate a Christian territory in their space. There are even secular analogies to monastic communities that have come together in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (thefec.org). One example of such a community in the Protestant context is the Rutba House in Durham, North Carolina, founded by the Christian Peacemaker Team after their return from Iraq. It is a group of people living and working together in a house and developing new forms of living together. Despite their small size (there are only five permanent members), their reach is broader due to their activism. For instance, by organizing a workshop on the new monasticism (Rutba House 2005) they have put the study of these movements on the map. In their view, monasteries were founded throughout history to escape and seek alternatives to empire. They write in their introduction (p. ix): “In an age when Christian America is the ‘last remaining superpower’ in an all-out ‘war on terror,’ we’ve begun to think that once again it is time for a new monasticism.” There are many other examples of similar communities that they

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cite as role models: these include the Bruderhof, the Catholic Worker tradition, the Christian Development Association, the Renovare movement, the Ekklesia Project, the Shalom Mission Network, the Atlantic Life Community, and Antioch Communities. There is also a whole “new monasticism” within the Catholic Church that emerged after the Second Vatican Council (Palmisano 2013). As Juliet Schor (2010) points out, it is time to reconsider more radically what is really needed in terms of economic production. Her book shows many secular examples for how to live well while living with less— in this way, turning declining wages and increasing debt levels into a more positive form of living that may allow a more healthy form of survival as climate change will require tremendous adjustment in lifestyles, especially in the North. Connolly (2008, p. 101) speaks to this when he points out that eco-egalitarian capitalism requires a completely new ethos of economic life that will have to create new consumption and living patterns markedly different from the current ones. One of his proposals is to establish a maximum income, in order to prevent economic inequality (Connolly 2008, p. 108). Such a reform would need the realization that salaries are not necessarily a reflection of competition and merit but of power and influence. Communities such as the Rutba House or the new monasticism within the Catholic Church show that there are already alternatives on the ground within religious activism that use different models for communal living. Cooperatives are one form of alternative economic organization of production. They are more prominent than can be gleaned from economic textbooks, employing 20% more people worldwide than TNCs (International Co-Operative Alliance 2006, p. 7). Many came out of Catholic social teaching that sought to develop a more ethical form of capitalism. Mondragon from Spain, founded by a Catholic priest in the 1950s, is one of the worker-owned conglomerates of enterprises often mentioned in this context. Each of the individual 257 firms is owned by its members; there are no unions, but instead social councils and decisions about the firm are voted upon in a general assembly. There is a general assembly of all the member firms where collective decisions are made. Salaries for managers are limited to nine times that of the lowest paid member (as opposed to the average of 331:1 in the United States). Members have guaranteed employment and adjustment during downturns is decided communally (Kasmir 2016; Gibson-Graham 2006, Chapter 5).

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At the level of the household, the most important question concerns how to raise the next generation and how to care for each other. Economic democracy in this context does not yet exist. A starting point here is to understand that all religious traditions have liberationist thinking concerning the sexual contract. Scholars from within the Islamic tradition have recently applied traditional hermeneutical approaches to the sacred texts and established the compatibility of homosexuality with being a Muslim. Much like the Islamic feminists discussed in Chapter 6, these interpretations argue that there is a need to recognize that any interpretation of the Islamic tradition is based on the current level of understanding and lived experience, and that therefore even though the Qur’an as a book will never change, its interpretation will (Kugle 2016; Duderija 2017). There is therefore a recognition among progressive Muslims that the Islamic tradition does not really outlaw same-sex relations and that the Islamic tradition in reality is one of mercy and forgiveness (Khorchide 2019; Esack 1997). With regard to Hinduism the same point has been made by Anantanand Rambachan (2006) and for Buddhism by Tavivat Puntarigvivat (1998). But what is also needed is a clear recognition that humans need other humans to take care of them when they are too little, too sick, or too old to look after themselves, and this care work needs to be recognized as such and distributed equally and democratically.

Capitalism and Ecology Modernity and capitalism have led to a disaster in the form of the climate emergency, which is about to destroy the basic foundations for most life on the planet. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IIPCC) has accumulated enough evidence to show that global warming over 1.5°C will be extremely devastating for food production and survival. In addition, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services has shown that there are an unprecedented one million species at risk of extinction (Badré 2019). Time is running out. As activist Greta Thunberg has put it: “I want you to panic” (Rahim 2019). Within the Islam traditions there are movements toward the idea of Eco-Islam. One early expression was Nasr (1968). But the notion of Eco-Islam is now more widespread. For example, there is the Islamic Declaration on Climate in 2015 before the Paris Climate summit that was adopted at an International Islamic Climate Change Symposium in

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Istanbul. According to the United Nations Climate Change Web site, other religious leaders prepared similar statements for the Paris meeting. Even the Catholic Church has come around to this viewpoint. The Laudato si Encyclical of the current pope, published in 2015, can be upheld as a push toward a post-capitalist era through the development of eco-solidarity (Sachs 2017). The same is true for some evangelical Christians in the United States who have accepted that global warming is real and that a serious reconsideration of their lifestyle is needed (Nicinska 2016). They have developed campaigns to that effect, asking believers “what car would Jesus drive,” and some are seriously reconsidering their way of living and consumption and seek to reduce their ecological footprints. An interesting development is the new Jewish food movement which seeks to reevaluate notions of kosher and kashrut (laws governing food consumption) in light of the crisis of agri-business, animal cruelty, and climate emergency. The idea is tikkun olam—mending, repairing the world, a notion that is gaining ground for progressive interpretations of the Jewish faith traditions in Jewish communities in North America. It has larger connotations involving also ideas of economic justice and has allowed activists to get involved in the discussion around food production, including the setting up of farming communities in North America (Diemling 2015). Marc Ellies has outlined a Jewish liberation theology, proposing to redefine Jewish identity based on solidarity and justice, which are a key part of the Jewish prophetic tradition in his view (Duchrow and Hinkelammert 2012, p. 238; Ellis 2004). Indigenous Peoples have gone much further. They are at the forefront in the struggles against what Latin Americanists have started to call extractive capitalism, in part compounded by China’s growth after joining the World Trade Organization in 2001. Extractive projects involve land grabbing, water grabbing, and resource grabbing, with extremely negative effects on the livelihood of peasants, Indigenous Peoples, and mining workers. Canadian capital is at the forefront of extractive capitalism in Latin America (Veltmeyer 2013). As a result, many Indigenous Peoples perceive a deep antagonism between their way of life and capitalism. They have therefore participated in the WSF process and proposed more radical alternatives to capitalist globalization. Specifically, the WSF in Belem in 2009 brought together Indigenous Peoples and the global justice movement. At that forum, the Indigenous delegates passed their own declaration (Indigenous Peoples 2009). This declaration first describes the destructive process of capitalist imperialism, racism, genocide, and

