Enlargement of the European Union (EU) is infusing renewed religious vitality into European political and social life through the influential role that religion plays in many of the states that have recently joined or are seeking to join the EU as full-fledged members. This vitality is, in turn, fortifying the role of religion in European politics in two closely related ways. In the first place, the close ties between religious tradition and national identity that new member-states and candidate-states are introducing to the EU hold the very real potential of reviving political recognition of the Christian, and specifically Catholic, roots of European integration. Western Europe may be said to have preserved Christianity only as glimmering embers that are not able to generate much heat, on their own. But when fanned, in very different ways, by Catholic Poland, Orthodox Serbia, or Islamic Turkey, those embers are much more likely to flicker back into flames. Second, the greater attention to religious difference that this renewed vitality implies could itself ignite political reactions and conflicts that are likely to impede the process of “Europeanization.” Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam are transnational religious traditions that each have their own understanding of European identity, European unity, and even of European modernity. These religious understandings and definitions, animated politically in complex ways in places like Warsaw, Belgrade, and Ankara, may not be consistent with how these concepts are defined and understood in, say, Paris, Berlin, or Brussels. As these religious traditions, and the national communities partly defined by them, are drawn more deeply into the project of European integration through enlargement, religion will also get drawn more deeply into European public life. Put another way, religion, widely presumed to have been consigned to the political margins in Europe, is now poised to play an important role in one of the most central political processes of contemporary European life.
Of course, even the most casual reader of current news could not help but notice the increasing prominence of religion in European politics. Perhaps the first shock of recognition came in the 1990s when hundreds of thousands of refugees from Croatia (Catholic), Serbia (Orthodox) and Bosnia (Muslim) tragically embodied Europe's enduring religious heterogeneity. Declaration No. 11, appended to the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, innocuously proclaimed that the European Union respects and in no way prejudices national laws governing the status of churches and religious associations as well as of philosophical and non-confessional organizations. But since that resolution was adopted, religious issues have only become more politicized across Europe.1
Soper and Fetzer 2002.
Economist2003.
It is also all too easy to point out how often religious fervor has led to violence in Europe in recent years. There were the March 2004 bombings in Madrid and the July 2005 attacks in London, the riots in the Paris suburbs in late 2005, and most recently the widespread protests in response to the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad. All of these flashpoints have pointed to religion as a basic element of political conflict in contemporary Europe, and all have involved Islam in one way or another. Indeed, reactions to the U.S.-led “war on terror” have also raised pointed questions about the level of compatibility between secular Europe and politicized Islam. Both sides, writes Alan Cowell, find themselves pushed across an unexpected threshold “where they view each other with miscomprehension and suspicion.”3
Cowell 2006.
Grace Davie has argued, to cite one example, that with the ascendance of secularization European religion did not simply vanish.4
Davie 2000.
This European condition is worth noting. For a long time, the enduring vitality of religion in American life was attributed to an ill-defined “American exceptionalism.” More recently, in the face of a global religious revival beyond the United States that even the most secular observers have found difficult to ignore, it has become fashionable to talk instead of “European exceptionalism.” Modernization theory may have been proved wrong by events, the argument concedes … except in “secular Europe.” This is the basic assumption, for example, that informs a historian like Tony Judt's understanding of the European experience since 1945.6
Judt, 2005.
Weigel 2005, 29–34.
We begin with a call for the inclusion of religion as one element of an eclectic choice among alternative analytical approaches to International Relations. The second section establishes the original Christian Democratic foundations of the subsequently secular processes of European integration and “Europeanization.” Next we discuss the role that three important transnational religious traditions—Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam—are playing in these political processes. We conclude with a consideration of the ways in which these religious politics are confronting Europe at this historical moment with the idea of multiple “modernities” and multiple “Wests.” These notions of multiplicity, by the way, have been common features of American thought for a very long time.
Europe and Religion: Analytical Perspectives
In the analysis of Europe and its international relations the rediscovery of religion is overdue. Specifically, scholars of Europe's emerging polity have so far neglected this topic in their voluminous writings. This oversight is true, specifically, for analyses grounded self-consciously in secular liberal and cultural realist perspectives. Instead of multiplicity, these perspectives stress uniformity of outcomes: the absence of religion in either a progressive and cooperative secular politics for liberals or a divided and conflictual one for realists.
For more accurate analysis and deeper insights into the role of religion in European politics, liberal and realist analyses would gain from being grounded in a sociological perspective. As one manifestation of the sociological turn in international relations theory, constructivism insists that through interaction people build the social and political world within the context of a material world they also inhabit. Agent, structure and language co-exist and co-evolve without one enjoying ontological primacy over the other. In this view, there is no reason to privilege actors, such as the unitary state, or levels of analysis, such as the international system, that have been central to most strands of realist and liberal international relations scholarship. The disciplinary orientation of sociology and the analytical lenses of constructivism are particularly well suited to examine non-state actors such as religious communities as well as many aspects of an evolving European polity. Sociology and constructivism are open to inquiring into the transnational dimensions that are often central to religious politics and that connect global and international processes with national and local ones.
