Transnational Religion in an Expanding Europe

Enlargement of the European Union (EU) is infusing renewed religious vitality into European political and social life through the influential role that religion plays in many of the states that have recently joined or are seeking to join the EU as full-fledged members. This vitality is, in turn, fortifying the role of religion in European politics in two closely related ways. In the first place, the close ties between religious tradition and national identity that new member-states and candidate-states are introducing to the EU hold the very real potential of reviving political recognition of the Christian, and specifically Catholic, roots of European integration. Western Europe may be said to have preserved Christianity only as glimmering embers that are not able to generate much heat, on their own. But when fanned, in very different ways, by Catholic Poland, Orthodox Serbia, or Islamic Turkey, those embers are much more likely to flicker back into flames. Second, the greater attention to religious difference that this renewed vitality implies could itself ignite political reactions and conflicts that are likely to impede the process of “Europeanization.” Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam are transnational religious traditions that each have their own understanding of European identity, European unity, and even of European modernity. These religious understandings and definitions, animated politically in complex ways in places like Warsaw, Belgrade, and Ankara, may not be consistent with how these concepts are defined and understood in, say, Paris, Berlin, or Brussels. As these religious traditions, and the national communities partly defined by them, are drawn more deeply into the project of European integration through enlargement, religion will also get drawn more deeply into European public life. Put another way, religion, widely presumed to have been consigned to the political margins in Europe, is now poised to play an important role in one of the most central political processes of contemporary European life.

Of course, even the most casual reader of current news could not help but notice the increasing prominence of religion in European politics. Perhaps the first shock of recognition came in the 1990s when hundreds of thousands of refugees from Croatia (Catholic), Serbia (Orthodox) and Bosnia (Muslim) tragically embodied Europe's enduring religious heterogeneity. Declaration No. 11, appended to the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, innocuously proclaimed that the European Union respects and in no way prejudices national laws governing the status of churches and religious associations as well as of philosophical and non-confessional organizations. But since that resolution was adopted, religious issues have only become more politicized across Europe.¹

Soper and Fetzer 2002.

In France, Spain, and Germany, for example, controversies over headscarves and public education have been intense. In addition, disagreements over the proper balance to be struck between secular and Christian markers of European identity plagued discussion of the preamble to the proposed Constitution. The eventual compromise left the document open to sharp criticism from both the Roman Catholic Pope and the leader of the Greek Orthodox Church, and in the view of one British diplomat, made the preamble “pompous and pretentious but at first sight not actively dangerous.”²

Economist2003.

In a different way, the remarkable fanfare surrounding the death of that Pope, John Paul II, was a powerful reminder, as much in Europe as it was around the globe, of the personal charisma and political stature of Christianity's most prominent leader. And with the opening of negotiations between the EU and Turkey about eventual membership, religion now holds a central place on Europe's diplomatic agenda.

It is also all too easy to point out how often religious fervor has led to violence in Europe in recent years. There were the March 2004 bombings in Madrid and the July 2005 attacks in London, the riots in the Paris suburbs in late 2005, and most recently the widespread protests in response to the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad. All of these flashpoints have pointed to religion as a basic element of political conflict in contemporary Europe, and all have involved Islam in one way or another. Indeed, reactions to the U.S.-led “war on terror” have also raised pointed questions about the level of compatibility between secular Europe and politicized Islam. Both sides, writes Alan Cowell, find themselves pushed across an unexpected threshold “where they view each other with miscomprehension and suspicion.”³

Cowell 2006.

It would be a mistaken oversimplification, however, to view the return of religion to political contention in Europe as merely a function of Muslim immigration renewing religious conflicts of the past. To be sure, the number of Muslims living in Europe has increased in less than a generation from about one to over fifteen million, and the challenges associated with that growth have been a factor in the conflicts we have just cited. But a growing number of social scientists have started to notice that the religious challenges facing Europe go much deeper than that.

Grace Davie has argued, to cite one example, that with the ascendance of secularization European religion did not simply vanish.⁴

Davie 2000.

Instead a variety of what she calls mutating collective memories have provided a never-ending reconstruction of religious traditions—in the churches and through churchgoers for sure, but also in education, the media, and the law, as well as in alternative formulations provided by new religions, and in the arts. The present article's contribution to this growing literature is to point out that exclusive scholarly attention to the Europeanization of only secular politics—to who gets what, when, and how—misses a central aspect of what is going on today in Europe. EU enlargement is bringing the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Churches, and the Islamic umma into ever closer contact with the European project. And the increasing importance of these religious communities points to an odd but instructive irony about the self-perceptions of many Europeans. “At one and the same time,” to quote Davie, “they perceive themselves as increasingly secular and draw the boundaries of their continent—known sometimes as “fortress Europe”—along Christian lines. Whether consciously or not, the effective barriers to entry coincide with a geographical definition of Christendom. Nations dominated by Western (Catholic) Christianity will … find it easier than their Orthodox equivalents to enter the European Union; Muslim states will find it harder still (if not impossible) despite the existence of significant Muslim communities within most, if not all, West European nations.”⁵

Davie 2001, 467–468; ibid. 1994.

This European condition is worth noting. For a long time, the enduring vitality of religion in American life was attributed to an ill-defined “American exceptionalism.” More recently, in the face of a global religious revival beyond the United States that even the most secular observers have found difficult to ignore, it has become fashionable to talk instead of “European exceptionalism.” Modernization theory may have been proved wrong by events, the argument concedes … except in “secular Europe.” This is the basic assumption, for example, that informs a historian like Tony Judt's understanding of the European experience since 1945.⁶

Judt, 2005.

And it is also the conclusion that drives the critique of secularism in Europe offered by an American Catholic like George Weigel, although he takes some comfort from the greater religious emphasis of the “Slavic view of history”.⁷

Weigel 2005, 29–34.

In this paper, we argue for a less dismissive and less sweeping understanding of the role of religion in European politics. We are arguing that Europe is less exceptional than it is often thought to be. The ongoing and apparently inexorable enlargement of the European Union is likely to make Europe less and less exceptional as time goes on.

We begin with a call for the inclusion of religion as one element of an eclectic choice among alternative analytical approaches to International Relations. The second section establishes the original Christian Democratic foundations of the subsequently secular processes of European integration and “Europeanization.” Next we discuss the role that three important transnational religious traditions—Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam—are playing in these political processes. We conclude with a consideration of the ways in which these religious politics are confronting Europe at this historical moment with the idea of multiple “modernities” and multiple “Wests.” These notions of multiplicity, by the way, have been common features of American thought for a very long time.