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militarism that now “leads us to planetary suicide” (para 1). The declaration identifies an ecological crisis, a climate crisis, an economic crisis, which together create “an authentic crisis of civilization.” What is needed is a new paradigm of how nature, society, democracy, state, and consumption can coexist. “The Native Indigenous Peoples practice and propose unity between Mother Earth, society and culture. Nurturing Mother Earth and to be nurtured by her” (para 4). This includes saying no to the commodification of water; saying yes to community self-government; multinational states that realize the self-determination of the peoples; a recognition of diversity and different spiritualities; the establishment of collective decision-making procedures regarding production, markets, and economy; a recognition of diversity when it comes to sciences and technology; and the recognition of reciprocity when it comes to the distribution of work, products, and services. The aim is: “from all of the aforementioned to produce a new social and ethical alternative to that of the colonial and capitalist profit-making market” (para 4). The declaration concludes: We belong to Mother Earth. We are not her owners, plunderers nor are we her vendors and today we arrive at a crossroads: imperialist capitalism has shown to be dangerous not only due to its domination, exploitation and structural violence but also because it kills Mother Earth and leads us to the planetary suicide, which is neither “useful” nor “necessary.” (Indigenous Peoples 2009, para 5)

This led to Eva Morales, the first Indigenous president of Bolivia, supporting the protesters outside the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. He then organized a World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba in 2010. The resolution from this meeting also emphasized the need to recognize that Mother Earth is not merely a source for raw materials, human beings are not just consumers, and people are valuable for what they are and not based on what they own. Humanity confronts a great dilemma: to continue on the path of capitalism, depredation, and death, or to choose the path of harmony with nature and respect for life. It is imperative that we forge a new system that restores harmony with nature and among human beings. And in order for there to be balance with nature, there must first be equity among human beings. (cited in Löwy 2015, p. 70)

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The declaration concludes with the promotion of buen vivir—living well. Buen vivir means “living together with sufficiency or comfortably” where the goal is that all members are well in a material, social, and spiritual sense, but this should not come at the expense of others or of earth (Duchrow and Hinkelammert 2012, p. 199). It stands in marked contrast to “the capitalist cult of growth expansion” and “development,” accompanied by the consumer obsession of “always more,” and it seeks to ensure the fulfillment of real social needs and to respect Mother Earth— Pacha Mama in Ahmara and Quechua (Löwy 2015, p. 71). In Ecuador and Bolivia, this has led to a constitutional form of environmentalism where nature is given legal standing in order to protect it from the “fundamentalism of the market,” as one proponent expressed it (cited in Scauso 2016, p. 272). Latin Americans are not alone in proposing a more community-centered economic organization (Gudynas 2011). Similar ideas have been proposed in South Africa based on the concept of ubuntu—which is based on the notion that individuals need community and communities need individuals, an idea that in Chinese has been described as sangsaeng (Duchrow and Hinkelammert 2012, p. 198). The Mi’kmaq culture in Eastern Canada has developed a form of resource stewardship and self-governance based on what they call netukulimk (Prosper et al. 2011). These reflect notions of community-centered development and post-growth thinking that Thomson (2011) compared to the degrowth movement.

Conclusion Friedman’s (1970) idea that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” the key mantra of the neoliberal revolution, can no longer be upheld in the face of climate emergency and biodiversity destruction, and their social costs in the form of hunger, unemployment, homelessness, drug addictions, and other health crisis. It is no longer acceptable to an ever-increasing number of people that the economic system does not deliver food security, housing security, job security, and health for a large majority and is now undermining the very basis of life within our lifespan (Bendell 2018). A transformation can come about if a significant fraction of capital, in addition to a majority of the population, accepts this insight and starts to act on it. As the history of the New Deal has shown, where a significant section of business together with the Progressive Churches and a majority of the electorate allied against the

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banks, change is possible (see Chapter 2), but it needs ideas, organizations, and material capabilities (Cox 1981). Hopefully, the slogan “Green New Deal” is a turning point in this direction, given that until now progressives simply did not have any good alternatives on offer that could be summarized succinctly.

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Moghadam, V. M. (2002). Violence, terrorism and fundamentalism: Some feminist observations. Global Dialogue, 4(2), 66–76. Moghadam, V. M. (2009). Confronting “empire”: The new imperialism, Islamism, and feminism. In D. E. Davis & J. Go (Eds.), Political power and social theory (Vol. 20, pp. 201–226). Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing. Nasr, V. (2010). Meccanomics. London: Oneworld Publications. Nasr, S. H. (1968). Man and nature: The spiritual crisis of modern man. Chicago: Kazi Publications. Nicinska, J. (2016). Greed and climate change: Confronting economic globalization in the U.S. religious environmental movement. In S. Dreher & P. J. Smith (Eds.), Religious activism in the global economy: Promoting, reforming, or resisting neoliberal globalization? (pp. 229–249). London: Rowman & Littlefield. Noor, F. A. (2010). On the permanent Hajj: The Tablighi Jama’at in South East Asia. South East Asia Research, 18(4), 707–734. Osborn, A. (2015, July 2). Islamic State looting Syrian, Iraqi sites on industrial scale. Reuters. https://uk.reuters.com. Accessed on June 18, 2019. Palmisano, S. (2013). The paradoxes of new monasticism in the consumer society. In F. Gautheri & T. Martikainen (Eds.), Religion in consumer society: Brands, consumers and markets (pp. 75–91). London: Ashgate. Pettifor, A. (2018). The production of money: How to break the power of bankers. London: Verso. Portes, A., Guarnizo, L. E., & Landolt, P. (1999). The study of transnationalism: Pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22(2), 217–237. Prosper, K., McMillan, L. J., Davis, A. A., & Moffitt, M. (2011). Returning to Netukulimk: Mi’kmaq cultural and spiritual connections with resource stewardship and self-governance. The International Indigenous Policy Journal, 2(4), 7. Puntarigvivat, T. (1998). Toward a Buddhist social ethics: The case of Thailand. CrossCurrents, 48(3), 347–365. Rahim, Z. (2019, April 16). Greta Thunberg: Teen activist tells EU “to panic” over climate change. The Independent. https://www.independent. co.uk. Accessed on June 18, 2019. Rambachan, A. (2006). The Advaita worldview: God, world, and humanity. New York: Suny Press. Rethel, L. (2019). Corporate Islam, global capitalism and the performance of economic moralities. New Political Economy, 24(3), 350–364. Rosenberg, J. (1994). The empire of civil society: A critique of the realist theory of international relations. London: Verso. Rudnyckyj, D. (2013). From Wall Street to Halal Street: Malaysia and the globalization of Islamic finance. The Journal of Asian Studies, 72(4), 831–848.