A secular liberalism is deeply ingrained in the self-understanding of most Europeans, and in the interpretations of most scholars of European politics. Not long ago it was an article of faith, so to speak, among most scholars of religion and of Europe that secularization was the dominant trend in modernization. Francis Fukuyama went so far as to pronounce the “the end of history” after Liberalism's final and decisive victory over the challenges posed by Fascism in the first half of the twentieth century and Communism in the second.8
Henceforth there would be no more ideological opposition to the rationalist secularism that Fukuyama believed had triumphed in the Cold War.As the collapse of Communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union occurred with the help of a devout Polish Pope and fervent Islamicist mujahedeen, Fukuyama's conclusion is less than fully convincing. It does not sit well at least with one of the preeminent sociologists of religion of his generation. In the words of Peter Berger, “What I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization. It wasn't a crazy theory. There was some evidence for it. But I think it's basically wrong. Most of the world today is certainly not secular. It's very religious.”9
And so, in its own way, is Europe. Berger describes the European way with religion in the following terms: a “strong survival of religion, most of it generally Christian in nature, despite the widespread alienation from organized churches. A shift in the institutional location of religion, then, rather than secularization, would be a more accurate description of the European situation.”10Berger 1999, 10.
Cultural realism offers an alternative perspective that is more open to the influence of religion in world politics.11
In the aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Samuel Huntington's political intuition differed sharply from Fukuyama's.12 Huntington's “clash of civilization” draws a pessimistic picture. The historical turn of 1989–91 removed one ideological conflict, but it revealed the existence of another. For Huntington, civilizations have become the relevant cultural context for states and non-state actors alike. Huntington insists that this is true in particular of “faultline” states that lie between civilizations, such as Serbia. Civilizational clashes are for Huntington the defining characteristic of a new era of international politics.Because their building blocks are variable constellations of religion, culture, language, values, traditions, and memories, civilizations are not easily defined with any degree of precision. Today religion, specifically the rise of political and religious fundamentalism in the Middle East, gives the civilizational argument much of its political prominence. Huntington's primary argument holds that underneath civilizational fluidity, a profound split exists between the “West” and the “rest.” A secondary argument is less clearly identified with Huntington's main thesis. It holds that under the wide umbrella of civilization, identities are contested and can be reconstructed quite easily through a politics that by definition is forever in flux. For example, Huntington argues that Kemalist reformism can be explained within the context of Islam, as can significant reform efforts in Mexico and Russia.13
Huntington 1993, 24, 42–44, 48.
Secular liberalism and cultural realism have the virtue of simplicity. Both, however, suffer from limitations that invite us to move beyond them in our analysis of the interactions between Europeanization and transnational religious communities. Contra secular liberalism, there exists no teleology in history, secular or otherwise. And contra cultural realism, diversity, and difference rather than unity and homogeneity, are the markers of civilizational entities and the collective identities they foster. This is not to argue that concepts central to liberal and realist perspectives, such as efficiency and power, are irrelevant for the analysis of religion in European and world politics. They are, however, most useful in combination with other concepts that better capture the ideas motivating religious politics. Efficiency as the master variable of a variety of liberal theories of international relations, for example, has great difficulties in engaging substantively the identities, motivations, and strategies of religious actors whose calculations typically cannot be reduced to simple instrumental reasoning. And material capabilities as the only measure of power in most variants of realism misses core aspects of religious politics.14
There are numerous avenues of inquiry into the processes by which religious communities and other non-state actors interact with states at the multiple levels that constitute the European Union. In their research practice, sociological schools of thought differ on specifics. For example, some display a bent for more15
Almond, Appleby and Sivan, 2003.
Esposito and Watson 2000.
Rudolph 1997.
Secular Europeanization on Christian Democratic Foundations
Contemporary Europe is a moving target. Its historical foundations after the devastations of two world wars was Christian-Democratic. Yet successive waves of European enlargement were motivated by secular interests, particularly the urge to stabilize the various European peripheries. In its various forms, Europeanization is an open-ended and largely secular process played out against a Christian-Democratic background. Enlargement of the EU to the East is likely to draw more attention to that background in the coming years.
Europeanization refers to the impact that institutions and policy outcomes at the European level have on domestic polities, politics, and policies.18
Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005.
It is difficult to imagine the European integration movement after 1945 without the political contribution of Christian Democratic parties. Robert Schumann, Alcide de Gasperi, and Konrad Adenauer, the three “fathers” of the European integration movement, were all leaders of parties that had come to fill the spiritual void that Fascism, Communism, and the experience of World War II had left. In the words of Scott Thomas, European integration “was an act of the political imagination of Christian Democracy,” informed by a “different vision of faith, life, and politics.”19
Thomas 2005, 167, 169.