Europe and Religion: Analytical Perspectives

In the analysis of Europe and its international relations the rediscovery of religion is overdue. Specifically, scholars of Europe's emerging polity have so far neglected this topic in their voluminous writings. This oversight is true, specifically, for analyses grounded self-consciously in secular liberal and cultural realist perspectives. Instead of multiplicity, these perspectives stress uniformity of outcomes: the absence of religion in either a progressive and cooperative secular politics for liberals or a divided and conflictual one for realists.

For more accurate analysis and deeper insights into the role of religion in European politics, liberal and realist analyses would gain from being grounded in a sociological perspective. As one manifestation of the sociological turn in international relations theory, constructivism insists that through interaction people build the social and political world within the context of a material world they also inhabit. Agent, structure and language co-exist and co-evolve without one enjoying ontological primacy over the other. In this view, there is no reason to privilege actors, such as the unitary state, or levels of analysis, such as the international system, that have been central to most strands of realist and liberal international relations scholarship. The disciplinary orientation of sociology and the analytical lenses of constructivism are particularly well suited to examine non-state actors such as religious communities as well as many aspects of an evolving European polity. Sociology and constructivism are open to inquiring into the transnational dimensions that are often central to religious politics and that connect global and international processes with national and local ones.

A secular liberalism is deeply ingrained in the self-understanding of most Europeans, and in the interpretations of most scholars of European politics. Not long ago it was an article of faith, so to speak, among most scholars of religion and of Europe that secularization was the dominant trend in modernization. Francis Fukuyama went so far as to pronounce the “the end of history” after Liberalism's final and decisive victory over the challenges posed by Fascism in the first half of the twentieth century and Communism in the second.⁸

Fukuyama 1989; ibid. 1992.

Henceforth there would be no more ideological opposition to the rationalist secularism that Fukuyama believed had triumphed in the Cold War.

As the collapse of Communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union occurred with the help of a devout Polish Pope and fervent Islamicist mujahedeen, Fukuyama's conclusion is less than fully convincing. It does not sit well at least with one of the preeminent sociologists of religion of his generation. In the words of Peter Berger, “What I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization. It wasn't a crazy theory. There was some evidence for it. But I think it's basically wrong. Most of the world today is certainly not secular. It's very religious.”⁹

Berger 1997, 974; quoted in Stark 1999, 16.

And so, in its own way, is Europe. Berger describes the European way with religion in the following terms: a “strong survival of religion, most of it generally Christian in nature, despite the widespread alienation from organized churches. A shift in the institutional location of religion, then, rather than secularization, would be a more accurate description of the European situation.”¹⁰

Berger 1999, 10.

Cultural realism offers an alternative perspective that is more open to the influence of religion in world politics.¹¹

A. Johnston 1995; Nau 2002; See also Niebuhr 1940; D. Johnston 2003.

In the aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Samuel Huntington's political intuition differed sharply from Fukuyama's.¹²

Huntington 1993; ibid. 1996.

Huntington's “clash of civilization” draws a pessimistic picture. The historical turn of 1989–91 removed one ideological conflict, but it revealed the existence of another. For Huntington, civilizations have become the relevant cultural context for states and non-state actors alike. Huntington insists that this is true in particular of “faultline” states that lie between civilizations, such as Serbia. Civilizational clashes are for Huntington the defining characteristic of a new era of international politics.

Because their building blocks are variable constellations of religion, culture, language, values, traditions, and memories, civilizations are not easily defined with any degree of precision. Today religion, specifically the rise of political and religious fundamentalism in the Middle East, gives the civilizational argument much of its political prominence. Huntington's primary argument holds that underneath civilizational fluidity, a profound split exists between the “West” and the “rest.” A secondary argument is less clearly identified with Huntington's main thesis. It holds that under the wide umbrella of civilization, identities are contested and can be reconstructed quite easily through a politics that by definition is forever in flux. For example, Huntington argues that Kemalist reformism can be explained within the context of Islam, as can significant reform efforts in Mexico and Russia.¹³

Huntington 1993, 24, 42–44, 48.

Secular liberalism and cultural realism have the virtue of simplicity. Both, however, suffer from limitations that invite us to move beyond them in our analysis of the interactions between Europeanization and transnational religious communities. Contra secular liberalism, there exists no teleology in history, secular or otherwise. And contra cultural realism, diversity, and difference rather than unity and homogeneity, are the markers of civilizational entities and the collective identities they foster. This is not to argue that concepts central to liberal and realist perspectives, such as efficiency and power, are irrelevant for the analysis of religion in European and world politics. They are, however, most useful in combination with other concepts that better capture the ideas motivating religious politics. Efficiency as the master variable of a variety of liberal theories of international relations, for example, has great difficulties in engaging substantively the identities, motivations, and strategies of religious actors whose calculations typically cannot be reduced to simple instrumental reasoning. And material capabilities as the only measure of power in most variants of realism misses core aspects of religious politics.¹⁴

S. Thomas 2000; ibid. 2005.

There are numerous avenues of inquiry into the processes by which religious communities and other non-state actors interact with states at the multiple levels that constitute the European Union. In their research practice, sociological schools of thought differ on specifics. For example, some display a bent for more¹⁵

Almond, Appleby and Sivan, 2003.

or less¹⁶

Esposito and Watson 2000.

theoretical self-consciousness and positivist commitment. But they all claim that social structures contain shared knowledge, material resources, and practices; that knowledgeable agents use these resources to construct through their practices variable and ever-changing norms and identities; and that through these practices they change themselves and the structures in which they are embedded. The intended outcome of the eclectic analytical perspective we adopt here aims at the “dehomogenization” of religious communities and polities as well as the civilizational, regional, and political environments of which they are a part.¹⁷

Rudolph 1997.

Secular Europeanization on Christian Democratic Foundations

Contemporary Europe is a moving target. Its historical foundations after the devastations of two world wars was Christian-Democratic. Yet successive waves of European enlargement were motivated by secular interests, particularly the urge to stabilize the various European peripheries. In its various forms, Europeanization is an open-ended and largely secular process played out against a Christian-Democratic background. Enlargement of the EU to the East is likely to draw more attention to that background in the coming years.