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CHAPTER 9

Beyond Neoliberal Theocracy?

International political economy typically analyzes the role of hegemonic powers, competition among states over resources and markets, how this conflict is shaped by internal power struggles, and how states sometimes cooperate and create international institutions or global governance arrangements (which include civil society and corporations as actors). This more state-centric IPE needs to be complemented by considering household production and the related gendered (and racialized) arrangements—as a part of the hierarchy involved in the production of goods and services—as well as migrants and their transnational social spaces. Interpretivist and neo-Gramscian IPE advance the proposition that ideas, institutions, and power arrangements mutate over time due to shifting alliances and activism (Ruggie 1982; Cox 1987; Lynch 2013). The most recent major change was from a more state interventionist period (1930– 1971) toward the neoliberal globalization project (1971–?). In the future, IPE will have to devote more time to the climate emergency which calls for a radical restructuring of the current economic system (Bendell 2018). Today, neoliberalism seems to have evolved into a theocracy—rule of the market at all costs but imposed via authoritarian means. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, theocracy is a “form of government in which God (or a deity) is recognized as the king or immediate ruler, and his laws are taken as the statute-book of the kingdom, these laws being usually administered by a priestly order as his ministers and agents.” © The Author(s) 2020 S. Dreher, Religions in International Political Economy, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41472-6_9

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Neoliberalism has become something of a theocracy, with the market as deity and CEOs and economists as the high priests who cannot be criticized. In the process, states are going to be dramatically transformed with Erdogan in Turkey proposing to roll back many of Atatürk’s reforms by using the privatization reforms advocated by the IMF to amass economic power. Brexit and Trump also signal a state transformation that will fundamentally roll back the interventionist state capacities for good as signaled by the debate around the privatization of health care in the UK and the challenge to federal power that is looming in the Supreme Court in the United States (see Chapter 3). This highlights the degree to which the new authoritarianism is also in many ways a continuation of neoliberalism (Hendrikse and Fernandez 2019; Harrington 2019; Hendrikse 2018). Yet, one needs to ask to what degree the transformation process has entered a new stage and new conceptualizations are needed. There are however also signs that politics is changing in a more progressive direction. Even capitalists are coming to realize that inequality went too far, and that capitalism is broken. Already in 1997, George Soros, the hedge fund investor who single-handedly forced the British government to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, argued that capitalism is now the central enemy of an open society. Charles Moore (2011), Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer, concluded that the left’s analysis of the free market system is actually true: the wealthy manipulate democracy through the press, and ask for state bailouts in times of crisis; Moore portrayed the Euro as being maintained at the expense of workers and highlighted how bankers were spared painful adjustments while everyone else experienced lower wages and fewer public services. Free market arguments, in his view, are now merely used to silence critics. A similar analysis came from Warren Buffet, who openly speculated about a class war of the rich against the poor, with the rich about to win (Stein 2006). The “high priests” of the International Monetary Fund admitted that the costs of neoliberal policies, such as the increase in inequality, are now higher than its benefits (Ostry et al. 2016). More dramatically, Ray Dalio (2019), manager of one of the world’s bigger hedge fund, warned that there is a national emergency in that capitalism is no longer producing enough opportunities for most Americans and that this inequality will spark conflict. Thus, there is a growing chorus, not only from the global social justice movement (Ayres 2004), calling to undo some of the damage of neoliberal globalization. The business class in the United States shows signs of a split,

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one precondition for change (Shipman et al. 2018). Enter the proposition for a (Green) New Deal in the United States (see Chapter 8), which has the potential to develop into a rallying cry if enough people mobilize to that effect. This is backed by a resurgence of new economic policy ideas from the left in Britain and the United States, according to Guinan and O’Neill (2019), an agenda that has been increasingly consolidated over the last twenty years (Wong 2019; Raworth 2017). Hopefully it will not take a major catastrophe such as a war or a general civilizational breakdown—the way inequality was reduced historically, according to Kuran (2017)—to remedy the situation. As this book has shown, if IPE does not take into account that roughly 80% of the world population are influenced by religious beliefs then many of the issues raised above will be left unaccounted for. Taking religion into consideration makes it possible to account for the shift toward neoliberalism, and its staying power but also its contestation. The ultimate insight of the book is that religious activism is to be found on both sides of the divide, and that the dichotomy of secular versus religious activism is not really useful for an understanding of the history, development, and contestation of neoliberal globalization. The book proposed instead to distinguish between fundamentalist or right-wing, reformist, and progressive forms of religion in relationship to the neoliberal globalization project. This point of view is in direct contrast with those approaches that present religions as world religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity. A world religion is characterized by the fact that it proposes a “universal message, a doctrine of salvation that is sufficiently transparent to be potentially available to adherents in a variety of cultural contexts”; furthermore, a world religion needs to have scriptures and institutions (Fitzgerald 1990, p. 104). Most instruction of religion follows this model today. However, this understanding of religion first of all privileges certain kinds of religions without any clear justification (for instance, many lists do not include Indigenous forms of spirituality), and it furthermore assumes that “there is literally some essential entity, with a definable identity, which exists simultaneously in several different societies” (Fitzgerald 1990, p. 109). However, Catholicism in Latin America in the form of liberation theology was very different from the Catholicism in Poland in the 1970s, as Chapter 8 highlighted. The problem, according to Fitzgerald (p. 110), is that the world religion approach does not study how a “religion” relates to a society or how it is embedded in the power configuration but tries to describe the religion as