Kalyvas 1996, 2–6.
Holmes 2000, 27–28, 50–56.
In the 1950s, European integration was widely viewed, especially among Protestants and Social Democrats, as a Catholic conspiracy of conservatives, an ideologically tainted attempt to revive clerical politics as a handmaiden of big business, orchestrated by the Vatican. True to that caricature, Christian Democracy has strongly supported European integration not only in the 1950s but throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There are strong roots of this stance in the Catholic Church's historical skepticism towards sovereign states, and its enduring attachment to Europe's federal unity, dating back to the Middle Ages.22
S. Thomas 2005, 166–171.
European enlargement has occurred on that Christian Democratic foundation. Before 1945, Europe exported models of political organization, economic governance, and ideological hegemony beyond the European continents.24
Bull and Watson 1985.
Vink 2003.
Important to Europeanization are secular elites adopting European rules for European polities built on Christian and Social Democratic foundations. Such rules concern issues of distribution, regulation, and redistribution, as well as of institutional design and jurisdictional conflict. The adoption of EU rules, for example, often focuses on their institutionalization at the domestic level. By acceding to membership in the EU, new member states commit themselves to adopt, or “transpose,” all of these rules into domestic law. This entails often far-reaching changes in the structure of domestic institutions and domestic political practices to meet EU standards. Formal adoption is one thing, practical implementation quite another. The behavioral dimension is shaped by the regulative and constitutive effects of rules that operate at the individual level through internalization and habituation and at the collective level through various sanctioning mechanisms. In addition to the formal and behavioral dimensions, there is also the discursive dimension of rule adoption in the process of Europeanization. Political discourse shows domestic actors speaking in three different modes—paying lip-service, talking strategically, and being truly persuaded.26
And until recently, most of the talk has been secular, not religious.Europeanization can lead to socialization. European elites adopt multiple roles in institutional settings where social and political pressures are absent, augmenting their national role conceptions with European ones.27
Jeffrey Checkel reviews in a recent paper the scholarship that has explored the socializing effects of numerous meetings over long periods in European institutions, particularly when those meetings promote deliberation and collective puzzling over complicated issues.28Checkel 2005, 805–08.
Checkel 2005, 815.
Moving from the micro-level of elite socialization to the macro-level of domestic institutional change, Risse, Cowles, and Caporaso conclude that Europeanization leads to distinct and identifiable changes in the institutional structures of member states.30
Risse, Cowles and Caporaso 2001, 1–2.
Law is the instrument that patches things up in a secular politics. European law is embodied in the acquis communautaire that the European polity has created since 1957.32
Iankova and Katzenstein 2003.
Tallberg 1999, 125–26.
After World War II, Europe was rebuilt on the basis of two strong commitments: to political democracy, Christian and otherwise, and to harnessing Germany's destructive potential in a variety of European political arrangements. Whereas, until recently, the religious moment in European politics has waned over the last half century, the commitment to taming German power and securing European peace has not. To date legal Europeanization is the process by which a secular Europe seeks to mold its constituent parts, directly and indirectly, in the process of enlargement. Religious politics is now poised to have a noticeable effect on that process.
Transnational Religious Communities: Catholicism, Islam, and Orthodoxy
The challenge that religion poses to the European project has an important transnational dimension. A generation ago, Keohane and Nye defined a “transnational interaction” as “the movement of tangible or intangible items across state boundaries when at least one actor is not an agent of a government or an international organization.”35
Keohane and Nye 1971, xii.
Byrnes 2001.
The secular forces that during the last half century have advanced the Europeanization of Europe are now joining up with a renewed political salience of religion as Europe enlarges. We want to look individually, albeit in comparative terms, at Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam and at the roles those very different entities are playing in the ongoing processes of Europeanization. In doing so, we will focus on two specific factors in particular: the relationship between a given religious community and European identity; and the degree to which that religious community's own institutional structure equips it for meaningful participation in the myriad transnational interactions that so profoundly define contemporary European politics.
Transnational religion turns out to be a very complex category, and included within that category is a very diverse set of political actors. Some of those actors have close historic ties to traditional notions of European identity centered around the concept of Christendom; for others, such connections are far more problematic and contested, in both historic and contemporary terms. Moreover, the ways in which each of these religious communities structures itself are clearly distinct, one from the other, and politically significant. Roman Catholicism embodies one very particular form of transnational interaction, but Orthodoxy manifests a very different form of transnationalism, and Islam is defined by yet another. A key factor in determining the nature of these three religious communities' roles in contemporary European politics is the variant transnational structure of the communities themselves.
