Religion in the New Europe (Conditions of European Solidarity Volume II)

Religion in the New Europe Conditions of European Solidarity What Holds Europe Together? Volume I Religion in the New...

Author: Krzysztof Michalski

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Religion in the New Europe

Conditions of European Solidarity What Holds Europe Together? Volume I Religion in the New Europe Volume II

Religion in the New Europe Edited by Krzysztof Michalski

Central European University Press Budapest New York

©2006 by Krzysztof Michalski

Published in 2006 by Central European University Press An imprint of the Central European University Share Company Nádor utca 11, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 Fax: +36-1-327-3183 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ceupress.com 400 West 59th Street, New York NY 10019, USA Tel: +1-212-547-6932 Fax: +1-646-557-2416 E-mail: [email protected] All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN 963 7326 49 9 cloth 978-963-7326-49-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conditions of European solidarity / edited by Krzysztof Michalski. p. cm. Contents: v. 1. What holds Europe together? v. 2 Religion in the new Europe. 1. European federation. 2. European cooperation. 3. Europe—Religion. I. Michalski, Krzysztof, 1948– . JN15.C595 2005 341.242’2—dc22 2005029454 Printed in Hungary by Akaprint

Contents Charles Taylor Religion and European Integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . José Casanova Religion, European Secular Identities and European Integration

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Judeo-Christian Heritage and Secularisation Danièle Hervieu-Léger The Role of Religion in Establishing Social Cohesion . . . . . . . . . . 45 David Martin Integration and Fragmentation: Patterns of Religion in Europe . . . 65 Peter L. Berger Observations from America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Muslims and Islam in Europe Tariq Modood Muslims and European Multiculturalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Bhikhu Parekh Is Islam a Threat to Europe’s Multicultural Democracies? . . . . . . 111 Nilüfer Göle Islam, European Public Space and Civility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .122 Olivier Roy Islam in Europe: Clash of Religions or Convergence of Religiosities? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .131 List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .145

CHARLES TAYLOR

Religion and European Integration

I This is a tremendously broad topic. I propose to approach it from a certain angle, the role of religion in the various political identities that are now jostling with one another in Europe. But first I have to explain what I mean by this term “political identity,” which is a term of art I want to introduce, and which is, alas, hardly transparent in meaning. Political identity is, of course, related to other uses of identity today, as when one talks of “identity crisis,” or “identity politics,” or of people respecting or failing to respect my/our identity. But it occupies a peculiar place in this constellation of expressions. We define the identities of individuals, and often of groups, in terms of the crucial reference points by which these individuals or collectivities orient themselves in life. In this we are following the influential use of the term in the developmental psychology of Erik Erikson.1 I might say of myself that I am a Catholic, social democrat in outlook, a Canadian/Québécois, thus conveying to you the value frameworks in which I sense myself to be firmly situated as I face the choices in life. These frameworks, I feel, are so fundamental that they define “who I am”—hence the use of the term “identity” here. There is a whole story, very interesting and still not fully understood, of how the term “identity” came to be used, in the last half century, for this kind of fundamental orientation. This is not just a meaningless semantic shift—like the way Americans at a certain point stopped saying “envisage” and started saying “envision,” presumably because it sounded more pompously serious. It is also fraught

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with interesting consequences, which we do not have space to go into here.2 Personal identities are usually complex, and multi-polar: I mentioned three main reference points in my personal statement above, but I could also have added others—a certain family I belong to, certain defining relations of friendship and love, and so on. When people coagulate around a certain identity as groups, in order to affirm or defend that identity, some of this complexity must fall away. A nationalist movement, for instance, around Québécois or Scottish independence, will group people whose religious, ethical, and family reference points differ. For the purposes of this mobilization only one pole counts. A single reference point gathers people with varied, sometimes conflictingly complex, multi-polar identities. This is frequently a great source of tension. We need to think only of Black feminists in the U.S., who are often torn between African–American solidarity, on the one hand, and their convictions about gender relations, on the other. These kinds of conflicts can create a hostility to group identity mobilization, a stand that Liberals frequently take. And this is directly relevant to our theme here, because political identity can be seen as a species of group identity. In this context, the hostility to group identity takes “nationalism” as its target; the dream is frequently described in terms of a political identity that is purely defined in terms of certain constitutional principles, abstracting from particular historical, linguistic, confessional allegiances. This is the ideal famously defined by Habermas, under the term “Verfassungspatriotismus.” This term is, in fact, more problematic than is often realized. But in order to see this, we must try to get a handle on political identity. So far we have approached political identity simply as a species of group identity, a unipolar reference point around which one attempts to mobilize, or hold together, people with a large number and variety of complex, multi-polar identities. But there is more to political identity than this, which can best be seen if we can explain why it is not an optional extra—why, in other words, political identities in the modern world are unavoidable (unumgänglich, incontournable).


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When I say “the modern world,” I mean, more precisely, a world in which the major idea of political legitimacy is that of popular sovereignty. This is an even wider concept than the world of democracy, if we define this latter term in a more demanding fashion, wherein a condition of democracy is that the people are offered effective political choices. The 20th century saw régimes which were far from democratic in this sense, but that claimed to incarnate the real will of the people, be they fascist, communist, or some other derivative form. The thesis that I wish to propound here is that politically sovereign régimes require a political identity. If the reader will bear with me for a few paragraphs, I’d like to explain this connection by employing a few considerations which have a distinctly Rousseauian flavor. I make no apology for this, because I consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau to be the conflicted genius who first articulated many of the basic themes of modernity—from democracy through authenticity to transparency—in the fullness of their contradictory demands. He is a great thinker, whose advice is always disastrous to follow, but whose formulations offer unparalleled early insight into the yearnings of our age. The revolutions, which ushered in regimes of popular sovereignty, transferred ruling power from a king onto a “nation,” or a “people.” In the process, they invented a new kind of collective agency. These terms existed previously, but this new kind of agency was something unprecedented, at least in the context of early modern Europe. Thus the notion “people” could certainly be applied to the ensemble of a kingdom’s subjects, or to the non-élite strata of society, but prior to the turnover it didn’t suggest an entity to which one could attribute a will. Now this new kind of entity needs a strong form of cohesion, which might not be immediately evident. Isn’t the notion of popular sovereignty simply that of majority will, more or less restrained by the respect for liberty and rights? But all sorts of bodies, even the loosest aggregations, can adopt this kind of decision-making rule. Supposing, during a public lecture, some people feel the heat to be oppressive and ask that the windows be opened; others demur. One might easily decide this conflict by a show of hands, which those present would accept as legitimate. And yet

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the audience at the lecture might consist of the most disparate individuals, unknown to one another, without mutual concern, simply brought together by the event. This example shows by contrast what democratic societies need. It seems at once intuitively clear that they must be bonded more powerfully than this chance grouping is. But how can we better understand this necessity? One way to see it is to push the logic of popular sovereignty a bit further. This not only suggests a certain class of decision procedures—those that are ultimately grounded on the majority (with restrictions)—but it also offers a particular justification. Under a régime of popular sovereignty we are free in a way we are not, for example, under an absolute monarch, or an entrenched aristocracy. Now supposing we regard this from the standpoint of some individual. Let’s say I am outvoted on some important issue. I am forced to abide by a rule I am opposed to. My will is not being done. Why should I consider myself free? Does it matter that I am overridden by a majority of my fellow citizens, as opposed to the decisions of a monarch? Why should that fact be decisive? We can even imagine that a potential monarch, waiting to return to power in a coup, agrees with me on this question, against the majority’s will. Wouldn’t I therefore be freer after the counterrevolution? After all, my will on this matter would then be put into effect. We can recognize that this kind of question is not merely a theoretical one. It is rarely posed on behalf of individuals, but it regularly arises on behalf of sub-groups, e.g., national minorities who see themselves as oppressed. Perhaps no response can satisfy them. Whatever one says, they cannot see themselves as part of this larger sovereign people. Therefore they see its rule over them as illegitimate, and this accords with the logic of popular sovereignty itself. We see the inner link between popular sovereignty and the idea of the people as a collective agency here in a somewhat stronger sense than in the example of our lecture audience above. This agency is something you can be included in without really belonging to, which makes no sense to a member of the audi-


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ence. We can see the nature of this belonging if we ask what answer we can provide to those who are outvoted, and tempted by the argument above. Of course, some extreme philosophical individualists believe there is no valid answer, that appeals to some greater collective are just as much humbug as to get contrary voters to accept voluntary servitude. But without deciding this ultimate philosophical issue, we can ask: what is the feature of our “imagined communities” by which people very often readily accept the fact that they are free under a democratic régime, even where their will is over-ridden on important issues? The answer they accept runs something like this: You, like the rest of us, are free just by virtue of the fact that we rule ourselves in common, and are not ruled by some agency which need to take no account of our will. Your freedom consists in your having a guaranteed voice in the sovereign, in the fact that you can be heard, and have some part in decision-making. You enjoy this freedom by virtue of a law that enfranchises all of us; thus we enjoy it together. Your freedom is created and defended by this law, whether or not you win or lose any particular decision. This law defines a community, of those whose freedom it defends together. It defines a collective agency, a people, whose acting together through law preserves their freedom. Such is the answer, valid or not, people have come to accept in democratic societies. We can see right away that it involves their accepting a kind of belonging that is much stronger than that of the people in the lecture hall. It is an ongoing collective agency, one whose membership realizes something very important, and thereby a kind of freedom. Insofar as this good is crucial to their identity, they thus identify strongly with this agency, and therefore also feel a bond with their co-participants in it. It is only an appeal to this kind of membership that can answer the challenge of our imagined individual above, who ponders whether to support the monarch’s (or general’s) coup in the name of his freedom. The crucial point here is that, whoever may be ultimately right philosophically, it is only insofar as people accept some such answer that the legitimacy principle of popular sovereignty

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can work to secure their consent. This principle is only effective via its appeal to a strong collective agency. If the identification with that agency is rejected, the rule of this government seems illegitimate in the eyes of the rejecters, as can be seen in countless cases of disaffected national minorities. It may be rule by the people, they contend, but we can’t accept rule by a gang we aren’t part of. This is the crucial link between democracy and strong common agency. It follows the logic of the legitimacy principle, which underlies democratic régimes. They fail to generate this identity at their peril. This last example points to an important modulation of the appeal to popular sovereignty. In the version above, the appeal was to what we might call “republican freedom,” one inspired by ancient republics and which was invoked by the American and French Revolutions. But very soon afterwards, the same appeal began to take on a nationalist form. The attempts to spread the principles of the French Revolution through the force of French arms created a reaction in Germany, Italy and elsewhere, a sense of not being part of, or represented by, that sovereign people in the name of which the Revolution was being made. It came to be accepted in many circles that a sovereign people, in order to possess the unity needed for collective agency, had to have an antecedent unity of culture, history or (more common in Europe) language. Thus, a pre-existing cultural (sometimes ethnic) nation had to stand behind the political nation. Nationalism, in this sense, was born out of democracy, as a (benign or malign) growth. In early nineteenth-century Europe, as peoples struggled for emancipation from despotic multi-national empires, joined in the Holy Alliance, there seemed to be no opposition between the two. For a Mazzini, these were perfectly converging goals.3 Only later on do certain forms of nationalism throw off the allegiance to human rights and democracy in the name of self-assertion. But even before this stage, nationalism lends another modulation to popular sovereignty. The answer to the objection above: something essential to our identity is bound up in our common laws, now refers not just to republican freedom, but also to something of the order of cultural identity. What is defended and


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realized in the nation-state is not just your freedom as a human being, but also the guaranteed expression of a common cultural identity. We can therefore speak of a “republican” variant and a “national” variant of the appeal to popular sovereignty, though in practice the two often run together, and often lie undistinguishable in the rhetoric and imaginary of democratic societies. In fact, even the original “republican” pre-nationalist revolutions, the American and French, have seen a kind of nationalism develop in the societies that issued from them. The point of these revolutions was the universal good of freedom, whatever mental exclusions the revolutionaries in fact accepted, or even cherished. Their patriotic allegiance, however, was to the particular historical project of realizing freedom, in both America and France. This very universalism became the basis of a fierce national pride, in the “last, best hope for mankind,” and in the republic that was bearer of “the rights of man.” That is why freedom, first in the French case, and more recently in the American, could unfortunately become a project of conquest, with the fateful results in reactive nationalism that I mentioned earlier. So we have a new kind of collective agency, with which its members identify as the bulwark of their freedom, and the locus of their national expression. Of course, in pre-modern societies as well, people often “identified” with the régime, sacred kings, or hierarchical orders. They were often willing subjects. But in this democratic age we tend to identify as free agents, which is why the notion of popular will plays a crucial role in our legitimating idea.4 This means that the modern democratic state has generally accepted common purposes, or reference points, the features of which it can lay claim to being the bulwark of freedom, and the locus of its citizens’ expression. Whether or not these claims are actually well-founded, the state must be so imagined by its citizens in order to be legitimate. So questions arise for the modern state for which there is no analogue in most pre-modern forms: What/whom is this state for? Whose freedom? Whose expression? The questions seem to make no sense applied to, say, the Austrian or Turkish Empires—

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unless one answers the “whom for?” question by referring to the Habsburg or Ottoman dynasties, which would hardly provide one with their legitimating ideas. This is the sense in which a modern state has what I want to call a political identity, defined as the generally accepted answer to the “what/whom for?” question. This identity is distinct from the identities of its members, which are the reference points, many and varied, that define what is important in their lives for each. There needs to be some overlap, of course, if these members are to feel strongly identified with the state; but, as I argued above, the identities of individuals and constituent groups will generally be richer and more complex, as well as often quite different from one another.

II With the above as background, I’d like now to discuss some of the ways in which religion figures in contemporary political identities, both more broadly, and with specific reference to Europe. The first general point to be made is that it is obvious that religion has frequently been, and continues to be, an important component of many political identities. Just think of what we often classify as “nationalist” movements or conflicts, such as those in Northern Ireland, or in ex-Yugoslavia, or the BJP in India. In some cases, this takes on a rather paradoxical air, as hard-bitten, and not very pious political leaders, often with a Communist-atheist past (and probably present: what are Slobodan Miloshevich’s theological convictions?) mobilize people around an identity whose ultimate markers are confessional: Catholic/ Protestant, or Catholic/Orthodox/Muslim, or “Hindutva.”5 But it is clear that this is only one facet of the phenomenon. Religion frequently occupies a somewhat ambiguous position in modern political identities. Ambiguous, that is, in relation to a distinction I made above, between the “republican” components of political identities, generally defined in universal, ethical terms (democracy, representative institutions, human rights), and the more particular, historical, national, linguistic, or confessional components, on the other. This distinction is frequently not easy


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to make, and I will discuss it further shortly. But for the moment, I want to point out that it can’t easily be done away with, since it is an integral part of the framework of political argument. That is, how one positions one’s demands in relation to this distinction makes a difference as to how one defends them. We may ask for a certain freedom or immunity for our group— say, schooling in a minority language in the name of some general principle of free choice—or we may demand it as being owed to people of this historic group in this historical situation. Of course, even in the latter case, some general principle will play a role, say, equal recognition of different identities; but this second strategy of argument needs to be supplemented by considerations to the effect that schooling is essential to our continued identity, and that this identity has a claim to protection in this polity. (Thus in Canada, claims of this kind from Francophones and aboriginals are at least seen as worth weighing, whereas a similar demand from some group of recent immigrants would generally not be so considered.)6 This distinction, then, is anchored in the discursive framework of contemporary democratic argument. But at the same time, it is not always easy to draw. Certain components have a tendency to flip from one side to the other, like the well-known unstable drawings of the duck/rabbit type. Therefore, we have a problem with Verfassungspatriotismus, mentioned but not discussed above. Our sense of identity is gathered around certain constitutional principles, say, democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. But our loyalty is directed not just to these principles, but to a particular historical project that aims to realize them (the US Constitution, the French Republic, the bizarre and not always consistent ensemble of traditions defining “British freedom,” or whatever). It is not always easy to see where one leaves off and the other begins. Take, for instance, a universally agreed principle among modern liberal democracies, namely that of the separation of Church and state, or state neutrality between different confessions. It is well-known that the régimes recognizing this vary greatly among different societies. There are relatively strict ones, like the American “Wall of Separation,” or French “laïcité”; then there are

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more relaxed and fumbling accommodations in countries like Britain and Canada. When for instance, the various “headscarf” cases arose in France, with Muslim girls appearing in state schools with the foulard, the outraged reaction in certain “republican” circles took on an ambiguous status. The headscarves were an infringement on “laïcité” we were told, but did this term designate the fundamental principle itself, which all contemporary liberal democracies embrace? Or was it the particular French form that was being defended? Did the reaction take the form of: “we don’t want to be like Iran”? Or was it rather: “we don’t want to be like those sloppy, unprincipled Anglo-Saxons across the Channel”? Similar questions frequently arise about expressions like the “American Way,” that is often implicitly identified with “freedom” itself, particularly at this unhappy juncture in American history. But the most important source of this duck/rabbit ambivalence is religion itself, as the above case partly illustrates. Religion has been at the heart of many modern political identities. This is clear in the number of cases where it enters as a crucial marker of what both insiders and outsiders, agree is a “national” identity: e.g., Catholicism for Poles, Irish and (earlier generations of) French Canadians; Protestantism for 17th and 18th-century7 Britons and Bismarckian Germany at the time of the Kulturkampf (wherein a kind of Kulturprotestantismus seemed to define the nation for a majority of its citizens); Orthodoxy in the case of contemporary Greece, and so on. But it also plays another kind of role: as the underpinning of universal, ethical, constitutional principles. Take the case of the early American Republic. A strong Providentialist streak existed in early American thinking. The new Republic, in winning its independence and establishing its constitution, was following God’s design. This could be expanded into a kind of idea of moral order, seen as established by God and invoked by the American Declaration of Independence: Men have been created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. The idea of moral order expressed in this Declaration, which


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has since become dominant in our world, is quite different from the orders that preceded it. It begins with individuals, whom it doesn’t see as a priori within a hierarchical order, outside of which they would not be fully human. Its members are not agents essentially embedded in a society which in turn reflects and connects with the cosmos, but, rather, disembedded individuals who associate together. The design underlying this association is that each, in pursuing his or her own life purposes, acts to benefit others. It calls for a society structured for mutual benefit, in which each respects the rights of others, and offers them mutual help of certain kinds. The most influential early articulator of this formula is John Locke, but the basic conception of such an order of mutual service has come down to us through a series of variants, including more radical ones such as presented by Marx and Rousseau. In the earlier days, however, when the plan was understood as Providential, and the order seen as Natural Law (the same as the law of God), building a society that fulfilled these requirements was seen as fulfilling God’s design. To live in such a society was to live with God present, not in a way that belonged to the enchanted world via the sacred, but because we were following His design. God is present as the designer of the way we live. We see ourselves, to quote a famous phrase, as “one nation under God.” In thus talking the United States as a paradigm of this new idea of order, I am following Robert Bellah’s tremendously fertile idea of an American “civil religion.” That concept is understandably and rightly contested today, because some of the conditions of that religion are now being challenged, yet there is no doubt that Bellah has captured something essential about American society, both at its inception, and for some two centuries thereafter. The fundamental idea, that America had a vocation for carrying out God’s purposes (which alone makes sense of the passages Bellah quotes, for example, from Kennedy’s Inaugural address and Lincoln’s second Inaugural), can seem strange and threatening to many unbelievers in America today, and must be understood in relation to this conception of order of free, rightsbearing individuals. It was also invoked in the Declaration of

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Independence, appealing to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The rightness of these laws, for both Deists and Theists, was grounded in their being part of a Providential Design. What the activism of the American Revolutionaries added to this was a view of history as the theatre in which this Design was to be progressively realized, and of their own society as the place where this realization was to be consummated. Lincoln later referred to that society as “the last best hope on earth.” It was this notion of themselves as fulfilling Divine purposes, which, along with the Biblical culture of Protestant America, facilitated the analogy to ancient Israel that often recurs in the official American rhetoric of the early days.8 Today’s confusion arises from the fact that there is both continuity and discontinuity. What continues is the importance of some form of the modern idea of moral order, providing a sense that Americans are still operating on the same principles as the Founders. The rift, however, derives from the fact that what makes this order the right one is, for many though by no means for all, no longer God’s Providence; that order is grounded in nature alone, or in some concept of civilization, or even in supposedly unchallengeable a priori principles, often inspired by Kant. So that some Americans want to rescue the Constitution from God, whereas others, with deeper historical roots, see this as doing violence to it. Hence the contemporary American “culture wars,” their own version of Kulturkampf. Europe at the moment seems free of this kind of deep inner conflict. This is often attributed to the fact that it is so much more “secular,” and unbelieving. But as other contributors to this volume, notably Danièle Hervieu-Léger and David Martin, have shown, it is not so clear in what this greater secularity consists of. I would add that the important difference may be that Americans have retained something Europeans have lost: a strong “providentialist” national identity, insisting that they are at the forefront of human progress and have a duty to spread it. IntraEuropean butchery in the first half of the 20th century, followed by decolonization and the construction of multi-national Europe in the second half, have ended up creating ambivalent and conflicted feelings around assertions of national identity in “old”


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Europe. These same assertions are very often seen just as senility or failure of nerve in Bush’s America. The point is that American political identity is viewed as something of immense significance, worth fighting over between people of different philosophical views, whereas Europeans—even the French, with long history of this sort of thing—have trouble motivating themselves to carry on the struggle. But this doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways in which religion can once again become a source of conflict, precisely in its ambivalent status as both a source of universal values and a marker of historic identity. As both Martin and Hervieu-Léger have pointed out, both here and in their other writings, the rise of individualism and a culture of authenticity have helped erode so much of the continuity with older forms of life (in community structure, family form, and so on) that they have created an understandable counter-demand to revivify memory and reconnect with deeper historical roots. But whatever one’s present beliefs and one’s stance towards the church, Europe’s roots are Christian and there is no way of getting around it. A minority of people are drawn back to religion in their quest to reconnect,9 but many more can be led to a kind of non-theological, non-cultic historical identification with their Christian past. This arises in two ways, both potential sources of conflict, which can, moreover, feed on one another. The first is the attempt I have just mentioned to recover our deepest roots. This arises, for example, in the search for “European values,” which inevitably came to the fore, for example, during recent attempts to draft a European constitution. Evoking these values cannot be avoided in any case, as we saw with the mini-crisis around the Austrian coalition government of 2001, and the consequent “quarantine” of Austria. Once European values need to be defined, and need to be connected to a deep past, we are forced to face how conflicted this past is, and how much we rely on different partisan readings of it, e.g., human rights as the fruit of Christianity versus human rights as won in heroic struggle against the reactionary obscurantism of the Church. These conflicts, then, intersect with certain present-day debates, involving, for example, attitudes toward homosexuality and homo-

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sexual marriage or unions. A conception of marriage developed in Latin Christendom involves an interweaving of theological understanding with ideas of the “natural”—a point at which even the religious opponents of gay marriage today will appeal as much to natural law as to the revealed tradition. This entire understanding is being deeply challenged as a consequence of the cultural revolution of authenticity, and the attendant revisions of sexual morality, that came to a head in the last third of the 20th century. Coping with this has been deeply unsettling in all Western countries, and will be the source of continuing conflicts, more or less acute as one shifts from country to country. It is both the case that churches are deeply divided on these issues (for example, the Anglican Church today), and also that this bundle of questions will be a renewed source of division between churches and their critics. The second context in which the reconnection with deeper roots occurs is the multicultural. Europe’s Christian roots begin to stand out when there are sizeable populations that don’t share them. These are mainly Muslim, but there is a steady diversification of religious (including anti-religious) belonging in Europe, in part through immigration, in part through internal change. Faced with growing Muslim populations, we find many Europeans becoming conscious of their roots in Christendom. Even those who take the dimmest view of the Churches’ role in the development of human rights and democracy can reflect that Christendom has at least wrestled the reactionary forces of religion into a relatively submissive posture, whereas the same hasn’t occurred in the Muslim world. Here too the ambivalent status of religion plays an important role in the conflict. Anti-Muslim sentiment, which from a liberal point of view seems the very paradigm of privileging one particular historical identity over another, often is presented as a defense of the European, i.e. correct, version of universal values. Thus Le Pen can invoke the principles of the French Constitution and “laïcité,” and, with far less bad faith, the List Pim Fortuyn benefited from a widespread feeling in the Netherlands that many Muslims were flouting certain basic principles of the society, those of gender equality in particular.


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III In all these cases, the conflicts are exacerbated, and difficult to solve, because they connect to political identity, that is, to the values and reference points we must share in order to have a viable democratic society. On one hand, departing from them risks generating a profound sense of alienation from society among important parts of the population, whereas, on the other hand, as sources of conflict they are by definition already alienating others. From another point of view, the dilemma can be posed like this: faced with differences in religious and philosophical outlook, or in historical identity, the reflex of liberal society has always been to remove these issues from the public sphere, and relegate them to the private. The ur-move of this kind was triggered by the struggle between different confessions. The separation of church and state makes the state effectively non-confessional (even where an Established Church theoretically remains, as in Britain and Scandinavia), so that people of all different allegiances can meet on neutral ground in the public sphere. But when we are dealing with what, for many people, are components of political identity, we cannot merely shunt them into the private sphere without risking a severe loss of legitimacy among them. Or, rather, we can only do this if we at the same time bring about a redefinition of our political identity that permits them to fall outside it. We need a new understanding of what binds us together in the particular historical project that seeks to realize democracy and human rights. The growing diversification of our populations, as well as the cultural revolutions invoked above, have been forcing all Western societies more and more into efforts of political identity-reconstruction. These are particularly difficult because they run against the grain of virtually all early political identities that emerged in the era of democratic revolutions. They all have a strong “ancestral” quality; that is, they see political identity as being settled once and for all at the founding. This is particularly evident in states founded on what Gellner defines as the principle of nationalism: “which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent.”10 If the basic point of the founding of this

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political unit was to provide self-determination for the X people, then that clearly should be an unrevisable feature of X-land’s political identity. We see this fundamental principle at work today, as well as the problems it gives rise to, in places such as Israel and India. But a similar difficulty can arise in nations like France or the USA, founded on certain supposedly simple constitutional principles. One might think ancestralism would pose no problem here. If the original purpose of the founding was to realize certain crucial universal values, then there can be no harm in sticking to ancestralism through thick and thin. But it can in fact be a problem, for two reasons. The first pertains to the complexity I noted above in the idea of Verfassungspatriotismus: universal values are incarnated in a particular historical and institutional project. In fact, as we look around the liberal democratic world, we see that very much the same values have been expressed by quite different régimes. But it is all to easy for each society to elide the particular into the general, and to believe that in defending one’s particular form of “laïcité,” for instance, one is defending THE separation of church and state. The second problem with ancestralism comes from another elision, which the later work of Rawls has strongly brought to our attention. This is the confusion between the particular political principles on which our state is grounded, on one hand, and the deeper ethical vision of human life by which we justify those principles, on the other. In fact, as Rawls argues, we can imagine a régime in which we can concur on those political principles— and without that our polity couldn’t function—but in which we differ greatly as to the ultimate reasons for supporting them. To use Rawls’ language, we differ about the “comprehensive conceptions of the good” by which we justify them. There is a problematic elision here, because, just as people easily confuse principles and their particular institutional and legal expression, they also easily elide certain institutionalized principles, like judicially retrievable human rights, and the deep philosophical reasons for which they have been espoused in our society. After all, what provides these principles with their hold on us is that they are anchored in deep convictions. So we tend


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to believe that those who don’t share the deep convictions cannot really support the political principles. In the particular case of human rights, these have been supported in the West by a generally individualist doctrine of the dignity of human agency. For Westerners, support of human rights and the belief in such a doctrine are often seen as indissolubly linked. And yet a little reflection tells us that this needn’t be so. There are alternative justifications for an institutional régime of justiciable rights that begin from other bases entirely, such as in the case of ahimsa for certain Buddhists.11 A situation in which we separate the two levels, and live together in a political identity defined by the principles, while recognizing that we cannot share the underlying justifications, is designated by Rawls an “overlapping consensus.” We can thus see three ways in which ancestralism may fail to deal with the growing diversity of modern societies. 1. A society defined as the expression of a certain nation “finds” that it includes more than one entity deserving of this name. This can come about not only through migration, but also (much more commonly) because, under the conditions of modernity, more and more suppressed or ignored minorities have come to demand recognition. 2. A liberal-democratic society, living under a certain institutional–legal expression of its fundamental principles, finds that this may have been well-designed to suit its original situation, but that it is less and less adapted to the present level and type of (recognized) diversity of its population. Can the institutions and practices of French “laïcité,” which was designed to keep the Catholic church in its place, and to that extent was acceptable to other religious minorities in the past (Protestants, Jews), meet the challenge of integrating sizeable self-consciously Muslim populations? 3. A liberal democratic society, originally united as to the deeper reasons underlying its political principles, has now become philosophically/theologically/metaphysically more diverse, whether through migration or internal pluralization. What was originally an indissoluble package of principles and deep rea-

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sons is now no longer seen as supported by everyone. The political identity becomes a source of conflict. All these call for the kind of reconstruction of political identity that I described above; and all are fraught with difficulty. Members of the hegemonic nation in (1) are often dismayed at the loss of status involved in conceding a description of their society as multinational (English Canadians, Singhalese in Sri Lanka, ethnic Turks in Turkey); they often are ready to go to any lengths to deny the very existence of diversity. Supporters of the ancestrally-defined institutional forms in (2) often cling to them with an emotion which is as powerful as it is ambivalent and confused, eliding as it does a belief in universal principles with a powerful attachment to “our” way of expressing them (many French supporters of laïcité, American devotees of the “Wall of Separation”). And in (3), the original set of deep reasons can be seen as cosubstantial with the principles themselves. I think the latter is one of the factors underlying the virulence of the American Kulturkampf. There was an early reading of the doctrine of separation of church and state that put all churches or denominations on an equal footing, equidistant from the state, but did not challenge the civil religion that saw American history in a providential light. There is a later “secular liberal” reading which views any recognition of the theist or deist providential perspective as an infringement on the separation. Hence, the demand to remove “under God” from the pledge of allegiance, or to remove the Ten Commandments from the façade of an Alabama courthouse. Both sides identify their conception with the principle itself, meaning that what would elsewhere be seen as trivial issues, amenable to creative fudging and accommodation, tend to arouse fierce passions. American secular liberals invented the (extremely fruitful) idea of an overlapping consensus, but find it very difficult to apply it in the atmosphere of cultural warfare.