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disembedded from the societies and cultures that practice it. Thus, statements like “Islam is a religion of peace” or its opposite do not make much sense if one does not look at the social, political, and economic conditions under which certain groups of Muslims create a progressive and peaceful variety of Islam (see also Moore 2007). For this reason, Chapter 2 developed a conceptualization of religion as a concept of control or ideology among elites and counter-elites that use neoliberalism and religious frames to challenge entrenched patronage networks. More precisely, the crisis of the interventionist regime in the 1970s led to the abandonment of this project by business elites in the United States, who started to support the shift toward neoliberalism, while at the same time there was a resurgence and transformation of the Christian right. This elite transformation enabled the election victory of Ronald Reagan and inaugurated a process of neoliberal restructuring in the United States and across the globe via IMF structural adjustment programs (see Chapter 3). The religious right was instrumental in the election victory of all Republican presidents since and has fundamentally altered the party itself. The Republican Party has become more extremist and totalitarian as a result. Foreign policy has changed and has become more “muscular” and Islamophobic. Not even the 2008 financial crisis has been able to dislodge austerity and other key elements of the neoliberal agenda from its hold on policymaking. Even Trump, ostensibly elected in opposition to the neoliberal globalization project, has pushed through key demands such as tax cuts for the wealthy and the deregulation of financial services. We also see the emergence of counter-hegemonic elite forces using religious nationalism and neoliberalism to dislodge entrenched secular national statist interventionist regimes elsewhere. This has been discussed for Muslim-majority countries where the paradigmatic case was Turkey (while the religious challenge was brutally beaten back in Egypt and Algeria), in India through the Hindutva movement, and in Latin America through the diffusion of evangelical and Pentecostal movements that have reduced the dominance of Catholicism from 90 to 69% (see Chapters 4 and 5). This has, for example, brought Bolsonaro to power in Brazil with the support of the evangelical right. Globally, the impact of the religious right as a political force has resulted in serious contestation of the further extension of women’s rights and the LGBTQ+ agenda amidst increasing racism (see Chapter 6). Yet radical and conservative political Islam is contested by Islamic feminists and progressive Muslims.

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In the Arab world, there has been an increase of the proportion of people who define as non-religious between 2013 and 2019. For example, that percentage increased in Tunisia from roughly 15% to over 30% and in Yemen from 5% to roughly 12%. Unfortunately, the same survey showed that patriarchy remains entrenched in the region (BBC 2019). In Ireland, the Catholic power grab under which abortion was outlawed in 1983 was finally pushed back in 2018. Within the United States itself, religious fundamentalism is contested from within the Christian religious tradition by more progressive forces such as the Poor Peoples’ Movement, organized by the Reverend William Barber, which follows in Martin Luther King’s footsteps. Progressive religious activists are slowly understanding that they cannot ignore questions of social justice while union leaders realize that faith communities are important. One concrete example is the Service Employees International Union’s campaign for $15 minimum wage in the Seattle-Tacoma area, which was successful because the union also reached out to religious communities, who broadened the campaign to turn it into a discussion about the moral foundation of the economy (Rosenblum 2017). Religious activists alongside the global social justice movement have developed fair trade initiatives, proposed debt reduction and cancellation, protested against Wall Street corruption alongside the Occupy movement, supported migrants through the sanctuary movement, and held multinational firms accountable through investor activism (Chapter 7). This picture is complemented by a revival of monasticism trying to develop new forms of communal living, the new Jewish food movement, and the ongoing success of cooperatives from a religious background, such as Mondragon. Liberation theology with its radical critique of the market, Indigenous forms of thinking (buen vivir) and ubuntu have come from the Latin American and the African continent to provide an alternative to the individualist emphasis on economic growth that comes with the neoliberal agenda (Chapter 8). It is to be hoped that these more progressive forms can be strengthened if humanity seeks to honestly approach the climate emergency in a way that will safeguard the rights of coming generations to biodiversity, food security, and safety from extreme weather events. In addition, we need solutions to the jobs crisis that the fourth industrial revolution will bring, which will reduce available work, even for high-skilled professionals; it is unclear how to deal with the crisis of masculinity due to the revolution in household composition and the sexual division of

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labor; lastly, and most importantly, the current extreme form of inequality due to corrupt elites is leading to middle-class eruptions in one country after another. Religious activism can provide employment, ontological security, and projects (e.g., religious holidays or festivals that can be celebrated) and be a part of the solution. However, this can happen only if religious pluralism is accepted by all adherents—which implies that conservative and fundamentalist interpretations are extremely problematic, as they make all-encompassing truth claims. There needs to be a recognition that religious activists who enter the public sphere cannot hide behind blasphemy charges, the sanctity of religion, or freedom of religion. Progressive religious activists and their critical analysis of the conservative or fundamentalist interpretation will be one of the more important interventions in the future. This debate needs to be on the agenda when teaching and researching religious activism to increase religious literacy that creates a more nuanced understanding of religious traditions and their internal diversity as Moore (2007) has outlined.