Roman Catholicism
Because of its institutional makeup, Roman Catholicism is generally considered the most straightforwardly transnational of the three religious traditions we will be considering in this article. Most analysts of the Catholic Church in this regard focus on the papacy and its authority, and we will certainly do so here. But Catholic transnationalism, to coin a term, goes well beyond the authority and universal status of the Pope. Catholic bishops from around the globe are also transnational actors, both through their communal membership in a collegial magisterium (or teaching authority) of a global church, and also through the complex web of personal and institutional contacts that exist among and between individual prelates and national Episcopal conferences across state borders. In addition, the Catholic population of the whole world, what Vatican II's Lumen Gentium called with characteristic grandiosity, the “people of God,” is also fundamentally transnational in character.38
Abbott and Gallagher 1966, 24.
To begin with the papacy, however, it is true that the Roman Catholic Pope is the central figure of a very centralized and straightforwardly hierarchical structure. The heart of modern papal authority, of course, is the First Vatican Council's declaration in 1870 that when the Pope “defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church,” he does so infallibly, that is to say that “such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the church, irreformable.”39
Tanner 1990, 816.
The Pope's role in the church goes well beyond this aura, however. In practical terms, the Pope personally appoints each and every bishop across the globe, and those bishops must meet with the Pope every five years during what are called ad limina visits to Rome. Even more importantly, the teachings of the Catholic Church are articulated most clearly and most forcefully (even when not necessarily infallibly) in papal documents. All of these levers of power and modes of authority were highlighted by the centralizing instincts and peripatetic style that characterized the papacy of Pope John Paul II. Whether he was denouncing Communism, warning against secularism, resisting legalized abortion, or punishing dissent within his own church, the late Pope sought to impose a coherent voice of papal authority over a far-flung, very complex Catholic Church.
We can see how pervasive that authority was by looking just briefly at the significance of Pope John Paul II's attitude towards the European Union, and its eastward expansion. One might ask, for example, why the Polish bishops, so otherwise distrustful of “the West,” and so anxious to establish an authentically Catholic Poland as a truly autonomous state, have so clearly supported Poland's accession to the EU. To be sure, this is a complex story. But one factor in that story was the simple, but powerful fact, that EU accession was supported by the Polish Pope. Given the decisive nature of papal authority, the Polish bishops were simply not able to take a public stance that would contradict the Vatican's position on an issue of such importance.
To be sure, the Polish Pope had a very particular vision of “Europe,” and very particular reasons for wanting Poland to be a part of it.40
Sutton 1997.
Vatican 1997.
One could certainly question the extent to which this vision is likely to be turned into a reality in modern-day Europe. But the important point here is not the practicality of implementing a papal vision. Instead, the point is simply that the authoritative head of the Catholic Church supported Poland's entry into the EU. That alone was a significant political fact, both in terms of the internal politics of the church and the actions of the Polish episcopate, just as it was also a significant fact in terms of the external politics of how East Central Europe's “return to Europe” was conceived of in the East and, to a lesser extent, in the West. Moreover, the role of the Catholic Church today is played out not only in relation to the expansion of the European Union. The Church, as it has always been, is also now interested in defining Europe, in saying what Europe is as an idea, and in saying what values European society should devote itself to.
In this connection, it is not at all surprising that Popes tend to articulate these values in decidedly Catholic terms. Pope John Paul II was particularly fond of referring to Europe as a fundamentally Christian civilization, and he tirelessly called on Europe to renew its civilizational identity through a renewed commitment to its Christianity, as defined, of course, in Rome. Ecclesia In Europa, issued in 2003, was in a way, the culminating articulation of this worldview, but this theme had been present throughout Wojtyła's pontificate.42
Ecclesia in Europa, reproduced in Origins 33:10, 149–76.
Besides the Pope, Catholic transnationalism is also embodied in and articulated by the thousands of Catholic bishops who serve the church in almost every corner of the globe. These men exercise fundamentally local authority, but that authority is only exercised legitimately because these bishops are members of a collegial teaching authority that in communion with the Pope shares authority as a collective body over the entire global church. This collegial body, along with each bishop's individual relationship with the Bishop of Rome (the Pope), renders Catholic bishops the central players in a kind of global/local dynamic that defines transnational Catholicism.
At the same time, these bishops are also members of what are called national episcopal conferences, groups of bishops within each country that “form an association and meet together at fixed times” in order to “fulfill their office suitably and fruitfully.”43
Abbott and Gallagher 1966, 424–25.
For our purposes, a particularly relevant element of this communication and interaction is the development in recent years of the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Community (COMECE). This body is made up of bishops who are delegated by their individual national episcopal conferences to a kind of Catholic episcopal supranational organization that is served by an administrative secretariat based in Brussels. Interestingly, the bishops' conferences of many of the countries who are candidates for admission to the EU are counted as “associate members” of COMECE. And not surprisingly, given the position articulated at the Vatican, the COMECE has come out explicitly in favor of EU expansion to the formerly communist countries of Europe.