Europeanization refers to the impact that institutions and policy outcomes at the European level have on domestic polities, politics, and policies.¹⁸

Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005.

It refers also, though less prominently, to the effect that various national polities and policies have on the EU and other European institutions. Broadly speaking, across the EU and different polities Europeanization is constructing, diffusing, and institutionalizing both formal and informal rules and procedures, policy paradigms and styles, shared beliefs, and ways of conducting political business.

It is difficult to imagine the European integration movement after 1945 without the political contribution of Christian Democratic parties. Robert Schumann, Alcide de Gasperi, and Konrad Adenauer, the three “fathers” of the European integration movement, were all leaders of parties that had come to fill the spiritual void that Fascism, Communism, and the experience of World War II had left. In the words of Scott Thomas, European integration “was an act of the political imagination of Christian Democracy,” informed by a “different vision of faith, life, and politics.”¹⁹

Thomas 2005, 167, 169.

The clerical roots of Christian Democracy were considerably stronger before Vatican II than after. Christian Democratic parties were, however, not simply instruments of the Catholic Church created to combat the rising tide of anticlericalism in an era of mass politics. And they were not simply instruments of conservative political elites intent on appropriating Catholic social doctrine, which was supportive of some public welfare programs and intent on building mass parties to combat the rise of socialism. Instead, in their historical origins Christian Democratic parties were the contingent outcomes of decisions made by actors who were pursuing interests often not related to confessional politics.²⁰

Kalyvas 1996, 2–6.

And they were carriers of the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity as a pillar of the European integration movement.²¹

Holmes 2000, 27–28, 50–56.

In the 1950s, European integration was widely viewed, especially among Protestants and Social Democrats, as a Catholic conspiracy of conservatives, an ideologically tainted attempt to revive clerical politics as a handmaiden of big business, orchestrated by the Vatican. True to that caricature, Christian Democracy has strongly supported European integration not only in the 1950s but throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There are strong roots of this stance in the Catholic Church's historical skepticism towards sovereign states, and its enduring attachment to Europe's federal unity, dating back to the Middle Ages.²²

S. Thomas 2005, 166–171.

Although Social Democrats came to support the European project in growing numbers after the mid-1960s, a noticeable gap persists. Survey research reveals that since 1973, Catholics have been more supportive of European integration than Protestants; devout Catholics have been more supportive than conventional Catholics, who in turn are more supportive than nominal Catholics.²³

Nelsen, Guth, and Fraser 2001, 19; Nelsen and Guth 2003.

European enlargement has occurred on that Christian Democratic foundation. Before 1945, Europe exported models of political organization, economic governance, and ideological hegemony beyond the European continents.²⁴

Bull and Watson 1985.

After Europe's reconstruction, starting in the 1970s EU enlargement has been accomplishing the same outcome on a more limited geographic scale. Europeanization is a powerful political process that is not restricted only to EU member states. It extends also to non-members such as Norway and Switzerland, as well as to candidate countries in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. And Europeanization goes well beyond the issue of direct compliance with European rules to address also indirect effects that concern the organizational logic of national politics and policy making on issues such as the functioning of political parties, local government, refugee policies, and citizenship.²⁵

Vink 2003.

Important to Europeanization are secular elites adopting European rules for European polities built on Christian and Social Democratic foundations. Such rules concern issues of distribution, regulation, and redistribution, as well as of institutional design and jurisdictional conflict. The adoption of EU rules, for example, often focuses on their institutionalization at the domestic level. By acceding to membership in the EU, new member states commit themselves to adopt, or “transpose,” all of these rules into domestic law. This entails often far-reaching changes in the structure of domestic institutions and domestic political practices to meet EU standards. Formal adoption is one thing, practical implementation quite another. The behavioral dimension is shaped by the regulative and constitutive effects of rules that operate at the individual level through internalization and habituation and at the collective level through various sanctioning mechanisms. In addition to the formal and behavioral dimensions, there is also the discursive dimension of rule adoption in the process of Europeanization. Political discourse shows domestic actors speaking in three different modes—paying lip-service, talking strategically, and being truly persuaded.²⁶

Olsen 2002; ibid. 1997; Liebert 2002.

And until recently, most of the talk has been secular, not religious.

Europeanization can lead to socialization. European elites adopt multiple roles in institutional settings where social and political pressures are absent, augmenting their national role conceptions with European ones.²⁷

Trondal 2001; Chayes and Chayes 1995.

Jeffrey Checkel reviews in a recent paper the scholarship that has explored the socializing effects of numerous meetings over long periods in European institutions, particularly when those meetings promote deliberation and collective puzzling over complicated issues.²⁸

Checkel 2005, 805–08.

Summarizing the existing research on elite socialization, he concludes that “the socializing effects of European institutions are uneven and often surprisingly weak, and in no sense can be construed as shaping a radically new, post-national identity”.²⁹

Checkel 2005, 815.

This conclusion is even more true for mass publics.

Moving from the micro-level of elite socialization to the macro-level of domestic institutional change, Risse, Cowles, and Caporaso conclude that Europeanization leads to distinct and identifiable changes in the institutional structures of member states.³⁰

Risse, Cowles and Caporaso 2001, 1–2.

National adaptation to Europeanization is omnipresent. But this does not suggest either wholesale convergence or continued divergence in national institutions and policies. Instead, national adaptations retain distinctive national colors. Where national institutions fit well into emerging European ones, adaptation is minimal; where they do not fit well, pressure to adapt can be intense. Rather than favoring either the European or the national level, Europeanization meshes increasingly closely with both. An evolving European polity is experimenting with new methods of policy coordination that go beyond legal harmonization to include also codified practices such as target-setting, benchmarking, and peer review. Between perfect adaptation on the one hand and hard-core resistance on the other, the messiness of Europeanization typically works itself out and creates “patched-up” institutional structures.³¹

Héritier 2001, 54; Héritier, Knill, Mingers and Barrett 1996; Ansell and Di Palma 2004.

Law is the instrument that patches things up in a secular politics. European law is embodied in the acquis communautaire that the European polity has created since 1957.³²

Iankova and Katzenstein 2003.

The acquis is the result of legislative decisions, legal rulings, and political practices. Although it is a legal concept that refers to a body of law, the acquis also represents the continuously changing institutional terms and political practices that result from a process of political integration through law. The European Union insists that any prospective member must, before accession, adopt the acquis—about 100,000 printed pages. This is a tall order, and a requirement that long-standing members of the EU themselves have difficulty meeting. Jonas Tallberg reports that in about 10 percent of the cases member states did not comply with EU directives in the 1990s.³³

Tallberg 1999, 125–26.