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IV If we think of Europe in relation to these three axes of elision, and therefore of identity reconstruction, we might say the following: As to (1), Europe is way ahead of the rest of the world. It is not just that Europe must see itself as multi-national, but that this partial passing of sovereignty seems to have liberated many of its Member States from their obsessions with the unitary nation. Of course, some states were already federal, or moving towards federation, but the devolution of power in the UK and Spain is a sign of the willingness to give certain historic regions their space, undeterred by the fear of earlier times that conceding difference must lead to break-up (a fear that actually may make such breakups more likely in the long run). Moreover, Europe as a desirable political destination for a number of states in the East has led to those states considerably improving their performance regarding the treatment of minorities. As to (2), in spite of the great diversity of institutional forms in which basic democratic liberal values are expressed on the Continent, it might seem on the surface that European integration has done little to put those forms into question in their respective home societies. This seems to be connected with the slow, sluggish and late development of what could be called a European public sphere; public discussion and exchange still mainly takes place within each nation’s media.12 But appearances may tend to deceive. We are just on the verge of a new stage of European integration, and some of the deeper problems arising from religious diversity are beginning to be more acutely felt. New and important developments may be in the works. Thus many have felt for some time that it would be important for pan-European expressions of Islam to develop, bridging both the relatively closed communities of different national provenance, and the organizations focused on dealing with an individual European state. The slow formation of a European Muslim identity, creating its own way of being Muslim outside the Dar-ulIslam and coming to cherish this as something more than an unavoidable pis-aller, would do something for integration and

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mutual understanding that could not be accomplished as effectively on any national stage. As to (3), we are just at the beginning of the process. The fact of plural foundations (as far as I can see from my extraEuropean vantage point, which may have missed important features of the debate) hasn’t greatly impinged on the debate concerning European values. But the future certainly holds some shake-ups. One of the consequences of plural foundations is that very different interpretations of principles are often held in common. One of the latter has been the belief that society should provide favorable conditions for family life. But the growing disparity between our conceptions of human good and sexual fulfillment have meant that the family, the couple, and sexual life are all sites of contestation. We are perhaps not handling this very well in many Western countries today. On one hand stands the supposedly “natural” and traditional Christian understanding of the family, as uniting a man and woman for the purpose of procreation, that is claimed to be normative for everyone; on the other hand stands a conception of the erotically bound couple, essentially concerned with their relationship, although they may also have children. This is thought to be the essence of marriage, recognition of which has been denied in a discriminatory fashion to same-sex couples. We would do better to recognize that there are different ethicallycharged models of sexual existence (and more than the above two), as there have been hundreds in human history; and that people espousing different models need to live together. All of which means that the state cannot simply endorse even the supposedly more “inclusive” one. But we should also realize that this removal of state endorsement is a very bitter pill for many— including many same-sex couples, who are seeking exactly this kind of public recognition in marriage—to swallow. Another such shake-up comes from the fact that some of the problems in reaching a consensus on international human rights are now being reproduced within our Western democracies, just as immigration increasingly diversifies us. The long quarrel over whether Christian values or those of the Enlightenment are foun-


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dational for our society is about to be broken into by other voices. This might decisively and irreversibly transform the debate. I have emphasized throughout how this reconstruction of our political identities along these three axes can be painful and difficult. But there is also something in its favor; we sense, as we grope along these axes, that we may be creating societies with an unprecedented degree of openness and inclusion. For many outsiders like myself, this is why we follow the attempts of Europe to widen its boundaries even beyond the borders of former Christendom with fascination and excitement. In its finest moments, Europe is blazing a trail for all of us. Our hope lies in the fact that we know, in spite of all the difficulties, setbacks and seeming impasses, that this profoundly human prospect motivates millions of Europeans as well.

Notes 1

See Childhood and Society, New York, Norton, 1963. I have discussed this at greater length in “Les Sources de l’identité moderne,” in Mikhaël Elbaz, Andrée Fortin, and Guy Laforest, eds., Les Frontières de l’Identité: Modernité et postmodernisme au Québec, SainteFoy, Presses de l’Université Laval, 1996, pp. 347–64. 3 And in fact, the drive to democracy took a predominately “national” form. Logically, it is perfectly possible that the democratic challenge to a multi-national authoritarian régime, e.g., Austria, Turkey, should take the form of a multi-national citizenship in a pan-imperial “people.” But in fact, attempts at this usually fail, and the peoples take their own road into freedom. So the Czechs declined being part of a democratized Empire in the Paulskirche in 1848; and the Young Turk attempt at an Ottoman citizenship foundered, and made way for a fierce Turkish nationalism. 4 Rousseau, who laid bare very early the logic of this idea, saw that a democratic sovereign couldn’t just be an “aggregation,” as with our lecture audience above; it has to be an “association,” that is, a strong collective agency, a “corps moral et collectif” with “son unité, son moi commun, sa vie et sa volonté.” This last term is the key one, because what gives this body its personality is a “volonté générale.” Contrat Social, Book I, chapter 6. 5 I have discussed this at greater length in “Glaube und Identität. Religion und Gewalt in der modernen Welt,” in: Transit 19 (1998/99), pp. 21–37. 6 See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, Oxford University Press, 1995. 2

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Religion in the New Europe 7

See Linda Colley, Britons, Yale University Press, 1992. See Robert Bellah “Civil Religion in America,” in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World, New York, Harper & Row, 1970, chapter 9. 9 See Hervieu-Léger, Le pélerin et le converti. 10 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Cornell University Press, 1983, p. 1. 11 I have discussed these issues at greater length in “Conditions of an unforced consensus on human rights,” in Joanne Bauer & Daniel Bell, eds., The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 124–44. 12 See Craig Calhoun, “The Democratic Integration of Europe: Interests, Identity, and the Public Sphere,” in: Mabel Berezin & Martin Schain (eds.), Europe without Borders: Remapping Territory, Citizenship and Identity in a Transnational Age, Baltimore, 2004. 8

JOSÉ CASANOVA

Religion, European Secular Identities and European Integration

Since the signing of the Treaty of Rome establishing the EEC and initiating the ongoing process of European integration in 1957, Western European societies have undergone a rapid, drastic and seemingly irreversible process of secularization. In this respect, one can talk of the emergence of a post-Christian Europe. At the same time, the process of European integration, the eastward expansion of the European Union and the drafting of a European constitution have triggered fundamental questions concerning European identity and the role of Christianity in that identity. What constitutes “Europe”? How and where should one draw its external territorial and internal cultural boundaries? The most controversial and anxiety-producing issues, which are rarely confronted openly, are the potential integration of Turkey and the potential integration of non-European immigrants, who in most European countries happen to be overwhelmingly Muslim. It is the interrelation between these phenomena that I would like to explore in this paper. The progressive, though highly uneven, secularization of Europe is an undeniable social fact.1 An increasing majority of the European population has ceased participating in traditional religious practices, at least on a regular basis, while still maintaining relatively high levels of individual religious belief. In this respect, one should perhaps talk of the “unchurching” of the European population and of religious individualization, rather than secularization. Grace Davie has characterized this general European situation as ‘believing without belonging.’2 At the same time, however, large numbers of Europeans, even in the most secular countries, still identify themselves as “Christian,”

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pointing to an implicit, diffused and submerged Christian cultural identity. In this sense, Danièle Hervieu-Léger is also correct when she offers the reverse characterization of the European situation as “belonging without believing.”3 Among most Europeans, “secular” and “Christian” cultural identities are intertwined in complex and rarely verbalized modes. The most interesting issue sociologically is not the fact of progressive religious decline among the European population, but the fact that it is interpreted through the lense of the secularization paradigm, and therefore accompanied by a “secularist” self-understanding that interprets that decline as “normal” and “progressive.” It is therefore seen as a quasi-normative consequence of being a “modern” and “enlightened” European. It is this “secular” identity, shared by European elites and ordinary people alike, that paradoxically turns “religion” and the barely submerged Christian European identity into thorny and perplexing issues when it comes to delimiting the external geographic boundaries and defining the internal cultural identity of a European Union in the process of being constituted. I would like to explore some of the ways in which religion has become a perplexing issue in the constitution of “Europe” by way of a review of four ongoing debates: the role of Catholic Poland, the incorporation of Turkey, the integration of non-European immigrants, and the place of God, or the Christian heritage, in the text of the new European constitution.

Catholic Poland in post-Christian Europe: secular normalization or great apostolic assignment? The fact that Catholic Poland is “re-joining Europe” at a time when Western Europe is forsaking its Christian civilizational identity has produced a perplexing situation for Catholic Poles and secular Europeans alike. In a previous article I examined the convoluted historical patterns of convergence and divergence in Polish and Western European religious developments.4 It suffices to state here that throughout the Communist era Polish Catholicism went through an extraordinary revival at the very same time that Western European societies were undergoing a drastic process of secularization.


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The reintegration of Catholic Poland into secular Europe can therefore be viewed as “a difficult challenge” and/or as “a great apostolic assignment.” Anticipating the threat of secularization, the integralist sectors of Polish Catholicism have adopted a negative attitude towards European integration. Exhorted by the Polish Pope, the leadership of the Polish church, by contrast, has embraced European integration as a great apostolic assignment. The anxieties of the “europhobes” would seem to be fully justified, since the basic premise of the secularization paradigm—that the more modern a society the more secular it becomes—seems to be an assumption also widely taken for granted in Poland. Since modernization, in the sense of catching up with European levels of political, economic, social and cultural development, is one of the goals of European integration, most observers tend to anticipate that such modernization will lead to secularization also in Poland, putting an end to Polish religious “exceptionalism.” Poland’s becoming at last a “normal” and “unexceptional” European country is, after all, one of the aims of the “Euroenthusiasts.” The Polish Episcopate, nevertheless, has enthusiastically accepted the papal apostolic assignment and repeatedly stressed that one of its goals upon Poland’s rejoining Europe is “to restore Europe for Christianity.” While this may sound preposterous to Western European ears, such a message has found resonance in the tradition of Polish messianism. Barring a radical change in the European secular Zeitgeist, however, such an evangelistic effort has little chance of success. Given the loss of demand for religion in Western Europe, the supply of surplus Polish pastoral resources for a European-wide evangelizing effort is unlikely to prove effective. The at best lukewarm, if not outright hostile, European response to John Paul II’s renewed calls for a European Christian revival point to the difficulties of the assignment. I’ve suggested that a less ambitious, though no less arduous, apostolic assignment could perhaps have equally remarkable effects. Let Poland itself prove the secularization thesis wrong. Let Polonia simper fidelis keep faith with its Catholic identity and tradition while succeeding in its integration into Europe, thus becoming a “normal” European country. Such an outcome, if feasible, could suggest that the decline of religion in Europe might not be a teleological process

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necessarily linked with modernization, but rather a historical choice Europeans have made. A modern religious Poland could perhaps force secular Europeans to rethink their secularist assumptions and realize that it is not so much Poland that is out of sync with modern trends, but rather secular Europe that is out of sync with the rest of the world. Granted, such a provocative scenario is merely meant to break the spell secularism holds over the European mind and the social sciences.

Could a democratic Muslim Turkey ever join the European Christian club, or, which is the torn country? While the threat of a Polish Christian crusade awakens little fear among secular Europeans confident of their ability to assimilate Catholic Poland on their own terms, the prospect of Turkey joining the European Union generates far greater anxieties among Europeans, Christian and post-Christian alike. But they are of the kind that cannot be easily verbalized, at least not publicly. Turkey has been patiently knocking on the door of the European club since 1959, only to be politely told to keep waiting, while watching latecomer after latecomer invited first, in successive waves of accession. The formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951 by the six founding members (Benelux, France, Italy and West Germany) and its expansion into the European Economic Community (EEC) or “common market” in 1957 was predicated on two historic reconciliations: the reconciliation between France and Germany, who had been at war or preparing for war from 1870 to 1945, and the reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics within Christian Democracy. Indeed, ruling or prominent Christian Democrats in all six countries played leading roles in the initial process of European integration. The Cold War, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the newly established Washington–Rome Axis formed the geopolitical context for both reconciliations. Greece in June 1959 and Turkey in July 1959, hostile enemies yet nonetheless both members of NATO, were the first two countries to apply for association with the EEC. That same July, the other Western European countries formed EFTA


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as an alternative economic association. Only Franco’s Spain was left out of all these initial Western European associations and alliances. Granted, that the EEC always made clear that candidates for admission would have to meet stringent economic and political conditions. Ireland, the United Kingdom and Denmark formally applied for admission in 1961, but only joined in 1973. Spain and Portugal were unambiguously rebuffed so long as they had authoritarian regimes, but were given clear conditions and definite timetables once their democracies seemed on the road to consolidation. Both joined in 1986. Greece, meanwhile, had already gained admission in 1981 and, with it, de facto veto power over Turkey’s admission. But even after Greece and Turkey entered into a quasi-détente and Greece expressed its readiness to sponsor Turkey’s admission in exchange for the admission of the entire island of Cyprus, Turkey once again did not receive an unambiguous answer, and was told once again to go back to the end of the waiting line. The fall of the Berlin Wall once again rearranged the priorities and the direction of European integration eastward. In 2004 ten new members, eight ex-Communist countries plus Malta and Cyprus, are set to join the European Union. Practically all the territories of Medieval Christendom, that is, of Catholic and Protestant Europe, will be now reunited in the new Europe. Only Catholic Croatia and “neutral” Switzerland will be left out, while “Orthodox” Greece as well as Greek and Turkish Cyprus will be the only religious “others.” “Orthodox” Romania and Bulgaria are supposedly next in line, but without a clear timetable. Even less clear is the matter of if and when the negotiations for Turkey’s admission will begin in earnest. The first open, if not yet formal, discussions of Turkey’s candidacy during the 2002 Copenhagen summit touched a raw nerve among all kinds of European “publics.” The widespread debate revealed how much “Islam,” with all its distorted representations as “the other” of Western civilization, was the real issue rather than the extent to which Turkey was ready to meet the same stringent economic and political conditions as the other new members. There could be no doubt neither as to Turkey’s eagerness to join nor her willingness to meet the conditions, now that the new, officially no longer “Islamic” government had unambiguously reiterated the position of all previous Turkish “secularist” administrations. Turkey’s “publics,” secularist and

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Muslim alike, had spoken in unison. The new government was certainly the most representative democratic government in all Turkey’s modern history. A wide consensus had seemingly been reached among the Turkish population, showing that, on the issue of joining Europe and thus “the West,” Turkey was no longer a “torn country.” Two of the three requirements laid down by Samuel Huntington for a torn country to successfully redefine its civilizational identity had clearly been met: “First, the political and economic elite of the country has to be generally supportive of and enthusiastic about this move. Second, the public has to be at least willing to acquiesce in the redefinition of identity.”5 It was the satisfaction of the third requirement that was apparently missing: “the dominant elements in the host civilization, in most cases the West, have to be willing to embrace the convert.” The dream of Kemal “Father of the Turks” of begetting a modern Western secular republican Turkish nation-state modeled after French republican laïcité has proven not easily attainable, at least on Kemalist secularist terms. But the possibility of a Turkish democratic state, truly representative of its ordinary Muslim population, joining the European Union is realizable today for the first time. The “six arrows” of Kemalism (republicanism, nationalism, secularism, statism, populism, and reformism) could not lead towards a workable representative democracy. Ultimately, the project of constructing such a nation-state from above was bound to fail because it was too secular for the Islamists, too Sunni for the Alevis, and too Turkish for the Kurds. A Turkish state in which the collective identities and interests of those groups constituting the overwhelming majority of the population cannot find public representation cannot be a truly representative democracy, even if it is founded on modern secular republican principles. But Muslim Democracy is as possible and viable today in Turkey as Christian Democracy was half a century ago in Western Europe. The still Muslim, but officially no longer Islamist, party in power has been repeatedly accused of being “fundamentalist,” and of undermining the sacred secularist principles of the Kemalist constitution banning “religious” as well as “ethnic” parties, religion and ethnicity being forms of identity not allowed public representation in secular Turkey. One wonders whether democracy does not become an impossible “game” when potential majorities are not allowed to win elections, and


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when secular civilian politicians ask the military to come to the rescue of democracy by banning those potential majorities which threaten their secular identity and their power. Practically every continental European country has had religious parties at one time or another. Many of them, particularly the Catholic ones, had dubious democratic credentials until the negative experience of Fascism turned them into Christian Democrats. Unless people are allowed to play the game fairly, it may be difficult for them to appreciate the rules and acquire a democratic habitus. One wonders, who the real “fundamentalists” here are: “Muslims,” who want to gain public recognition of their identity and demand the right to mobilize in order to advance their ideal and material interests while respecting the democratic rules of the game, or “secularists,” who view the Muslim veil worn by a duly elected parliamentary representative as a threat to Turkish democracy and a blasphemous affront against the secularist principles of the Kemalist state? Could the European Union accept the public representation of Islam within its boundaries? Can “secular” Europe admit “Muslim” democratic Turkey? Officially, Europe’s refusal to accept Turkey thus far is mainly based on Turkey’s deficient record of human rights. But there are not-too-subtle indications that an outwardly secular Europe is still too Christian when it comes to the possibility of imagining a Muslim country as part of the European community. One wonders whether Turkey represents a threat to Western civilization or simply an unwelcome reminder of a barely submerged, yet inexpressible and anxiety-ridden, “white” European Christian identity. The widespread public debate in Europe over Turkey’s admission showed that Europe was actually the torn country, deeply divided over its cultural identity, unable to answer the question of whether European unity, and therefore its external and internal boundaries, should be defined by the common heritage of Christianity and Western civilization, or by its modern secular values of liberalism, universal human rights, political democracy and inclusive multiculturalism. Publicly, of course, European liberal secular elites could not share the Pope’s definition of European civilization as essentially Christian. But they also could not verbalize the unspoken “cultural” requirements that make Turkey’s integration into Europe such a difficult issue. The specter of millions of Turkish citizens, many of them second generation immigrants, already in Europe but not of Europe,

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caught between an old country they have left behind and European host societies unable or unwilling to fully assimilate them, only makes the problem the more visible. “Guest workers” can be successfully incorporated economically. They may even gain voting rights, at least on the local level, and prove to be model, or at least ordinary, citizens. But can they pass the unwritten rules of cultural European membership, or are they to remain “strangers”? Can the European Union open up new conditions for the kind of multiculturalism that its constituent national societies find so difficult to accept?

Can the European Union welcome and integrate the immigrant “other”? Comparative perspectives from the American experience of immigration Throughout the modern era Western European societies have been immigrant-sending countries, indeed the world’s primary immigrantsending region. During the colonial phase, European colonists and colonizers, missionaries, entrepreneurs and colonial administrators settled all the corners of the globe. During the age of industrialization from the 1800s to the 1920s, it is estimated that around 85 million Europeans emigrated to the Americas, Southern Africa, Australia and Oceania, 60 per cent of them to the United States alone. In the last decades, however, the flow of migration has reversed and many Western European societies have instead become centers of global immigration. A comparison with the United States, the paradigmatic immigrant society (despite the fact that from the late 1920s to the late 1960s it too became relatively closed to immigration), reveals some characteristic differences with the contemporary Western European immigration experience. Although the proportion of foreign immigrants in many European countries (the United Kingdom, France, Holland, and West Germany before reunification), at approximately 10 per cent, is similar to the proportion of foreign born nationals in the United States, most of these countries still have difficulty viewing themselves as permanent immigrant societies, or in viewing the native second generation as nationals, irrespective of their legal status. But it is in the different ways in which they try to accommodate and regulate immigrant reli-


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gions, particularly Islam, that European societies distinguish themselves, not only from the United States, but also from each other. European societies have markedly different institutional and legal structures regarding religious associations, highly diverse policies of state recognition, state regulation and state aid to religious groups, and also diverse norms concerning when and where one may publicly express religious beliefs and practices. In their dealing with immigrant religions, European countries, like the United States, tend to replicate their particular model of separation of church and state and the patterns of regulating their own religious minorities. France’s étatist secularist model and the political culture of laïcité require the strict privatization of religion, eliminating it from any public forum, while at the same time pressuring religious groups to organize themselves into a single centralized churchlike institutional structure that can be regulated by, and serve as, interlocutor to the state, thus following the traditional model of the concordat with the Catholic Church. Great Britain, by contrast, while maintaining the established Church of England, allows greater freedom to religious associations, who deal directly with local authorities and school boards to press for changes in religious education, diet, etc., with little direct appeal to the central government. Germany, following the multi-establishment model, has tried to organize a quasi-official Islamic institution, at times in conjunction with parallel strivings on the part of the Turkish state to regulate its diaspora. But the internal divisions among immigrants from Turkey, as well as the public expression and mobilization of competing identities (secular and Muslim, Alevi and Kurd) in the German democratic context, have undermined any project of institutionalization from above. Holland, following its traditional pattern of pillarization, seemed, at least until very recently, bent on establishing a separate state-regulated but self-organized Muslim pillar. Lately, however, even traditionally liberal and tolerant Holland is expressing second thoughts, and seems ready to pass more restrictive legislation setting clear limits to the kinds of un-European, un-modern norms and habits it is prepared to tolerate. If one looks at the European Union as a whole, however, there are two fundamental differences with the situation in the United States. In Europe, first of all, immigration and Islam are almost synonymous.

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The overwhelming majority of immigrants in most European countries, the UK being the main exception, are Muslims, and the overwhelming majority of Western European Muslims are immigrants. This identification appears even more pronounced in those cases where the majority of Muslim immigrants tend to come predominantly from a single region, e.g., Turkey in the case of Germany, the Ma’ghreb in the case of France. This entails a superimposition of different dimensions of “otherness” that exacerbates issues of boundaries, accommodation and incorporation. The immigrant, the religious, the racial, and the socio-economic de-privileged “other” all tend to coincide. In the United States, on the other hand, Muslims constitute at most 10 percent of all new immigrants, a figure that is actually likely to decrease given the strict restrictions on Arab and Muslim immigration imposed after September 11 by the increasingly repressive American security state. Since the US Census Bureau, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and other government agencies are not allowed to gather information on religion, there are no reliable estimates on the number of Muslims in the United States.6 Available estimates range widely between 2.8 million and 8 million. Moreover, it is estimated that from 30 to 42 percent of all Muslims in the United States are African-American converts to Islam, making the characterization of Islam as a foreign, un-American religion even more difficult. Furthermore, Muslim immigrant communities in the United States are extremely diverse in terms of their origins from all over the Muslim world, in terms of both discursive Islamic traditions and socio-economic characteristics. As a result, the dynamics of interaction with other Muslim immigrants, with African-American Muslims, with non-Muslim immigrants from the same regions of origin, and with their immediate American hosts are, depending on socio-economic characteristics and residential patterns, much more complex and diverse than anything one finds in Europe. The second main difference has to do with the role of religion and religious group identities in public life and in the organization of civil society. Internal differences notwithstanding, Western European societies are deeply secular societies, shaped by the hegemonic knowledge regime of secularism. As liberal democratic societies, they tolerate and respect individual religious freedom. But due to the increasing


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pressure towards the privatization of religion, which among European societies is now taken for granted as a characteristic of the selfdefinition of modern secular society, those societies have much greater difficulty in offering a legitimate role for religion in public life, and in the organization and mobilization of collective group identities. Muslim organized collective identities and their public representations become a source of anxiety, not only because of their religious otherness as a non-Christian and non-European religion, but, even more significantly, because of their religiousness itself as the “other” of European secularity. In this context, the temptation to identify Islam and fundamentalism becomes all the more pronounced. Islam, by definition, becomes the other of Western secular modernity. Therefore, the problems posed by the incorporation of Muslim immigrants become consciously or unconsciously associated with seemingly related and vexatious issues concerning the role of religion in the public sphere, which is a question European societies assumed they had already solved according to the liberal secular norm of the privatization of religion. Americans, by contrast, are demonstrably more religious than Europeans. Therefore there is a certain pressure for immigrants to conform to American religious norms.7 It is generally the case that immigrants in America tend to be more religious than they were in their home countries. But even more significantly, today as in the past, religion and public religious denominational identities play an important role in the process of incorporating new immigrants. The thesis of Will Herberg concerning the old European immigrant, that “not only was he expected to retain his old religion, as he was not expected to retain his old language or nationality, but such was the shape of America that it was largely in and through religion that he, or rather his children and grandchildren, found an identifiable place in American life,” is still operative with the new immigrants.8 The thesis implies that collective religious identities have been one of the primary ways of structuring internal societal pluralism in American history. One should add as a corrective to this thesis, that not religion alone, as Herberg’s study would seem to imply, and not race alone, as contemporary immigration studies tend to imply, but religion and race and their complex entanglements have served to structure the

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American experience of immigrant incorporation, and are the keys to “American exceptionalism.” Today, once again, we are witnessing various types of collisions and collusions between religious identity formation and racial identity formation, processes that are likely to have significant repercussions for the present and future organization of American multiculturalism. Religion and race are once again becoming the two critical markers identifying new immigrants either as assimilable or as suspiciously “alien.” Due to the corrosive logic of racialization, so pervasive in American society, the dynamics of religious identity formation assume a double positive form in the process of immigrant incorporation. Given the institutionalized acceptance of religious pluralism, the affirmation of religious identities is enhanced among the new immigrants. This positive affirmation is reinforced, moreover, by what appears to be a common defensive reaction by most immigrant groups against ascribed racialization, particularly against the stigma of racial darkness. In this respect, religious and racial self-identifications and ascriptions represent alternative ways of organizing American multiculturalism. One of the obvious advantages of religious pluralism over racial pluralism is that, under proper constitutional institutionalization, it is more reconcilable with principled equality and non-hierarchic diversity, and therefore with genuine multiculturalism. American society is entering a new phase. The traditional model of assimilation, turning European nationals into American “ethnics,” can no longer serve as a model of assimilation now that immigration is literally worldwide. America is bound to become “the first new global society” made up of all world religions and civilizations, at a time when religious civilizational identities are regaining prominence at the global level. At the very same moment that political scientists like Samuel Huntington are announcing the impending clash of civilizations in global politics, a new experiment in intercivilizational encounters and accommodation between all the world religions is taking place at home.9 American religious pluralism is expanding and incorporating all the world religions in the same way as it previously incorporated the religions of the old immigrants. A complex process of mutual accommodation is taking place. Like Catholicism and Judaism before, other world religions, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism are being “Americanized” and in the process they are trans-


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forming American religion, while, much as American Catholicism had an impact upon the transformation of world Catholicism and American Judaism has transformed world Judaism, the religious diasporas in America are serving as catalysts for the transformation of the old religions in their civilizational homes. This process of institutionalization of expanding religious pluralism is facilitated by the dual clause of the First Amendment which guarantees “no establishment” of religion at the state level, and therefore the strict separation of church and state and the genuine neutrality of the secular state, as well as the “free exercise” of religion in civil society. The latter includes strict restrictions on state intervention and on the administrative regulation of the religious field. It is this combination of a rigidly secular state and the constitutionally protected free exercise of religion in society that distinguishes the American institutional context from the European one. In Europe one finds, on the one extreme, the case of France, where a secularist state not only restricts and regulates the exercise of religion in society but actually imposes its republican ideology of laïcité on society, and, on the other, the case of England, where an established state church is compatible with wide toleration of religious minorities and the relatively unregulated free exercise of religion. As liberal democratic systems, all European societies respect the private exercise of religion, including Islam, as an individual human right. It is the public and collective free exercise of Islam as an immigrant religion that most European societies find difficult to tolerate, precisely on the grounds that Islam is perceived as an “un-European” religion. The stated rationales for considering Islam “un-European” vary significantly across Europe, and among social and political groups. For the anti-immigrant, xenophobic, nationalist Right, represented by Le Pen’s discourse in France and Jörg Haider’s in Austria, the message is straightforward: Islam is unwelcome and un-assimilable, simply because it is a “foreign” immigrant religion. Such a nativist and usually racist attitude can be differentiated clearly from the conservative “Catholic” position, paradigmatically expressed by the Cardinal of Bologna when he declared that Italy should welcome immigrants of all races and regions of the world, but should particularly select Catholic immigrants in order to preserve the country’s Catholic identity.