The Catholic “people of God” also serve as a layer of Catholic transnationalism in Europe and in European politics. This has, of course, been true throughout European history to one extent or another. The original notion of Christendom, after all, was a Catholic notion. Indeed, medieval Christendom, though surely not a relevant model for modern political structures, is nevertheless often cited as an indicator that European politics has not always been structured around individual states, and therefore does not necessarily have to be structured around individual states in the future.44
As we mentioned above, Nelsen, Guth, and Fraser have argued, among others, that this historically based transnational worldview renders the Catholic populations of Europe more amenable to notions of European identity and perhaps European government than their Protestant and Orthodox neighbors.45 The important point for our purposes here is that like their bishops, though admittedly in very different ways, the Catholic peoples of Europe are also prepared by their shared religious identity to conceive of themselves as a European people.Orthodoxy
If Roman Catholicism is the most transnational of the three religious traditions we have examined, then Orthodoxy would appear to be the least. The Orthodox Church, unified on doctrine and ritual, is institutionally structured around what are known as “autocephalous” national churches. John Meyendorff has defined autocephaly, “on the strictly canonical plain,” as “the right granted to a diocese or group of dioceses to elect its own bishop or bishops.”46
Meyendorff 1966, 42.
Unlike Roman Catholicism with its well-developed system of transnational authority, and its well-defined understanding of the global “people of God,” the very close ties between individual churches and individual nations within Orthodoxy make any movement towards transnational or supranational authority structures (whether religious or political) an uphill struggle. In part, these ties between Orthodox Churches and Orthodox nations are a function of specific historical developments that created a specific understanding of the relationship between church and state.
Whereas in Western Europe struggles between Pope and emperor led in time to notions of a clear distinction between temporal and divine power, in the East the relationship between Patriarch and emperor was conceptualized as one of “symphony,” the idea that these two powers should work together in harmony.47
Meerson 1988, 35.
That does not mean, however, that we can completely ignore the degree to which doctrinal unity endures within Orthodoxy and coexists alongside of national differentiation. Just because Patriarch Bartholomew has less authority than Pope Benedict XVI (and he does), does not mean that the Orthodox Churches do not conceive of themselves as a unified religious tradition (because they do). Meyendorff, for example, warns “observers from outside” not to underestimate “the power—keenly felt by the Orthodox themselves—of a common perception of basic Christian truths, expressed particularly in the liturgy but also in frequent unofficial and brotherly contacts which hold the church together.”48
Meyendorff 1996, 235–36.
These brotherly contacts, by the way, have grown more formal and more regularized in recent years as clerical leaders across the Orthodox world have gathered together from time to time to recognize their powerful ties to each other, to salvage recognition of pan-Orthodox solidarity from the perils of Caseropapasim, and even to consider the convening of a “Council” that would reemphasize their unity and reconfigure their relationships with each other and with the Patriarchal office in Istanbul. In fact, some of these contacts in recent years have been quite explicitly about relations between the Orthodox Church and the European Union.
Public recognition of Orthodox unity, however, does not necessarily work in favor of ready integration of “Orthodox nations” into the European Union. Indeed, Orthodox unity, such as it is, might be just as likely, if not more likely, to hinder ready accession for Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia rather than to facilitate it. Echoes of the historic rivalry between Constantinople and Rome seem to underpin the hesitation expressed by so many Orthodox leaders about accepting definitions from Western sources of “Europe,” and how it should be politically structured. Byzantium, one might want to conclude, is not anxious to take lessons from Rome (or Brussels) on what it means to be European, or what it means to structure European unity.
Much Orthodox hesitation at the prospects of Europeanization from the West may also be seen as a function of an alternative Orthodox vision for Europe, or at least for part of Europe, in the form of some kind of Orthodox Commonwealth. Looking to Russia and Istanbul, rather than to Brussels and Rome, the Orthodox Churches are not against Europe or European unity per se. Far from it. Instead, Orthodox leaders tend to be wary of “Europe” and “European unity” only so long as those phenomena are defined by nations who are, after all, signatories to the Treaty of Rome.
This way of defining things suggests a number of potentially complicating factors that could get in the way of ready integration of Orthodox nations into the European Union. Russia's role in European politics is viewed quite differently, for example, from Belgrade or a purported Orthodox Commonwealth, than it is from Brussels or, for that matter, from Washington. Greece's very important traditional role in transnational Orthodoxy will also have to be taken into account as the EU decides in coming years which Orthodox nations merit being invited to join “Europe,” and which do not. Whatever a very uncertain future holds in this regard, however, it is hard to see at this point how Pan-Orthodoxy or transnational Orthodoxy could do anything but complicate the path of Orthodox nations to EU accession. This is a self-consciously European religious tradition not very interested in undergoing Europeanization, as that process is currently defined.