References Ayres, J. M. (2004). Framing collective action against neoliberalism: The case of the anti-globalization movement. Journal of World-Systems Research, 10(1), 11–34. BBC. (2019, June 24). The Arab world in seven charts: Are Arabs turning their backs on religion? BBC News. https://www.bbc.com. Accessed on June 24, 2019. Bendell, J. (2018). Deep adaptation: A map for navigating climate Tragedy. IFLAS Occasional Paper 2. http://www.iflas.info. Cox, P. (1987). Power and world order: Social forces in the making of history. New York: Columbia University Press. Dalio, R. (2019, April 5). Why and how capitalism needs to be reformed. Economic Principles. http://economicprinciples.org. Accessed on May 29, 2019. Fitzgerald, T. (1990). Hinduism and the ‘world religion’ fallacy. Religion, 20(2), 101–118. Guinan, J., & O’Neill, M. (2019). From community wealth building to system change: Local roots for economic transformation. IPPR Progressive Review, Spring. https://www.academia.edu. Accessed on June 25, 2019. Harrington, B. (2019, February 19). “Aristocrats are anarchists”: Why the wealthy back Trump and Brexit. The Guardian. https://www.guardian.com. Accessed on May 30, 2019.

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Hendrikse, R. (2018). Neo-Illiberalism. Geoforum, 95, 169–172. Hendrikse, R., & Fernandez, R. (2019). Offshore finance: How capital rules the world. In Transnational Institute (Ed.), State of power 2019: Finance (pp. 24– 36). https://www.tni.org. Accessed on May 30, 2019. Kuran, T. (2017). What kills inequality: Redistribution’s violent history. Foreign Affairs, 96, 151. Lynch, C. (2013). Interpreting international politics. London: Routledge. Moore, C. (2011, July 22). I am starting to think that the Left might actually be right. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk. Accessed on May 29, 2019. Moore, D. (2007). Overcoming religious illiteracy: A cultural studies approach to the study of religion in secondary education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ostry, J. L., Loungani, P., & Furceri, D. (2016). Neoliberalism: Oversold. Finance and Development, 53(2), 38–41. Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st-century economist. Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing. Rosenblum, J. (2017). Beyond $15: Immigrant workers, faith activists, and the revival of the labor movement. Boston: Beacon Press. Ruggie, J. G. (1982). International regimes, transactions, and change: Embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order. International Organization, 36(2), 379–415. Shipman, A., Turner, B., & Edmunds, J. (2018). The new power elite: Inequality, politics and greed. London: Anthem Press. Soros, G. (1997). The capitalist threat. Atlantic Monthly, 279(2), 45–55. Stein, B. (2006, November 26). In class warfare, guess which class is winning. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com. Accessed on May 29, 2019. Wong, F. (2019, June 19). New rules new politics: How a revolution in economics has led to a new kind of politics. Boston Review. https://www. boston.review.net.

Index

A Afary, Janet, 78, 138, 142, 144 Afghanistan, 6, 66, 108, 158, 185 Africa. See Nigeria; Occult economies; Pentecostalism; Tanzania; Ubuntu; Uganda Agamben, Giorgio, 31 Ahmad, Aisha, 38, 185, 186 Algeria, 23, 38, 108, 212 Ali Shari’ti, 193 Alternative Globalization Addressing People and Earth (AGAPE), 160, 163, 192 Anarchy, 54 Asian Infrastructure Bank, 104 Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), 139, 141 Atatürk, 25 Austerity, 1, 3, 5, 31, 41, 111, 132, 136, 157, 164, 165, 167, 212 Authenticity, 78, 142, 192 B Banana republic, 164

Bangladesh, 101, 189 Barber, William, 68, 138, 213 Biblical literalism, 57, 65 Bilateral investment treaties, 28 Biodiversity, 185, 198, 201, 213 Bloch, Ernst, 183 Blowback, 67 Bolsonaro, Jair, 117, 120, 212 Brazil, 5, 11, 83, 90, 94, 115–117, 140, 157, 163, 194, 195, 212 Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS), 104 Brenner, Robert, 30, 106 Bretton Woods system, 8, 22, 23, 26, 42, 103, 155, 167 Brexit, 5, 210 British colonialism, 111, 131 Buddhism commercial Buddhism, 10 four noble truths, 12, 34 Occupy Wall Street, 157 Soka Gakkai, 191 Buen vivir, 201 Buffet, Warren, 36, 210

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 S. Dreher, Religions in International Political Economy, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41472-6

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INDEX

C Canada, 30, 137, 172, 183, 201 Capital controls, 22, 23, 103, 167 Capital flight, 22, 155, 167, 168 Capitalism authoritarian capitalism, 106, 111, 120 capitalist patriarchy, 136 extractive capitalism, 199 liberal democratic capitalism, 155 neoliberal capitalism, 31, 32, 35, 39, 42, 87, 155, 174, 186 state capitalism, 110, 111, 121 See also Social democracy; Social question; State Care work, 11, 130, 132, 133, 136, 198 Casanova, José, 14, 19, 32, 33 Catholic Church base community, 195 catholic social teaching, 195, 197 El Shaddai, 84 gender ideology, 141 Laudato si Encyclica, 199 money laundering, 137 new monasticism, 197 Pope Francis, 140, 194 Pope John Paul II, 194 See also Liberation theology; Sexual abuse Catholicism, 39, 211, 212 Charity, 76, 80, 91, 93, 188, 195 China Belt and Road Initiative, 104, 105 commodity super-cycle, 161 Falun Gong, 90, 189 Folk religions, 90, 189 Friedrich List, 104 monetary order, 184 Pentecostalism, 189 China, Asian Infrastructure Bank, 104 Christian Aid, 169

Christianity. See Catholic Church; Christian Right; Evangelicalism; Liberation theology; Monasticism; Pentecostalism; Prosperity gospel; Religious feminism Christian nation, 61 Christian Right, 34, 35, 41, 52, 56, 57, 61, 62, 64–69, 78, 79, 91, 139, 186, 212 Citizenship, 26, 140, 158, 159 Clash of civilization, 64, 66 Class warfare, 36, 210 spiritual warfare, 186 Climate change, 12, 69, 117, 197, 200. See also Climate emergency Climate emergency, 4, 198, 199, 201, 209, 213 Colonization, 22, 54, 104, 143, 183, 189 Columbia, 116 Commodity super-cycle, 161 Conditionality, 170 Congo-Zaire, 85, 168 Connolly, William, 54, 56, 64, 66, 68, 69, 186, 197 Constructivism. See Critical interpretivism Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 130, 134, 135, 147 Cooperatives, 39, 104, 184, 197, 213 Corporate power, 8 Corporate social responsibility, 172, 192 Corruption, 81, 105, 106, 213 Cosmopolitanism, 159 Coulthard, Glen, 183 Cox, Robert, 21, 37, 51, 53, 59, 133, 202 Crisis of democracy, 26, 61, 173 Critical interpretivism, 40