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Liberal secular Europeans tend to look askance at such blatant expressions of racist bigotry and religious intolerance. But when it comes to Islam, secular Europeans tend to reveal the limits and prejudices of modern secularist toleration. One is not likely to hear explicitly xenophobic or anti-religious statements among liberal politicians and secular intellectuals. The politically correct formulation tends to run along such lines as “we welcome each and all immigrants irrespective of race or religion as long as they are willing to respect and accept our modern liberal secular European norms.” The explicit articulation of those norms may vary from country to country. The controversies over the Muslim veil in so many European societies and the overwhelming support among the French citizenry, including apparently among a majority of French Muslims, for the recently passed restrictive legislation prohibiting the wearing of Muslim veils and other ostensibly religious symbols in public schools as “a threat to national cohesion” may be an extreme example of illiberal secularism. But in fact one sees similar trends of restrictive legislation directed at immigrant Muslims in liberal Holland, precisely in the name of protecting its liberal tolerant traditions from the threat of illiberal, fundamentalist, patriarchal customs reproduced and transmitted to the younger generation by Muslim immigrants. Revealingly enough, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, in his address to the French legislature defending the banning of ostensibly religious symbols in public schools, made reference in the same breath to France as “the old land of Christianity” and to the inviolable principle of laïcité, exhorting Islam to adapt itself to the principle of secularism as all other religions of France have done before. “For the most recently arrived, I’m speaking here of Islam, secularism is a chance, the chance to be a religion of France.”10 The Islamic veil and other religious signs are justifiably banned from public schools, he added, because “they are taking on a political meaning,” while according to the secularist principle of privatization of religion, “religion cannot be a political project.” Time will tell whether the restrictive legislation will have the intended effect of stopping the spread of “radical Islam,” or whether it is likely to bring forth the opposite result of further radicalizing an already alienated and maladjusted immigrant community. The positive rationale one hears among liberals in support of


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such illiberal restrictions on the free exercise of religion is usually put in terms of the desirable enforced emancipation of young girls, against their expressed will if necessary, from gender discrimination and patriarchal control. This was the discourse on which the assassinated liberal politician Pim Fortuyn built his electorally successful anti-immigrant platform in liberal Holland, a campaign that is now bearing fruit in new restrictive legislation. While conservative religious persons are expected to tolerate behavior they may consider morally abhorrent such as homosexuality, liberal secular Europeans are openly stating that European societies ought not to tolerate religious behavior or cultural customs that are morally abhorrent, insofar as they are contrary to modern liberal secular European norms. What makes the intolerant tyranny of the secular liberal majority justifiable in principle is not just the democratic principle of majority rule, but the secularist teleological assumption, built into theories of modernization, that one set of norms is reactionary, fundamentalist and anti-modern, while the other is progressive, liberal and modern.

Does one need references to God or to the Christian heritage in the new European constitution or does Europe need a new secular “civil religion” based on Enlightenment principles? Strictly speaking, modern constitutions do not need transcendent references, nor is there much empirical evidence for the functionalist argument that the normative integration of modern differentiated societies requires some kind of “civil religion.” In principle there are three possible ways of addressing the quarrels provoked by the wording of the Preamble to the new European Constitution. The first option would be to avoid any controversy by relinquishing altogether the very project of drafting a self-defining preamble explaining to the world the political rationale and identity of the European Union. But such an option would be self-defeating in so far as the main rationale and purpose of drafting a new European constitution appears to be an extra-legal one, namely contributing to a sense of European social integration, enhancing a common European identity, and remedying the deficit in democratic legitimacy.11

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A second alternative would be the mere enumeration of the basic common values that constitute the European “overlapping consensus,” either as self-evident truths or as a social fact, without entering into the more controversial attempts to establish a normative foundation, or trace the genealogy of those European values. This was the option chosen by the signatories of the Declaration of American Independence when they proclaimed We Hold These Truths As SelfEvident. But the strong rhetorical effect of this memorable phrase was predicated on the widely accepted belief in a Creator God who had endowed humans with inalienable rights, a belief shared by republican deists, Establishmentarian Protestants and radical-pietist sectarians alike. In our post-Christian and post-modern context, it is not quite as simple to conjure such self-evident “truths” requiring no discursive grounding. The 2000 Solemn Proclamation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union attempts to produce a similar effect in its opening paragraph: “Conscious of its spiritual and moral heritage, the Union is founded on the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality, and solidarity.” But the proclamation of those values as a basic social fact, as the common normative framework shared by most Europeans, could hardly have the desired effect of grounding a common European political identity. It simply reiterates the already existing declarations of most national European constitutions, of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights, and, most importantly, of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. Without explicitly addressing the thorny question of Europe’s “spiritual and moral heritage” and its disputed role in the genesis of those supposedly “universal values,” it is unlikely that such a proclamation can have the desired effect of inscribing those values as uniquely, particularly or poignantly “European.” The final and more responsible option would be to face the difficult and polemical task of defining the political identity of the new European Union through open and public debate: Who are we? Where do we come from? What constitutes our spiritual and moral heritage and the boundaries of our collective identities? How flexible internally and how open externally should those boundaries be? This, under any circumstance, would be an enormously complex task that


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would entail addressing and coming to terms with the many problematic and contradictory aspects of European heritage in its intranational, inter-European and global-colonial dimensions. But such a complex task is made all the more difficult by secularist prejudices that preclude, not only a critical yet honest and reflexive assessment of the Judeo-Christian heritage, but any public official reference to such a heritage on the grounds that any reference to religion could be divisive and counterproductive, or simply violates secular postulates. The purpose of my argument is not to imply that the new European constitution ought to make some reference to either some transcendent reality or to the Christian heritage, but simply to point out that the quarrels provoked by the possible incorporation of some religious referent in the constitutional text would seem to indicate that secularist assumptions turn religion into a problem, and thus preclude the possibility of dealing with religious issues in a sensible pragmatic manner. Firstly, I fully agree with Bronislaw Geremek that any genealogical reconstruction of the idea or the social imaginary of Europe that makes reference to Greco-Roman antiquity and the Enlightenment while erasing any memory of the role of Medieval Christendom in the very constitution of Europe as a civilization evinces either historical ignorance or repressive amnesia.12 Secondly, the inability to openly recognize Christianity as one of the constitutive components of European cultural and political identity means that a great historical opportunity may be missed to add yet a third important historical reconciliation to the already achieved reconciliation between Protestant and Catholics, and between warring European nation-states, by putting an end to the old battles over Enlightenment, religion and secularism. The perceived threat to secular identities and the biased overreaction to excluding any public reference to Christianity belies self-serving secularist claims that only secular neutrality can guarantee individual freedoms and cultural pluralism. What this imposed silence signifies is not only the attempt to erase Christianity or any other religion from the public collective memory, but also the exclusion from the public sphere of a central component of the personal identity of many Europeans. To guarantee equal access to the European public sphere and undistorted communication, the European Union would need to become not only postChristian, but also post-secular.13

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Finally, the privileging of European secular identities and secularist self-understandings in the genealogical affirmation of the common European values of human dignity, equality, freedom, and solidarity may not only impede the possibility of gaining a full understanding of the genesis of those values and their complex process of societal institutionalization and individual internalization, but would also preclude a critical and reflexive self-understanding of those secular identities. David Martin and Danièle Hervieu-Léger have poignantly illustrated that the religious and the secular have been inextricably linked throughout modern European history, that the different versions of the European Enlightenment are inextricably linked with different versions of Christianity, and that cultural matrixes rooted in particular religious traditions and related institutional arrangements still serve to shape and encode, mostly unconsciously, diverse European secular practices.14 The conscious and reflexive recognition of such a Christian encoding does not mean that one needs to accept the claims of the Pope or of any other ecclesiastical authority to be the sole guardians or legitimate administrators of the European Christian heritage. It only means to accept the right of every European, native and immigrant, to participate in the ongoing task of definition, renovation and transmission of that heritage. Ironically, as the case of French laic étatism shows, the more secularist self-understandings attempt to repress this religious heritage from the collective conscience, the more it reproduces itself subconsciously and compulsively in public secular codes. The four issues analyzed in this paper—the integration of Catholic Poland in post-Christian Europe, the integration of Turkey into the European Union, the incorporation of non-European immigrants as full members of their European host societies and of the European Union, and the task of writing a new European constitution that both reflects the values of the European people and at the same time allows them to become a self-constituent European demos—all are problematic issues. But the paper has tried to show that unreflexive secular identities and secularist self-understandings turn those problematic issues into even more perplexing and seemingly intractable “religious” problems.


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Notes 1

Cf. David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization, London, 1978; and Andrew Greeley, Religion in Modern Europe at the End of the Second Millennium, London, 2003. 2 Grace Davie, Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing without Belonging, Oxford 1994, and Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates, Oxford, 2000. 3 Danièle Hervieu-Léger, “The Role of Religion in Establishing Social Cohesion,” this volume. 4 José Casanova, “Das katholische Polen im säkularisierten Europa,” Transit 25 (2003). 5 Samuel N. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York, 1996, p. 139. 6 Karen Isaksen Leonard, Muslims in the United States. The State of Research, New York, 2003. 7 José Casanova, “Beyond European and American Exceptionalisms: towards a Global Perspective,” in G. Davie, P. Heelas and L. Woodhead, eds., Predicting Religion, Aldershot, 2003. 8 Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, Chicago, 1983, pp. 27–8. 9 Indeed, one of the most questionable aspects of Huntington’s thesis is his nativist anti-immigrant and anti-multi-culturalist posture in order to protect the supposedly Western civilizational purity of the United States from hybridization. 10 Elaine Sciolino, “Debate Begins in France on Religion in the Schools,” The New York Times, February 4, 2004. 11 This point was forcefully made by Dieter Grimm at his keynote address, “Integration by Constitution—Juridical and Symbolic Perspectives of the European Constitution,” at the Conference “Toward the Union of Europe—Cultural and Legal Ramifications,” at New School University, New York, March 5, 2004. 12 Bronislaw Geremek, “Welche Werte für das neue Europa?,” in Transit 26 (2003/2004). 13 Even in his new post-secular openness to the religious “other” and in his call for the secular side to remain “sensitive to the force of articulation inherent in religious languages,” Jürgen Habermas still implies that religious believers must naturally continue to suffer disabilities in the secular public sphere. “To date, only citizens committed to religious beliefs are required to split up their identities, as it were, into their public and private elements. They are the ones who have to translate their religious beliefs into a secular language before their arguments have any chance of gaining majority support.” Jürgen Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge,” in The Future of Human

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Nature, Cambridge, 2003, p. 109. Only by holding to a teleological philosophy of history can Habermas insist that “postsecular society continues the work, for religion itself, that religion did for myth” and that this work of “translation,” or rational linguistification of the sacred, is the equivalent of “non-destructive secularization” and enlightenment. 14 See their contributions in this volume.

Judeo-Christian Heritage and Secularisation

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DANIÈLE HERVIEU-LÉGER

The Role of Religion in Establishing Social Cohesion

With the enlargement of the European Union on the agenda, and at a time when there is a manifest need for a “European voice” to make itself heard on the world arena, it seems particularly appropriate to consider the role of religion in establishing social cohesion and creating European identity. The question has been raised explicitly in the current debates as to whether or not the introduction of the future European Constitution should refer to transcendent matters and/or Europe’s religious heritage. At the root of these debates, however, is not just the simple matter of comparing divergent principles, or achieving the difficult task of reconciliation necessitated by the different ways in which the religious and political domains are organized in the countries involved. The problem of religion, in fact, has implications that extend far beyond the realm of religion itself, inasmuch as it provides an opportunity to examine—under the microscope, as it were—a number of issues inherent in the project of cultural European integration, and the accompanying emergence of genuine European citizenship. The purpose of the following discussion is to point out a few elements that may help to clarify various aspects of this question from the viewpoint of the sociology of religion.

Secularization as a unique feature of European society The obvious starting point for any examination of the position of religion in Europe is the long-standing observation that the process of secularization is extremely advanced throughout the continent.

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The most readily available (and most widely used) indicator of the advanced degree of secularization is the level of religious practice. There are, it is true, considerable differences between the countries of the European Union in terms of religious observance. It is only, for example, in certain countries, where churches are deserted at all times of the year other than the main religious festivals (Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands), that religious structures seem to have weakened to the point of collapse. In general, however, the level of religious observance is considerably lower in Europe than in the United States. The general trend observed in major quantitative and comparative studies of religious belief is that belief in a personal god (with the attributes of the Judeo-Christian deity) is waning in favor of a vague belief in a “power” or “supernatural force.” There is no diminution in the belief in a life after death, but it is becoming clearly dissociated from the Christian vision of salvation in the world hereafter. While the number of Europeans declaring themselves convinced atheists and rejecting any belief in life after death, remains relatively low everywhere (with nonetheless significant national variations), it is still much higher than the 1% rate recorded in the United States. Comparison with the United States is valid here because this erosion of religion in modern societies was long held, across the entire spectrum of sociological thought, to be an unavoidable feature of modernity itself, even a condition of modernization. The European situation could thus be viewed as a model prefiguring the general development of advanced societies. When it was observed that American society, whose classification in the ranks of modern societies could hardly be questioned, did not adhere to this model of religious erosion, the unique nature of the American experience, rather than the universal nature of the European situation, was called into question. This point of view was reversed after the 1970s, when it became clear that religion was a powerful presence in public life everywhere except in Europe, the only cultural area where the paradigm of secularization was genuinely applicable, but in ways that varied from country to country. This reversal in points of view now leads us to examine the exceptional nature of the European experience in light of the prevailing tendencies elsewhere in the world.


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The first effect of the shift in attitude to the paradigm of secularization was to enable the “loss” at issue to be reassessed. For a long time, the thinking was that the decline in religious practice was of itself an indicator of a parallel retreat in religious belief. This school of thought acknowledged that the combination of the spread of scientific and technical rationalism, the affirmation of individual autonomy, and the increasingly specialized nature of spheres of human activity led to the modern world’s deep-seated loss of illusion, and, consequently, a definitive loss of religious belief. The drawback to this description of a rationally disillusioned modern world was that it disregarded the structural insecurity into which societies driven by the imperative for change were thrust. This omission meant that the need for order engendered and stimulated by that insecurity remained unidentified. The proliferation of new-wave religious movements recorded at the end of the 1960s has shown that religious belief still thrives in Europe, even if its symbolism is liberated from the control of mainstream organized religion. The intensity (and the multifaceted nature) of different faiths is a response to the scale of the expectations, aspirations and frustrations engendered by the typically modern promise that individual accomplishment is available to everyone. Another reading of secularization in Europe has gradually come to the fore. The problems of the loss of institutional religion that dominated the 1950s and 1960s were followed by an approach deregulating institutional religions. The emphasis was switched to patterns of individualization of belief, leading individuals to independently evolve personal credos that would give meaning to their existence, according to their own frame of mind, interests, aspirations and experience. This emphasis on the do-it-yourself approach to religious belief and practice does not mean that conventional religious traditions lost all their cultural relevance in European society. Those traditions simply began to increasingly serve as symbolic repositories of meaning, available for individuals to subjectively use and reuse in different ways. The major religions are less and less “codes of meaning” imposed on individuals from above, and less and less “natural communities” within which individuals inherit their religious identity through generations. In modern societies, particularly in Europe, religious identi-

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ty is increasingly a matter of personal choice. Individuals make their own choice of religious allegiance—often after a long spiritual journey—either for good, or merely for a short time. More than any other people, Europeans are moving away from the model of the “practicing” believer, who receives his religious identity from the community to which he belongs from childhood, and within which he complies with rules of religious observance set by the institution responsible for the transmission of faith. They most closely follow the pattern of two descriptive models that I have elaborated in order to take account of contemporary patterns of faith in the modern world: the pilgrim (who follows an individual spiritual path involving a series of phases) and the convert (who chooses the religious family to which he belongs).1 These models do not merely apply to the European situation, but are the most appropriate description of the trend towards religious individualization in Europe. This trend disrupts the organization of conventional forms of religious allegiance, particularly the traditional forms of involvement in religion at the parish level and the transmission of religion through the family. The British sociologist Grace Davie’s expression believing without belonging best characterizes this state of secularization in Europe.2 Let me point out, in passing, that this formula can be inverted to become belonging without believing, another expression which typifies Europeans’ attitude toward religion. This attitude entails a distant shared memory, which does not necessitate shared belief, but which—even from a distance—still governs collective reflexes in terms of identity. The Danish citizens who do not believe in God and never attend church, but who faithfully continue to pay the tax that goes to the Lutheran Church because they like to see religious buildings properly maintained, and the French citizens who are nostalgic for the beautiful church services of their childhood and complain about mosques being built in France while never setting foot in church until “the bell tolls” for them, illustrate how one can “belong without believing,” the European counterpart to the expansion of beliefs without belonging. In all these cases, Europeans’ shared religious identity is nowadays expressed through the general advent of a spiritual individualism that overturns established structures for the transmission of reli-


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gious identity. This subjectivization of religion is the latest stage in the long process of its gradual repression into the private domain. Historically, Europe was the place where political autonomy was affirmed (through processes that varied from nation to nation) in relation to the authority of any religious standard imposed from above. Europe was the test-tube that saw religion’s exit from the stage and the invention of political sovereignty, giving rise to a set of standards governing collective life that was dictated from below.3 It is now the testing ground for the absorption of the symbolic resources of religion into contemporary individualistic culture. Even so, religion has not disappeared: it continues to exist as a personal option and a means of individual identification, but it informs collective identity less and less and, at least in Europe, no longer provides the framework for ethical standards in the life of its citizens.

Religion’s role in determining the values of European civilization: the residual pluralism of different religious cultures If we wish, however, to describe the position of religion in Europe, it is not enough simply to record the objective indicators of loss (the decline in religious practice and the erosion of traditional belief patterns) and to strive to map out personal homemade symbolic systems. Such an approach does no more than skim the surface, revealing only the visible involvement of individuals with the “major religions.” If we truly wish to take the measure of the presence of religion in European societies, we must dig deeper, and look into the political, cultural, ethical and symbolic structures that make up the framework for collective life in the societies concerned. At this level, one can gauge the extent to which both institutions and mentalities are imbued with and shaped by religion, even in the absence of any explicit reference to the religious traditions involved in the development of the civilization’s values. Civilized values have developed, broadly speaking, within a Judeo-Christian cultural context: we are aware, for instance, of what modern thinking, and specifically European thinking, on autonomy owes to the Jewish concept of the covenant (Brith) as the foundation for the relationship between

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the deity and humans on a quasi-contractual basis (binding the fulfillment of the divine promise to the elective loyalty of the people). The concept of the covenant is the opening page of history. Christian tradition renders this concept twofold: universal (the Good News is for all humanity) and individual (conversion is an individual choice). Yet this common context that lies in part behind our concept of human rights is diffracted and differentiated within different religious cultures. It is common, and perfectly justifiable, to draw a distinction between a “Protestant Europe” and a “Catholic Europe” within which, for example, the construction of the modern problem of autonomy has taken different routes. The difference can best be illustrated with reference to the German and French experiences. The German treatment of autonomy, predating any concept of political autonomy, is born of the historical experience of the Reformation, and constructed through the affirmation of a religious individualism that radically challenges the foundations of authority in the Church and dispenses with the need for institutional mediation in the relationship between believer and deity. The concept of the individual and the sovereignty deriving from it is radically different from the essentially political construction established in France due to the joint struggle against despotism and religion that came together in the revolutionary experience.4 If we wish to make a more detailed analysis of the differentiated ways in which religion contributed to the development of the values of civilization in Europe, we would need to look further into relevant subdivisions within the Catholic and Protestant spheres of influence. Within “Protestant Europe,” for example, the British, German and Scandinavian issues of the Enlightenment, themselves rooted in different Protestant structures, engendered political cultures, concepts of the relationships between the State and the citizen, and interpretations of sovereignty and representation that were far from homogenous. The key point is that each European society is now characterized by its own specific religious roots. In a country such as France, where the historic effect of secularization was particularly far-reaching and where the objective and subjective loss of religion may be specifically illustrated, the phenomenon of the Catholic encoding of culture,


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institutions and mentalities continues to be extraordinarily significant. As Sartre maintained in Being and Nothingness, “We are all Catholic.” In particular, this phrase highlights the two-way relationship which secular society maintains with the figure of the Roman Catholic Church, whose direct potential for influence over society and individuals it dedicated itself to undermining. More generally, the program of public institutions (everything from schools to hospitals, courts, universities, etc.) was entirely based on, and has continued to operate (though, obviously, not explicitly) with reference to, the Catholic model.5 It is impossible to appreciate the discussion of many questions in French public life which have nothing strictly to do with religion (from food quality to the ethical regulation of science, the management of hierarchical relationships in business, the future of rural society, societal expectations of the State, and demands for workers’ rights) without being aware of the extent to which French culture is impregnated with Catholic values. The fact is that the same degree of symbolic and cultural encoding is at work in all European countries, from Scandinavia to the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy or Ireland, though it takes completely different forms. In all the countries of Europe, not only the styles of political life, the content of public debate on social and ethical issues, the definition of State or individual responsibility, the concept of citizenship or of family, and attitudes toward nature and the environment, but also the practical rules of civil conduct and attitudes toward money or patterns of consumption, have taken shape in historical and religious contexts which still continue to shape them. Not because the religious institutions have retained any real power to set standards (they have, on the contrary, lost that power everywhere), but because the symbolic structures which they shaped, even after official belief has been lost and religious observance has declined, still have a remarkable capacity to influence the local culture. It is worth noting that this differentiated influence operates within a shared world shaped by a long history in which the political and the religious spheres were resulting in, among other things, the specific style of religiosity centered around the individual.

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A disintegrating cultural matrix? The key question today, obviously, is: What will be the future of this civilizational matrix shaped over a long historical period? Several sets of factors contribute to shaking a cultural foundation that is at one and the same time unified and diverse. In each instance, the problems encountered highlight and accentuate the tension between, on the one hand, the process of the homogenization of the European religious scene under the influence of secularization and, on the other, the possibly contradictory stimulation of the various religious cultures which exist in the same European area. The first—and most visible—factor is Europe’s cultural and religious pluralization, primarily associated with the phenomenon of immigration, and, specifically, the long-term settlement of immigrant populations in the host countries. The core of the phenomenon of pluralization, clearly, resides in the massive Islamic presence in several European countries, which is a common bond between European countries facing the problems of reciprocal acclimatization of quite separate religious and cultural worlds. At the same time, this necessitates the wholesale reassessment of the relationships between religion and culture in the societies concerned. However, it also reveals the disparities in these societies’ responses to the demands for the recognition of Islam in their midst. While it is true, for example, that the size of the Moslem populations in the United Kingdom, France and Germany has made Islam a force to be reckoned with in these countries, it is also clear that the road to integrating these populations is significantly different, due to both the political cultures of the host countries and the specific features of the different branches of Islamic faith involved (in these cases, those of Pakistani, North African or Turkish origin). The different approaches to issues such as the wearing of veils in school are clear demonstration of the fact that the presence of Islam has become a fact of life that both unites and divides different European countries. The same dialectical tension between rapprochement and separation is at work in connection with the cultural globalization phenomena affecting Europe along with the rest of the world. On the one hand, the spread of a homogenized media culture, the accelerat-


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ed development of the movement of goods, persons and ideas, the homogenization of models of consumption and the general subjection of trade—including the exchange of symbolic ideas—to the liberalized market regime are tending to erode the cultural—and, in particular, the religious—individualism of European societies. On the other hand, the very dynamic of cultural homogenization provokes reactions likely to stimulate the reactivation of those same cultural specificities and allows national political and symbolic problems involving religion one might have thought obsolete to resurface. While it is conceivable that the growing hegemony of North American culture and values may engender, as a reaction, the affirmation of a European culture with its own references and values, there is also the possibility that it will give rise to “reactionary identities” sustaining, even in Europe, heightened rivalries inseparably linked to religious persuasion and nationality. The fight to defend “cultural uniqueness” may find sustenance in the fertile soil of the religious worlds that exist side-by-side in Europe, but these very different religious worlds may make something quite different of that struggle. One feature of the phenomena of cultural pluralization and cultural globalization is that they contribute both to the erosion and, paradoxically, to the partial reconstitution of the various religious civilizations which exist in Europe. This is not the case with a third set of phenomena directly impacting the cultural foundation made up of these religious civilizations. Indeed, considering the cultural upheavals with which Europe (like all democratic Western societies) is faced nowadays, we might wonder if we are not currently engaged in changes whose effects could well be as decisive in scale, for religion, as the critical turning-point of the Enlightenment was in the eighteenth century.6 That period was characterized by the elimination of the transcendent from the political sphere, though it did not preclude the transfer of a form of transcendent thinking without a reference to a deity (and the eschatological considerations that went hand-in-hand with it) into the political arena. It is possible that the cultural change we are currently experiencing will shake up the symbolic framework of our societies from top to bottom, perhaps definitively displacing religion from society. Identifying (and hopefully interrelating) three major observations will perhaps help make some sense of this stage in our cultural development:

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The first of these observations involves the advent, for the first time in human history and specifically in this economically and politically privileged arena that is Western Europe, of a well-fed or satiated society. Not only have the generations reaching adulthood today never known the reality, or even the real threat, of war, but they now live without ever having to worry about having enough to eat. An adequate supply of food is now a given which is not adversely affected by even large-scale animal epidemics (compared, for example, with the last swine fever epidemic in Europe, which caused shortages as recently as the 1950s). The cases of hunger that still exist in Europe have chiefly to do with problems some underprivileged social groups have in accessing resources, rather than with the fact that resources are not available.7 This revolution of food satiety (apart from the new problems of food safety it has brought to the fore) can be perceived as a major symbolic operator, entailing a radical transformation in collective and individual relationships to the world. This transformation also affects other areas that pose some threat to the experience of being— more or less—safe, in particular childbirth (except in rare cases, giving birth is no longer a life-threatening experience in Europe) and (up to a point) health.8 Admittedly, the experience of insecurity has shifted to other areas (employment, urban violence, social segregation, the environment, etc.) and general access to this “self-evidence of safety” is still, in the real world, unfairly distributed. But this is precisely because the “self-evidence of safety” (supported, one might say, by the self-evident sufficiency of food resources that is its symbolic center) has become the norm to the extent that we now become indignant about new experiences of insecurity, or when we see that sense of safety fail. The experience of satiety, which now typifies our societies, has major symbolic implications. In particular, it is directly linked with the focusing of belief systems that is supported by surveys of Europeans’ values. As soon as it is set up as an objective that is accessible in the here and now as a normal condition of individual and collective life (which ought to be the case for everyone), it can be accepted —or at least suggested—that the experience of satiety (not to be confused, obviously, with the personal, subjective experience of satisfying a desire) displays a crucial affinity with the shift of individual


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and collective aspirations for accomplishment demonstrated by the surveys of values. Less and less associated with the arrival of the Kingdom, or even with the radical or gradual transformation of society, the ideal of accomplishment is increasingly centered on the individual, part of a trend not of dismissing, but of “subjectivizing,” utopia, which is perceived as a radical alternative to the experience of the present. This shift has nothing to do with some “end of history”: it is simply caused (obviously only in part, but a nonetheless significant part) by an increasingly clear-cut dislocation between the “fear of shortage” and the aspiration to happiness, which is now labeled “selfrealization,” “fulfilling one’s potential,” personal access to “wisdom,” “balance,” “inner peace.” One might maintain that this “subjectivization of utopia” is one of several aspects of the invasion of the expressive individualism characteristic of all modern democratic societies. It is, however, worth establishing the connection between the general trend of subjectivizing utopia and what has been described here as the collective and individual experience of satiety. The latter, in its direct link with matters of biological survival and, therefore, death, resolves one of the central symbolic themes in all religious traditions, as evidenced particularly in the Jewish and Christian liturgy: the thousand-year association of the end to hunger with the fulfillment of god’s promise of a “land of milk and honey.” The second observation involves the spread of democratic culture beyond the political sphere in which democracy, as a way of organizing the exercise of sovereignty, took shape. In this respect, the turning point that came about in Europe in the years 1968–1970 was clearly crucial. The democratic experience, as achieved par excellence by the desire of self-determining citizens in public debate to guide the society in which they live, is expanding beyond the confines of public life to infiltrate the exercise of all relationships, overturning established roles and hierarchies. No institution—school, business, university or church—is exempt from this transformation of traditional ways of exercising authority, representations of obligation and a more or less “naturally ordained” distribution of roles and tasks. This democratic revision of “natural” roles and forms of authority obviously has the greatest impact within the family. In Europe, the

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trend suggests that the “relational family,” an association of individuals on an increasingly contractual basis, is inevitably gaining ascendancy over the “traditional family,” in which roles are supposed to reflect the “natural” destiny of its members. The question of homoparental families is the latest, and most controversial, stage in this grass-roots revolution in conjugal and family relationships, directly—and revealingly—reflected by the reforms in family law undertaken in a number of European countries. I wish to focus on just one aspect of these changes here: their connection with the undermining of the religious justification for authority (specifically, male or paternal authority) defined as godgiven. This undermining of authority which has already begun in the political arena is finding further application in contemporary challenges to the assignment of men, women and children to predetermined roles in society, or in the family justified by a “natural order” which refers back explicitly or implicitly to the “will of god,” a “will” which is, by definition, intangible and passes our understanding. The very different ways in which European societies and religious institutions have adjusted to the new forms of marriage and parenthood—between the openness (despite some counter-reactions) that characterizes societies in the Protestant sphere of influence and the defensive fall-back position more typically adopted by societies in Catholic-influenced countries—help revive the divisions between civilizational values that have been broadly shaped by religious history. Such disparities are being eliminated, however, with the onset of a cultural and social revolution that is ultimately destroying the very foundation of these civilizational constructs. In more global terms, it is suggested that the current rocking of the cultural foundation is closely connected with the changes in Europeans’ attitude to nature. Indeed, these changes have a direct influence on the dynamics of collective production of what Charles Taylor labels “strong evaluations.”9 Social cohesion is effectively determined by the choices a particular group is led to make between options it agrees to regard as superior or inferior, better or worse, desirable or undesirable, etc. Such evaluations involve not only contending frames of mind, interests and aspirations within the group, but also the references, norms, memories, aspirations etc. that make sense within the group.