According to Abram and Antonia Chayes the principal source of noncompliance rests not so much in “willful disobedience” as in a lack of political capacity or priority.³⁴

Chayes and Chayes 1995, 23–28; See also Conant 2002.

After World War II, Europe was rebuilt on the basis of two strong commitments: to political democracy, Christian and otherwise, and to harnessing Germany's destructive potential in a variety of European political arrangements. Whereas, until recently, the religious moment in European politics has waned over the last half century, the commitment to taming German power and securing European peace has not. To date legal Europeanization is the process by which a secular Europe seeks to mold its constituent parts, directly and indirectly, in the process of enlargement. Religious politics is now poised to have a noticeable effect on that process.

Transnational Religious Communities: Catholicism, Islam, and Orthodoxy

The challenge that religion poses to the European project has an important transnational dimension. A generation ago, Keohane and Nye defined a “transnational interaction” as “the movement of tangible or intangible items across state boundaries when at least one actor is not an agent of a government or an international organization.”³⁵

Keohane and Nye 1971, xii.

The inclusion of a chapter on the Catholic Church as a transnational actor in Keohane and Nye's original volume signaled that if a conception of international relations took root where actors other than states were to be taken seriously, then some of those actors would probably turn out to be religious in nature. After all, the whole notion of transnationalism invites examination of institutions, religious and otherwise, that do not fit readily into the traditional paradigms of international relations theory. To argue, as Byrnes has elsewhere, that the role of Pope John Paul II in the fall of communism in East Central Europe does not fit readily into analysis driven by state-based theory of any stripe is not to say that his role was epiphenomenal, or irrelevant.³⁶

Byrnes 2001.

It is, rather, to suggest that we need to stretch our theoretical paradigms in order to take further into account the ways in which transnational actors, such as religious communities and religious leaders, participate in international political processes, and how those actors might actually independently influence international political outcomes.³⁷

Rudolph and Piscatori 1997; Dark 2000; Carlson and Owens 2003; Petito and Hatzopoulos 2003.

The secular forces that during the last half century have advanced the Europeanization of Europe are now joining up with a renewed political salience of religion as Europe enlarges. We want to look individually, albeit in comparative terms, at Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam and at the roles those very different entities are playing in the ongoing processes of Europeanization. In doing so, we will focus on two specific factors in particular: the relationship between a given religious community and European identity; and the degree to which that religious community's own institutional structure equips it for meaningful participation in the myriad transnational interactions that so profoundly define contemporary European politics.

Transnational religion turns out to be a very complex category, and included within that category is a very diverse set of political actors. Some of those actors have close historic ties to traditional notions of European identity centered around the concept of Christendom; for others, such connections are far more problematic and contested, in both historic and contemporary terms. Moreover, the ways in which each of these religious communities structures itself are clearly distinct, one from the other, and politically significant. Roman Catholicism embodies one very particular form of transnational interaction, but Orthodoxy manifests a very different form of transnationalism, and Islam is defined by yet another. A key factor in determining the nature of these three religious communities' roles in contemporary European politics is the variant transnational structure of the communities themselves.

Roman Catholicism

Because of its institutional makeup, Roman Catholicism is generally considered the most straightforwardly transnational of the three religious traditions we will be considering in this article. Most analysts of the Catholic Church in this regard focus on the papacy and its authority, and we will certainly do so here. But Catholic transnationalism, to coin a term, goes well beyond the authority and universal status of the Pope. Catholic bishops from around the globe are also transnational actors, both through their communal membership in a collegial magisterium (or teaching authority) of a global church, and also through the complex web of personal and institutional contacts that exist among and between individual prelates and national Episcopal conferences across state borders. In addition, the Catholic population of the whole world, what Vatican II's Lumen Gentium called with characteristic grandiosity, the “people of God,” is also fundamentally transnational in character.³⁸

Abbott and Gallagher 1966, 24.

To begin with the papacy, however, it is true that the Roman Catholic Pope is the central figure of a very centralized and straightforwardly hierarchical structure. The heart of modern papal authority, of course, is the First Vatican Council's declaration in 1870 that when the Pope “defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church,” he does so infallibly, that is to say that “such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the church, irreformable.”³⁹

Tanner 1990, 816.

Infallibility, though very rarely exercised, grants an aura of finality to the Pope's every word, and is a kind of logical end to an ecclesiology that views one man, the Pope, as personally selected by the Holy Spirit to lead the universal church.

The Pope's role in the church goes well beyond this aura, however. In practical terms, the Pope personally appoints each and every bishop across the globe, and those bishops must meet with the Pope every five years during what are called ad limina visits to Rome. Even more importantly, the teachings of the Catholic Church are articulated most clearly and most forcefully (even when not necessarily infallibly) in papal documents. All of these levers of power and modes of authority were highlighted by the centralizing instincts and peripatetic style that characterized the papacy of Pope John Paul II. Whether he was denouncing Communism, warning against secularism, resisting legalized abortion, or punishing dissent within his own church, the late Pope sought to impose a coherent voice of papal authority over a far-flung, very complex Catholic Church.

We can see how pervasive that authority was by looking just briefly at the significance of Pope John Paul II's attitude towards the European Union, and its eastward expansion. One might ask, for example, why the Polish bishops, so otherwise distrustful of “the West,” and so anxious to establish an authentically Catholic Poland as a truly autonomous state, have so clearly supported Poland's accession to the EU. To be sure, this is a complex story. But one factor in that story was the simple, but powerful fact, that EU accession was supported by the Polish Pope. Given the decisive nature of papal authority, the Polish bishops were simply not able to take a public stance that would contradict the Vatican's position on an issue of such importance.

To be sure, the Polish Pope had a very particular vision of “Europe,” and very particular reasons for wanting Poland to be a part of it.⁴⁰

Sutton 1997.

For Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyła of Krakow, EU expansion was an occasion for a “new evangelization” flowing from East to West. “The church in Poland,” he argued, “can offer Europe as it grows in unity, her attachment to the faith, her tradition inspired by religious devotion, the pastoral efforts of her Bishops and priests, and certainly many other values on the basis of which Europe can become a reality endowed not only with higher economic standards but also with a profound spiritual life.”⁴¹

Vatican 1997.