INDEX

Critical political economy, 11, 53 Critical theory of religion, 40 Cuba, 187 cultural studies, 2, 13, 40, 41 D Dalio, Ray, 210 Debt bondage, 169 Debt crisis, 1, 2, 27, 42, 102, 104, 161, 165, 168–170 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 183 Decolonization, 103, 107, 117 Democratic deficit, 156 Desai, Radhika, 10, 101, 104, 105 Duderija, Adis, 146, 192, 198 E Ebadi, Shirin, 143 Eco-Islam, 198 Ecology, 198 Economic democracy, 182, 184, 185, 198 Economies, spiritual, 81, 87, 93, 186 Economy of death, 182, 185 Economy of life, 160, 163, 169, 182, 184, 191, 192 Egypt, 67, 80, 91, 108, 141, 143, 194, 212 Eisenhower, Dwight, 61, 64, 68 Eisenstein, Hester, 132 ˙ Eliaçık, Ihsan, 193 Elite counter-elites, 9, 13, 25, 28, 37, 38, 63, 75, 94, 101, 102, 107, 114, 120, 129, 157, 190, 212 elite corruption, 191 elite socialization, 51, 53 globalizing elite, 42, 80, 156, 157 power elite, 4, 30, 36, 37, 63 ruling elite, 4, 147

219

See also Banana republic; Financial oligarchy Elsenhans, Hartmut, 7, 38, 106, 107 Embedded liberalism, 8, 19, 22, 24 Evangelicalism Christian Right, 57 climate emergency, 199 evangelical-capitalist resonance machine, 39, 56 free enterprise, 59 Hillsong Church, 186 Southern Baptist Convention, 62 the family, 24, 83, 116 See also Christian nation; JudeoChristian culture; Sexual abuse Everyday political economy, 11, 182 Evil, 66, 85, 158, 186 Exodus, 194 Expulsion, 158, 181 Extractive capitalism, 199

F Fair trade, 162, 163, 213 Faist, Thomas, 158, 182 Falun Gong, 90, 189, 190 Farris, Sara R., 142 Feminism feminist revolution, 26 femonationalism, 142 Gender Paradox, 83 Islamic feminists, 13, 39, 78, 121, 130, 144–147, 149, 198, 212 neoliberal feminism, 147 patriarchal bargain, 26, 148, 149 religious feminism, 143 See also Sexual contract; Social reproduction Financial oligarchy, 105, 164 Fitzgerald, Timothy, 6, 12, 31, 40, 211

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INDEX

Fixed exchange rates, 22, 26, 103 Foucault, Michel, 78, 142 Frame, 9, 13, 14, 20, 32, 36, 38, 40, 66, 101, 114, 120, 156, 162, 171, 183, 190, 212 strategic framing, 170 Françafrique, 103 Fraser, Nancy, 2, 29, 88, 148 Freedom of religion, 12, 80, 214 Friedman, Milton, 54, 75, 159, 172, 201 Fundamentalism, 7, 20, 31, 34, 36, 39, 51, 52, 57, 58, 60, 61, 65, 66, 130, 133, 136, 141, 142, 148, 213. See also Market fundamentalism; United States (US) G Gandhi, Mahatma, 88, 190 Gender binary, 130, 136 equality, 136, 141 identity, 130, 135, 141, 191 ideology, 116, 141 paradox, 83 pentecostal women’s movement, 83, 136 Genocide, 3, 21, 115, 138, 183, 199 Germany, 13, 14, 41, 55, 103, 159, 167, 188 Global care chains, 10, 132, 156, 182 Global civil society, 156, 171 Global commodity chains, 1, 160 globalizing elite, 42, 80, 157 Global Political Economy (GPE), 7–9, 23, 104, 105, 156, 182, 194 Global South, 2, 10, 19, 23, 27, 55, 82, 101, 102, 107, 132, 160, 165, 167, 191. See also Majority world God’s household, 191

Goldman Sachs, 168 Göle, Nilfüfer, 38 Gramsci, Antonio, 13, 39, 142 Great Depression, 3, 21, 59 Great Financial Crisis (GFC), 3, 29, 52, 120, 157, 163, 164, 166 Green New Deal, 4, 157, 173, 184, 202 Guatemala, 83, 115, 116 Gülen Movement, 25, 28, 35, 80, 110, 147, 188, 189 Gutierrez, Gustavo, 194 H Hadiz, Vedi R., 114 Haenni, Patrick, 35, 79, 80 Haiti, 92 Haitian slave revolution, 120 Hayden, Patrick, 158 Hayek, Friedrich von, 5, 59, 172 Hendrick, Joshua, 35, 80, 188, 189 Hinduism Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 112 corporate Hinduism, 10, 35, 94 Hindu Right, 112, 113 Hindutva, 6, 29, 88, 114, 212 Rajneesh, 88 salvation ware, 88 Hinkelammert, Franz, 191, 195, 199, 201 Hodgson, Marshall G.S., 118 Hungary, 5, 10, 81, 102, 105, 106, 109, 111, 120, 140 Huntington, Samuel, 64, 66, 119 hyper-masculinity, 185 I Ideology of order, 101, 129 Ikenberry, John, 10, 51, 53, 155 Illiberal democracy, 81, 102 Imaginary, 12, 182–184, 186