Islam
Though profoundly dissimilar in numerous ways, Islam resembles Roman Catholicism in one important respect: they are both religious traditions that are fundamentally transnational in nature, and that make universal claims for all persons, at all times, in all places. For Muslims, the Qu'ran is the actual word of God, the record of the uniquely direct intervention of the divine into human history. That is not something which is true for some people at some times, or true in some countries but not in others. It is true all the time and everywhere, and Islam's overriding transnational character is derived from the fundamental universality of these basic theological claims.
The Prophet Mohammad's intention was to found a highly unified community that would be both religious and political in nature, and that would brook no division within itself. Indeed, the original Islamic community under the Prophet, and under his immediate successors, was the very model of a tightly knit religious community, albeit one with imperial ambitions and universal claims. But within a very short time following Mohammad's death, this community divided itself in all sorts of ways. Shi'a split from Sunni; one Islamic empire followed after another Islamic empire in Arabia, the Indian sub-continent, and the Middle East; and the caliphate, the human symbol of Islamic unity, became subject to claims, counterclaims, and subsequent dilutions of authority until it was formally “abolished” by the post-Ottoman Turks in 1924.
These divisions, however, were not, by and large, articulated in national terms. In part, this was because the parameters of Islamic life were set before the rise of nationalism as a force in International Relations, and before the division of the globe into individual legal entities called states. But in time, the creation of the international state system, and perhaps more significantly the development of Western imperialism in subsequent centuries, combined to bring about what James Piscatori has called “territorial pluralism” within Islam.49
Piscatori 1986, 40–75.
There always was, however, and still is, a significant and portentous disjunction between the ideal of Islamic unity, and the reality of Islamic “territorial pluralism.” And that disjunction is rooted in the development of relations between the Islamic religious community and state power. From the days of the Prophet Mohammad, the notion of distance between religion and politics—or to use the Christian terminology, church and state—had always been foreign to Islam. Distinctions such as those between divine law and human law, temporal power and religious power, so central to the trajectory of Western political development, had been rejected in the Islamic community. Such distinctions, in fact, had been seen as the central barriers to the realization of Islam's central goal: a godly community that could live in harmony under Islamic rule, governed by shari'a, God's law.
The most relevant point for our purposes here is that the umma, the Islamic people of God, is not divided into a series of national communities across the dozens of states wherein Muslims predominate. On the contrary, there is in Islamic thought only one umma, one community of Muslims, bound together by its shared convictions that there is no God but God, and that Mohammed is His prophet. The umma's devolution into “territorial pluralism” is, in other words, a shortcoming to be overcome, not a nationalist designation to be celebrated.
Moreover, the European manifestation of this transnational umma is diasporic, with close familial, cultural, and religious ties to other places and countries that are closely identified with Islam. The central question, then, is what role this diasporic community is playing, or is likely to play, in either the expansion of the European Union per se or in the reconceptualization of the idea of “Europe” to include Muslims or states with majority Muslim populations. Can we envision the transnational umma, or the Muslim diaspora in Europe, in short, as either a catalyst for or barrier to EU accession for Turkey, or a deeper, more integrated relationship between the EU and the Islamic states of the so-called Mediterranean Initiative?
The first thing to note in this regard is that if Roman Catholicism can be seen in some way as definitional in relationship to Europe, then Islam can be seen in a similar way as oppositional. European identity—and what we tend to call Western civilization—coalesced in considerable part around its relationship with—and distance from—Islam. As Neumann and Welsh have argued, Islam was “the Other” that served as the foundation of Europe's self-definition.50
Neumann and Welsh 1991.
Sheikh 2003, 7.
Clear echoes of this historical dynamic can be heard today in the renewed talk of a Christian Europe, of neo-Christendom, and of the potential conflict between the Islamic religion and European values, however the latter are defined. As we have seen, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, each is able to offer a definition of European identity that derives in large part from its own religious tradition and institutional history. For Islam, the relationship between religion and identity in the European context—the relationship between Muslim tradition and European unity—is much more problematic. Indeed, quite often in European history, Islam has been perceived by Christian Europeans as an external imperial power seeking to export its universal religious claims to Europe, to a Europe, of course, that was already in thrall to the similarly universal claims of Christianity. Some of the trepidation expressed today about the growing presence of Muslims in Europe, or about the accession of a Muslim country like Turkey to the European Union is derived from historical memories of the great battles that took place over European religious and cultural identity in the distant but not forgotten past. It is perhaps no accident that opposition to Turkish accession to the EU is these days strongest in Vienna.