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One might hypothesize that, to a great extent, the connection that has arisen in the long term between this social dynamic of the production of strong evaluations within European societies and their specific religious civilizational matrix was based on a particular way of viewing the natural order. The problem of the natural order was itself rooted in a religious worldview (clearly differentiated according to whether a Catholic or a Protestant society is involved) that survived the advance of secularization in various forms (including in legal form). Now, because of prodigious advances in science and technology, the basic human experiences most directly involved in the production of “strong evaluations”—sustenance, reproduction, health care, communication, the distinction between the living and dead, etc.—have been overturned by the discovery of the human capacity to alter processes previously thought to be immutable: with medically-assisted procreation dissolving the connection between marriage and filiation, the development of genome science and the practical control of the living organism turning farming conditions and therapeutics upside down, and the expansion of the cognitive sciences with all its implications for the field of information and our relationship to time and space, etc. There is no need for a long list: what entire civilizations have for thousands of years considered to be imperatives inevitably imposed upon humans by the dictates of the natural world, shaped symbolically by different religious systems, are now increasingly perceived as a set of mechanisms that can be manipulated, broken down, reorganized and modified. Nature has ceased to be an order, in either sense of the word: nature is perceived less and less as a world governed by immutable, eternal principles and is consequently less and less able to impose its rules on humans. All European societies are today faced with a radical revision of their attitude toward nature as the order of things that used to structure their symbolic worldviews (i.e. the shared mechanisms of meaning which lay at their center). The foundations of the religious civilizations incorporating this view of nature have been definitively shaken by the accompanying reassessment. The topical debates on bioethics in all European countries and in Europe as a whole are a perfect illustration of this. We are calling upon the symbolic resources

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of the different religious traditions to deal with ethical problems raised by the scientific control of nature the like of which have never been encountered before. At the same time, we are discovering the extraordinary weakness of these resources in terms of delivering standards, as well as the contradictions they entail. This process brings to light the eminently political nature of the generation of standards in ultramodern societies, and this discovery is seriously undermining the cultural plausibility of the codes of meaning that religions claim they still offer.

From the elimination of religion from culture to new ways of exploiting “Europe’s religious heritage” It may seem paradoxical, even provocative, to emphasize the ongoing process of the elimination of religion from European culture, as I have just done, given the prospect of a process which will instead amplify the wealth and the unifying power of Europe’s “religious heritage.” I do not seek to disparage the symbolic and ethical potential of this heritage. Indeed I have endeavored to emphasize the importance of the religious civilizational matrix—both unified and diverse— in which European societies are rooted. Nonetheless, I think it worth examining—in the precise light of the cultural development that I have just described—the significance of referring to the European religious bedrock in terms of heritage. My first remark concerns the reference to memory that forms part of this reference to religious heritage. As we know, the question of memory is raised obsessively, most specifically in societies in which there are a risk of loss of memory because of the rapid rate of change. Traditional societies, which rely on memory, do not feel the need to talk about collective memory all the time. It is a given which makes its organizational power felt in all aspects of social life and is not an “issue.” On the other hand, modern societies, which have change as their motor and their imperative, are much more anxious about keeping the flickering “flame of memory” alive. The predilection for commemoration is a modern and even an ultramodern one. Concern for heritage, and religious heritage, is in keeping with that attitude. Religion can be considered “heritage” only because it is kept distinct


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from and operates separately from the places where the rules of collective life are primarily decided. The classification of religion as heritage is supported inexorably by the erosion of the organizational power of religion in social life. For Europe, an act of commemoration—i.e. classifying religion as heritage—is, at the same time, a way of negotiating its attitude to its own history. This is my second comment. What does Europe’s religious history first and foremost consist of? For the most part, of wars—often bloody wars—setting groups and entire nations against each other. Indeed, the question of how to ensure religious peace is the main issue that gave rise to the founding of the State in Europe. The reference to religious history as heritage currently at issue is a way of assuaging the dark memory of the religious wars in Europe in favor of the convergent contribution of different religions to the creation of the (intellectual and artistic) values and works which now form a bond between Europeans. Treating Europe’s religious treasure as heritage is also a way of cleansing religion of its connections with the political conflicts and phenomena of social domination and violence with which it was associated, of retaining and conserving only the “pure” civilizing power it is supposed to have exerted throughout history. We should not resent or decry this application of selective memory. Quite the opposite, it contributes crucially to the production of norms and values that we use to govern our collective lives. Referring to Europe’s religious (or spiritual) heritage is not, in that sense, an act of conservation in a museum but rather an activity of symbolic production that contributes to the emergence of a shared worldview. From this point of view, there is nothing anecdotal about the debate on the nature of the reference to religious heritage in the texts governing the European Union. For, while it propounds irreconcilable local views, it also illuminates the collective cultural choices currently being made. The third comment is that, precisely because of its nature as an active producer of shared norms, reference to Europe’s religious heritage also entails a twofold risk. The first risk is that such a reference may itself become the focus of strategies undertaken by the major churches to regain the public prominence they are tending to lose. The search for the prospect of shared meaning, sustained in part by reference to the religious her-

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itage which Europeans theoretically share, may seem, in the eyes of religious institutions, to be an opportunity to put themselves forward as the special keepers, hence the most legitimate administrators, of that heritage. In a study of Pope John Paul II’s speeches during his visit to the European institutions in 1992, Jean-Paul Willaime asked the question in explicit terms, as follows: “If, by civil religion, we mean the system of beliefs and rites by means of which a social area ritualizes its collective existence and maintains collective reverence for the values which lie at the foundation of its order, one might wonder whether the Pope’s visit to the European institutions is not part of a process of developing a civil religion for Europe, a process in which the Catholic Church would put itself forward as the favored guardian of the European soul.”10 This is an important question that is worth considering if we wish the reference to a shared religious inheritance to be able to operate, not as a way of placing rivalry between religious persuasions and ideological conflict back on the agenda, but as an integrating reference which may be shared by all Europeans, believers and non-believers, whether or not they adhere to a particular religious persuasion. The second risk, probably more alarming, is that this reference to Europe’s religious heritage, while one hopes that it may have an integrating effect within the Community, may be seen outside it as a way of setting boundaries. The heritage covered by the reference is a Jewish and, above all, Christian heritage, in its two variants, Protestant and Catholic. As such, it denotes a clearly demarcated area, bordered to the east by the domain of Orthodox Christianity and to the south by that of Islam. The discussions surrounding Turkey’s entry into the European Union clearly show—quite apart from the major issue of human rights—the cultural, legal and symbolic issues raised by opening the European house to admit an Islamic country, however declaredly secular that country may be. Nor is the fact that there are no Orthodox countries among the signatories to the Treaty of Athens without significance. The public debate to which the definition of the cultural, political, ethical and symbolic heritage denoted by “Europe’s religious heritage” belongs itself represents an active aspect of the ongoing construction of social cohesion in Europe. It is first of all a place where the very frontiers of the shared European area are defined.


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Secondly, it is the privileged place for negotiating—based on the work of producing a shared memory—the reconciliation between establishing a common spirit and acknowledging the unique features that nourish this common spirit. Lastly, it is one of the potential testing grounds for the production of “strong evaluations” with respect to the completely new cultural situations currently facing Europe. In this final area, Europe partakes of the questions that are raised in all ultramodern societies. It also shares the risk that the extent of the social implications of this turning point, and indeed the psychological implications for the individual, may give rise, as it already has in the United States, to a severe backlash on the part of institutions and religious authorities. Such bodies may make every effort to defend their social and economic influence, and even to regain their lost political influence, by relying on the reactionary forces generated by the widespread insecurity (the loss of all absolute references) caused by this change. We have sufficiently clear evidence to believe that this is not a mere hypothesis. The possibility that extremely bitter cultural (and hence social and political) conflicts may come into being in this context is not just a theory. The possibility of the emergence in Europe of a “culture war,” like the one in the United States whose violence is described by the sociologist James D. Hunter (in a somewhat onesided but relevant manner), cannot be dismissed out of hand.11 At the very least, this situation encourages the republicanization of religious identities (which secularization was supposed to have pushed back into the private domain). While this feature is part of the general trend of all modern democratic societies to promote individual rights (of a person or group) to publicly assert the uniqueness of identity,12 it takes on special significance in the religious domain. There, it heightens the tension between the propensity toward the tolerant individualization of belief and the ambition of asserting the right to differ within the public forum as to the “truth” the community claims to possess.13 In this context, reference to Europe’s religious heritage becomes meaningful. If Europe’s religious foundation is weakened, this does not mean that the Judeo-Christian bedrock into which the foundation is sunk is being definitively dismissed. For that would mean forgetting that both the concept and experience of autonomy and the concept and experience of human dominion over nature—both implicat-

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ed in weakening the religious foundation—are themselves derived (at least in part) from that same Judeo-Christian tradition. Thus, the very experience of the weakening of the foundations of religion becomes the starting point for the reconsideration of European religious heritage with reference to two specific aspects: firstly, the possibility of redefining autonomy on the basis of JudeoChristian concepts of otherness and mutual relations, rather than as merely the liberal affirmation of an individual’s autonomy in his private life; secondly, the issue of dominion over nature, which might be considered, in the light of the Judeo-Christian concepts of the Creation, as something other than raw material and a source of revenue. In my opinion, the question of the “European soul” is best addressed by considering these two aspects, not by referring nostalgically to a religious past that is both glorious and painful but which has, in any case, definitively ceased to exist.

Notes 1

Cf. D. Hervieu-Léger, Le pèlerin et le converti. La religion en mouvement, Paris, Flammarion, 1999 (Poche Champs, 2001); and D. HervieuLéger, La religion en miettes ou la question des sectes, Paris, CalmannLévy, 2001. 2 Cf. G. Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, London, Blackwell, 1994; and G. Davie, Europe: The Exceptional Case. Parameters of Faith in the Modern World, London, Darton, Longman, Todd, 2002. 3 Cf. M. Gauchet, La religion dans la démocratie. Parcours de la laïcité, Paris, Gallimard, 1998. 4 Cf. the analysis given by P. Bouretz, “La démocratie française au risque du monde,” in M. Sadoun (ed.), La démocratie en France, T1: Idéologies, Paris, Gallimard, 2000, pp. 27–137. 5 Cf. F. Dubet, Le déclin de l’institution, Paris, Seuil, 2003. 6 Regarding this change, cf. D. Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme. La fin d’un monde, Paris, Bayard, 2003. 7 Cf. B. Hervieu et J. Viard, L’Archipel paysan, Paris, Editions de l’Aube, 2000. 8 Despite the considerable shake-up caused by the AIDS epidemic, the eradication of a number of major diseases and progress in disease prevention have given substance in Europe to the problem of “entitlement to health,” which is borne out (confirmed by negative examples i.e. access problems) by the existence of social, economic and cultural inequalities in access to healthcare.

The Role of Religion in Establishing Social Cohesion 9

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C. Taylor, Le malaise dans la modernité, Paris, Cerf, 1999. (Bellarmin, 1992). 10 J. P. Willaime (ed.), Strasbourg, Jean-Paul II et l’Europe, Paris, cerf, 1991; and J. P. Willaime, “Les religions et l’unification européenne,” in G. Davie et D. Hervieu-Léger (eds.), Identités religieuses en Europe, Paris, La Découverte, 1996. 11 James D. Hunter, Culture Wars. The Struggle to Define America, New York, Basic Books, 1991. 12 On this “democracy of identities”, cf. M. Gauchet, La religion dans la démocratie, op. cit.; and D. Schnapper, La démocratie providentielle, Paris, Gallimard, 2002. 13 On the specific tension in the contemporary religious arena between soft or mutual forms of validation of belief and hard forms of community validation of belief, cf. D. Hervieu-Léger, Le pèlerin et le converti, op. cit.

DAVID MARTIN

Integration and Fragmentation Patterns of Religion in Europe

Languages of Religion In this essay I shall be making certain assumptions unconnected with any personal views about further European integration. I assume that a question about how religion does or does not contribute to European integration is an empirical question, and, if the answer is rather discouraging, then that is what I have to report. No doubt the question itself is embedded in normative concerns, such as those now focused on the European Constitution, and it might be possible to respond by drawing on carefully selected religious norms relevant to those concerns. But that is not my main task. I am concerned, then, with the varying states of religion between Galway and Salonika, not with that particular subset of religious norms—of which subsidiarity is a characteristic example—which are capable of being subsumed within the conceptual abstractions dominating the humanist agenda. That is a game worth playing, but its rules are already set by that agenda. Were I to pause briefly and play that game, I would suggest that —classical sources apart—ideas like liberty, equality and fraternity are secular translations of Biblical texts, such as our oneness (irrespective of all adventitious characteristics) in Christ, the unity of humanity ‘under God,’ and the way in which every human being is a king and a priest ‘unto God.’ To this I would add ‘Glory to God,’ ‘The Peace of God,’ and ‘Christian liberty’ by God’s grace. If one removes the references to Christ and to God, one arrives at comprehensive mottos of republican principle and virtue. Since Christian language can in this way be emptied out into ordinary secular currency, the question is whether the specifically religious gold standard,

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held (literally) in vaults and crypts, is still required as reserve backing, or whether it has been finally converted into the secular. When one repudiates that standard, a relativistic nihilism of the kind brilliantly delineated in John Gray’s Straw Dogs (2002) easily follows. I hold that the hidden gold standard provides permanent backing for secular enlightened usage, while resisting all attempts at a final conversion. Religious language is sui generis. In any case, its fundamental grammar of incarnation and redemption, transformation and deformation, acceptance and alienation, sacrifice and resurrection, cannot be incorporated into the public realm without damage and compromise on all sides. A Risorgimento in the secular realm echoes the Resurrection, but cannot be confused with it, any more than a secular Renaissance can be confused with a Second Birth. Religious language is embedded in specific angles of vision, specific modes of human association, and in sacred places specifically shaped and informed by the gestures, images, and exclamations of worship. Such sacred places are scattered all over Europe and are part of its unity. Even if you dismiss Christianity as a lingering or malingering tenant, this deposit of faith remains a social presence and a social fact. The normative question can therefore be rephrased to ask how this presence and this fact may or may not be acknowledged in the public realm. I referred above to the enlightened agenda as a kind of takenfor-granted—one which, like a media interview, reserves the right to question without being questioned itself. From the protected vantage point of that agenda, enlightened elites presuppose an established universalism that somehow has to cope with, and perhaps override, an awkward, fissiparous and archaic religious particularity. In a supposedly postmodern age, however, one is permitted to think outside this protected vantage point. What we have in practice are rivalrous secular universalisms, such as those represented by France, Anglo-America and (until recently) Russia, each involved in a complex encounter with rivalrous religious universalisms. In these encounters there are certainly shared wisdoms, complementary vocabularies and perennial common understandings, such as peace with justice and human responsibility, to be exploited and explored. But unless the protocols of human dignity are threatened or violated either by different religions or by different

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Enlightenments, there must be respect for difference, and a sense of an unoccupied neutral space. Neither God nor truth can be pre-empted by the secular city. In any case, abstract rights are notoriously capable of being deployed in contrary directions: gays should not be discriminated against when it comes to employment and religious organizations should be able to employ those who share their ethos. Enlightenments, then, are in conflict, and the French Enlightenment in particular, as allied to the omnicompetent and secularist state, is challenged by other less statist Enlightenments (English, Scottish, Dutch, German and American). These have had or, in the German case, have lately arrived at, a limited federal view of the state, and all involve piety and reason in a partial alliance. The main historical conflict, which was once between the British and French versions, has now become a conflict between the American and French versions, with the British usually leaning westward once push comes to shove. The Anglo-Dutch genealogy of 1689 and the American genealogy of 1776 have long faced the genealogies of 1789 and 1917. Not only are there characteristic and powerful alliances of Christianity and Enlightenments running east and west across the northern tier from Harvard to Halle, but there are also powerful and parallel lines of theological communication, mostly moving westward from German sources. Religiously, linguistically and historically, Britain looks west to North America as well as to Australasia and the global Anglosphere. This is where the sometime Protestant character of Britain retains some relevance in spite of the passionate love affairs pursued by the educated British middle classes with France, Italy and Greece, in search of places where sensuous relaxation can be briefly indulged in beneath a southern sun. All that aside, the postProtestant north still preens itself on its capacity to internalize rules and laws, rather than to accept them in principle while venally evading them in practice. Whatever may be true of the old border of the magisterial Reformation, mutations of Protestant and Catholic attitudes still remain in force to cause cultural and political misunderstanding. If there are such palpable if modest differences between north and south, there are more basic differences between west and east, especially northwest and southeast. In the north there is a socially critical religious leadership, which includes high caliber lay opinion


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on such matters as bioethics, whereas in the south the weight of a more traditional Catholicism supports the idea of the Church speaking as a collective voice. Media convenience and political convenience collude with this Catholic view. In the east, and especially the southeast, the accepted role of religious leaderships has been, and remains, to speak on behalf of nations, even though the concrete norms governing people’s lives are not at all subject to ecclesiastical guidance or control. Indeed, churches in the east damage their moral credibility by seeking power and status. Perhaps I may summarize. These comments outline certain basic contrasts in contemporary European religiosity. There is a socially concerned ‘reformed’ Catholicism, particularly where Catholics are effectively a minority. There is an embedded folk Catholicism with its redoubts in the south, but with northern outliers. There is the ethnoreligion of eastern Europe, sometimes with recently renewed links to the state, but energized by several different kinds of alien rule. Western Europe has also nurtured ethnoreligions, in particular in such niches as the Brittany peninsula and the island of Ireland. Then there are the two Protestant types of religiosity found right across the northern tier. One is Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-American, based on religion as generating voluntary social capital, either as passive service station under the shadow of establishment, in the Englishstyle, or active, entrepreneurial and competitive, in the American style. The other is Scandinavian and German, with a strong Social Democratic reflection of Lutheran monopoly in Scandinavia, and a federal state working in partnership with churches to maintain a massive web of social assistance in Germany: Gotteshilfe, Selbshilfe, Staatshilfe, Brüderhilfe, to use a recent formulation by Klaus Tanner. The remaining kinds of religion are the cases of successful secularist indoctrination by the state in France, the Czech Republic, the former East Germany and Estonia. This is the obverse of religious nationalism, because the success of counterindoctrination by an ideologically secularist state, whether radical liberal or Marxist, depends to a great extent on whether the Church has been aligned with, or opposed to, the mobilization of national feeling and the nation-state. Religion and ethnicity either divide the sacred between them, or the sanctity of faith and nation are partially merged. So one needs to understand both how the sacred may occupy rival poles, and how it

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may partially migrate to occupy a new national sacred space. One also needs to be cautious about projections concerning the demise of sacred nationalism or the sacred nation-state, the rumors of whose death could well be exaggerated. Sacred nationalism is palpably alive in Croatia, as is the sacred nation-state in France. Since parts of northern Europe are post-Protestant (in spite of the fact that even in secular Britain 72% identify themselves as Christian), one must also observe the growth of largely unorganized subjective spiritualities, stressing human potential, sacralizing the individual, and creating a kind of Puritanism based, not on self-control, but on passionate judgments about pure air, racism, and green issues. If there is a unifying dimension connecting changes in the Church, charismatic movements, and the subjective ‘self-religions,’ it is the world of the Spirit, Holy or otherwise. Joachim of Fiore would not have been surprised at the arrival of his Third Age of the Holy Spirit.

Some patterns of religion in Europe In what follows I will sketch some patterns of religion in Europe that can be mentally superimposed, like a set of transparencies. My aim is to suggest what these patterns mean with regard to the integration and fragmentation of Europe, and I should say that they rest upon two premises. The first is that Christianity embodies a dialectic of the religious and the secular that more easily generates secular mutations of faith than straightforward replacements and displacements. The second is that religion should not be regarded as a separate channel of culture, but as a distinctive current mingling in the mainstream, sometimes going with the flow, sometimes against it. These two premises taken in tandem mean that religious forms and molds are often reflected in secular analogues. The Scandinavian symbiosis of Lutheranism and Social Democracy is one such pre-eminent case. Part of the aim of this essay is to lend additional depth to those standard accounts of religiosity that rely on comparative statistics about belief and practice. Counting matters, but one needs some account of religion as a mode of social consciousness and identity rooted in history and geography, time and place. Christianity can be viewed as a flexible repertoire of images and gestures, and as a code


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simultaneously replicating itself and adjusting to social cues and circumstances. It is best to proceed with concrete illustrations of the different patterns, rather than to continue setting out programmatic abstractions. One pattern of changing relations between the religious and the secular can be found at the center of every European city, though most dramatically so in regional and national capitals. In the Byzantine tradition, divine and human sovereignty are placed in intimate juxtaposition at the sacred heart of the city, whereas, in a western renaissance city like Florence, we see the incipient separation of powers in the two distinct spaces of Cathedral and Signoria. Rome and Paris are ancient cities where a relatively recent history of conflict between the religious and the secular has been realized in rival architectural emplacements. In Rome, St Peter’s is directly confronted by the vast Victor Emmanuel Monument, though eventually the Via della Conciliazione had to be constructed to bring Vatican City and the national capital back into contact. In Paris, Notre Dame and the Sacré Coeur represent one kind of sacred center, in which France is the eldest daughter of the Church, while the Panthéon and the Place de la Bastille represent sacred centers in which France is the eldest daughter of the revolution. This paradigmatic urban ecology, with its rival versions of the sacred, signals two centuries of warfare between religion and progress, Church and state, faith and liberal nationalism, clericalism and anticlericalism, Catholic and Enlightenment universality. It provided a model of conflict, and of the attempted supercession of one sacred by another, disseminated from Paris to the intelligentsias of Europe and Latin America. The governing concept, enshrined in Paris, and taken for granted in France, was and remains laicité. Quite different notions, however, are enshrined (and taken for granted) elsewhere. In Germany, Scandinavia, England and Scotland, piety and enlightenment lived to some extent in partnership, partly because the Church was subordinate to the state, and overlapped the middle and ruling classes. In Berlin and Helsinki, the churches were integrated into a profile that included the university, the arts and administration within a classical format conveying the power of enlightened absolutism. In Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm, monuments to Social Democracy and civic consciousness later com-

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plemented the old centers. The modest enlightenment in England and Scotland integrated modest classical churches into civic squares and bequeathed a model of coexistence to North America that has become the main alternative to the model of warfare and supercession emanating from France. Clearly, some of these different models of the religious and the secular can be read in the city itself, literally at a glance. On the one hand, Europe is a unity by virtue of the universality of the basic distinction between the religious and the secular, and the deposit of sacred buildings from Syracuse to Trondheim and Dublin to Sofia; on the other, it is a diversity by virtue of the different ways that distinction is realized. This mapping in terms of urban sacred ecology can be supplemented by thinking in terms of architectural styles in a way already hinted at in references to the classicism of enlightened absolutism in parts of Europe (Charles III, Joseph II, Catherine the Great), and the more modest bourgeois classicism of the Anglo-American tradition. Europe could be looked at, again quite literally, in terms of zones of Counter-Reformation Baroque, the classicism of enlightened absolutism, and the more modest, domestic and bourgeois traditions found in Amsterdam, London and Boston, New England. These three civic cultures, each rooted in Protestantism, pioneered a model of (relative) pluralism, tolerance, federalism and philosemitism between them. They reduced the height and scale of human and divine sovereignty and emptied out some of the potency of the sacred concentrated at the heart of the city. Perhaps the weakening of the sacred center began when the sacred heart of Catholic Amsterdam was forcibly sequestered and turned over to the university. This must be regarded as a major mutation because it shifted the locale of protected space to the university (and eventually the art gallery and concert hall), which was conceived of as a new kind of Church. Whether or not that idea holds up in the academic history of sacred representation, it remains the case that the four cities of Amsterdam, Edinburgh, London and Boston have been historically linked by shared forms of politics, economy and religion, as well as by naval power and global trading empires, since the late seventeenth century. They also represent one major linkage and continuity between Europe and North America, just as France represents another. In light of


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such examples, it is not so easy to formulate principles that unequivocally distinguish Europe from the U.S. so as to render the U.S. distinguishable as ‘the Other.’ This mapping of the connection between the northwestern peripheries of Europe and the northeastern peripheries of America is really just an extension of the initial map based on such models as Rome and Paris, Byzantium and Florence. It is one that would reach its outer limits, expressed in purely classical terms, with the sacred field of Washington D.C. representing the final separation of church and state. But a second mapping or transparency can be devised, based on the way the historic religious moulds of European societies are mirrored in characteristic secular mutations and transpositions. The rigorous state monopoly exercised by the Catholic Church in France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, for example, was transposed into the monopoly eventually exercised during the Third Republic by the omnicompetent secular state. Just as for the Catholic Church error had no rights, so, for the sacred Republic, Catholic error had no right to acknowledgement in the public realm. The continuity of this French tradition of secular monopoly is perhaps illustrated in recent laws restricting the operation of sects and cults. Another example of secular mutation is the way the inclusive scope of Lutheran monopoly in Scandinavia has been fused with, and replicated by, the inclusiveness of Social Democracy and the welfare state. In Germany, Holland and Switzerland once again, religious pluralism is mirrored in the federal character of the state. In England, the attempt of the Reformed Anglican Church to accommodate and ‘comprehend’ an inclusive middle, and the eventual evolution of that accommodation into an accepted rivalry between the church-state establishment and religious non-conformity, became mirrored in the flexibility of the political system and its concept of loyal opposition. Here another American comparison may be useful. England (and Scotland and Ulster) generated a style of evangelical Protestantism based on heartwork which, in the U.S., became a universal devotion to individual sincerity. However, the retention of an Anglican religious establishment meant that England also acted as a hinge turning, on the one hand, towards American inwardness, and, on the

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other, towards Scandinavian formality. If these distinctions seem rather marginal to European integration, I nonetheless hope to illustrate how such cultural characteristics belong among others separating the Anglosphere from the European continent, as well as linking England to Scandinavia’s cautious attitude towards European involvement. For a wide variety of cultural reasons, the national traditions of Britain and Scandinavia understand each other, while both regarding the mainland of Europe with suspicion. Since the mapping so far has focused to a considerable extent on peripheries and secular translations, I now need to sketch two supplementary maps, the first identifying the historic European center for which Britain and Scandinavia are peripheries, the second tracing the heartlands of secularity and secularism. I will treat secularity as a condition, and secularism as an ideology. The historic center of the West is arguably in Charlemagne’s Middle Kingdom and in the bands of territory on either side of Aachen/ Aix-la-Chapelle. Looking back historically even further, this is the point where Latinity encountered the German tribes (as Trent was also much later!), and looking forward it gave birth to Schuman and Adenauer, who, along with Monnet, became the architects of the Franco-German compact after the Second World War. With only the modest extension it undergoes in Frankfurt, the old imperial capital and the city that hosted the first assembly of liberal Germany and that is now a global financial capital, this heartland makes more sense as a center than Rome, since Rome is really the Center of the Mediterranean, north and south, and has lost its southern littoral to Islam. This frontier area, broadly understood, is one of mixed religion and contains the three key cities of Brussels, Strasbourg and Geneva. Each is symbolically close to the linguistic frontier that renders them appropriate sites for international co-ordination and co-operation. The capital of Germany is no longer situated in the frontier area at gemütlich Catholic Bonn, but in post-Protestant Berlin. So, the heartland of Western Europe redivivus is neither in post-Protestant Berlin nor in post-Catholic Paris, but in between. Berlin and Paris respectively are the centers of European secularity and European secularism. Increasingly the new Berlin looks like the capital of the whole northern plain, and of a secular landscape stretching from Birmingham to Tallinn. The epicenters of secu-


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larity lie in the former East Germany and the Czech Republic, in spite of the extraordinary role played by the Lutheran churches of East Germany in the revolution of 1989. The examples of East Germany and Estonia, and to a lesser extent Latvia, suggest that Lutheranism is less able to resist secular persecution in the way Catholicism did in Lithuania and Poland. The crucial point to notice, however, is that a great deal hinges on whether Catholicism or Catholic political powers were hostile to the birth of a modern nation-state: in France and in Czech lands, Catholicism was perceived as hostile, in Poland, Lithuania, Croatia and Slovakia the situation was quite the reverse, while in Hungary the situation was mixed, given the strong connection between the birth of the nation and the Protestant east of the country around Debrecen. The countries of east-central and eastern Europe are all, to this or that extent characterized by ethnoreligiosity, due to a long history of alien domination by Ottomans, or Austrians, or Russians—either Orthodox or communist. Some of the variations in religiosity are not entirely explicable, when one compares, for example, the remarkably vital Orthodoxy of Romania and the relatively secular condition of Bulgaria, unless the divisions in Bulgarian Orthodoxy and poor negotiation with the government after the war were serious factors. Certainly Romania, as a country constructing itself both in Latin and orthodox terms, has a very distinctive national identity nourished by the Orthodox Church. Serbia presents an interesting case because when at the center of Yugoslavia under Tito it was highly secularized, yet as the federated state went into dissolution it recovered a strong sense of religious identity, particularly in relation to Kosovo. The recovery in Serbia parallels the religious recovery in Russia after the break-up of the Soviet empire, and in both cases the framework of Church-state partnership was renewed with perhaps only a minority of the population much engaged by active religion, and a mélange of magical ideas alive and well in the population at large. Revivals also occurred in those parts of the western Ukraine historically linked to Poland and Lithuania. However, the vitality of ethnoreligion throughout Eastern Europe has brought about no nostalgia for the restoration of ecclesiastical influence over law and personal conduct. The Polish episcopate tried this and failed.