INDEX

Imperialism, 24, 29, 55, 119, 120, 193, 199 Import-substitution industrialization, 23, 38 India, 5–7, 10, 24, 28, 30, 37, 38, 88–90, 94, 111–114, 117, 118, 120, 135, 143, 189, 212 Indigenous Peoples, 115, 117, 121, 183, 184, 192, 199. See also Buen vivir; Extractive capitalism Indonesia, 81, 114, 189 Industrial revolution, 4, 12, 118, 120, 185, 191, 213 Inequality, 3, 4, 8, 20, 23, 30, 34, 37, 76, 85, 105, 115, 116, 119, 132, 134, 143, 155, 158, 160, 166, 173, 185, 191, 197, 210, 211, 214 Internationalization of the state, 53 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 1, 3, 4, 22, 28, 29, 53, 55, 75, 102, 104, 105, 108, 117, 164, 165, 168, 170, 210, 212 International Relations (IR), 6, 9, 12, 13, 32–34, 54, 158 Interpretivism. See Critical interpretivism interventionist state, 22–24, 29, 34, 36, 38, 41, 42, 57, 59, 94, 101, 111, 129, 210 Investor share activism, 172 Iran, 11, 24, 33, 38, 56, 67, 69, 78, 108, 118, 138, 140–143, 158. See also Ali Shari’ti; Foucault, Michel; Sexual economy Iraq, 9, 55, 64–67, 196 Ireland, 137, 196, 213 Islam AK Party, 80, 108–110, 193 Alevi, 109 anti-capitalist Muslims, 39, 193 eco-Islam, 198

221

female preachers, 144 halal food, 10, 82 hyper-masculinity, 185 ISIS, 185 Islamic feminism, 143, 144, 147 Islamic finance, 10, 81, 82, 105, 143, 166–168, 182, 187, 192 Islamophobia, 52, 68, 113, 189 Left Islam, 193 liberationist Islam, 194 market Islam, 7, 10, 35, 79–82, 87, 109, 147 market Islamists, 80, 105 Meccanomics, 188 Muslim Brotherhood, 108 Muslim democrat, 109 pious neoliberalism, 80, 91 political Islam, 9, 29, 38, 79, 107, 120, 212 progressive Muslims, 145, 146, 192, 198, 212 queer Muslims, 145 Salafi-Jihadism, 146 Sunni nationalism, 109 Israel, 56, 66, 69 Greater Israel Project, 111 Gush Emunim, 6, 111 Israel lobby, 65, 186

J Jubilee year, 169, 171 Judaism Jewish food movement, 199 Judeo-Christian culture, 62, 66 Occupy Judaism, 166 tikkun olam, 199 See also Religious feminism Judeo-Christian culture, 62, 66

222

INDEX

K Keynesianism, 19, 42, 51, 167. See also interventionist state Kruse, Kevin, 24, 59–63, 69 L Latin America, 3, 10, 22, 29, 39, 75, 76, 83, 94, 103, 114, 120, 149, 162, 170, 186, 194, 195, 199, 211, 212 LGBTQ+ rights. See Yogyakarta Principles Liberal order, 10, 119 Liberal tyranny, 35, 62 Liberation theology, 29, 39, 91, 162, 193–195, 199, 211, 213 List, Friedrich, 104 Löwy, Michael, 183, 194, 195, 201 Lynch, Cecelia, 4, 8, 9, 40, 209 M Majority World, 101–104, 119, 120, 158, 165 Malaysia, 144, 147, 168, 182, 188, 189 Mammon, 192 Market fundamentalism, 19, 26, 94, 173, 201 Marxism, 195 Marx, Karl, 93, 186 Masculinity. See hyper-masculinity Middle class, 3, 37, 38, 42, 76, 81–83, 87, 88, 91, 93, 110, 115, 166 Middle East, 14, 24, 28, 30, 38, 56, 67, 79, 81, 103, 131, 134, 143, 186. See also West Asia Migration border, 160, 183 expulsion, 158 Global Compact for migration, 159

refugee, 3 remittances, 132, 133 sanctuary movement, 159 See also Global care chains Military coup, 2, 28, 54, 55, 75, 81, 108–110, 115, 186 Military-industrial complex, 64 Millenarianism, 57, 65 Millennium Development Goals, 92 Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, 146, 147 Modernity. See Multiple forms of modernity Modernization theory, 77 Modi, Narendra, 7, 10, 112, 114, 119, 120 Moghadam, Valentine, 55, 135, 136, 145, 149, 185, 186 Monasticism, 213 Mondragon, 197, 213 Money, 1, 10, 22, 31, 52, 86, 88, 90, 92, 132, 136, 155, 163, 164, 168, 195 Moore, Diane, 12, 34, 40, 41, 212, 214 Morales, Eva, 200 Multiple forms of modernity, 78, 117, 141 Multipolarity, 101, 103, 104, 116, 117 Musawah, 39, 145 N Nasr, Vali, 81, 188 Neo-Gramscian perspective, 1, 9, 13, 20, 37 Neoliberalism neoliberal authoritarian populism, 114, 120 neoliberal crony capitalism, 105 neoliberal feminism, 147 neoliberal globalization project, 2, 5, 7–9, 28, 29, 41, 75, 76,

INDEX

101, 104, 120, 148, 156, 181, 209, 211, 212 neoliberal optimist school, 155 pious neoliberalism, 80, 91 progressive neoliberalism, 28, 88, 148 reactionary populism, 155 New Deal, 21, 34, 36, 41, 56, 59–61, 63, 64, 67, 68, 201, 211. See also Green New Deal New international economic order (NIEO), 23, 26, 27, 103, 104, 120, 161 New Right, 26, 27, 34, 52, 57 Nicaragua, 140, 195 Nigeria, 86, 107, 138 Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), 91–93, 115, 145 Northern Ireland, 137

223

O Occult economies, 87, 93 Occupy Wall Street, 4, 68, 157 Offe, Claus, 26, 27, 36, 39, 57, 61 Offshore financial centers, 156, 164 Opium, 93 Orban, Viktor, 10, 102 Organization for Islamic Cooperation, 187 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 104, 161, 168 Osho. See Rajneesh