This observation is not meant in any way as an endorsement of simplistic notions of an unbridgeable distance or an implacable opposition between Islam and the West. The relationship between these broad, diverse entities has been varied and complex, and the question of where one ends and the other begins has not always been as clear cut as some might imagine, even in historical terms. Islam was a powerful presence on the Iberian peninsula, after all, for seven centuries, and the Muslim populations of places like Bosnia or Albania are not, to put it in absurdist terms, recent immigrants from “the East.” This recognition of complexity is particularly germane to any informed discussion of Turkey's relationship to Europe. The Muslim country that is a candidate for EU membership, after all, is not Pakistan, or Malaysia, or even Morocco. It is Turkey, a country with deep European roots, and the successor state to what was to a significant degree a European Ottoman Empire. Ataturk's pursuit of “Westernization,” of course, was not the same thing as Ergodan's acceptance of “Europeanization.” But the whole span of modern Turkish history does suggest that essentialist notions of a Christian West and an Islamic East are too simple. Such notions, in fact, are liable to hinder rather than advance our understanding of the very complex processes involved in Turkey's relationship with the European Union.
Catholic transnationalism and its effect on EU expansion and the processes of Europeanization can be defined in papal, clerical, or popular terms. Orthodoxy, as a religion and as a political force, is defined most clearly by the concept of autocephaly. But the Islamic case has to be defined in less institutional terms and according to the ways in which Muslim experience in one place is transformed into Muslim expectations in another. This may not be as clear cut as the Catholic or Orthodox cases. It may, indeed, be much more open to analytical disputation. But surely these transnational processes of communication and influence are the proper ones to emphasize when dealing with a religious tradition so clearly defined by the umma, the Islamic people. It is through complex transnational interactions between and among Muslims themselves that Islam will have its effect on European integration.
Multiple Wests and Religious Politics in Secular Europe
Multiple Wests and multiple conceptions of modernity disappoint those searching for one dominant narrative in world politics, such as the growth of secularism or the inescapability of civilizational clashes. Such multiplicities are expressed in a variety of cultural programs that reinvent themselves continuously in history. These programs adapt themselves to, and also modify, large-scale historical processes—modernization, secularization, industrialization, and democratization among them. Variable contexts shape and transfigure an enlarging Europe as it encounters transnational religious communities.
Shmuel Eisenstadt has interrogated “multiple modernities” as a central topic in macro-history.52
Eisenstadt 2002; ibid. 2000a; ibid. 2000b; ibid. 1999a; ibid. 1999b; See also Berger and Huntington 2002. The plausibility of focusing on multiple modernities is supported by central conclusions of a large number of sociologists of religion (for example, Esposito and Watson 2000; Marty and Appleby 1997; Race and Williamson 1995; Beyer 1994; Casanova 1994; Johnston and Sampson 1994; Robertson and Garrett 1991) and a few political scientists who have written on the role of religion in world politics (for example, Thomas 2005; ibid. 2000; Norris and Inglehart 2005; Almond, Appleby and Sivan 2003; Carlson and Owens 2003; Hurd 2004; Petito and Hatzopoulos 2003; Byrnes 2001; Dark 2000; Millennium2000; Kurth 1998; Haynes 1998; Orbis1998; Rudolph and Piscatori 1997; Janis 1991; Berger 1982).
Eisenstadt 2002, 2.
Spohn 2001, 501.
Because Western modernity is adopted selectively and transformed in widely differing political and cultural contexts, it does not create a common global standard. Indeed, Western modernity is sufficiently broad to allow for tensions, even contradictions, between orthodox and heterodox orientations and identities, and unavoidable conflicts between geographic and socio-economic centers and peripheries. That difference is very evident across the Atlantic and across the borders that separate the U.S. from Canada and Mexico, thus giving the current rift over the Iraq war a different significance than merely a sharp political disagreement over the doctrine of preventive war and unilateral action outside of the UN framework. Difference also marks Germany and Japan, and not only as distinct models of capitalism. The difference created by Germany's exposure to Christianity as one of the world's great religions—in sharp contrast to Japan's tradition of religious syncretism—confirms the political plasticity and institutional plurality of modernity.55
On this point Eisenstadt parts company with others, such as Ernst Haas, who claim Japan as an example of secularization. Eisenstadt stresses instead Japan's syncretism.56 This disagreement is instructive. Does the belief in secularism become compelling largely as a self-fulfilling prophecy—because of its foundational commitment to open-ended learning that by definition only it, not syncretism, can embody? Work on multiple modernities is rooted in Max Weber's writings on world religions. Secularist thought instead draws heavily on Weber's analysis of bureaucratic rationality. Writings in the secular tradition cling with determination to the idea that in the long term the self-reflexivity, open-endedness, and procedural thinness of secularism give it a decisive edge over all other forms of modernity. Multiple modernities make us look for and accept political antinomies that are perpetually recreated and that make even traditional fundamentalism modern.The rules for the relations between European states and the modern international state system reflect this tension. They were established at the end of the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century.57
“Westphalia” has become shorthand for an interstate system that banished religion to the domestic and private realm. Because they are expressions of rationalist thought deeply antithetical to religion, the silence of realist and liberal theories of international relations on the role of religion in European and world politics thus is not surprising. Yet a burgeoning literature on sovereignty demonstrates that the canonical view of sovereign states governed by the principle of non-intervention is bad history.58This is particularly germane at a moment of dramatic shifts in the very structure and organizing principles of the international state system. Suzanne Rudolph has written in this connection of the declining sovereignty of individual states, and even of the very notion of the state as fading in the contemporary world of globalization, supranational organization, and ideological realignment.59
Rudolph 2003, 141.