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Greece requires some separate comment because it is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the secularism of France and yet remains the historic icon of western democracy and rationality. Exactly to what extent the Church is a powerful presence in the public realm, and Orthodoxy co-extensive with citizenship and Greek identity, is illustrated by the fierce controversy over whether the bearer’s religion should be noted on the Greek passport. The Greek case also illustrates the vigorous and firm profile of religion brought about by being at a border with Islam in Turkey, by the ethnic cleansings on both sides of the Islamic-Christian border, and by a global diaspora on a scale similar to the diasporas of the Armenians and the Irish. The map of ethnoreligion in Eastern Europe overlaps the map of embedded folk religion throughout the littoral of the northern Mediterranean, which is not necessarily marked by conscientious religious practice of a formal kind, but by customs, pilgrimages and festivals. As in much of Eastern Europe and Russia, a confused mixture of magic and paganism, and of ancient and modern notions, lies quite close to the surface. This kind of religion is rather different from the conscious and socially aware Catholicism that exists further north, especially in countries where practicing Catholics are a minority, or where Catholicism itself is only locally the dominant religion. Catholicism in Sicily or south of Ancona is not like Catholicism in either France or Holland. On the other hand, what I have called embedded religion is not only found on the Mediterranean littoral, but in the Alps and various extensions like the Veneto, and in the mountains of the Massif Centrale, of northern Portugal, Catalonia and north eastern Spain. There is a further extension here related to various micro-nationalisms that may or may not be shaped by geographical niches like mountains or peninsulas. Galicia, Aragon, the Basque country, parts of Catalonia, and parts of the Pyrenees are often regions of quasi-uniformity with respect to Catholic consciousness, in spite of the steep decline of church-going in the Iberian peninsula as a whole. Britanny and Bavaria have been similar areas of intense Catholic consciousness further to the north even though they have also experienced a marked decline in official practice, and Catholic Ireland may well belong in ‘the south’ rather than in the northwest. A similar folk Protes-


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tantism exists in niches in northern Europe: the Western Isles in Scotland, and in Jutland, and parts of Norway. Speculating a bit as to these regional Catholicisms (often but not always in geographical niches such as highlands, peninsulas and islands), they probably express a resistance to ‘the center,’ whether the center is in Madrid or in Paris, though in the case of Italy there are various centers, with Rome virtually in the south and Milan looking northward across the Alps. That fragmentation is part of the “problem” of Italy: it is nearly all elongated peninsula. A combination of embedded Catholicism and resistance to “the center” gives rise to a distinctive political coloring (southern Italy, Bavaria) and is associated with great pilgrimage centers; Fatima, Santiago, Zaragoza, Montserrat, Rocamadour, Lourdes, Lisieux, the Vierzehnheiligen, Einsiedeln and Medjugorje. Where the Virgin chooses to appear, and when, is not entirely accidental. The mapping offered so far has covered embedded religion or ethnoreligion or some combination, “conscientious” minority Catholicism and conscientious minority Protestantism, the great centers of northern secularity and French secularism, and has also sketched some special characteristics of the semi-detached northern and northeastern peripheries. What remains now is to fill in some borderlands, enquiring whether the borders are quiet and quiescent or lively and dangerous. Broadly speaking, it is all quiet along the old border of the Reformation, except in Ulster: Armagh with its two cathedrals still marks a dangerous transition. As has already been noted, Strasbourg and Alsace have been converted from borderlands into centers of co-operation. However, the old West-East border, at least as you go south and east is still alive with dangerous tensions. Thus, although Breslau/Wroc°aw and Pressburg/Bratislava/Pozsony are seemingly settled borders, Timisoara, and even more so Sarajevo and Skopje, are not. This is precisely the region of the most intense ethnoreligiosity, characterized by dangerous mixtures of majorities and minorities, with consequent danger of ethnic cleansing, for example, the fate of the historic “seven cities,” of German settlement in Romania, and the creation of ghettos such as now exist in Sarajevo and Mostar. The Hungarians of Transylvania and of areas more isolated and deeper into Romania, feel under pressure, whether they are Catholic or Protes-

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tant, and it is significant that the Romanian revolution of December 1989 was sparked off by a Hungarian Protestant pastor in Timisoara. In the whole of this area church leaders may also be political leaders, as Stepinac, Tiso and Makarios were in the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, their representative role needs to be contrasted with the role of church leaders in “the West.” These Western leaders have mostly ceased to speak for ethnic constituencies and are rather the spokesmen of a liberal middle class within a more conservative active Church constituency. It is also worth suggesting where other distinctive constituencies may lie, even if not on the strictly political map and not overtly present on the ecclesiastical map. Communities can, after all, form around seas, like the Lutheran Baltic and the Celtic Irish Sea. The rise of Celticism around and far beyond the Irish sea, in new spiritualities (or old spirits in Irish pubs) is phenomenal. It has affinities with other ‘constructed’ revivals, not only of earlier Christianities, but also of pagan roots. In the case of the Irish Sea, it is surrounded by highlands, islands and peninsulas with sacred associations, such as Iona, St Patrick’ s Mountain and St David’s, and these harbor both an ancient Christianity and enclaves for modern spiritual travelers of many kinds. There are links here with folklore and mythological revivals all over the continent, also with associated kinds of music. This area of spirituality is difficult to chart, not only because it is so varied, but because it insists on fragmentation and resists institutions as such. However, I would like to sketch in a mutation of Protestant and post-Protestant spirituality that does to some extent still respect the old border of the Reformation. Its origins lie in the Protestant pursuit of inwardness and in the Protestant desire to internalize the rules, with the result that rules are taken seriously and to heart. In its most developed form this leads to the secular religion of sincerity or authenticity, in particular in the USA. Sincerity and inner seriousness about rules, however, leads to an inability to cope with the necessary negotiated compromises, and, perhaps, the understood corruptions of politics, and therefore to an apolitical cynicism about government. What was once a classically Protestant objection to a Catholic theoretical acceptance of rules, combined with an understood evasion of them in practice, has become an alienation from society as such with strongly religious resonances.


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Of course, this classically (and stereotypically) Protestant objection is still present in Anglo-Saxon attitudes towards the EU, and towards French, Belgian and Italian politics. One version of a looser, more spontaneous spirituality retains links with disciplined life-styles within a vigorous charismatic Christianity. The multitudinous non-institutional forms, however, defy mapping, except perhaps through the proliferation of holistic therapies and green politics. Concerns over pollution and demands for pure air and pure food and political correctness are a version of Puritanism that has relaxed personal responsibility, hard work and selfdiscipline in favor of complaints about spoliation, war, desecration, and the depredations of global capitalism and misapplied science. The fundamental shift, present both in the new spiritualities and the shifting psychological landscape within the churches, is (as a very insightful study of Kendal, Cumbria shows) toward subjectivization. Put dramatically, Protestantism destroys its capacity to reproduce and to retain its vital memory, not because of some problem with the scientific world-view or rationalization, but by going completely inward, becoming personal and inarticulate. The churches have mostly incorporated this in the USA, whereas in Europe they mostly have not. Subjectivity militates against obedience, group discipline and personal obligation; it also rejects authority, in particular patriarchy, be it religious or otherwise. It therefore overflows into a feminine or feminist sense of “participation” in the rhythms of the natural world. Nature, human or physical, is good, but sin and evil, sacrifice and redemption, are difficult to comprehend, even though evil is readily identified as malignantly present in the institutional and official social order. If one were to identify this complex of spiritualities negatively, it would be as part of the religious hedonism and search for “goods” of all kinds which has always underlain the more ascetic, and indeed Puritanical, expressions of both the Catholic and Protestant faiths. Protestantism has no monopoly on Puritanism, as versions of Irish and Spanish spirituality indicate. The migration of mostly non-Christian populations is not a focus of this essay, except to underline the gulf that separates the Muslim faith in particular from the subjective spiritualities just outlined. In parenthesis Britain is unusually included here, partly because some

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of the migration into Britain comes from the Christian Caribbean and Christian sub-Saharan Africa, but also because migration comes from global populations not adjacent south and east of the European continent. The characteristics of Muslim migrant populations are antithetical to the “advanced” religiosity of much of Europe, to the point where assimilation is perceived as death. Muslim communities have learned how to use a rhetoric of freedom, rights, inclusivity and multiculturalism, while for the most part—whatever their internal fragmentation—remaining integral, organic, monocultural and patriarchal, as well as stirred to some extent by global radical Islam. The relative lack of the religious/secular distinction within Islam has serious consequences. Whether or not there is accelerating tension along this particular internal border depends on various factors, such as the size, location, and the ethnic and class character, of the migrant community. Of course, in this context Turkey as a nation-state seeks a space for neutral civility, rather than the religiosity of which it has had more than enough at home. That sheer numbers should play a crucial role is obviously a major anxiety with respect to interreligious tensions and social harmony in general. The official leaderships of the churches mostly express the inclusive sentiments often characteristic of the educated middle classes, while being caught in the classic liberal dilemma as to how far one should include the exclusive. It remains to be seen whether Muslim assimilation will follow the path of Jewish assimilation (bracketing for a moment the horrors of the holocaust) but there are reasons to doubt it. Nor can one assume the tolerance of even the most multicultural of European societies, as the recent Dutch experience indicates. Even Holland has found that it contains a border.

Integration and fragmentation In this essay so far I have not gone through the standard procedure of recounting figures of variations in belief, practice and religious selfidentification, or assessing such indices with regard to secularization. The object has been primarily to look at kinds of religiosity and kinds of secularity, or of principled secularism, in the historic French and


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Russian style, as these might bear on the integration or fragmentation of Europe. So far as the figures go, what one needs to know is as follows. First, that perhaps between one fifth and one third of the population has some active engagement with religious practice—depending on the criteria employed—within a range between the former East Germany, low on both belief and practice, and countries like Ireland, Poland, Greece, Romania and Malta, high on all counts. That list in itself reminds us that Catholicism accounts for a much higher proportion of active, church-related religion than would be consistent with the size of “Catholic” populations. There is, however, an undeniable secularizing process affecting the capacity of churches to reproduce themselves and their historical memory in the younger generations. This process includes pre-emptive strikes by personnel in key educational and welfare agencies under religious aegis in favor of secular criteria, as well as the effects of the media. Throughout Western Europe the secularizing process has accelerated since the sixties, following its arrival at a post-war plateau, and this has been evident above all in the mainstream churches. The usual caveats must be made, of course: the acceptance of Christian identity, of God, of prayer, of Christian moral maxims, and of “spirituality.” Protestant Scandinavia ranks low on practice but high with respect to confirmation and, in many areas, nurtures what is known as “personal” religion. Britain resembles Scandinavia in terms of indices of practice, yet (in Grace Davie’s formulation) Britons believe without belonging, while Scandinavians belong without believing. Nearly three out of four Britons describe themselves in a census as Christian, and three out of a hundred as Muslim, even though religious practice in Birmingham is probably more Muslim than anything else, with Catholicism ranking perhaps second. These varied profiles could be amplified, but it is only the broad profile that matters. Clearly, Western Europe has undergone a different experience from Eastern Europe, but secularizing tendencies exist even in Poland and Greece. Equally clearly, the decline in churchrelated religious practice is paralleled by a decline in large-scale voluntary activity, including political activity, as such. This is sometimes described as a deterioration in social capital, even though partly offset, as the Kendal study suggests, by an increase in the activity

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of small, intimate self-help and mutual support groups, spiritual and otherwise (e.g. Families Anonymous). How does all the background sketched in so far bear on questions relating to European integration and fragmentation, cultural similarity and cultural variety? To begin with, questions about the role of the religious sphere with respect to European integration are problematic, since one would not put the question in the same way regarding the role of politics, since we all understand that politics is inherently about negotiated differences as well as about solidarities. The question is also slightly paradoxical in that one would not pose it were there an implicit consensus. The question itself suggests there is a problem, and a serious one. One way of stating the problem is to draw attention to the difference between French laicité and its principled secularism, as contrasted with Anglo-Germanic secularity, and the ethnoreligiosity of much of Eastern Europe, where churches or religions may be surrogates for nations. There are parallel differences between an actively chosen personal religion on the Protestant model, and embedded religion on the older, traditional Orthodox and Catholic model. Once again, the religiosity of activist and socially concerned Christianity represented by many church leaderships in Western Europe, particularly northwestern Europe, differs greatly from religion as cultural resistance, and from the leadership that goes with it. An Anglican Archbishop is not remotely like such figures as Archbishops Makarios or Stepinac, or Tiso in Slovakia, or the leadership of the Hungarian minority in Romania—or Ghamsakurdia in Georgia! In terms of spirituality and ‘sobornost,’ Christians in the West reach out to the Catholic and Orthodox world. In terms of ethnoreligiosity, exclusive claims, and the ethnopolitics of religion, however, they abhor it. (Interestingly enough, it is that very same eastern world, and especially perhaps Poland, now seeking integration in Europe, which most rejects the secularist ideology of France and Russia, and identifies its liberation with the USA and the Anglosphere. After all, there are perhaps nearly as many Poles and Greeks in Chicago, as there are in Warsaw and Athens.) Perhaps this is the point at which to highlight some characteristics of Christian leaderships in Western Europe with regard to European integration. Although such leaderships retain some representa-


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tive role with respect to religion and nation, more particular where religion relates to a micro-nationalism, they are nonetheless likely to be culturally quite close to the secular middle class in modes of expression, attitudes and agenda. This means they are more liberal, ecumenical and European than the rank and file active Christian constituency, let alone the average dormant Christian identity in the population at large. This point was aptly made in the United Sates by whoever it was who joked that the divide between Republican and Democrat in the American Episcopal Church ran along the altar rail. There is a wider issue lurking here, brought about by important ethical issues, typically those raised by the advances in the life sciences. In such matters, the views of bishops, treated by the media as the views of “the Church” according to traditional Catholic conceptions, are not the same as those of educated lay persons. There is a Church view articulated by “churchmen” and there are any number of informed lay viewpoints held by Christians. So the question is not simply what “the Church” says or what the Pope pronounces. Indeed, all the evidence suggests that, for the purposes of Catholic identity, the Pope is a charismatic totem rather than a source of authority on life-styles, someone who can prescribe what is appropriate for family organization and sexual behavior. In the West Church leaderships as such have this totemic quality without exercising what might be called moral jurisdiction, an area where they tend to lag painfully behind what lay Christians already have decided to do in practice. Italy’s low birth rate is the most dramatic index of this, and even in Poland and Ireland strong Catholic identity does not imply recognition of ecclesiastical authority, or a desire for its embodiment in secular law. Identity is not obedience. Religious identity may and does seek recognition in the public realm with respect to belief in God and broadly Christian behavior, but it is decreasingly “patriarchal” in its attitude toward ecclesiastical moral authority, and looks like was once the case to exemplary figures and models. Some turn to the Bible or the Church for secure guidance, but most do not. Religious conservatism and secularity therefore increase in tandem. This in turn is linked to a more general point about Christian morality and secular morality. Christianity is most widely understood as care for one’s neighbors, reverence for life and charitable

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attitudes and endeavors, and in that respect overlaps ordinary secular precepts. However, Christian language concerning moral obligation is expressed in terms of story and image, and so has greater existential impact than abstract civic principles. There is a further divide here that relates to what John Paul II has described as a “culture of narcissism,” and it has something to do with the subjective spiritualities (or “self-religions”) already touched on. It also relates to the shift from ethical attitudes expressed in terms of duty and obligation to criteria of happiness, utility, freedom and self-fulfillment. In its extreme form, freedom expresses itself as limitless permission to transgress and shock. However, this limitless permission is in no way the final advent of human autonomy, but rather the replacement of older exemplars of endeavor and responsibility by peer-group pressure and the often-damaging examples provided by the life-styles of ‘celebrities.’ What is sometimes referred to as consumer hedonism lies behind the American idea of religious preference, and, to that extent, religion itself is chosen rather than inherited. Once again the difference between Protestant Europe and Islam is maximal. One is talking about different kinds of society, let alone different varieties of religion. Such realities pose particular problems for the dominant liberalism of Western societies, more particularly the dominant liberal elites, Christian or secular. It is, after all, they who hold most firmly that one should respect “the other” (and indeed feel nostalgia for Catholic, Orthodox, and even Islamic communal integrity), and yet most firmly condemn the authoritative deployment of scripture or tradition to inhibit freedom, limit choice, or maintain patriarchal authority and images of God. The issue might be summarized by asking whether agreement that all the “children of Abraham” believe in one God is the same as agreement that all believe in the same God. No doubt the polite and politic fiction “Judaeo-Christianity” serves its purpose in observing serious differences in angle of vision, however closely affiliated Christianity may be to Judaism. But just how far such ecumenical concepts can be extended to Islam is a moot point, especially because of the difficulty Islam has in recognizing the autonomy of the secular in relation to the religious when it comes to law and the boundaries of social belonging. Conscientious choice


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in religious matters is inadequately developed. This is an area where contemporary liberals are no more inclined to grant rights to egregious error than Catholics were to concede such rights in the past.

The presence of religion At this point one comes to issues that trespass awkwardly beyond the domain of sociology. Such issues turn around the specificity and particularity of religious forms of association and language. They are brought out most clearly with respect to the role churches often play, locally and nationally, as foci of communal grief and rejoicing, as for example at the death of Princess Diana and the sinking of the Estonia. Here, religious solidarity, the commonalities of sacred space, and the depth and range of religious language take over where secular talk and utilitarian venues have little or nothing to offer. Religious association has traditionally been expressed through communities of obedience, discipline (internal and external) and sacrifice, based on cumulative reference to deposits of tradition and/or canonical scripture. This is still a crucial aspect of the specific difference exemplified in most forms of contemporary European religion. Religious language also exemplifies difference through being rooted in narratives bearing images of transformation and deformation, transcendence and immanence. It points “beyond” in a vertical as well as a horizontal direction: it aspires, and its grammatical tense is not only the past, but also the future perfect. It conveys solidarity in hope rather than facilitating negotiation over rival interests, as does political language. Of course, it may be that religious hope and aspiration lose some degree of purchase as consumer society offers an interim satiation of human wants, except for the fact that satiation is not satisfaction. “European” principles, such as the dignity of the individual, human rights, equality, solidarity, the primordiality of reason, and the rule of law, function at a different level of abstraction from that of religious language, and to an important extent cover a different spectrum of concerns. There are, indeed, mediating concepts, such as subsidiarity or the autonomy of the secular, which can be fed into secular discourse; and governing concepts like liberty, equality and fraternity can be viewed as translations of St Paul respecting the

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unity and equality of humankind in Christ. But religious language is embedded differently and in a different range of concerns. That human beings are made in the image of God can be translated into such terms as “All men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” But the priority of faith, hope and love—above all love—cannot be translated into civic and constitutional terms. Such priorities are laid on human beings by religious commitment in a manner that cannot be articulated as constitutive of the state or as a matter of policy in the public realm. No more can incarnation and redemption be reduced to secular discourse, or churches converted into art galleries and concert halls or civic spaces, without some aspect remaining unfulfilled. Such space is there not for particular social functions, but for the specifically human, and for griefs and joys unmet and unconsidered by other kinds of meeting place. How you treat that specificity and acknowledge it as a presence in the public realm is partly a matter of whether you view religion as archaic survival condemned to continuous erosion by social evolution, or as a constitutive language that is as primordial in its way as reason, and with its own coherence and continuing relevance. Beyond that basically philosophical divide, the question is how far and in what manner you do or do not explicitly acknowledge the religious presence. Empirically it is there: but is it a private or a public fact? Historically, after all, without the prior existence of Christianity, in successive mutations of Reform, Humanism and Enlightenment, the “West” and Europe are little more than geographical expressions, or congeries of economic convenience. NB The above is a think piece not needing academic reference except in its citation of the Kendal, Cumbria, study by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead with Benjamin Seel, Bronislaw Szersynski and Karin Tusting, entitled Bringing the Sacred to Life, Oxford, 2004. I have also drawn on Grace Davie Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging, Oxford, 1994, Religion in Modern Europe: a memory Mutates, Oxford UP, 2000, and Europe: the Exceptional Case, London, 2002. There is further empirical detail in Andrew Greeley Religion in Modern Europe at the End of the Second Millennium, London, 2003.

PETER L. BERGER

Observations from America

The contributions in this volume provide a very useful overview of the role of religion in the integration of Europe, a matter that has become topical in the current debate over whether some reference to religion should be included in the proposed constitution of the European Union. In what follows I will not attempt a commentary on these excellent papers. Rather, I will make some (more or less organized) observations from the perch on which I happen to sit, namely an American perch. (So as not to offend Taylor’s Canadian sensitivities, I should say “a United States perch.” Canada is different from the United States in religion as in other things. However, for the sake of style, I will stick with the customary terminology.) At first blush there is something ironic about mentioning religion in the same breath as integration. Religion has always been an integrating force—typically by integrating one community in intense and frequently murderous hostility against other communities. The religious history of Europe in particular is dripping with blood— Catholics against Protestants, both against Jews, Latin Christendom against Eastern Orthodoxy, and Christians against Muslims. The idea of religion as an overarching integrative force throughout Europe is novel and, in view of the historical record, not very promising. Indeed, secularism (as carefully defined and distinguished from secularity by Martin) would be a more likely candidate for such a role. Perhaps one could speak more plausibly of European integration despite religion. The American perch is useful, because the comparison between Europe and the United States is theoretically strategic for the sociology of religion. Secularity (simply put, the decline in religious belief

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and practice) has commonly been seen as an inexorable consequence of modernization. Yet the United States, which can hardly be described as less modern than Western Europe, is robustly religious when compared with the latter. Reference is often made to “American exceptionalism” (sometimes favorably, sometimes not so). America is undoubtedly exceptional in many ways, but not when it comes to religion. Most of the world is religious, as is America—Europe is the exception (as stated in the title of a recent book by the British sociologist Grace Davie)—and it is that exception which begs for explanation. It so happens that our research center at Boston University is in the final stages of a research project on “Eurosecularity,” directed by Hervieu-Léger with the collaboration of an international team of scholars. The findings of this study will be published in the near future, and this is not the place for a preview. But I will allow myself some idiosyncratic comments of my own. The conventional distinction is between “religious America” and “secular Europe.” Things are rather more complicated—I will get to this in a moment. But, looked at from an American perch, there is something ironic about the current arguments for mention of the religious (or “Judaeo-Christian,” or “Judaeo-Christian-Islamic”) basis of so-called “European values” in the proposed constitution. The only mention of religion in the constitution of the United States is in the First Amendment, which both guarantees the free exercise of religion and prohibits its establishment by government—no mention of any religious basis for “American values.” (The Declaration of Independence, which does contain some very vague language of this sort, is not part of the constitution.) Yet this omission has not been an obstacle to the exuberant development of religion. Could it be that it has actually been helpful to this development? Alexis de Tocqueville certainly thought so. Is there a lesson here for Europe? Be this as it may, there are both differences and similarities in the place of religion on the two continents. (More precisely, the comparison refers to Western and Central Europe, the vortex of the alleged secularity. As one goes east and southeast from this region, one finds a very different situation.) What is different? All objective indices of religious behavior are much higher in America—in terms of church attendance, recruitment to the clergy, material support of the churches. There has been a high


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degree of “de-institutionalization” of religion in Europe. Both the Catholic and the Protestant churches are almost everywhere in a state of institutional crisis, with only some relatively small enclaves of traditional “churchliness.” By contrast, church life in America continues vigorously. There has been a decline in participation in the socalled “mainline” Protestant churches, much less so among Catholics. But there is one American phenomenon that is almost completely absent in Europe—the exuberant presence of Evangelical Protestantism, with some forty million Americans describing themselves as “born-again Christians.” The same difference shows up in subjective indices—expressions of belief in God, salvation through Jesus Christ, life after death, and for that matter any of the traditional Christian doctrines. If Hervieu-Léger is right (as in her recent book Catholicisme, la fin d’un monde), there has also been a decline in Europe of what she calls the “civilizational” role of religion—that is, the way in which entire cultures were shaped by Catholic, or Protestant, values, regardless of the fate of the churches. Thus America can still be seen as a Protestant civilization in a way in which, say, Scandinavia cannot. But what is similar? The most important similarity is individuation. This means that religion is no longer embedded in the culture in a taken-for-granted manner, but rather becomes an object of individual choices. Hervieu-Léger has called this phenomenon “bricolage” (the term suggests tinkering with a Lego set). Robert Wuthnow, referring to America, has used the term “patchwork religion” to describe the same phenomenon. On both continents this includes the people who say that they are not religious but “spiritual.” Many of them are perpetual seekers (Hervieu-Léger calls them pilgrims) rather than resolute affirmers of this or that faith. In Europe these people express their religiosity in very diffuse ways, typically outside the churches. In America they frequently set up churches. The prototypical American church of this kind is the Unitarian–Universalist denomination, which officially defines itself as a community of seekers. (A telling joke: How does the Unitarian version of the Lord’s Prayer begin? “To Whom It may Concern.”) Significantly, this denomination, though small, has experienced healthy growth. I would argue that this phenomenon (and not secularity) is indeed a result of modernity, which pluralizes the life-world of individuals

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and makes taken-for-granted certainty (in religion as in everything else) hard to come by. This pluralization is caused by a variety of modern developments—urbanization, mass migration, literacy, and the mass communication media. All of these confront the individual with a diversity of worldviews, value systems and lifestyles, between which he is compelled to choose. (Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of “being condemned to freedom” is doubtful as a description of the general human condition, but it applies neatly to the modern condition.) Modernity can occur under different political and legal regimes, but the pluralization it engenders is obviously enhanced under democratic regimes that guarantee religious liberty. When the churches can no longer rely on the police to fill their pews, they are forced to compete for the allegiance of uncoerced consumers of their services. This is so even in countries (like France, or Sweden) where one traditional church nominally contains the majority of the population. Even if no other churches are available in the individual’s neighborhood, he is free not to adhere to a church at all or/and to put together his own religio-moral “patchwork.” Why the difference? As already indicated, ever since de Tocqueville there has been the classical explanation of the vitality of American religion in terms of the separation of state and church, which is almost certainly a valid explanation. The withdrawal of state support forced American churches to compete, and competition makes for vital institutions. (It was possible to see this long before the recent introduction of economic theory into the sociology of religion by Rodney Stark and others, though it makes sense to think of a religious market in which certain economic processes occur.) Equally important, though, churches that are not identified with the state do not incur the resentments that, sooner or later, will be directed against the latter. But this cannot be the whole story. If it were, the separation of church and state in France, more rigid than the American model, has now lasted for almost exactly a century, yet there are no signs that it has vitalized religious institutions in that country. Indeed, as soon as real religious liberty is introduced in a country, even if it still has an official religious establishment, there will be a de facto separation of church and state. This has long been the case in the democracies of Western Europe, with no discernible vitalization of the churches ensuing.