Pentecostal women’s movement, 83, 136 See also Prosperity gospel Peterson, V. Spike, 133 Pettifor, Ann, 30, 155, 163, 164, 167, 184 Philippines, 84, 140 Phillips-Fein, Kim, 36, 59, 64 Pluralism, religious, 214 Poland, 5, 102, 105, 140, 195, 211 Political process, 4, 13, 40, 106, 158 Poor people’s movement, 68, 213 Populism. See Neoliberalism Post-colonialism, 118, 121 Post-developmentalism, 76, 78, 79, 142 Post-modernity, 78 Powell Memo, 61 Power elite, 4, 30, 36, 37, 63 Prebisch, Raul, 19, 22, 160 Prosperity gospel, 7, 35, 60, 76, 77, 82, 84–86, 88, 94 Protectionism, 5, 51, 106, 161, 173 Protestantism American power elite, 62 Mennonite Church, 162 new monasticism, 196 protestant work ethic, 80 Quakers, 162 Social gospel, 62 World Council of Churches, 192 See also Evangelicalism; Pentecostalism; Prosperity gospel

P Pakistan, 108, 158, 189 Pateman, Carol, 131, 134 Pentecostalism global Pentecostalism, 187 mega-churches, 86 Pentecostal squatters, 196

R race, 136 racism, 148 Rajneesh, 88, 94 Reactionary modernity, 57 Reagan, Ronald, 2, 35, 41, 59, 62, 63, 68, 104, 212

224

INDEX

Realism, 10, 51, 53 Refugee, 158, 159 Reich, Robert, 106, 171, 173 Religion. See Freedom of religion; Gramsci, Antonio; Ideology of order; Marx, Karl; Riesebrodt, Martin; Salvation; World religion Religious activism progressive utopian, 13, 38, 39 reactionary, 2, 13, 38 reformist-liberal, 13 right-wing, 5, 13, 39, 68, 130, 159 Religious feminism, 143 Religious nationalism, 24, 61, 68, 90, 101–103, 107, 113, 121, 129, 212 Rent-seeking, 105–107, 111 Rethel, Lena, 82, 105, 166, 167, 182, 187 Riesebrodt, Martin, 6, 34, 36, 39, 57–59, 63, 65, 130 Robin Hood Tax, 165 Rodrik, Dani, 1, 3, 4, 8, 23, 30, 77 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 60 Russia, 5, 7, 10, 102, 105, 117, 119, 138, 140, 141 S Sabbath, 169 Salvation, 10, 12, 31, 36, 60, 86, 87, 89, 90, 194, 211 Sassen, Saskia, 31, 55, 132, 158, 163, 167, 181 Satan, 85 Saudi Arabia, 13, 24, 67, 108, 140 Secular humanism, 62 Secularism, 13, 14, 24, 25, 34, 35, 38, 66, 77, 80, 110, 112, 113, 142 Securitization, 10, 66 Sexual abuse, 137 Sexual contract, 131, 134, 198

Sexual economy, 138 Shanghai Cooperation Association, 104, 110 Sharlet, Jeff, 59, 60, 187 Sisters in Islam, 144, 145 Slavery, 25, 138, 162, 169, 171 Social democracy, 23 Socialism, 20, 58–60, 88, 155, 172 Social question, 59, 158, 159 Social reproduction, 131, 133 Solimano, Andres, 184, 185 Somalia, 38, 185 Soros, George, 4, 210 South Africa, 85, 117, 172, 201 South Asia, 76, 103 State developmental state, 19, 22, 23, 26, 42, 102–104, 106, 114 interventionist state, 22–24, 29, 34, 36, 38, 41, 42, 57, 59, 94, 101, 111, 129, 210 Mafia state, 105, 106 neo-patriarchal state, 141 state elite, 107 state transformation, 21, 92, 105, 158, 210 welfare state, 23, 26, 31, 42, 59, 85, 103, 159, 173 Westphalian state system, 6, 7, 119 See also Banana republic Sweatshop, 171, 172

T Tablighi Jam’at, 188, 189 Tanzania, 172 Tax evasion, 22, 77, 106, 160, 173 Terrorism, 64, 67, 139, 185, 186, 189 Tétreault, Mary Ann, 7 theocracy, 58, 139, 209, 210 Thunberg, Greta, 198

INDEX

Tobin Tax, 165 Trade. See Fair trade Transnational capitalist class. See globalizing elite Transnational corporations (TNCs), 171, 197 Transnational social spaces, 11, 156, 182, 183, 188, 209 Trump, Donald, 5, 7, 41, 55, 63, 67, 69, 117, 121, 139, 140, 148, 155, 159, 210, 212 Tugal, Cihan, 195 Tunisia, 80, 108, 120, 213 Turkey, 5, 7, 10, 14, 23–25, 28, 35, 38, 39, 41, 80, 81, 90, 94, 108–110, 118–120, 140, 142, 147, 158, 187–189, 192, 193, 210, 212. See also Gülen Movement; Islam U Ubuntu, 192, 201, 213 Uganda, 85, 105, 138, 158 Unequal exchange, 20, 160, 161, 168 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 164 United Nations, Millennium Goals, 3 United Nations (UN), 91, 92, 115, 129–131, 134, 135, 141, 144, 159, 172, 183 United States (US) Christian Nation, 61 Christian terrorism, 6, 139 hyper-masculinity, 185 Third Reconstruction, 138 See also Banana republic; Barber, William; Financial oligarchy; Reagan, Ronald; Trump, Donald; theocracy

225

V Venezuela, 196 Volcker shock, 168

W War on Terror, 29, 65–68, 157, 185, 196. See also Class warfare Weber, Max, 7, 9, 54, 76, 77, 82, 87, 88, 93 Wedge issue, 37, 40, 112, 113, 116 West Asia, 28, 67, 68, 75, 103, 105, 110, 134, 143. See also Middle East Westphalia, 14, 119 White supremacy, 62 Women’s movement, Pentecostal, 83, 136 World Bank, 1, 3, 4, 22, 53, 75, 91, 102, 117, 134, 143, 165 World Council of Churches (WCC), 160, 163, 165, 169, 182, 184, 185, 191, 192 World Islamic Economic Forum, 82, 188 World religion, 12, 13, 31–33, 76, 211 World Social Forum (WSF), 4, 7, 29, 157, 160, 191, 199

Y Yavuz, Hakan, 25, 28, 80, 81, 188 Yogyakarta Principles, 135

Z Zolberg, Aristide, 158