One could certainly question the extent to which this vision is likely to be turned into a reality in modern-day Europe. But the important point here is not the practicality of implementing a papal vision. Instead, the point is simply that the authoritative head of the Catholic Church supported Poland's entry into the EU. That alone was a significant political fact, both in terms of the internal politics of the church and the actions of the Polish episcopate, just as it was also a significant fact in terms of the external politics of how East Central Europe's “return to Europe” was conceived of in the East and, to a lesser extent, in the West. Moreover, the role of the Catholic Church today is played out not only in relation to the expansion of the European Union. The Church, as it has always been, is also now interested in defining Europe, in saying what Europe is as an idea, and in saying what values European society should devote itself to.

In this connection, it is not at all surprising that Popes tend to articulate these values in decidedly Catholic terms. Pope John Paul II was particularly fond of referring to Europe as a fundamentally Christian civilization, and he tirelessly called on Europe to renew its civilizational identity through a renewed commitment to its Christianity, as defined, of course, in Rome. Ecclesia In Europa, issued in 2003, was in a way, the culminating articulation of this worldview, but this theme had been present throughout Wojtyła's pontificate.⁴²

Ecclesia in Europa, reproduced in Origins 33:10, 149–76.

When John Paul II implored Europe to be true to its Christian roots, he did so as a religious leader who believed that an authentic European identity and an authentic European unity were impossible without reference to the religious tradition for which he spoke authoritatively. This understanding of European history provided Pope John Paul II with a powerful sense of legitimacy in terms of his and his religious community's participation in the processes of developing the political structures that will govern European society in the twenty-first century. John Paul II's successor, Pope Benedict XVI does not bring his predecessor's Polish messianism to his understanding of Europe and its destiny. Benedict has nevertheless spoken quite plainly about the need to acknowledge Europe's Christian roots. And the very fact that the College of Cardinals elected a German to the leadership of such a distinctively global institution indicates the degree to which a European heart still beats at the core of Roman Catholicism.

Besides the Pope, Catholic transnationalism is also embodied in and articulated by the thousands of Catholic bishops who serve the church in almost every corner of the globe. These men exercise fundamentally local authority, but that authority is only exercised legitimately because these bishops are members of a collegial teaching authority that in communion with the Pope shares authority as a collective body over the entire global church. This collegial body, along with each bishop's individual relationship with the Bishop of Rome (the Pope), renders Catholic bishops the central players in a kind of global/local dynamic that defines transnational Catholicism.

At the same time, these bishops are also members of what are called national episcopal conferences, groups of bishops within each country that “form an association and meet together at fixed times” in order to “fulfill their office suitably and fruitfully.”⁴³

Abbott and Gallagher 1966, 424–25.

What this means is that episcopal conferences are the specific vehicles for articulating and disseminating the social and theological teachings of today's Catholic Church. These conferences have the effect of nationalizing the day-to-day activities of an otherwise transnational church, but they also provide institutionalized avenues of communication and interaction for bishops from different, and especially neighboring, countries.

For our purposes, a particularly relevant element of this communication and interaction is the development in recent years of the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Community (COMECE). This body is made up of bishops who are delegated by their individual national episcopal conferences to a kind of Catholic episcopal supranational organization that is served by an administrative secretariat based in Brussels. Interestingly, the bishops' conferences of many of the countries who are candidates for admission to the EU are counted as “associate members” of COMECE. And not surprisingly, given the position articulated at the Vatican, the COMECE has come out explicitly in favor of EU expansion to the formerly communist countries of Europe.

The Catholic “people of God” also serve as a layer of Catholic transnationalism in Europe and in European politics. This has, of course, been true throughout European history to one extent or another. The original notion of Christendom, after all, was a Catholic notion. Indeed, medieval Christendom, though surely not a relevant model for modern political structures, is nevertheless often cited as an indicator that European politics has not always been structured around individual states, and therefore does not necessarily have to be structured around individual states in the future.⁴⁴

Meyer 1989, 399; Bull 2002, 255.

As we mentioned above, Nelsen, Guth, and Fraser have argued, among others, that this historically based transnational worldview renders the Catholic populations of Europe more amenable to notions of European identity and perhaps European government than their Protestant and Orthodox neighbors.⁴⁵

Nelsen, Guth, and Fraser 2001; Davie 2001.

The important point for our purposes here is that like their bishops, though admittedly in very different ways, the Catholic peoples of Europe are also prepared by their shared religious identity to conceive of themselves as a European people.

Orthodoxy

If Roman Catholicism is the most transnational of the three religious traditions we have examined, then Orthodoxy would appear to be the least. The Orthodox Church, unified on doctrine and ritual, is institutionally structured around what are known as “autocephalous” national churches. John Meyendorff has defined autocephaly, “on the strictly canonical plain,” as “the right granted to a diocese or group of dioceses to elect its own bishop or bishops.”⁴⁶

Meyendorff 1966, 42.

But Meyendorff also recognized that over time the term came to refer to “the absolute independence of … national churches.” Today this concept of autocephaly denotes the great depth of connection between church and state, or in the Orthodox tradition, between church and nation.

Unlike Roman Catholicism with its well-developed system of transnational authority, and its well-defined understanding of the global “people of God,” the very close ties between individual churches and individual nations within Orthodoxy make any movement towards transnational or supranational authority structures (whether religious or political) an uphill struggle. In part, these ties between Orthodox Churches and Orthodox nations are a function of specific historical developments that created a specific understanding of the relationship between church and state.

Whereas in Western Europe struggles between Pope and emperor led in time to notions of a clear distinction between temporal and divine power, in the East the relationship between Patriarch and emperor was conceptualized as one of “symphony,” the idea that these two powers should work together in harmony.⁴⁷

Meerson 1988, 35.

Of course, these distinctions were always more theoretical than real. The temporal power of the papacy died a long and difficult death, and “symphony” was sometimes a cover for the cooptation of the religious by the political through a phenomenon known as Caesaropapism. But the ties between religion and nation are nevertheless much more pronounced and organic in the Orthodox tradition than they are in the Catholic, or for that matter in the Islamic.