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There must be some other factors to account for the difference, of which I will mention three possible ones. One, the chronology and the intensity of religious pluralism in America: this occurred from the beginnings of European settlement in America, with a large number of Protestant churches spreading throughout the colonies, none big enough to do the others in. Attempts at religious establishment, in New England by Congregationalists and in Virginia by Anglicans, soon failed because of this pluralism. The constitution of the Union then only ratified the pluralism that had preceded it. As Richard Niebuhr had pointed out, America generated a new type of religious institution, the “denomination,” defined as a church that recognizes other churches’ right to exist. Even churches to which such recognition is theologically repugnant are nevertheless forced to behave “denominationally” in the American situation. This is notably the case with the Roman Catholic Church. Two, again for historically explainable reasons, Americans have developed a genius for creating voluntary associations: let three Americans be stranded on a desert island, and they will start four neighborhood associations. (The conventional view is that American culture is very individualistic. I think this is a mistake. Americans are much less individualistic than other Western cultures such as the French. Rather, they are “associationist”—a different matter altogether.) American religious pluralism has benefited from this cultural trait. Three, the status of intellectuals differs greatly as between the two continents. Raymond Aron once called France the paradise of intellectuals, America their hell. This is a slight exaggeration, but it is still a valid insight. From the beginning America created a highly commercial culture, and businessmen tend to have a low opinion of intellectuals. This difference became very important for religion on both continents as primary education became universal and compulsory. In many European countries education has been a function of the central state. The cadres of teachers were then drawn from the lower ranks of an intelligentsia, that tended to be more secularized than the general population. By contrast, in America, until very recently, education was entirely run by local communities. The results are simple: in Europe, unless a religious school was nearby, children were exposed to secularizing indoctrination regardless of the wishes of their parents; in America,

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the parents could fire the teachers whose instruction they disliked. It may be added that the American Enlightenment, and thus the intelligentsia it spouted, was much less anti-clerical than its European cousin —which, again, may be related to the fact that there was no dominant “clerisy” against which Enlightened spirits could fulminate (to paraphrase Voltaire, no infamy to be crushed). Thus America is indeed different, but not without significant similarities. And, as David Martin points out in his paper, America has been part of a “bourgeois Protestant” axis—Amsterdam/London/Boston—that developed a tradition of relative tolerance early on. The principle of voluntary association intensified as this axis moved westward and its tradition of tolerance embraced an everwider circle of religious groups—first within the Protestant fold, then taking in Catholics and Jews, and by now embracing any religious group that eschews ritual cannibalism. What is the integrative power of Europe?—Here I must respectfully disagree with Charles Taylor, who claims that Europe is “way ahead of the rest of the world” in seeing itself as “multi-national.” Hardly. To be sure, the European Union is a great achievement in providing an almost ironclad guarantee that no nations within it will ever go to war with each other again. But in terms of a political identity (which is Taylor’s focus) Europe is a project rather than a present reality, and the future of the project is far from determined at this time. This was brought home to me a couple of years ago. I attended a conference of young German professionals (it was advertised as no less than an Elitetagung). An official from Brussels addressed the conference. The subject of her address was the present structure of the European Union and its future plans. She ended her address by saying, “Thank you for your interest in Europe.” No one seemed to find this phrase odd. I imagined how odd it would be for a speaker at this conference to say, “Thank you for your interest in Germany.” Will there be a European political identity, as there now is a German one, a French one, and so on? Maybe. Obviously the project will become more difficult as the European Union expands to include ever more heterogeneous nation-states. Whatever the outcome of this project, Europe is certainly not “way ahead” of the United States in integrating immigrants from every conceivable ethnic and religious background. America has


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been phenomenally successful in this kind of integration, despite some setbacks. (For historically understandable reasons, the major setback has been with African-Americans—who, paradoxically, are not immigrants at all in the conventional sense.) Europeans have a much harder time including culturally diverse immigrants in the political identity of their nation-states. It is not easy to be a Bavarian Muslim or a Hindu Norwegian. In the 1950s a public-service advertisement in the New York subway read, “Worship in the church or synagogue of your choice.” More recently, in Hawaii, a similar advertisement read, “Worship in the church, synagogue or shrine of your choice.” The term “shrine” embraces every conceivable nonChristian, non-Jewish faith. If one asks how religion may relate to European integration, one must look at the role of religion in the public space of societies. In most of Western Europe one finds the phenomenon described by Grace Davie as “believing without belonging”—as mentioned before, people put together (bricoler) some sort of religious worldview, but without actively adhering to a church. But there is also the obverse phenomenon—“belonging without believing.” In this connection Davie has spoken of “vicarious religion”: many people do not make use of the church, but they want it to be there—just in case it may be needed, or just as a symbolic presence which one does not want to miss. Davie is correct, I think, in finding that such vicariousness is significant. Take Germany: the state collects a church tax and hands it on to the churches. This Kirchensteuer amounts to about eight percent of an individual’s income tax—a not inconsiderable amount of money. This tax, unlike every other tax, is not compulsory. To be exempted from it, an individual merely has to declare himself without any religious affiliation (konfessionslos). Not surprisingly, many people have made use of this easy way of increasing their disposable income. What is remarkable that most have not including many who never set foot in a church. Their motives are often vague, yet finally quite clear: they want the church to be there as a symbolic presence, as some sort of moral authority, even if they do not need it at this point in their lives. The need for this symbolic presence may suddenly manifest itself in public space in moments of crisis—for example, in England at the death of Princess Diana (when it went unquestioned that the

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funeral service took place in Westminster Abbey), in Sweden when the steamship Estonia sank with great loss of life (the Lutheran church became, as it were, the official mourner), and on comparable occasions elsewhere. Vicariousness is not the same as irrelevance. It is conceivable that a renewed public role of the churches would emerge if Europe were subjected to a more long-lasting crisis. But there is a less speculative situation already at hand—the confrontation of Europe with Islam, both within and outside its borders. Can Europe integrate Islam? Bhikhu Parekh draws an optimistic picture for Britain (and it is not irrelevant to reflect on the significance of the fact that this author occupies a seat in the House of Lords). I think that it would be more difficult to be equally optimistic about Islam in France, where Muslims almost inevitably pose a challenge to the secularism (laicité) of the republican ideology. Be this as it may, in every European country there is an intensely separatist trend among many young Muslims, who fiercely reject the culture of the host country. Throughout the Muslim world there is a contestation between a modernizing view of Islam, capable of accepting the separation of religion from the state, and the more traditional view, in which Islam must dominate every phase of social and political life. The outcome of this contestation is as yet unclear, but it will have great consequences for the political identity/identities of Europe. And then there is the pivotal case of Turkey’s candidacy for entry into the European Union, as described in Nilüfer Göle’s paper. One need not doubt the sincerity of European concerns for human rights in Turkey to suspect that there is also a reluctance to let a huge body of poor Muslims into the European Union—and not merely for economic reasons. There is a bitter irony to the Turkish story: ever since the creation of Kemal Ataturk’s republic Turkey has been proclaiming its European identity (Ataturk equated it with “civilization”)—and now, after all this, Europe is not sure whether it recognizes this identity. Hervieu-Léger sees the possibility of a rediscovery of Europe’s “religious patrimony” in the confrontation with Islam. That “patrimony,” of course, is that of Christendom—more specifically, Latin Christendom. Thus it is not only in drawing the frontier of Europe against the Muslim world that religion may play a role. There is also the question of the frontier with Eastern Orthodoxy. With the exception of Greece, the borders of the present European Union coincide


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with the old borders of Latin Christendom. Can Europe integrate Greek Christendom? Samuel Huntington may have been prescient when he raised the question of whether Greece and Turkey belong in NATO—because they were not part of Western civilization as he defined it. Such questions are not acceptable in politically correct discourse, presently left to demagogues of the far Right, but this may change. The anti-Muslim diatribes of, for example, Oriana Falacci may be a harbinger of things to come. And it is not a pretty picture. David Martin’s paper draws our attention to the fact that European secularity is almost as heterogeneous as European religion. Martin suggests a useful trilogy. First, there was what he called the “Counter-Reformation Baroque,” a predominantly Catholic phenomenon. It sought to re-establish a sacred unity between church and society, generating its mirror image of a sacred secular republic. In this sense, French laicité is a post-Catholic phenomenon. But secularity in the form of anti-clerical secularism is not only to be found in France. Indeed, it can be found in all Catholic societies of southern Europe and Latin America. Thus the Italian sociologist Enzo Pace has analyzed the Communist Party of Italy as a mirror image of the Catholic Church, with both now undergoing parallel “secularizations.” And the Chilean historian Claudio Veliz has written about “the cracking of the baroque dome” in Ibero-America, with the advent of an “Anglo-Saxon” type of pluralism. There is also, secondly, the question of what Martin calls “Enlightened absolutism.” Scandinavia, with its development from a benign Lutheran monopoly to a benign social-democratic monopoly, is the model case for this. Thirdly, there is the aforementioned “bourgeois Protestantism,” best suited to the emergence of modern religious pluralism. Its key principle is that of voluntary association. Conservative Catholics are quite right when they see the acceptance of this principle as a subtle form of “Protestantization.” Whether one regards this as a good or a bad thing will depend, not on one’s sociological insights, but on one’s philosophical or theological views. Should the constitution of the European Union contain some reference to the religious history of Europe? I have no opinion on this and, frankly, am not terribly interested. It is quite clear, though, that the current debate on this topic may open up a Pandora’s box of divisive questions about the nature of Europe and its future.

Muslims and Islam in Europe

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TARIQ MODOOD

Muslims and European Multiculturalism1

In the aftermath of the events of 11 September the rhetoric associated with Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilization’ is thick in the air (Huntington, 1993; reprinted in The Sunday Times, London, 14 October, 2001 because it was thought to be especially relevant today). Despite official protestations to the contrary, many in the West think that the underlying problem is not terrorism or even Islamic fundamentalism, but Islam, i.e. a rival and inferior civilization. This pointing the finger at Muslims clearly will not go away and its denials—though politically important—are not believed by many Muslims throughout the world. Not just because all the countries, organizations and individuals that are being targeted by the US-led ‘war against terrorism’ are Muslims (e.g., no one mentions the Tamil Tiger separatists in Sri Lanka, even though they pioneered the use of ‘suicide bombers,’ not to mention the various groups that the CIA supports, as it once supported the Taliban). But also because Islam is so clearly evoked by many terrorist and jihadi organizations. Bin Laden remains perhaps the greatest advocate of the clash of civilization thesis. Hence this thesis poses a real danger of becoming a selffulfilling prophecy. The idea of Islam as separate from a Judeo-Christian West is, however, as false as it is influential. Islam, with its faith in the revelations of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, belongs to the same tradition as Christianity and Judaism. It is, in its monotheism, legalism and communitarianism, not to mention its specific rules of life such as dietary prohibitions, particularly close to Judaism. In the Crusades of Christendom and at other times, Jews were slaughtered by Christians and their secular descendents and protected by Muslims. The Jews remember Muslim Spain as a ‘Golden Age.’ Islam indeed, then, was a civilization and a genuine geopolitical rival to the West. Yet even in that period Islam and Christendom were

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not discrete, nor merely competitors. They borrowed and learned from each other, whether it was in relation to scholarship, philosophy and scientific inquiry, or medicine, architecture and technology. Indeed, classical learning from Athens and Rome, which was lost to Christendom, was preserved by the Arabs and was carried to Western Europe—much like the institution of the university—from Muslims. It is, in fact, no exaggeration to say that the critical rationalism and humanism, produced through engagement with ancient Greek texts, which lie at the heart of the Renaissance, Reformation and modern science, was born in Arab universities, even though bore fruit in Western Europe. That Europe came to define its civilization as a renaissance of Greece and Rome and excised the Arab contribution to its foundations is an example of racist myth-making that has much relevance today. It is great tragedy, too, that Muslims turned their backs on this intellectual current, and that Europeans appropriated it without acknowledgement. One step towards inter-civilizational dialogue and less exclusive definitions of Europe and of Islam would be if we were to excavate this history. There is an anti-Muslim wind blowing across the European continent. One factor is a perception that Muslims are making politically exceptional, culturally unreasonable or theologically alien demands upon European states. I would like to address this. My contention is that the claims Muslims are making in fact parallel comparable arguments about gender or ethnic equality. Seeing the issue in that context shows how inescapably European and contemporary is the logic of mainstream Muslim identity politics.

Muslims in Europe: a question of belonging The first thing to note about the estimated 15 million people in Europe who are subjectively or objectively Muslim, is that they are not a homogeneous group. Some Muslims are devout but apolitical. Some are political but do not see their politics as being ‘Islamic’ (indeed, may even be anti-Islamic). Some identify more with a nationality of origin, such as Turkish, others with the nationality of settlement and perhaps citizenship, such as French. Some prioritize fund-raising for mosques, others campaigns against discrimination, unemployment or Zionism. For some, the Ayatollah Khomeini is a hero and Osama bin

Muslims and European Multiculturalism

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Laden an inspiration; for others, the same may be said of Kemal Ataturk or Margaret Thatcher, who created a swathe of Asian millionaires in Britain, brought in Arab capital, and was one of the first to call for NATO action to protect Muslims in Kosovo. The category ‘Muslim,’ then, is as internally diverse as, say, ‘Christian’ or ‘Belgian’ or ‘middle-class,’ or any other category helpful in ordering our understanding of contemporary Europe. But just as internal diversity does not lead to the abandonment of social concepts in general, the same is true of the category, ‘Muslim.’ Muslims in Europe do not form a single political bloc or class, although they are disproportionately among the lowest-paid, unemployed and under-employed. Muslims have, however, the most extensive and developed discourses of unity, common circumstance and common victimhood among peoples of non-EU origin in the EU. This sense of community may be partial, may depend upon context and crisis, may coexist with other overlapping or competing commitments or aspirations; but it comprises an actual or latent ‘Us,’ partly dependent upon others seeing Muslims and partly causing others to see Muslims as a ‘Them.’ For many years, Muslims have been the principal victims of the bloodshed that has produced Europe’s asylum seekers (think of Palestine, Somalia, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan) and so are vulnerable to the anti-refugee mood and policies in the EU today. This, of course, also affects Muslim residents and citizens, a situation that has been thrown into sharp relief by September 11 and its aftermath. There are many reports of harassment and attacks against Muslims, and Muslims, having expressed both vulnerability and defiance, have become a focus of national concern and debate. They have found themselves bearing the brunt of a new wave of suspicion and hostility, and strongly voiced if imprecise doubts are being cast on their loyalty as citizens. There has been widespread questioning about whether Muslims can, or are willing to, be integrated into European society and its political values. In particular, these questions revolve around whether Muslims are committed to what are taken to be the core European values of freedom, tolerance, democracy, sexual equality and secularism.

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Across Europe, multiculturalism or interculturalism2 —a policy suitable to where groups want to maintain some level of distinction among communities—is in retreat and ‘integration’ is once again the watchword. These questions and doubts have been raised across the political spectrum, voiced by individuals ranging from Berlusconi in Italy and the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn to the British Home Secretary, David Blunkett. The Dutch, once the pioneers of a certain kind of multiculturalism, have reversed most of their earlier policies. Certainly in the UK, many politicians, commentators—including eminent Guardian left of center intellectuals such as Hugo Young and Polly Toynbee—letter-writers and phone-callers to the media from across the political spectrum have blamed such concern on the perceived cultural separatism and self-imposed segregation of Muslim migrants, as well as on a ‘politically correct’ multiculturalism that has fostered fragmentation rather than integration and ‘Britishness.’

Europe: a diversity of national contexts The same wind might be blowing across the continent, yet the landscape is not uniform. Of the three largest European countries, Germany, France and the UK, the former West Germany and France have, in both absolute and relative terms, a larger foreign-born population and population of non-European origin than the UK. Yet issues of racial discrimination, ethnic identity and multiculturalism have less prominence in those two countries than in the UK. One aspect of this is that national debates on these topics have a lesser prominence, and that such debates are less frequently led by non-whites or non-Europeans, who are more the objects of, rather than participants in, the debates. Another aspect is the relative lack of data about ethnicity and religious communities, and consequently of research and literature. Yet this is not a simple matter of scale. Each of the countries in the EU has a very different conception of what the issues are, depending upon its history, political culture and legal system. The German experience is dominated by the idea that Germany is not a country of immigration, and so those newcomers who can show German descent are automatically granted nationality while the others are temporary guest workers or refugees: none are immigrants.


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Hence, out of its population of 80 million, Germany has 5 million without German citizenship. This includes about 2 million Turks and Kurds, some of whom are now third-generation Germans but who until recently were excluded from citizenship by German self-conceptions of nationality as descent. In contrast, France has a history of immigration that it has proudly dealt with by a readiness to grant citizenship. But it has a republican conception of citizenship that does not allow, at least in theory, any body of citizens to be differentially identified, for example as Arab. In Germany, if you are of Turkish descent you cannot be German. In France, you can be of any descent but if you are a French citizen you cannot be an Arab. In each case, US-style—and now UK-style—composite identities like Turkish German, Arab French or British Indian are ideologically impossible. The giving up of preFrench identities and assimilation into French culture is thought to go hand in hand with the acceptance of French citizenship. If for some reason assimilation is not fully embraced—perhaps because some people want to retain pride in their Algerian ancestry, or want to maintain ethnic solidarity in the face of current stigmatization and discrimination—then their claim to being French and equal citizens is jeopardized. The French conception of the republic, moreover, also has integral to it a certain radical secularism, laïcité, marking the political triumph over clericalism. The latter was defeated by pushing matters of faith and religion out of politics and policy into the private sphere. Islam, with its claim to regulating public as well as private life, is therefore seen as an ideological foe, and the Muslim presence as alien and potentially both culturally and politically inassimilable. This is most visible in the new French policy of banning ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols in state schools, a measure so clearly aimed at the use of the hijab that is seen as drawing a ‘line in the sand’ in the containment of Islam.

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The British experience Against the background of these distinctive national contexts and histories, it is quite mistaken to single out Muslims as a particularly intractable and uncooperative group characterized by extremist politics, religious obscurantism and an unwillingness to integrate. The case of Britain is the one I know in detail and can be illustrative. In contrast to continental Europe, the British experience of ‘colored immigration,’ in contrast, has been seen as an Atlantocentric legacy of the slave trade. Policy and legislation were formed in the 1960s in the shadow of the US Civil Rights Movement, black power discourse and the inner-city riots in Detroit, Watts and elsewhere. It was, therefore, dominated by the idea of ‘race,’ more specifically by the idea of a black-white dualism. It was also shaped by the imperial legacy, one aspect of which was that all colonials and citizens of the Commonwealth were “subjects of the Crown.” As such they had rights of entry into the UK and entitlement to all the benefits enjoyed by Britons, from National Health Service treatment to social security and the vote. (The right of entry was successively curtailed from 1962 so that, while in 1960 Britain was open to the Commonwealth but closed to Europe, twenty years later the position was fully reversed.) The relation between Muslims and the wider British society and British state has to be seen in terms of the developing agendas of racial equality and multiculturalism. Muslims have become central to these agendas even while they have contested important aspects, especially the primacy of racial identities, narrow definitions of racism and equality, and the secular bias of the discourse and policies of multiculturalism. While there are now emergent Muslim discourses of equality, of difference and also, to use the motto of the Muslim Council of Britain, of “the common good,” they have to be understood as appropriations and modulations of habits of thought and action already formed in anti-racist and feminist discourse. While one result of this is to throw advocates of multiculturalism into theoretical and practical disarray, another is to stimulate accusations of cultural separatism and revive a discourse of ‘integration.’ While we should not ignore the critics of Muslim activism, we need to recognize that at least some of the


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latter is a politics of ‘catching up’ with racial equality and feminism. In this way, religion in Britain is assuming a renewed political importance. After a long period of hegemony, political secularism can no longer be taken for granted, but is having to answer its critics; there is a growing understanding that the incorporation of Muslims has become the most important challenge of egalitarian multiculturalism.

British equality movements The presence of new population groups in Britain made manifest certain kinds of racism, and anti-discrimination laws and policies began to be put into place from the 1960s. These provisions, initially influenced by contemporary thinking and practice in relation to antiblack racism in the United States, assume that the grounds of discrimination are ‘color’ and ethnicity. Muslim assertiveness became a feature of majority–minority relations only from around the early 1990s; and indeed, prior to this, racial equality discourse and politics were dominated by the idea that the dominant post-immigration issue was ‘color racism.’ One consequence of this is that the legal and policy framework still reflects the conceptualization and priorities of racial dualism. Until December 2003, it was lawful to discriminate against Muslims qua Muslims because the courts did not accept that Muslims were an ethnic group (though oddly, Jews and Sikhs are recognized as ethnic groups within the meaning of the law). While initially unremarked upon, this exclusive focus on race and ethnicity, and the exclusion of Muslims but not Jews and Sikhs, has come to be a source of resentment. Muslims did, however, enjoy some limited indirect legal protection qua members of ethnic groups such as Pakistanis or Arabs. Over time, groups like Pakistanis have become an active constituency within British ‘race relations,’ whereas Middle Easterners tend to classify themselves as ‘white,’ as in the 1991 and 2001 censuses, and on the whole have not been prominent in political activism of this sort, nor in domestic politics generally. One of the effects of this politics was to highlight race.

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A key indicator of racial discrimination and inequality has been numerical under-representation, for instance in prestigious jobs and public office. Hence, people have had to be (self-)classified and counted; thus group labels, and arguments about which labels are authentic, have become a common feature of certain political discourses. It has also become gradually apparent through these inequality measures that it is Asian Muslims and not, as expected, AfroCaribbeans, who have emerged as the most disadvantaged and poorest groups in the country. To many Muslim activists, the misplacing of Muslims into ‘race’ categories and the belatedness with which the severe disadvantages of the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis have come to be recognized mean that race relations are perceived, at best, as an inappropriate policy niche for Muslims, and, at worst, as a conspiracy to prevent the emergence of a specifically Muslim sociopolitical formation. To see how such thinking has emerged we need briefly to consider the career of the concept of ‘racial equality.’ The initial development of anti-racism in Britain followed the American pattern, and indeed was directly influenced by American personalities and events. Just as in the United States the color-blind humanism of Martin Luther King Jr. came to be mixed with an emphasis on black pride, black autonomy and black nationalism as typified by Malcolm X, so too the same process occurred in the UK (both these inspirational leaders visited Britain). Indeed, it is best to see this development of racial explicitness and positive blackness as part of a wider sociopolitical climate not confined to race and culture or non-white minorities. Feminism, gay pride, Québecois nationalism and the revival of a Scottish identity are some prominent examples of these new identity movements which have become an important feature in many countries, especially those in which class politics has declined; the emphasis on non-territorial identities such as black, gay and women is particularly marked among Anglophones. In fact, it would be fair to say that what is often claimed today in the name of racial equality, again especially in the English-speaking world, goes beyond the claims that were made in the 1960s. Iris Young expresses this new political climate very well when she describes the emergence of an ideal of equality based, not just on allowing exclud-


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ed groups to assimilate and live by the norms of dominant groups, but on the view that “a positive self-definition of group difference is in fact more liberatory.”

Equality and difference: the public–private distinction This significant shift takes us from an understanding of ‘equality’ in terms of individualism and cultural assimilation to a politics of recognition, and to ‘equality’ as encompassing public ethnicity. This perception of equality means not having to hide or apologize for one’s origins, family or community, and requires others to show respect for them. Public attitudes and arrangements must adapt so that this heritage is encouraged, not contemptuously expected to wither away. These two conceptions of equality may be stated as follows: – the right to assimilate to the majority/dominant culture in the public sphere, with toleration of ‘difference’ in the private sphere; – the right to have one’s ‘difference’ (minority ethnicity, etc.) recognized and supported in both the public and the private spheres. While the former represents a liberal response to ‘difference’, the latter is the ‘take’ of the new identity politics. The two are not, however, alternative conceptions of equality in the sense that to hold one, the other must be rejected. Multiculturalism, properly construed, requires support for both conceptions. For the assumption behind the first is that participation in the public or national culture is necessary for the effective exercise of citizenship, the only obstacle to which are the exclusionary processes preventing gradual assimilation. The second conception, too, assumes that groups excluded from the national culture have their citizenship diminished as a result. It sees the remedy not in rejecting the right to assimilate, but in adding the right to widen and adapt the national culture, and the public and media symbols of national membership, to include the relevant minority ethnicities. It can be seen, then, that the public–private distinction is crucial to the contemporary discussion of equal citizenship, and particularly

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to the challenge to an earlier liberal position. It is in this political and intellectual climate—namely, a climate in which what would earlier have been called ‘private’ matters became sources of equality struggles—that Muslim assertiveness emerged as a domestic political phenomenon. In this respect, the advances achieved by anti-racism and feminism (with its slogan “the personal is the political”) acted as benchmarks for later political group entrants, such as Muslims. While Muslims raise distinctive concerns, the logic of their demands often mirrors those of other equality-seeking groups.

Religious equality So, one of the current conceptions of equality is a difference-affirming equality, with related notions of respect, recognition and identity—in short, what I understand by political multiculturalism. What kinds of specific policy demands, then, are being made by, or on behalf of, religious groups and Muslim identity politics in particular, when these terms are deployed? I suggest that these demands have three dimensions, which get progressively ‘thicker.’

1. No religious discrimination The very basic demand is that religious people, no less than people defined by ‘race’ or gender, should not suffer discrimination in job and other opportunities. So, for example, a person who is trying to dress in accordance with their religion, or who projects a religious identity (such as a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf, a hijab), should not be discriminated against in employment. While discrimination against yarmulke-wearing Jews and turban-wearing Sikhs is deemed to be unlawful racial discrimination, Muslims, unlike these other faith communities, are not deemed to be a racial or ethnic group. Nor are they protected by the legislation against religious discrimination that does exist in one part of the UK: being explicitly designed to protect Catholics, it covers only Northern Ireland. The same argument lies behind the demand for a law in Britain (as already exists in Northern Ireland) making incitement to religious hatred unlawful, to parallel the law against incitement to racial hatred.


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(The latter extends protection to certain forms of anti-Jewish literature, but not anti-Muslim literature.) After some years of arguing that there was insufficient evidence of religious discrimination, the hand of the British government has been forced by Article 13 of the EU Amsterdam Treaty (1999), which includes religious discrimination in the list of the forms of discrimination that all Member States are expected to eliminate. Accordingly, the government has implemented a European Commission directive to outlaw religious discrimination in employment, taking effect from December, 2003. This is, however, only a partial ‘catching-up’ with the existing anti-discrimination provisions in relation to race and gender. The new legislation is confined to employment (not extended to discrimination in provision of goods and services), and will not create a duty upon employers to take steps to promote equality of opportunity.

2. Parity with native religions Many minority faith advocates interpret equality to mean that minority religions should get at least some of the support from the state that longer-established religions do. Muslims have led the way on this argument, and have made two particular issues politically contentious: state funding of schools and the law of blasphemy. After some political battles, the government has agreed in recent years to fund a few (so far, four) Muslim schools, as well as a Sikh and a Seventh Day Adventist school, on the same basis enjoyed by thousands of Anglican and Catholic schools and some Methodist and Jewish schools. (In England and Wales, over a third of state-maintained primary and a sixth of secondary schools are in fact run by a religious group—but all have to deliver a centrally determined national curriculum.) Some secularists are unhappy about this. They accept the argument for parity but believe this should be achieved by the state withdrawing its funding from all religious schools. Most Muslims reject this form of equality in which the privileged lose something but the under-privileged gain nothing. More specifically, the issue between ‘equalizing upwards’ and ‘equalizing downwards’ here is about the legitimacy of religion as a public institutional presence.

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Muslims have failed to get the courts to interpret the existing statute on blasphemy to cover offences beyond what Christians hold sacred, but some political support exists for an offense of incitement to religious hatred, mirroring the existing one of incitement to racial hatred. The government inserted such a clause in the post-September 11 security legislation in order to conciliate Muslims, who, among others, were opposed to the new powers of surveillance, arrest and detention. As it happened, most of the latter was made into law (leading to the arrest without trial of hundreds of Muslims), but the provision on incitement to religious hatred was defeated in Parliament. It was reintroduced in a private member’s bill, which also sought to abolish the laws governing blasphemy, by a Liberal Democrat, Lord Avebury. Although unsuccessful, these provisions may yet make their way back to Parliament in some form.

3. Positive inclusion of religious groups The demand here is that religion in general, or at least the category of ‘Muslim’ in particular, should be a category by which the inclusiveness of social institutions may be judged, as they increasingly are in relation to race and gender. For example, employers should have to demonstrate that they do not discriminate against Muslims by explicit monitoring of Muslims’ position within the workforce, backed up by appropriate policies, targets, managerial responsibilities, work environments, staff training, advertisements, outreach and so on. Similarly, public bodies should provide appropriately sensitive policies and staff in relation to the services they provide, especially in relation to (non-Muslim) schools, social and health services; Muslim community centers or Muslim youth workers should be funded in addition to existing Asian and Caribbean community centers and Asian and black youth workers. To take another case: the BBC currently believes it is of political importance to review and improve its personnel practices and its output of programs, including its on-screen ‘representation’ of the British population, by making provision for and winning the confidence of, say, women, ethnic groups and young people. Why should it not also use religious groups as a criterion of inclusivity and have to demonstrate that it is doing the same for viewers and staff defined by reli-


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gious community membership? In short, Muslims should be treated as a legitimate group in their own right (not because they are, say, Asians), whose presence in British society has to be explicitly reflected in all walks of life and in all institutions. Whether they are so included should become one of the criteria for judging Britain as an egalitarian, inclusive, multicultural society. There is no prospect at present of religious equality catching up with the importance that employers and other organizations give to sex or race. A potentially significant victory, however, was made when the government agreed to include a religion question in the 2001 census. This was the first time this question had been included since 1851, and it was largely unpopular outside the politically active religionists, among whom Muslims were foremost. Nevertheless, it has the potential to pave the way for widespread ‘religious monitoring’ in the same way that inclusion of an ethnic question in 1991 led to the more routine use of ‘ethnic monitoring.’ These policy demands no doubt seem odd within the terms of, say, the French or US ‘wall of separation’ between the state and religion, and may make secularists uncomfortable in Britain as well. But it is clear that they virtually mirror existing anti-discrimination policy provisions in the UK.

Conclusion The emergence of Muslim political agency has thrown British multiculturalism into theoretical and practical disarray. It has led to policy reversals in the Netherlands and elsewhere, and has strengthened intolerant, exclusive nationalism across Europe. We should in fact be moving in the other direction. We should be extending to Muslims existing levels of protection from discrimination and incitement to hatred, and impose duties on organizations that will ensure equality of opportunity, not the watered-down versions of legislation proposed by the European Commission and the UK government. In consultation with religious and other representatives, we should more effectively target the severe poverty and social exclusion of Muslims. And we should recognize Muslims as a legitimate social partner and include them in the institutional compromises of church and state, religion and politics, that characterize the evolving, moderate secu-

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larism of mainstream Western Europe—resisting the wayward, radical example of France. Ultimately, we must rethink ‘Europe’ and its changing nations so that Muslims are not a ‘Them’ but part of a plural ‘Us,’ not mere sojourners, but part of its future. A hundred years ago, the African American theorist W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that the twentieth century would be the century of the color line; today, we seem to be set for a century of the Islam–West line. The political integration or incorporation of Muslims—remembering that there are more Muslims in the European Union than the combined populations of Finland, Ireland and Denmark—has not only become the most important goal of egalitarian multiculturalism, but is now pivotal in shaping the security, indeed the destiny, of many peoples across the globe.

Notes 1

This contribution is based on a paper that was presented at ‘War and Peace in the 21st century: Constructing one diverse Europe for global security,’ organized by Fundacio CIDOB, Palau de Pedralbes, Barcelona, January 31, 2004, the proceedings of which are to be published in Spanish as ‘Musulmanes y multiculturalismo en Europe,’ in: M. Castells and N. Serra (eds.), Europa en construcción. Integración, identidades y seguridad, CIDOB: Barcelona, 2004. It derives from a longer English version in Political Quarterly 74 (1), 2003. 2 I understand that ‘multiculturalism’ is in disfavor in parts of mainland Europe, where the term, ‘interculturalism’ is favored; I do not think anything different is meant by the two terms.

BHIKHU PAREKH

Is Islam a Threat to Europe’s Multicultural Democracies?1

Many people in Europe think that Islam is inherently incompatible with multicultural democracy, and that it poses a long-term threat to Europe. They point to the obvious fact that very few Muslim societies are democratic, and conclude that the reasons for this must lie in the inherently undemocratic character of Islam. They also point to the Muslim rhetoric that is suffused with hatred of the West and of modernity itself, and conclude that Muslims cannot be good citizens of Western democracies. In this paper I question this view. To avoid abstract generalizations and shallow sweeping remarks that characterize much of the debate on this subject, I shall closely examine the concrete case of Britain. Since Britain is typical of much of Europe both in its democratic culture and its Muslim population, the conclusions I arrive at in relation to it broadly hold true for the rest of Europe as well.