Scott Thomas's analysis of religious movements and conflicts in world politics insists that the global resurgence of religion may have made the twentieth century the last modern one.60
Thomas 2005.
The privatization and nationalization of religion that occurred in the seventeenth century in Latin Christendom was a decisive impetus for modern European and international society. But that process has remained far from complete in a world in which strong religions interact with weak states and in which religion is now experiencing a resurgence on a global scale. This resurgence is not primarily a “fundamentalist” or “anti-modernist” reaction to the ineluctable march of modernization and globalization. It is, rather, in its public form a normative critique of historical developments that have failed to bring about the Enlightenment's project.
Thomas grants Europe an exceptional status in the resurgence of religion in world politics.61
Thomas 2005, 49–50.
Roman Catholicism, after all, is the religious community most straightforwardly supportive of the prospect of European unity. But the leadership of Catholicism is supportive of greater European integration only because those leaders want to define that integrated Europe through their own teachings and values, and only because they want to challenge today's Europe to return to the ostensibly Christian unity of its past. It is important to keep in mind in this connection that the Polish Pope and the Polish bishops were only willing to have Poland “rejoin Europe” because they hoped that eventuality would lead in time to secular Europe coming to look more like Catholic Poland!
The Orthodox Church is at its very foundation wary of any effort to diminish the status and role of nations and states, particularly if that effort is perceived as coming from Western Christendom. Leaders of today's Orthodox Church see the European Union as a modern echo of a division of Europe that is over 1,000 years old, and they see supranationalism and European identity as potential threats to national religious and political identities that have been forged and defended at tremendous cost.
Finally, Islam, regardless of the intentions of individual Muslims or even of the Islamic community in Europe as a whole, still stands as a formidable challenge to the ready integration of the European continent, not as a spur towards it. It is possible, of course, to envision an emerging version of Euro-Islam being accommodated more readily within the European Union than it is now. But it is also possible to envision this religious factor as a long-term point of contention and faction within an integrating Europe.
Regardless of these long-term effects in Europe, the widening gap between an emerging European polity and the United States is nevertheless underlining the multiple modernities between different parts of the West. After World War II, Reinhold Niebuhr and other Christian “realists” and “liberals” made the case for an ecumenical Protestantism that helped shape U.S. policy in the creation of the Bretton Woods system and the subsequent hegemony the U.S. enjoyed over the capitalist part of a bipolar international system.62
Thomas 2005, 159.
Thomas 2005, 162.
In Europe in the late 1940s, Christian Democracy and Catholicism laid the foundations of the European integration movement. Europe was not merely a site for state bargains and profitable economic transactions. It was also the focus of a political movement seeking to implement a particular, religiously infused vision. Arsene Heitz, who in 1955 designed what eventually became the European flag—12 yellow stars on a blue background—reportedly was inspired by a reference in the New Testament's Book of Revelation to “a woman clothed with the sun … and a crown of twelve stars on her head.”64
Economist2004.
Katzenstein and Keohane 2007.
The religious differences between Europe and the United States also point to the relevance of the idea of multiple modernity when applied to domestic developments in the United States and Europe. The sharp and ideologically charged divide between “retro” and “metro” America66
Sperling et al. 2004.
Conventional renderings of the historical origins of the modern European state system and religious politics are intellectually suspect. And so is the neglect of religious politics by scholars of Europe's contemporary international and transnational relations. Religion continues to lurk underneath the veneer of European secularization. Reinsertion of religious issues into European politics is beginning to occur, brought about by transnational religious communities which after many decades are “returning” to a Europe bent on enlargement. These communities bring with them very particular notions of European identity and European union, indeed of modernity itself, that challenge the notions of European unity to which “secular Europe” has grown so accustomed over the last half century. What is even more striking, however, is that these challenges posed by religious conceptions of European union and European identity will be reinforced in the coming years by European religion's embodiment of a form of social and political diversity that may not succumb readily to the unifying effects of Europeanization. The fractious implications of that diversity are real, and they are likely to be recognized as an increasingly prominent element of European politics in the coming years, as Europeans themselves may have to grapple not only with the spirituality of others, but with their own as well. Problematic legal and undefined cultural Europeanization leave ample space at the core of the European polity that is beginning to be reoccupied by these kinds of religious issues.67
In brief, Europe is poised for a renewed encounter with religious politics, reviving troubling memories and posing formidable challenges for a secular polity built on Christian foundations.