That does not mean, however, that we can completely ignore the degree to which doctrinal unity endures within Orthodoxy and coexists alongside of national differentiation. Just because Patriarch Bartholomew has less authority than Pope Benedict XVI (and he does), does not mean that the Orthodox Churches do not conceive of themselves as a unified religious tradition (because they do). Meyendorff, for example, warns “observers from outside” not to underestimate “the power—keenly felt by the Orthodox themselves—of a common perception of basic Christian truths, expressed particularly in the liturgy but also in frequent unofficial and brotherly contacts which hold the church together.”⁴⁸

Meyendorff 1996, 235–36.

These brotherly contacts, by the way, have grown more formal and more regularized in recent years as clerical leaders across the Orthodox world have gathered together from time to time to recognize their powerful ties to each other, to salvage recognition of pan-Orthodox solidarity from the perils of Caseropapasim, and even to consider the convening of a “Council” that would reemphasize their unity and reconfigure their relationships with each other and with the Patriarchal office in Istanbul. In fact, some of these contacts in recent years have been quite explicitly about relations between the Orthodox Church and the European Union.

Public recognition of Orthodox unity, however, does not necessarily work in favor of ready integration of “Orthodox nations” into the European Union. Indeed, Orthodox unity, such as it is, might be just as likely, if not more likely, to hinder ready accession for Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia rather than to facilitate it. Echoes of the historic rivalry between Constantinople and Rome seem to underpin the hesitation expressed by so many Orthodox leaders about accepting definitions from Western sources of “Europe,” and how it should be politically structured. Byzantium, one might want to conclude, is not anxious to take lessons from Rome (or Brussels) on what it means to be European, or what it means to structure European unity.

Much Orthodox hesitation at the prospects of Europeanization from the West may also be seen as a function of an alternative Orthodox vision for Europe, or at least for part of Europe, in the form of some kind of Orthodox Commonwealth. Looking to Russia and Istanbul, rather than to Brussels and Rome, the Orthodox Churches are not against Europe or European unity per se. Far from it. Instead, Orthodox leaders tend to be wary of “Europe” and “European unity” only so long as those phenomena are defined by nations who are, after all, signatories to the Treaty of Rome.

This way of defining things suggests a number of potentially complicating factors that could get in the way of ready integration of Orthodox nations into the European Union. Russia's role in European politics is viewed quite differently, for example, from Belgrade or a purported Orthodox Commonwealth, than it is from Brussels or, for that matter, from Washington. Greece's very important traditional role in transnational Orthodoxy will also have to be taken into account as the EU decides in coming years which Orthodox nations merit being invited to join “Europe,” and which do not. Whatever a very uncertain future holds in this regard, however, it is hard to see at this point how Pan-Orthodoxy or transnational Orthodoxy could do anything but complicate the path of Orthodox nations to EU accession. This is a self-consciously European religious tradition not very interested in undergoing Europeanization, as that process is currently defined.

Islam

Though profoundly dissimilar in numerous ways, Islam resembles Roman Catholicism in one important respect: they are both religious traditions that are fundamentally transnational in nature, and that make universal claims for all persons, at all times, in all places. For Muslims, the Qu'ran is the actual word of God, the record of the uniquely direct intervention of the divine into human history. That is not something which is true for some people at some times, or true in some countries but not in others. It is true all the time and everywhere, and Islam's overriding transnational character is derived from the fundamental universality of these basic theological claims.

The Prophet Mohammad's intention was to found a highly unified community that would be both religious and political in nature, and that would brook no division within itself. Indeed, the original Islamic community under the Prophet, and under his immediate successors, was the very model of a tightly knit religious community, albeit one with imperial ambitions and universal claims. But within a very short time following Mohammad's death, this community divided itself in all sorts of ways. Shi'a split from Sunni; one Islamic empire followed after another Islamic empire in Arabia, the Indian sub-continent, and the Middle East; and the caliphate, the human symbol of Islamic unity, became subject to claims, counterclaims, and subsequent dilutions of authority until it was formally “abolished” by the post-Ottoman Turks in 1924.

These divisions, however, were not, by and large, articulated in national terms. In part, this was because the parameters of Islamic life were set before the rise of nationalism as a force in International Relations, and before the division of the globe into individual legal entities called states. But in time, the creation of the international state system, and perhaps more significantly the development of Western imperialism in subsequent centuries, combined to bring about what James Piscatori has called “territorial pluralism” within Islam.⁴⁹

Piscatori 1986, 40–75.

The founding notion of Dar al-Islam (the Muslim world) and Dar al-Harb (the non-Muslim world) had presupposed a certain degree of reflexive unity among the world's Muslims. But, albeit reluctantly in some cases, hyphenated Islam developed within Dar al-Islam as nationalism came to play such a central role in world politics. A phrase like Turkish Islam, for example, came to denote more than geographical classifications. It also came to mean that the Islamic religion, and highly dispersed communities of Muslims, became closely associated with individual national identities and with specific iterations of state integrity

There always was, however, and still is, a significant and portentous disjunction between the ideal of Islamic unity, and the reality of Islamic “territorial pluralism.” And that disjunction is rooted in the development of relations between the Islamic religious community and state power. From the days of the Prophet Mohammad, the notion of distance between religion and politics—or to use the Christian terminology, church and state—had always been foreign to Islam. Distinctions such as those between divine law and human law, temporal power and religious power, so central to the trajectory of Western political development, had been rejected in the Islamic community. Such distinctions, in fact, had been seen as the central barriers to the realization of Islam's central goal: a godly community that could live in harmony under Islamic rule, governed by shari'a, God's law.

The most relevant point for our purposes here is that the umma, the Islamic people of God, is not divided into a series of national communities across the dozens of states wherein Muslims predominate. On the contrary, there is in Islamic thought only one umma, one community of Muslims, bound together by its shared convictions that there is no God but God, and that Mohammed is His prophet. The umma's devolution into “territorial pluralism” is, in other words, a shortcoming to be overcome, not a nationalist designation to be celebrated.

Moreover, the European manifestation of this transnational umma is diasporic, with close familial, cultural, and religious ties to other places and countries that are closely identified with Islam. The central question, then, is what role this diasporic community is playing, or is likely to play, in either the expansion of the European Union per se or in the reconceptualization of the idea of “Europe” to include Muslims or states with majority Muslim populations. Can we envision the transnational umma, or the Muslim diaspora in Europe, in short, as either a catalyst for or barrier to EU accession for Turkey, or a deeper, more integrated relationship between the EU and the Islamic states of the so-called Mediterranean Initiative?