Islam and democracy To start with some basic facts. According to the census of 2001, Britain has around 1.6 million Muslims in a population of just under 58.7 millions—that is, just under 3 per cent of its population. The 2001 census is not entirely reliable because the question was voluntary, and as many as 4.4 million people refused to answer. Nearly 400,000 respondents even called themselves Jedis after the fictitious faith in the Star War films! Around three quarters of Muslims come from the Indian subcontinent, mainly from the rural areas of Pakistan and Bangladesh. This is important because some of

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their difficulties in settlement, as well as some of their demands, arise not from their religion, but from their unfamiliarity with the modern Western way of life. They began arriving in the early 1960s, initially the males and later their wives and children. By the early 1990s, the migration was complete. The Muslim population is relatively young. Under two per cent are over 65, and almost sixty per cent are under 25, compared respectively to ten and thirty-two percent in the population at large. There have been four Muslim riots so far, compared to about eight racerelated riots by the Afro-Caribbeans. One of them concerned Rushdie’s Satanic Verses; others police insensitivity and racist marches. With the qualified exception of the first, all riots were local, relatively minor, and lasted barely a day or two. Muslims thus have so far presented no major problems of law and order to British democracy. What other challenges have Muslims presented to British democracy? For convenience, I shall divide them into three, namely those arising out of their social and cultural practices, moral values, and the nature and demands of citizenship.

Clash of practices: Some examples and British responses (1) Halal meat in schools for Muslim children. This is freely available. (2) Muslim method of slaughtering animals. Despite some resistance from the white population, it is allowed. (3) Muslim dress at work. After some resistance, this has been allowed. (4) Time-off for prayer from work. This is allowed subject to certain constraints. (5) Female circumcision. It mainly involves a small group of North African Muslims and has been banned with little Muslim resistance. (6) Polygamy. It has been banned since the 1980s with some but not much continuing Muslim unease. Those who had arrived before the ban were allowed to honor their polygamous obligations. (7) Arranged marriages. They are allowed provided that they are not forced or entered into under duress.

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(8) Publicly funded religious schools. Christian and Jewish schools have long been funded, but Muslim schools were not. Public funding has been extended to Muslim schools since 1998. There are 5 such schools. 75 Muslim schools are independent and fee-paying, and need and merit no public funding. (9) Withdrawal of children from schools for long visits to homeland. This is strongly discouraged and most Muslims are happy to comply. (10) Girls wearing hijab in schools. This is allowed. The fact that local authorities rather than the central government or schools decided policies in such matters has helped.

Clash of values Equality, freedom of expression, tolerance, peaceful resolution of differences, and respect for majority decision are by common consent some of the basic democratic values. By and large Muslims have shown considerable respect for them. (1) Equality of races is an important Muslim value and practice. Equality of the sexes poses difficulties. British Muslims have never objected to women enjoying equal civil and political rights with men. Muslim women are not prevented or discouraged from voting in elections, though the percentage is lower than in the case of men. Just under a fifth of Muslim local councilors are women, and one out of four Muslim members of the House of Lords is a woman. There have so far been no Muslim women parliamentary candidates, and naturally no Muslim Member of Parliament. Muslim organizations also tend to be dominated by men. Muslim girls go on to complete their school education, and do better than Muslim boys. A fairly large percentage of them go on to university, though it is lower than in the case of Muslim boys. They are discouraged from pursuing certain careers, but that is changing. Girls enjoy less social freedom, but they are rebelling against this, often citing the authority of the Koran against the conventional practice of patriarchy. Young girls demanding greater personal freedom are sometimes subjected to domestic and communal violence, of which there are about forty cases each year. The struggle for gender equality is fought out in many families, and as of now one cannot con-

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fidently say that it has become an accepted norm among Muslims. Girls rebelling against gender inequality often pit the authority of the Koran against that of the tradition. In order to do that, they need to study the Koran and attend religious classes in mosques. Outsiders mistake this as surrender to orthodoxy, and overlook its critical intentions. (2) Freedom of speech. Muslims value it, but do not privilege it as much as the liberals do, and would like it to be restricted when religion is involved. The Rushdie affair was a good example of this. Muslims wanted The Satanic Verses, or at least its paperback edition, to be banned. When the government proved uncompromising, they gave in, but continued to complain. It would be interesting to see what their reaction would be if a similar book were to be published today. (3) Muslims are sometimes discriminated against in employment. They want religious discrimination to be banned along the same lines as racial and sex discrimination. Many British liberals are sympathetic to this idea. The proposal was long resisted by successive governments. It is now conceded in response to the European directive, which prohibits discrimination on religious grounds. (4) Tolerance. British Muslims have by and large been tolerant both of internal dissent and of those practices of the wider society that they disapprove of. They have protested vigorously when they or their religion were attacked or misrepresented in the media or by political leaders, but they have done so peacefully. Some years ago when pimps, prostitutes and drug peddlers were operating in some Muslim areas, local residents drove them away and formed vigilante groups. Their attempts to reclaim their social space were peaceful, and were viewed sympathetically by much of the wider society. (5) Peaceful resolutions of differences. Muslims relied on persuasion, political pressure and peaceful protests to press the demands listed above and avoided violence, with the exception of the four riots mentioned earlier. During these riots, the older generation of Muslims did much to restrain the angry youth. (6) Respect for majority decision. Despite some unease, almost all Muslims accepted the ban on polygamy and female circumcision. Although they were for years unjustly denied public funding for their schools, and were unfairly discriminated against in employment and


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other areas, they never once resorted to violence. Even the violence surrounding the Rushdie affair was preceded by weeks of petitions, public appeals and peaceful protests.

Demands of citizenship In a democratic society citizens are expected to cultivate certain basic virtues, which form the core of democratic culture and without which democratic institutions lose their vitality. I shall take each of them and examine Muslim attitude to it. (1) Loyalty to the state. After some theological debate about Muslim obligations to a non-Muslim state, British Muslims have widely accepted that they owe unreserved loyalty to it. However, there is some ambiguity about what they should do when the claims of the state clash with those of the umma or the worldwide community of Islam. Four recent cases well illustrate this. Muslims objected to the war against Iraq in 1991, but did not mount public protests. The government of the day urged the country to respect their ‘understandable sympathies for their fellow-religionists,’ and the likely tensions were avoided. A very small number of young Muslims fought with the Taliban. They were condemned by a vast majority of their fellow-Muslims, who insisted that loyalty to Britain came first. The Imam of Finsbury Park mosque, who was preaching hatred of the West and urging support for Muslim terrorists, had long been tolerated. However, when the mosque was recently suspected of becoming a terrorist cell, it was raided and the police confiscated the weapons. Most Muslims approved of this. Finally, some Muslims refuse to join the armed forces in case they have to fight other Muslims. The potential conflict of loyalties has so far provoked no serious debate, because the number is small and the recruitment to the armed forces is voluntary. (2) Participation in public affairs. Muslims do so willingly. The percentage of those voting in local and national elections is not much different from that in the society at large. There are 150 local councilors and eight mayors, slightly smaller than other ethnic minorities but not alarmingly so. There are 4 Muslims in the House of Lords and 3 in the House of Commons, which is larger than for some other ethnic minorities.

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(3) Respect for parliamentary institutions. There is no open Muslim challenge to them, nor any attempt to denigrate or deny their legitimacy; in fact, the opposite is the case. A few years ago a Muslim parliament was set up to discuss issues of common concern to Muslims. It provoked some criticisms from moderate Muslims, and even greater criticism from the British society at large, which saw it as an attempt to challenge and set up a rival authority to that of the British parliament. The Muslim parliament soon became defunct, largely because of a mixture of Muslim hostility, indifference and factionalism. (4) Commitment to the country and a measure of pride in it. There is enough evidence, based on public opinion surveys, that most Muslims are proud to belong to Britain, and are committed to its stability and well-being. They appreciate the liberties and rights it gives them as well as its commitment to equality and justice, and are prepared to defend them. Common belonging is reciprocal in nature, and requires that both the wider British society and its Muslim members should see each other as part of a single community. Despite some hostility to and suspicion of Muslims, most white Britons accept them as rightful fellow-citizens whose well-being matters to them. (5) Sharing British national identity. In formal and informal ways, Islam is being increasingly interpreted in a manner that brings it closer to the central values of British democracy. Indeed, a distinctively British brand of Islam is beginning to emerge, just as France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain are throwing up their own forms of Islam. The British form of Islam obviously clashes with some aspects of the Islam that the immigrants initially brought with them. Muslim media and mosques wrestle with these conflicts, and most Muslims favor a democratic reading of Islam. There are signs that a sizeable body of Muslim youth, almost a third according to some estimates, is increasingly turning into a kind of underclass. They do badly in schools, and are either unemployed or work in poorly paid jobs. Many of them are involved in drug trafficking, prostitution, gang warfare and other criminal activities. They are alienated from both their parental and the wider British culture, nurture a sense of victimhood, and hold anarchic and even antinomian values. As yet, however, they have shown no signs of rebelling against British democratic institutions. If not handled with sensitivity


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and wisdom, they could provide a readily mobilizable pool of discontent. British Muslims then respect and imbibe democratic values. What is true of Britain is equally true of other European countries, in all of which Muslims have shown respect for democracy and in none of which there is a history of antidemocratic protests and riots. Even the theocratic and initially popular Iranian revolution of 1979 made no dent on the European Muslims’ commitment to democracy. And the widely unpopular recant of war on Iraq did not lead to Muslim violence. They could have mounted noisy protests, sabotaged the war effort, fought with the Iraqis, or done any of the things that disaffected groups generally do. The fact that they did not do any of these things speaks volumes. It is also worth noting that nearly a third of the Muslims supported the war for several reasons. They thought Saddam Hussein a disgrace to Islam, they were keen to shake up Muslim societies and make them democratic, and some of them did not like either his anti-Shia attitudes or his suppression of religion. I have argued that by and large the vast majority of British and European Muslims have adjusted to democracy and pose no threat to it. Many people find this puzzling. They think that since the vast majority of Muslim societies are undemocratic, having either known no democracy at all or rejected it after a brief experiment, there is or must be a deeper incompatibility between Islam and democracy, and that the Muslim presence in the West must therefore one day pose a serious challenge to its democratic institutions. Their reasoning is deeply flawed. First, it ignores those countries, albeit very few, where democracy has been tried with at least some success: for example, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Pakistan, for half of its political existence. Secondly, the fact that most Muslim societies are undemocratic does not mean that the blame lies with Islam. It might be one factor, but there are also others, such as their inegalitarian and in some cases feudal social structures, corrupt rulers, colonialism, a long history of external interference, and the failure to find an adequate place for religion in public life. Religion does not operate in a vacuum and its influence is mediated by that of many other factors. Hindus, who were told that their hierarchical religion and caste system ruled out democracy, have sustained it for over half a century in India. Jews faced a similar criti-

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cism, yet Israel is a vibrant democracy in spite of its discriminatory treatment of its Arab citizens. And the Christians, who now claim to be the natural friends of democracy, were for centuries hostile to it. None of the Christian fathers thought much of democracy, not even the great Thomas Aquinas, and the Catholic Church has for centuries supported anti-democratic movements and regimes in Europe, Latin America and many other parts of the world. Christian approval of democracy is a relatively recent phenomenon, and a result of centuries of conflict. No religion is inherently incompatible with any form of economic and political institutions. Human beings want to live and flourish, and when their vital interests so require, they cut theological corners, reinterpret sacred texts, and make God do their bidding while claiming to do His. This is not to say that they can do anything they like in the name of religion, or that all religions are equally hospitable to all forms of economic and political structures. Religions do have certain structures of beliefs and practices that limit the available range of hermeneutic possibilities. However the range is relatively elastic; beliefs and practices require interpretation, which is inevitably shaped by human interests and the society’s cultural ethos; no religion that wishes to enjoy popular support can afford to go against vital human interests and aspirations. Thirdly, the fact that Muslim societies have not themselves developed stable democratic institutions does not mean that Muslims cannot live under them, because the reasons in each case are quite different. When Muslims find themselves living under democracies, they have several good reasons to adjust to them. Political survival is one; the opportunities offered by a democracy to pursue their legitimate interests and even to protest is another; the educational impact of the schools, work places, and the ethos of the wider society is yet another; and one should not underestimate the power of the media either. Many developing countries have failed to create the modern capitalist economy, but that has never prevented their diasporic members from adjusting to and flourishing in the capitalist West. Fourthly and finally, the way in which a group behaves when it is in a majority is often quite different from the way it behaves when a minority. Many diasporic Hindus in the West want a Hindu state in India, but vehemently protest when any of the Western societies


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shows the slightest sign of favoring a particular religion and compromising its secular character. This is even truer of Muslims because of their distinction between dar-al-Islam and dar-al harb and their tendency to establish a close relationship between religion and the state. When they are in a majority, they are subject to the strong temptation to press for an Islamic state with all its undemocratic potential. When they are in a minority, that option is no longer available to them, and there is no theological basis for it either. Their main concern is to secure and enjoy the freedom to practice their religion and to lead the life of their choice. Democracy allows this, and they have therefore a strong pragmatic and even a moral reason to be loyal to it.

Islam and multiculturalism Although Muslims do not have much of a problem living in a democracy, they do have some difficulty coping with a multicultural society. Far more than the followers of any other religion, Muslims are convinced of the absolute superiority of Islam. The Koran is believed to be unique in being the literal, direct and unmediated word of God. It claims to represent the final and definitive revelation of God, superseding all other religions including Judaism and Christianity. Hinduism is dismissed as idolatrous, and not really a religion at all. Religions of the book do deserve respect, but they are believed to be inferior and more like early versions of Islam. It is true that Islam reveres the prophets of Judaism and Christianity and accepts both as worthy religions. However it sees itself as embodying all that is true in them and going beyond them. The remarkable military successes of early and medieval Islam gave it a triumphalist air, and confirmed in the eyes of its adherents their belief in its absolute superiority. Unlike almost any other religion, Islam sees itself as one that is destined to rule and dominate the world. This is a stark contrast to Christianity, which is in its initial inspiration, though not in its historical practice, a religion of the poor, the weak and the dispossessed. This spirit of Islamic superiority is reflected in many of its beliefs and practices. The current constant invocation of its past glory and the desperate desire to revive it is one obvious example of it. Muslims are supposed to have a positive duty to convert the followers of other religions, but they are not themselves free to convert to anoth-

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er. That is seen as apostasy and treason, meriting severest punishment in this world and the next. Most Muslims are anxious that others should learn about their religion and appreciate its great insights, but they have themselves little or only limited interest in other religions. They may marry non-Muslim girls, but do not allow others to marry theirs, and expect those marrying within Islam to convert to it. Much of this cannot be attributed to the current Muslim feeling of siege or fear of loss of identity. Even in the self-confident Ottoman Empire where Jews and Christians enjoyed considerable tolerance, they were treated as second-class citizens. And while they were free to convert to Islam, they were strictly forbidden to convert Muslims or to marry their women. Thanks to all this, Muslim attitude to multicultural society is one-sided. They welcome it largely because it gives them the freedom to retain their religious identity and to familiarize others with their beliefs, practices and history. However, they also resent it because it puts them on a par with other religions and cultures, denies their absolute superiority, and exposes them and their children to other religions and secular cultures. This has two important consequences. Firstly, Muslims tend to take a largely pragmatic view of multicultural democracy, to be welcomed only because it gives them the desired autonomy. It has for many of them neither an intrinsic cultural or moral significance nor a theological basis. Secondly, they tend to take a narrow and static view of multiculturalism. For many of them, it means not a vibrant and creative interplay of different cultures and religions under conditions of equality, but either a multicultural dialogue on Islamic terms or a compartmentalized social universe in which different religions and cultures live out their ghettoized existence. British Islam is no doubt changing, and is now more open than before to a genuine interreligious and intercultural dialogue. However, it still has a long way to go before it can enthusiastically participate in the creative tensions and controversies of a multicultural society in a spirit of curiosity, humility and open-mindedness. As the Muslims reap the benefits of multicultural societies, and their youth absorbs Western liberal culture, their attitudes to multicultural society are likely to become positive. Over time Western Muslims should not only become as good democratic citizens as the rest of the popula-


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tion, but should also feel fully at home in multicultural societies. As this happens, it will most certainly have a profound impact on the rest of the Muslim world, and should hopefully initiate a movement for multicultural democracies there.

Need for better understanding Islam has long been an important part of Europe and has shaped its cultural identity. Europe too has been a significant presence in Muslim societies, and has shaped their identity as well. Each has been the other’s other, its cultural interlocutor. Their sometimes friendly and sometimes hostile relations have bonded them far more deeply than they realize or acknowledge. With the exception of Spain and parts of Eastern Europe, they have hitherto interacted at a distance and outside the boundaries of Europe. They now need to find new ways of cultivating civic amity within the very heart of Europe. I have shown why there are strong reasons for optimism.

Note 1 Some parts of this article were first delivered as a lecture at a joint meeting of the Centers for European Studies and Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University. I am most grateful to Professors Nathan Glazer, Nancy Rosenblum, Glyn Morgan and Jocelyn Cesari for their helpful comments.

NILÜFER GÖLE

Islam, European Public Space and Civility

It is puzzling to ascribe to religion a role in European integration, especially to me as researcher on Islam, and with a Turkish background. For me, the role of religion in respect to the European Union acquires a different meaning. This is first of all because when we refer to the role of religion in European integration and to Islam in particular, we usually think of it in negative terms, namely as a hindrance to European integration. Secondly, a person with a Turkish background would be inclined to tackle this issue in a specific way. As you know Turkish modernists were uncompromisingly secular since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, and they still are. In consequence, European integration or Europeanness means the final accomplishment of a secular project for those Turks who embrace European values of modernity. Therefore, from this particular historical and cultural background it is puzzling to think of European citizenship as integration through religion. On the other hand, it is a challenge to encourage rethinking the role of religion in the construction of Europeanness, not only from the dominant perspective of Christian heritage, but also in relation to Islamic presence. “The role of religion in European integration” is a title that invites us to rethink the issue of religion as a kind of positive force, a positive value—Danièle Hervieu-Léger called it “le travail civilisationnel.” Seen from the angle of Islamic religion, this appears to be a much more difficult task, not only because today Islam is used (and misused) as a political force of opposition for Muslim agency, but also because it is perceived by many of the Europeans as the different “other,” thereby necessitating containment and exclusion.


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The presence of Islam through migration in European countries, but also through Turkey’s candidacy for the European Union, addresses new issues of difference and tolerance to Western democracies. Turkey as a candidate EU member state triggered a public debate in many European countries. The discussions on her candidature for membership in the European Union during the Copenhagen summit (2002) well illustrated the importance of Islam in European public debate. It was perhaps on this occasion that the identity of the European Union and the meaning of Europeanness were debated for the first time, not only by politicians and technocrats, but by an involved society at large. The question whether European unity should be defined by a common heritage of Christian religion and Western civilization, or in reference to political values, multiculturalism and democratic inclusiveness, divided European public opinion. It was interesting to observe that, as Turkey moved closer to Europe, apprehensions within European public opinion were made explicit with respect to Islam, and the necessity of defining and maintaining the frontiers of Europe was evoked by many politicians, intellectuals and members of society.2 Indeed the title of Paul Scheffer’s article, “An open society needs borders,” might be seen as translating this tacit desire and fear within the Dutch context of migration. Knowing that the question of borders is not merely a question of geographic belonging, but also of cultural and civilizational differences, the ways in which governments deal with the presence of Islam in Europe becomes a crucial issue for the construction of European political values. If we leave Islam aside for a moment and think of the role of religion in the contemporary modern world, and of whether religion can provide us with common values to define European citizenship, one conceptual problem that we face is that we no longer can define religion through its institutional representations. As Marcel Gauchet and Charles Taylor have claimed, we are observing a process of disinstitutionalization of religion today. It is not religion that has disappeared from modern life, but its institutional forms of representation. Religion in the modern world has become a much more personal and spiritual experience. But this does not mean that it is limited to the private sphere. People can have a personal religious experience and yet belong to a collective group or to collective movements.

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Charles Taylor describes social disembeddedness as a condition for a different kind of social imaginary; that is, “‘horizontal’ forms of social imaginary, in which people grasp themselves and a great number of others as existing and acting simultaneously.”2 In the modern age, religious experience becomes part of “expressive individualism,” that is, it becomes important to find one’s own way as against a model imposed from outside—be it from society, the previous generation, or religious authority.3 As Taylor rightly reminds us, although there is a strong individualist component to the religious experience in modern times, this will not necessarily mean that the content will be individuating; on the contrary, many will join powerful religious communities.4 So which religion do we refer to in relation to European project? Very often, rather than referring to present day religious practices and values, we refer to a prior Christian heritage. I think the process of deinstitutionalization of religious experience is equally valid for Islam. Islam, which has been traditionally a binding force among those who were belonging to a locality, to a particular confession and to a nation-state, today becomes a reference point for an imaginary bond between those Muslims who are socially uprooted. In this respect, contemporary Islam shares some common themes with modern forms of religious experience, because it represents socially disembedded forms of religiosity and, as a consequence, becomes a matter of personal choice. Rather than being a descendant of given religious structures, authorities, or national and confessional allegiances, the experience of Islam today works as a horizontal social imaginary bonding that connects many different Muslim actors in different contexts, acting together and simultaneously. Islamism refers to the modern production, elaboration and diffusion of this horizontal social imaginary bonding in spite of the historical distinctions between spiritual Sufi and canonized Shariat Islam, Shia and Sunnite Islam, and conservative Saudi Arabia and revolutionary Iran. Furthermore, the contemporary politicization of Islam engendered a displacement of the authority of the religious classes (ulema). On the one hand, this meant a democratic opening of the interpretation of religious texts to the public at large, including political militants, Islamic intellectuals, and women. On the other hand, it brought about


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a vulgarization of religious knowledge and sources, which is used, and especially abused and taken out of context, in favor of the political ideology of Islamism. Therefore radical Islamism does not subscribe to the traditional interpretations of religion; Islamist discourse is simplistic, anachronistic, and cut off from its referential context of the Koran. Islamism operates as a sort of ideological amalgam between different schools of Islam, national cultures and popular customs. Laypersons who speak the language of Islam without the institutional authority of religious schools and knowledge find legitimacy in their activism. Activism and terrorism provide, or rather impose, a new source of legitimacy for the Islamic idiom. Who will decide what is licit and illicit in Islam? Who has authority over the interpretation of religious texts? Who can give a “fatwa” and declare a “jihad”? These questions become very problematic, as Islam becomes de-traditionalized in the hands of Islamism in particular, and in the face of the modern secular world in general. Islam today is constructed, reinterpreted and carried into public life through political agency and cultural movements, not through religious institutions. At the same time the presence of Islam in public life and in the shaping of social imagery and daily practices of Muslims is increasing. We are therefore observing both personal and collective appropriations of Islam. Even though this does not take place on an institutional, purely political or revolutionary level, we can observe a growing public visibility of Islam and its claims for public visibility in Europe and elsewhere. Islam is moving into new life spaces, but we still have a tendency to think about it as belonging to a locality and without any claim to universalism. It is sufficient to trace the trajectory of contemporary Muslim actors empirically to see their move from rural to urban cities, from the margins to the center of politics and, of course, through migrations, to the core of big Western cities. We often speak of this process or move as something negative, emphasizing the fact that these people are socially uprooted, which leads to alienation and terrorism. However, as we know from the classical sociological literature, social mobility is also a precondition for entering into a state of having a predisposition to a modern personality.

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We now need to consider how this can be linked to religion. Disembeddedness and social mobility of Muslim actors means they experience a sense of distancing from, if not a break with, their social origins and local towns. This is true for migrant Muslims in Europe, but also for recently urbanized social groups in Muslim countries. Consequently, their religious experience is of a new kind; it is not directly handed over by community, religious, or state institutions. It is a kind of social imaginary, through which they reconstruct their sense of belonging to Islam. Their Islam is not linked to a territory or to a tradition, like Shia Islam or Sunni Islam. It is, rather, a kind of syncretic Islam getting into action. I am trying to argue therefore that being a Muslim and being an Islamist are not the same thing. What we are witnessing now is a shift from a Muslim identity to an Islamist identity. This new phenomena connected with Islamism cannot be derived from confessional or national schools of Islam. What we observe in contemporary forms of political Islam, rather, is an affirmative reconstruction of identity, a collective social imaginary. The presentation of a religious self, which is put forward, is being carried from the private to the public realm, albeit personally and collectively, and in a form of conflictual engagement with the Western and secular values of modernity. Those Muslims who embrace a more radical form of affirmation of their religious and cultural identity, however, are at the same time those who leave their local origins behind and enter into new public, urban, European life experiences. There is a sociological paradox behind the phenomenon of Islamism. It is not the distance from but, on the contrary, the familiarity with and proximity to modern forms of life, education and politics that trigger a return to religious identity and its political expressions. Radicalism is mostly a feature of those groups who by their experience of mobility and displacement got acquainted with secular and Western ways of political thinking and urban living. Modern techniques of self-presentation and regimes of communication are acquired in public spaces such as schools, associative life, urban habitat and media. Yet Muslim actors are not in conformity with the national and secular rules of public spaces; they carry out, perform and openly claim their religious identity and habits in the public. Islam provides a framework for the orientation of this identity, a


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framework in Charles Taylor’s sense that incorporates a set of crucial qualitative distinctions that provide a sense of good and higher forms of life.5 Islam is used as a source of orientation and distinction to represent and to achieve a higher form of life. But for that purpose, the radicals would claim, religion needs to be liberated from its traditionally subservient, passive and docile posture in the face of modern power. Religion provides an autonomous and alternative space for the collective self-definition of Muslims in their critical encounter with modernity. It provides a cognitive framework for the personal selffashioning and collective orientation of the movement. The politicization of religion and a personalized religiosity go hand in hand, a process made possible by the weakening of religious ties to their traditional context, hierarchical authority and canonical interpretations. The visibility of religious symbols and performances informs the public of the radical transformation that is taking place, from the concealment of Muslimness and its cultural attributes to collective and public disclosure of Islam. By wearing a veil and a beard, by claiming their right to prayer sites and hours in work places, specific food regimes, etc., they become overtly identifiable as Muslims and publicly assertive. They also convey a sense that they are more zealous and meticulous in their religious observance than those who confine their religiosity to the private sphere. Veiling is usually taken as a sign of the debasement of women’s identity, as a sign of their inferiority to men. Those Muslim women who are no longer confined to a traditional role and to an enclosed space are now readopting this sign of passivity and seclusion within the interior domestic spaces. They are crossing the frontiers of that interior space and gaining access to higher education, urban life and public agency. Veiling thus becomes both a personal and collective expression of Islamic religiosity. It is personally carried as a bodily sign, but also imagined as a source of collective empowerment and horizontal bondage among those who distinguish themselves as Muslims, and, more precisely, as Islamists. They turn the veiling, an attribute for potential public discredit, into a subaltern advantage. As a result, they are changing the meaning of veiling as they carry it into new modern spaces. From a symbol of stigmatization (as a sign of backwardness and gender inequality), it is transformed into a positive identity affir-

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mation (such as “black is beautiful”), bestowing Muslimness with a higher sense of self. Through a collective affirmation of Islamic identity, a historical sense of loss of dignity and humiliation is turned into a search for distinction, prestige and power (as best exemplified by the Iranian revolution). To sum up, the practice of veiling is not in continuity with prevailing Muslim cultural habits and pre-established religious conventions. On the one hand, it is not in conformity with liberal gender presentations, but on the other hand, it also transgresses Muslim communitarian values of morality. The case of young Muslim women in Europe illustrates well the undergoing transformations of the meanings of the symbol of the headscarf. Young migrant girls who adopt the Islamic headscarf in French and German schools, are closer in many respects (namely youth culture, fashion consciousness and language) to their class mates than to their first generation home-bound, uneducated mothers. The young girls who adopt, improvise and negotiate the headscarf in the public sphere are at the same time, albeit unintentionally, altering the symbol of headscarf and images of Muslim women. What we therefore observe is that these new figures of European Muslims have a double belonging, a double cultural capital. On the one hand, they define themselves through their religiosity, but, on the other hand, they have learned techniques of self-representation in public spaces and gained universal, secular knowledge. Because they have a double cultural capital, they can circulate between different activities and spaces such as home, class, youth associations and urban leisure space. Thus far, I have briefly depicted the ways in which Islam is becoming an identity reference for new Muslim figures who are bestowed with a double cultural capital, namely secular and religious. Secondly, I have tried to shift the perspective of our analysis from convictions and values of persons and groups to a notion of space, common space, and public space. The Islamic presence in public therefore challenges the strict separation between private religion and public secularism. Religion is carried into public life, a process through which the profane and sacred realms are intermingled. The regulations of public space become controversial; not only schools, universities, workplaces and parliament, but also public gardens, cemeteries and


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beaches, undergo a similar influence, when Muslims invest in and make claims for religious rules in conformity with Islamic religion. What we face today as a political problem is the issue of the public visibility of religion. The public sphere undergoes changes. We therefore cannot speak of the public sphere as a pre-established, immutable arena. The inclusion of new social groups necessitates a redefinition of its frontiers, and its normative values. Newcomers reveal the limits of the public sphere as constituted and imagined by the society and its legislators at a given time. The “headscarf debate” in France, for instance, provoked a larger public debate on the school system as well as on French secularism, namely “laicité,” considered to be a French exception. We are reminded of the historical heritage of laicité and the principle of neutrality in public school system by the protagonists who argued for banning all religious signs. However, the government’s project of setting up a new French Council for the Muslim Religion has already produced a change in relations between the French State and Islam.6 On the one hand, an Islamic religious organization means the public recognition of the Islamic presence in France, and therefore political acknowledgement of Islam as independent from the problem of immigration. On the other hand, it also means a space for religion in public, as well as a space created by means of State initiative. Secular conceptions and frontiers of the French public sphere are a subject of public controversy and are undergoing a radical change in respect to the problems of integration of Muslim immigrants. Yet the terms of the debate were discussed at a national level and with an emphasis on French exceptionalism, rather than with a future-oriented European perspective. With reference to Europe, however, the question is: Are we going to handle this issue through a kind of “didactic democracy,” one you teach through legislation—a kind of authoritarian intervention, where, for example, you forbid the veil? Ironically this reminds me of Turkish secularism that was historically adopted from French laicité. Today, Turkish forms of the state control of religion turn out to be a model of reference. Or do we have any other way of thinking about democracy as a way of inventing new forms of commonness? The definition of a new commonness requires a reconsideration of the issue of public space on a European scale.