The first thing to note in this regard is that if Roman Catholicism can be seen in some way as definitional in relationship to Europe, then Islam can be seen in a similar way as oppositional. European identity—and what we tend to call Western civilization—coalesced in considerable part around its relationship with—and distance from—Islam. As Neumann and Welsh have argued, Islam was “the Other” that served as the foundation of Europe's self-definition.⁵⁰

Neumann and Welsh 1991.

And Islam, or Islamic civilization, was also the benchmark against which Europe measured itself in political and cultural terms. As Sheikh has put it so straightforwardly, “the West is called the West because Europe and later its cultural offspring in the Americas were situated West of the Islamic caliphate. The very designation of ‘the West’ was derived from an Islamic preoccupation.”⁵¹

Sheikh 2003, 7.

Clear echoes of this historical dynamic can be heard today in the renewed talk of a Christian Europe, of neo-Christendom, and of the potential conflict between the Islamic religion and European values, however the latter are defined. As we have seen, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, each is able to offer a definition of European identity that derives in large part from its own religious tradition and institutional history. For Islam, the relationship between religion and identity in the European context—the relationship between Muslim tradition and European unity—is much more problematic. Indeed, quite often in European history, Islam has been perceived by Christian Europeans as an external imperial power seeking to export its universal religious claims to Europe, to a Europe, of course, that was already in thrall to the similarly universal claims of Christianity. Some of the trepidation expressed today about the growing presence of Muslims in Europe, or about the accession of a Muslim country like Turkey to the European Union is derived from historical memories of the great battles that took place over European religious and cultural identity in the distant but not forgotten past. It is perhaps no accident that opposition to Turkish accession to the EU is these days strongest in Vienna.

This observation is not meant in any way as an endorsement of simplistic notions of an unbridgeable distance or an implacable opposition between Islam and the West. The relationship between these broad, diverse entities has been varied and complex, and the question of where one ends and the other begins has not always been as clear cut as some might imagine, even in historical terms. Islam was a powerful presence on the Iberian peninsula, after all, for seven centuries, and the Muslim populations of places like Bosnia or Albania are not, to put it in absurdist terms, recent immigrants from “the East.” This recognition of complexity is particularly germane to any informed discussion of Turkey's relationship to Europe. The Muslim country that is a candidate for EU membership, after all, is not Pakistan, or Malaysia, or even Morocco. It is Turkey, a country with deep European roots, and the successor state to what was to a significant degree a European Ottoman Empire. Ataturk's pursuit of “Westernization,” of course, was not the same thing as Ergodan's acceptance of “Europeanization.” But the whole span of modern Turkish history does suggest that essentialist notions of a Christian West and an Islamic East are too simple. Such notions, in fact, are liable to hinder rather than advance our understanding of the very complex processes involved in Turkey's relationship with the European Union.

Catholic transnationalism and its effect on EU expansion and the processes of Europeanization can be defined in papal, clerical, or popular terms. Orthodoxy, as a religion and as a political force, is defined most clearly by the concept of autocephaly. But the Islamic case has to be defined in less institutional terms and according to the ways in which Muslim experience in one place is transformed into Muslim expectations in another. This may not be as clear cut as the Catholic or Orthodox cases. It may, indeed, be much more open to analytical disputation. But surely these transnational processes of communication and influence are the proper ones to emphasize when dealing with a religious tradition so clearly defined by the umma, the Islamic people. It is through complex transnational interactions between and among Muslims themselves that Islam will have its effect on European integration.

Multiple Wests and Religious Politics in Secular Europe

Multiple Wests and multiple conceptions of modernity disappoint those searching for one dominant narrative in world politics, such as the growth of secularism or the inescapability of civilizational clashes. Such multiplicities are expressed in a variety of cultural programs that reinvent themselves continuously in history. These programs adapt themselves to, and also modify, large-scale historical processes—modernization, secularization, industrialization, and democratization among them. Variable contexts shape and transfigure an enlarging Europe as it encounters transnational religious communities.

Shmuel Eisenstadt has interrogated “multiple modernities” as a central topic in macro-history.⁵²

Eisenstadt 2002; ibid. 2000a; ibid. 2000b; ibid. 1999a; ibid. 1999b; See also Berger and Huntington 2002. The plausibility of focusing on multiple modernities is supported by central conclusions of a large number of sociologists of religion (for example, Esposito and Watson 2000; Marty and Appleby 1997; Race and Williamson 1995; Beyer 1994; Casanova 1994; Johnston and Sampson 1994; Robertson and Garrett 1991) and a few political scientists who have written on the role of religion in world politics (for example, Thomas 2005; ibid. 2000; Norris and Inglehart 2005; Almond, Appleby and Sivan 2003; Carlson and Owens 2003; Hurd 2004; Petito and Hatzopoulos 2003; Byrnes 2001; Dark 2000; Millennium2000; Kurth 1998; Haynes 1998; Orbis1998; Rudolph and Piscatori 1997; Janis 1991; Berger 1982).

This body of research examines long time periods and puts religion in a central place. Modern societies are not converging around common patterns. Rather, “the idea of multiple modernities presumes that the best way to understand the contemporary world …. is to see it as a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs.”⁵³

Eisenstadt 2002, 2.

This makes inescapable the antinomies of modernity. Modernizing non-western societies and modern Western societies thus display different patterns of modernity. The cultural core of West European modernity offers a specific “bundle of moral-cognitive imperatives under the premises of the rationalization of the world” and a secularizing reconstruction of religious traditions that radiates outward to other parts of Europe and the world through a variety of mechanisms such as imposition, emulation, and incorporation.⁵⁴

Spohn 2001, 501.

Because Western modernity is adopted selectively and transformed in widely differing political and cultural contexts, it does not create a common global standard. Indeed, Western modernity is sufficiently broad to allow for tensions, even contradictions, between orthodox and heterodox orientations and identities, and unavoidable conflicts between geographic and socio-economic centers and peripheries. That difference is very evident across the Atlantic and across the borders that separate the U.S. from Canada and Mexico, thus giving the current rift over the Iraq war a different significance than merely a sharp political disagreement over the doctrine of preventive war and unilateral action outside of the UN framework. Difference also marks Germany and Japan, and not only as distinct models of capitalism. The difference created by Germany's exposure to Christianity as one of the world's great religions—in sharp contrast to Japan's tradition of religious syncretism—confirms the political plasticity and institutional plurality of modernity.⁵⁵

Eisenstadt 1998; ibid. 1996; ibid. 1986.