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Until now, this public space has been defined by the nation-state and by institutionally defined religions. Therefore, borders that Europe is now trying to transgress were imposed by state institutions and religious institutions. We still take this public space for granted, however. Can we open it up? Redefine this publicness, this commonness as European public space? Not only by means of legislation, but also as a common value space to be shared and imagined. Conceiving a European public space and a European civility could help us to go beyond the national scale and the confrontational definitions of civilization and focus on daily life experiences and interactions. Why not imagine European public space as an ethical and physical frame that enables us to develop a common civility drawn from liberal pluralism as well as a plurality of religious experiences?

Notes 1 Cf. the articles published in the French, German and Turkish press during the Copenhagen summit; see also the Internet site www.ataturquie.asso.fr. 2 Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 84. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. p. 112. 5 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1989. 6 The Minister of Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, succeeded in persuading rival Muslim organizations to create a New French Council for the Muslim Religion whose members were first elected on 13th of April 2003. The organization of the Jewish consistory which was set up under Napoleon in 1806 is given as an example of the French state regulating its relations with other major religions. The Council represents the first ever unified body authorized to speak on behalf of the five million French Muslim community. The aim is to develop a home-grown and liberal Islam.

OLIVIER ROY

Islam in Europe: Clash of Religions or Convergence of Religiosities?

Today’s religious revival among Europe’s Muslims is no importation of religious traditions born in the Middle East or the wider Muslim world. Rather, it reflects many of the dynamics of contemporary American evangelical movements. No surprise then that, instead of being tolerant and liberal, it is a movement based on dogmatism, communitarianism and scripturalism. The Salafism (fundamentalist religious radicalism) disseminated nowadays among teaching networks, and usually financed by Saudi Arabia, emphasizes the loss of cultural identity in traditional Islam. Spiritualism is promoted by the return of Sufist communities or even social predication (as when Imams preach to the youth in underprivileged neighborhoods to help them out of delinquency, or American churches preach to young Blacks to fight drugs and delinquency). It is a mistake to think that the phenomena of religious radicalism (Salafism) or political radicalism (Al Qaeda) are mere imports of the cultures and conflicts of the Middle East. It is above all a consequence of the globalization and Westernization of Islam. Today’s religious revival is first and foremost marked by the uncoupling of culture and religion, whatever the religion may be. This explains the affinities between American Protestant fundamentalism and Islamic Salafism: both reject culture, philosophy and even theology in favor of a scriptural reading of the sacred texts and an immediate understanding of truth through individual faith, to the detriment of educational and religious institutions. Religion is a mere faith and a system of norms marking the barrier between believers (the community of saints, or those who shall be

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saved) and others. On the other hand, both Catholicism and Orthodoxy consider religion to be profoundly anchored in a culture that cannot be shared by non-believers (hence the Pope’s call for the acknowledgement of the Christian roots of Europe, which are cultural rather than linked to actual religious practice). The success of all forms of neo-fundamentalism can be explained by the fact that, paradoxically, it vindicates the loss of cultural identity and allows a “pure” religion to be conceptualized independently of all its cultural variations and influences. This globalization of Islam also takes place in traditional Muslim countries, i.e. it not only refers to the movement of men and women, but also of ideas, cultural representations, and even modes of religiosity: the relationships that believers entertain with their religion. The first point, essentially linked to the issue of Islam in Europe, is the uncoupling of Islam, on the one hand, and a given territory and culture, on the other. In countries with a Muslim tradition, both the believer and the non-believer, or the less convinced believer, experience religion as some sort of cultural given: by and large their society organizes and provides the space for religious practice. It is easy to fast during Ramadan in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Egypt, even if a person does not want to. Anybody wishing to observe Ramadan can do so without any problem, as society is organized around it for as long as necessary, and there are even instances of societies like Iran, where, in fact, very few people practice it, but where, officially, everything is done in order for believers to observe Ramadan. In the countries of origin religion is always embodied in a culture, and it is difficult, for the believer, to distinguish between what belongs to the cultural tradition—and to some extent to social conventions—and what belongs to dogma. A distinction between religion as a corpus of beliefs—as theology—and culture is not usually made by the man in the street, that is, by ordinary believers. But immigration has suddenly created a divide between religion and society, between religion and culture, to the extent that religious belief is lost sight of. Suddenly, a Muslim living in Europe has somehow to reinvent, to rediscover or, to be more precise, to define what, to his thinking, belongs to the religious world. Therefore, for a Muslim, being in a minority, or being an immigrant, compels him to ultimately think about the basic nature of Islam. He is forced to objectify Islam, i.e. to try to define


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the essence of Islam as objectively as possible. Let me give you a few actual examples. Religious literature is, of course, as old as religion itself, and, if you care to look at the titles of religious books down the years, from the beginning to the present time, you will find, century after century, books with very similar titles, such as “The Explanation of Secrets.” Sometimes they are metaphors: “The Pearls of the Sea,” “The Pearls of Knowledge,” etc. Yet, for some time now we have seen titles appearing without precedent in religious literature: “What is Islam?”, “What Does it Mean to be a Muslim?”, “How to Experience Islam?” There is a wealth of literature nowadays that tries to provide an objective definition of what Islam is, because there is a need for such an objective definition, because there is no longer any evidence of religious belief, because there is no longer any mediation of knowledge by the ulemas, or legal experts. Everyone is faced with the need to invent, define and objectify what religion means to them. This does not mean that the ulemas, the scholars, have disappeared; they are still here. However, the knowledge they produce is no longer practical for the believer; their traditional and scholarly knowledge does not provide the answers the new believer is looking for. A lot of these books, with titles such as “What Is Islam?”, “Living with Faith,” “Being a Muslim in the West,” etc., are written by non-scholarly authors. A lot of them are engineers, people of a secular tradition with a very modern outlook, who have educated themselves in Islam. The first significant aspect of this phenomenon of people moving from one country to another, therefore, is the uncoupling of religion and culture, and the need to define a religion with criteria that are purely religious, and totally internal to the religious domain. This is exactly what I mean by “globalization.” Globalization means uprooting from given societies in an attempt to develop systems of thought that are no longer linked to a given culture, systems of thought or practices, behavior, taste, and modes of consumption. A lot of ink has been spilled in France on the resistance to globalization, i.e. Americanization, or to be more precise, the rejection of fast food and McDonald’s restaurants, which are seen as imports of American culture. In fact, however, it is nothing of the sort, it is simply a mode of consumption that is not linked to any culture, and that

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is adaptable to absolutely everywhere, which is why it works. Therefore, when asking the question “Under what conditions is Islam compatible with Western values?” we are asking the wrong question. The problem is not “What does Islam say about this or that?” The history of Islam has given rise to a lot of liberal scholars who have written books offering solutions: solutions, for example, insisting on a metaphoric reading of the Koran, solutions insisting on the message rather than the letter, solutions insisting on the spirit and the values more than norms and judicial rules, etc. This is nothing new. The Westernization of Islam is not necessarily through “aggiornamento,” or theologian liberalization. It can also assume fundamentalist forms. Modern fundamentalism is also a form of the globalization of Islam, a form of Islam’s Westernization. I have to stress this point, because it is what preoccupies people the most. There are, of course, liberal and modern thinkers in Islam. These thinkers do exist, and always have. In France, for instance, there is Professor Mohamed Arkoun, who is both a renowned philosopher of French culture and a scholar of Islam. The problem is: Who reads Professor Arkoun? Who buys his books? What influence does he have on the Muslim youth of today? The real question is not an intellectual or a theoretical question about Islam; the real issue here is about the tangible practices of Muslims. What forms and religious beliefs are in circulation among young Muslims today? The forms of religiosity witnessed in Islam today are transversal, i.e. they are more or less the same as the ones found in the most popular Western denominations: Catholicism, Protestantism, even Judaism. In our contemporary world we are now witnessing the uncoupling of religion and culture, i.e. contemporary believers put far more stress on faith, on spiritual experience, on individual and personal rediscovery of religion, than on legacy, culture, transmission, authority and theology. Today, we see forms of religious revival leading to the “born again” phenomenon, i.e. people are born again into their religion. It is perhaps the most striking phenomenon of contemporary religiosity in all denominations. It is these “born again” believers who now define religious belief, for the large part, and not what we call the sociological believers. A born again believer is someone who rediscovers faith and decides that from then on his or her life will be put totally in the


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perspective of this rediscovered faith, i.e. he or she will rebuild his or her self in his or her relationship to that faith. This is what I call “religiosity.” Religion is easy to define: the corpus, the revealed texts, the interpretations, the theological debates, the dogmas, etc. As for religiosity, it is the manner in which the believer lives his relationship to religion. And, today, religiosity, everywhere, is far more important than religion. The young people gathering to see the Pope during the world meeting of Catholic youth are not looking for theological explanations. They are looking for a spiritual and personal experience. They seek an immediate experience, an enjoyment of religious fervor. They are not seeking to understand, they are not seeking an authority. They cannot be found attending mass on Sundays or attending seminaries. There is said to be a return to religious belief in Christianity nowadays and millions of young people go to meet the Pope every year. However, at the same time, the seminaries and the vocations are losing ground and fewer and fewer people want to become priests. Therefore, what we have is not a contradiction, but two totally different trends: one is the crisis of religions as institutions and cultures, the other is the return of religiosity. The return of religiosity acts against religion. It is very visible, for instance, among the charismatic fundamentalist protestant movements, where faith is first of all experienced as an individual experience and a break with tradition. Today, religious revival everywhere takes the form of a break with tradition, rather than a form of continued legacy. This explains, for example, why the debate about the place of religion in the European Constitution, in my opinion, is totally misplaced, totally beside what is happening nowadays. That is why this debate is of no concern to anyone, except, of course, the religious establishment—more specifically, the Catholic establishment. What we today label as Islamic fundamentalism, the re-Islamization, is happening not only in the Western world, but also in a lot of Islamic countries, under the same conditions as the revival of religious belief in Christianity, be it Protestant or Catholic. Therefore, far from witnessing an expansion of Middle-Eastern and traditional Islam, which would assert itself against an equally traditional Chris-

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tianity, what we are seeing is the globalization and Westernization of Islam from within, including in its most fundamentalist forms. I mention fundamentalism because it is the subject that concerns people the most, and that is the issue at stake. A liberal Muslim worries no one, and does not appear to be an issue, even though such Muslims form the vast majority of Muslims living in the Western world. I am going to discuss a minority, not only because this minority is making headline news, but also because radical movements are often symptoms of underlying trends. Radical movements may be pathological, but, as often as not, it is pathology, or the absence of it, that defines good health. What do we call Islamic fundamentalism today? We use other names: some call it “wahhabism,” from the official name of the doctrine in Saudi Arabia. They themselves use “Salafis” as their preferred terminology. “Salafi” means “a return to the way of the pious ancestors,” i.e. of the prophet and the prophet’s successors. Personally, I use the term “neo-fundamentalism,” but this is merely a question of terminology. What are we talking about? The Salafi or neofundamentalist movements are above all movements that criticize traditional Muslim cultures. They are anti-cultural before they are anti-Western. Let me use an example we have all heard about, the Taliban in Afghanistan. When the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in 1996, their enemy was not the Western world: they had an excellent relationship with the Americans and foreigners. Westerners could travel freely in Afghanistan between 1996 and 1998. What the Taliban were fighting was not Christianity, not the Western world, but the traditional Afghan culture. They waged a cultural war: they forbade music, poetry, dance, all forms of games, everything resembling spectacle and entertainment. Movies, tapes, novels were all forbidden. They forbade forms of cultural activities that were very traditional among Afghans, such as caged songbirds at home, or the use of kites. Why forbid the use of songbirds? Why forbid the use of kites? The rationale of the Taliban was very simple: this world is simply made available to the believer to prepare for his or her salvation. This is a theme found in all forms of fundamentalism. The role of the state is not to put in place a fair society, etc., but to create opportunities, even if they are coercive, for believers to find their way to salvation.


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This kind of coercion was found during the Inquisition of yesteryear. The Inquisition never punished people because they went against the social order. On the contrary, the Inquisition approach was to allow believers to find their salvation and then, possibly, they could be handed over to the secular order. The Inquisition’s obsession was with salvation, not punishment. So, for the Taliban, to be a believer, to be a Muslim, meant strict observance of religious obligations—for instance, praying five times a day. If interrupted when praying, however, one had to begin again from scratch. The Taliban argument is the following: if you are praying and the bird in your room starts singing, you will be distracted and your prayer will be nullified. If you are a good Muslim, you will have to stop immediately and start all over again. But we are not sure you are a good Muslim and that you will have the strength to start all over again. Therefore, it is easier to ban the birds, since then they cannot bother you and distract you from your duties. Same thing with kites: a kite can get tangled in trees and, if it does, you will climb up the tree to untangle it because you paid good money for it. However, from the top of the tree, you can look over your neighbor’s wall and you run the risk of seeing a woman without her veil, which is a sin. Why run the risk of burning in hell for a kite? Kites are banned. This rationale is pushed to its limits, i.e. this form of religiosity cancels out culture, by the following reasoning: either culture belongs to religion and therefore culture is not needed or culture is something different from religion, and therefore must be eliminated because it distracts you from religion. Indeed, this denial of all distraction, of all that is not linked to religious practice and the seeking of salvation, is a line of thought found in a lot of religions. It is the standard line of thought and can even be found, for instance, in some forms of American Protestantism. This type of fundamentalism is also a major cause of the loss of cultural identity; in fact, it vindicates the loss of cultural identity. It considers not having any cultural identity as positive. And even if this type of fundamentalism has appeared in geographical zones that are, not surprisingly, rather tribal societies—Saudi Arabia, Taliban Afghanistan—it is perfectly suited to a modern loss of cultural identity. It offers young people an excuse for their crisis of cultural identity. The Mullahs, and the Wahhabi Imams or Salafis, who live in

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Europe and talk to young people from an immigrant background, tell them things very simply and clearly. They tell them: “You have not inherited your grandfather’s Islam because your grandfather did not pass his Islam on to you, your grandfather came from Morocco, from Algeria, your grandfather claims to be a Muslim, and sees himself as one, but he did not pass on his Islam to you. But that’s good, because your grandfather’s Islam is not the right Islam. “Your grandfather’s Islam is the Islam of the Marabouts, Moroccan Islam, the Islam of the Sufis, traditional Islam, which has nothing to do with the teachings of the prophet. So, it is really good that you have lost the traditional culture of your family. You don’t feel French or Spanish or Italian, you don’t feel European, which is fine because Europe is not Islam. You don’t feel anything in particular; which is perfect, as it puts you in the best possible situation to become a real Muslim, that is, to live your Islam like a pure religion, like a set of norms and values without any social or cultural content.” It is a coherent and structured discourse. It is what, for example, an association called the Tabligh say when they go preaching from door to door. They are not radicals, they are not terrorists, they are even people who scrupulously abide by the laws of the country they live in. But they are people who consider that we live in a world where Islam is not embodied by a society or a territory and that this is an opportunity rather than a loss, because Islam has finally been detached from any given culture. This explains why fundamentalist ideologies have a lot of success among young Muslims with Western experience. Here, fundamentalism is not at all the protest of an original culture; on the contrary, it vindicates the disappearance of the original cultures. It would be a huge mistake to link modern forms of fundamentalism to the idea of a clash of cultures, or a clash of civilizations, because there is no culture any more, there is no civilization. Today, we express the issues of religious conflicts in cultural terms. This is wrong and pointless, because we are beyond cultural differences. That is why the answers we in Europe try to bring to these religious fundamentalist issues are always blind to what is actually happening. It is not a Middle-Eastern issue, and young people are not joining fundamentalist groups because the Palestinian issue is not resolved. That has nothing to do with it. Young people do


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not become fundamentalists because their parents’ culture is ignored by Western civilization. That has nothing to do with it either. When these young people join neo-fundamentalist ideologies, they enter a universe where they rebuild their religion on the basis of their individual selves, and for them it is the experience of the Almighty, an experience of creation, which can also be found among Protestant fundamentalists. All these forms of fundamentalism are based on the same aspects: the loss of explicit cultural identity, individualization, the rupture of family ties and social ties, and “positivization”—the fact that this rupture is considered to be positive. This religious revival is also a generation thing. It is true of Catholicism, it is true among Muslims, and it is very often the case among young Protestants. The young are returning to religion against the religion of their parents, or alongside the religion of their parents, rather than as an extension of it. Protestants set great store by these words from Jesus: “Leave your family, leave your friends, leave your home and join me.” This idea that religious revival must happen through rupture has always been around, of course. The words of the Gospel have been here since the beginning, but, as always, different paradigms have been taken from the sacred texts at different times in history. Muslims do the same: the Koran provides answers to everything, but nowadays verses are chosen that match this religious fervor. This religious reconstruction is done on an individual, generational basis, and in a religion conceived as a set of codes, norms and values, rather than a theological corpus. We live in times where theology is despised. Theologians have disappeared: in the 1950s and 1960s, famous theologians had an audience among Catholics and Protestants alike. Theological issues were discussed. This is over now, even in Catholic circles. Of course, theology fellowships in famous seminaries still exist, but theologians as a body, as a corporation, do no longer. It is the Curia in the Vatican, not theologians, that manages religious orthodoxy today, and this is true of all religions. The same thing is happening with Islam. The Ulemas, or doctors of the faith, the ones who tell the truth, have lost their legitimacy, but, at the same time, people still need truth, hence the emphasis on norms and/or values. And the whole difference between the fundamentalist radical forms, on the one hand, and liberal forms, on the other, will depend on whether we attach more importance to norms

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or values. That is the difference between liberalism and fundamentalism today. But the forms of neo-fundamentalism that we are now witnessing are forms of reinvention of the norm, which can be very variable: some groups of neo-fundamentalists will insist on physical norms, such as dress codes, where the way one dresses matters. This explains the importance of the current Islamic veil issue. That said, it is interesting to note that the issue of the Islamic veil is a contemporary issue. 30 or 40 years ago, there was no debate about the veil. There has been some debate in cabalist Turkey about the banning of the veil, but even in Turkey, it is only in the last 15 years that the veil has become the subject of fierce public debate; in the 1950s, it was not the subject of any public controversy. Suddenly, this issue of marking religious identity becomes extremely important. Today, the issue of the external religious sign is so because all the religious communities are refashioning themselves as more or less closed communities. Let me come back to my Catholic example: 30 or 40 or 50 years ago, in France, anyone who was not a Protestant or a Jew was assumed to be Catholic, and the Catholic church lived as the expression of society, or culture, even if there was a conflict with the state. This was reflected in a very simple fact: anyone could get married in church, even if they were not churchgoers and did not take communion. Today, with the new generation of clergymen, you cannot get married in church so easily if you are not a member of a parish, or a community. You must prove you belong to the community; you must take religious training classes, etc. The religious communities of today are no longer the expression of cultures or societies. They are reconstructions made on an individual and voluntary basis. Today, all religions are lived as minorities, even when they represent the majority. For example, in the United States, 80% of Americans say they are believers and practicing churchgoers. At the same time, preachers, be they Protestants, Catholics or Muslims, all say the same: “We live in an atheistic, materialistic and pornographic society, etc.,” a society where 80% of the people say that they are believers. Thus, either there is a contradiction, or they are right. And in my opinion they are right. In fact, societies are no longer religious, even if believers represent a majority in society. Societies are built on other forms of cultural representation, of modes


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of consumption, of norms, of values, of economy, of anything we care to think of. There is no religious evidence any longer, even in societies with religious majorities. Therefore, the question ”What is a religion?” today becomes the question of a community of believers. But this community of believers no longer has a cultural basis, and less and less of a territorial basis. Therefore, we are in the middle of a reconstruction effort of a virtual community. It is easier for some. The Catholic Church has the huge advantage of being an institution, of having a Pope, of having a global dimension, and of being supranational. Thus, the Catholic Church can survive this globalization crisis, but other religions, which lack those very institutions, are suddenly faced with the problem of ”What does the norm say? Who is speaking the truth in religious matters?” This produces the paradox that the debate is totally open, but nearly always ends in favor of the fundamentalists. Why? Because they have the clearest ideas of what the norm is. Take the Fatwa websites on the Internet: they are all in English, because this is the language of globalization. Nobody would read a Fatwa website in Arabic if it existed. Furthermore, you can ask questions and there are always people, Muslims, young people usually isolated in a world that is not part of the Muslim world, who ask questions such as: “How can I manage?” And the person who answers —usually a fundamentalist, of course, because they are the ones who are interested in questions of this kind—knows only too well that the judicial norm cannot be activated or implemented. They know you cannot punish someone who does not follow the religious law. So, even fundamentalists are inclined to use a discourse based on morals and values and the supremacy of value over norm. That does not mean that we are heading towards a more liberal Islam—which would be a possibility—but that the forms of religiosity, even in their fundamentalist dimension, are profoundly modern, contemporary and, in a way, perfectly compatible with other religions. When Pim Fortuyn in Holland decided to lead a campaign against the influence of Islam, it was not in defense of the traditional values of Christianity and Europe, but, on the contrary, in defense of the values of sexual freedom (defense of homosexuals). The Moroccan Imam, whose preaching on Dutch TV had shocked Pim Fortuyn,

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adopted a conservative stance that could have been a Christian one (homosexuals are sick and in need of treatment rather than being acknowledged as a minority with rights). On subjects like family, sexual freedom, homosexuality, or abortion, religious Muslims in Europe side with conservative Christians. There is a clash of values, but it does not oppose East and West, the Orient and the Occident or Islam and Christianity. The debate is an internal debate in Europe, questioning Europe’s values and identity. Assuming that what I claim is true, that we find ourselves in a common matrix of religiosity, this still does not explain Islamic political radicalism. Osama Bin Laden is far more within the legacy of a tradition of Western radicalism than merely an expression of traditional political violence in Islam. Contemporary activists, apart from Saudis and Yemenis, who are an important exception, have all been reintroduced to Islam in a Western context: Mohamed Atta, Zacharias Moussaoui, Daoudi, all these people had become “Born again Muslims” here in the West, not in Egypt or Morocco, but here among us, in Marseilles, London, Montreal. They all benefited from a modern, Western education. None of them except the Saudis came from a religious Koranic school. They had all broken with their family. None had adopted the religious tradition of their parents. There is one absolutely common trend among them: when they were arrested, their families stated that they had not seen them for one, two or three years. And when they adopt radical opinions in the West, where do they go to wage jihad? Let’s take the example, in France, of a young French Muslim of Algerian descent, whose family is of Algerian origin, who becomes a “Born again Muslim” in the suburbs of Paris, and who decides to wage jihad. You might think all he has to do is to go to Algeria for his jihad, as there are lots of opportunities there. However, there are no examples of a young person of Algerian descent acquiring radicalism in France and going to wage jihad in Algeria. Where do they go? They go to Bosnia, to Chechnya, to Afghanistan, to Kashmir, to New York or to the West. No one goes back to his or her country of origin. This means that they do not in any way see the Middle East as the heart of a Muslim culture and the heart of a territorialized Muslim civilization that could be attacked and put under siege by crusaders. They live in a global world, not as Middle Easterners.


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Most of them, at least half, have married women of European descent, who have sometimes agreed to go with their husbands and, when they have a family life, they live in a modern family structure, in the structure of a couple. The memoirs of the wife of the killer of Commander Massoud in Afghanistan have just been published. She is Belgian, but of Tunisian descent. She is currently on trial in a court in Brussels, and she explains in her book how she came to be married, how she went with her husband to Afghanistan, how they lived as a couple among the Mujahideen and the Taliban. Their family structure was therefore entirely modern. There was no patriarchal structure, where the father or grandfather is to be obeyed. On the contrary, there was a break with the father or the grandfather. There is one final phenomenon: converts. In all the radical networks recently discovered, there are a growing number of converts. About a third of the Begal network, the latest to be arrested in France, were converts. Some Islamist terrorist actions in Muslim countries are apparently orchestrated in the West by converts. The terrorist attack on the synagogue in Djerba, in Tunisia, was carried out by a young Tunisian—himself a Tunisian from Tunisia, but whose whole family lives in Lyon, France. The French police have recently arrested a German citizen with a Slavonic name, a Polish name, a convert to Islam, who the police think is the man behind this attack and the link between this young Tunisian and bin Laden. Richard Reid, the man who tried to blow up a British plane, José Padilla, John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, are all converts. It is a growing phenomenon. We need to study these converts, because, even though they do not represent large numbers, their existence is highly symptomatic, and very interesting from an intellectual point of view. We can observe a conversion phenomenon in underprivileged neighborhoods in France today. That is what I call the “protest conversion,” e.g. a youth, of French origin, leads a dog’s life, as we say in France, in poverty, not only and often not even material poverty, but rather moral and psychological misery, with no job prospects, no social advancement, sometimes dealing in drugs, stealing cars, living in the small world of the underground economy, of delinquency, like a parasite, etc. He converts and joins a group of local Islamic activists, formed by his friends, his acquaintances, the guy who lives next door, in the same

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apartment building, and he joins because the group is actively fighting the system. The far left in Europe today has abandoned zones of social exclusion. This is a fact. We have good reason to rejoice in the disappearance of a violent and radical far left, but it did have a function, which was to contain and hold in check a certain revolt, often also based on the generation gap. But this is over: a 30-year-old, in France, who would have joined the proletarian left, the Maoists or Action Directe, who, in Italy, would have joined the Brigate Rosse, who, in Germany, would have joined the Rote Armee Fraktion, this young person no longer has the opportunity to join left-wing movements, and if he or she wants to fight the system, and use violence, he or she has only one role model: and that is bin Laden, or the local Islamist networks, and his or her friends. And what do they do? They do the same thing that far left radicals used to do in the 1960s: look for likely freedom fighter movements. They went to the Bekaa plains to learn how to use Kalashnikovs with the Palestinian left, and they hijacked planes with them. Today, they go to Afghanistan to learn how to handle Kalashnikovs with “Binladenists” and they also learn how to hijack planes; in the meantime, their skills have greatly improved. We are therefore witnessing a kind of quest for mythical, messianic, transnational liberation movements, all targeting the same enemy—American imperialism—that is perceived as the modern form of domination, of capitalism. Bin Laden’s struggles form part of a history, and of a matrix that is far more Western than strictly Middle-Eastern. Bin Laden’s people do not live in Egypt, in Syria, in Lebanon, or in Iraq. We went to look for them with 200,000 troops, but we did not find them. They are not even in Algeria; they are here among us—because they are the product not of our history, but of a fusion of all histories, a product of globalization.

List of Contributors

Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill University, Montreal, and Professor of Law and Philosophy at the Northwestern University. Chairman of the Advisory Board of IWM. Selected writings: Varieties of Religion Today, Harvard, 2002; “The Politics of Recognition” in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann, Princeton, 1994; The Ethics of Authenticity, Harvard, 1991; Sources of the Self, Harvard, 1989; Hegel and Modern Society, Cambridge, 1979. José Casanova is Professor of Sociology at New School University, New York, where his work concentrates on religion, democratization, and social change in Latin America and Southern and Eastern Europe. Author of Public Religions in the Modern World, University of Chicago Press, 1994. Danièle Hervieu-Léger is Professor and the President of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Recent publications: Catholicisme. La fin d’un monde, Paris, 2003; Sociologies et religions, Paris, 2003 (with J. P. Willaime); La religion en miettes ou la question des sectes, Paris, 2001; Le Pèlerin et le converti. La religion en mouvement, Paris 1999; Les identités religieuses en Europe (co-editor), Paris, 1996; La religion pour mémoire, Paris, 1993. David Martin is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Honorary Professor for Religious Studies at the University of Lancaster. Author of Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish, Oxford, 2001; Christian Language and Its Mutations, Aldershot, 2002; Christian Language in the Secular City, Aldershot, 2002; Does Christianity Cause War?, Oxford, 1998; Forbidden Revolutions: Pentecostalism in Latin America and Catholicism in Eastern Europe, London, 1996; Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America, Oxford, 1990. Peter L. Berger is University Professor Emeritus, Professor of Sociology and Theology and Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs (CURA) at Boston University. Recently author of Questions of Faith: A Sceptical Affirmation of Christianity, Oxford, 2003; Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World, ed. with Samuel P. Huntington, Oxford UP, 2002.

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Tariq Modood is Professor of Sociology and Political Science and Director of the University Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol. Recently author of Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain, University of Minnesota Press and Edinburgh UP, 2005. Lord Bhikhu Parekh is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Westminster and President of the Academy of Learned Societies in Social Sciences. He is a Labour member of the House of Lords and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of several books in political philosophy, his latest being Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory, Harvard University Press and Macmillan, 2000. Nilüfer Göle is Professor of Sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Centre d’Analyse et d’Intervention Sociologiques (CADIS). Her recent publications include Interpénétrations: L’Islam et l’Europe, Paris, 2005; Islam in Sicht (ed. with Ludwig Ammann), Bielefeld, 2004; The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling, University of Michigan Press, 1997. Olivier Roy is Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and Senior Researcher at the CNRS. Author of Globalised Islam. The search for a new ummah, London/New York, 2004; Islamist Networks. The Pakistan–Afghan Connection (with Mariam Abou Zahab), London, 2003; Les illusions du 11 septembre, Paris, 2002; L’islam mondialisé, Paris, 2002; Vers un islam européen, Paris, 1999; The Failure of Political Islam, Harvard UP, 1994.

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