On this point Eisenstadt parts company with others, such as Ernst Haas, who claim Japan as an example of secularization. Eisenstadt stresses instead Japan's syncretism.⁵⁶

Haas 1997; ibid. 2000.

This disagreement is instructive. Does the belief in secularism become compelling largely as a self-fulfilling prophecy—because of its foundational commitment to open-ended learning that by definition only it, not syncretism, can embody? Work on multiple modernities is rooted in Max Weber's writings on world religions. Secularist thought instead draws heavily on Weber's analysis of bureaucratic rationality. Writings in the secular tradition cling with determination to the idea that in the long term the self-reflexivity, open-endedness, and procedural thinness of secularism give it a decisive edge over all other forms of modernity. Multiple modernities make us look for and accept political antinomies that are perpetually recreated and that make even traditional fundamentalism modern.

The rules for the relations between European states and the modern international state system reflect this tension. They were established at the end of the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century.⁵⁷

Philpott 2001; ibid. 2000.

“Westphalia” has become shorthand for an interstate system that banished religion to the domestic and private realm. Because they are expressions of rationalist thought deeply antithetical to religion, the silence of realist and liberal theories of international relations on the role of religion in European and world politics thus is not surprising. Yet a burgeoning literature on sovereignty demonstrates that the canonical view of sovereign states governed by the principle of non-intervention is bad history.⁵⁸

Krasner 1999; ibid. 2001.

This is particularly germane at a moment of dramatic shifts in the very structure and organizing principles of the international state system. Suzanne Rudolph has written in this connection of the declining sovereignty of individual states, and even of the very notion of the state as fading in the contemporary world of globalization, supranational organization, and ideological realignment.⁵⁹

Rudolph 2003, 141.

One does not have to go quite that far, however, in order to reach the conclusion that something structural is going on in world politics today, and that shifts in the underlying foundations of International Relations might well be responsible for a renewed salience for religion in world politics. The so-called Westphalian system is not dead, of course; sovereign states still comprise the central building blocks of the international system. But the centrality of the state, or at least its overriding preeminence, is now being challenged by other actors.

Scott Thomas's analysis of religious movements and conflicts in world politics insists that the global resurgence of religion may have made the twentieth century the last modern one.⁶⁰

Thomas 2005.

Post-modernity recognizes explicitly the existence of multiple modernities. Religion is not an idiom of discontent. It is, rather, a set of ideas and practices that constitute the very content of a community's identity and the religious values, practices, and traditions that shape its political struggles. Religion is fundamentally a social tradition that encompasses and defines a community of believers rather than a body of beliefs, a social ethic, or a cultural system, as rationalist proponents of modernity argue.

The privatization and nationalization of religion that occurred in the seventeenth century in Latin Christendom was a decisive impetus for modern European and international society. But that process has remained far from complete in a world in which strong religions interact with weak states and in which religion is now experiencing a resurgence on a global scale. This resurgence is not primarily a “fundamentalist” or “anti-modernist” reaction to the ineluctable march of modernization and globalization. It is, rather, in its public form a normative critique of historical developments that have failed to bring about the Enlightenment's project.

Thomas grants Europe an exceptional status in the resurgence of religion in world politics.⁶¹

Thomas 2005, 49–50.

Secularization as an inherent feature of modernization, he argues, is applicable to European religion but not to the rest of the world. In pointing to European enlargement, this article argues otherwise and thus diminishes Europe's exceptionalism. Enlargement is bringing back into the center of the European Union what had been on its periphery: renewed attention to the dilemma of coping with the intersection between religious and secular politics. This observation leaves open, of course, the logical next question as to the likely effect transnational religion will have on the ongoing processes of Europeanization. A definitive answer to that important question must await future events that we can only dimly perceive now. Nevertheless, it is surely not too early to conclude on the basis of the analysis we provide here that religion, as a political force, will be more likely to hinder than advance further integration of the European continent.

Roman Catholicism, after all, is the religious community most straightforwardly supportive of the prospect of European unity. But the leadership of Catholicism is supportive of greater European integration only because those leaders want to define that integrated Europe through their own teachings and values, and only because they want to challenge today's Europe to return to the ostensibly Christian unity of its past. It is important to keep in mind in this connection that the Polish Pope and the Polish bishops were only willing to have Poland “rejoin Europe” because they hoped that eventuality would lead in time to secular Europe coming to look more like Catholic Poland!

The Orthodox Church is at its very foundation wary of any effort to diminish the status and role of nations and states, particularly if that effort is perceived as coming from Western Christendom. Leaders of today's Orthodox Church see the European Union as a modern echo of a division of Europe that is over 1,000 years old, and they see supranationalism and European identity as potential threats to national religious and political identities that have been forged and defended at tremendous cost.

Finally, Islam, regardless of the intentions of individual Muslims or even of the Islamic community in Europe as a whole, still stands as a formidable challenge to the ready integration of the European continent, not as a spur towards it. It is possible, of course, to envision an emerging version of Euro-Islam being accommodated more readily within the European Union than it is now. But it is also possible to envision this religious factor as a long-term point of contention and faction within an integrating Europe.

Regardless of these long-term effects in Europe, the widening gap between an emerging European polity and the United States is nevertheless underlining the multiple modernities between different parts of the West. After World War II, Reinhold Niebuhr and other Christian “realists” and “liberals” made the case for an ecumenical Protestantism that helped shape U.S. policy in the creation of the Bretton Woods system and the subsequent hegemony the U.S. enjoyed over the capitalist part of a bipolar international system.⁶²

Thomas 2005, 159.

The public theology of the time was internationalist, circumspect, tough, and self-critical, adhering to “due regard for the opinions of mankind,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.⁶³

Thomas 2005, 162.

It was a far cry from the religiously infused, unilateral actions of the United States as the world's lone military superpower at the outset of the twenty-first century.

In Europe in the late 1940s, Christian Democracy and Catholicism laid the foundations of the European integration movement. Europe was not merely a site for state bargains and profitable economic transactions. It was also the focus of a political movement seeking to implement a particular, religiously infused vision. Arsene Heitz, who in 1955 designed what eventually became the European flag—12 yellow stars on a blue background—reportedly was inspired by a reference in the New Testament's Book of Revelation to “a woman clothed with the sun … and a crown of twelve stars on her head.”⁶⁴

Economist2004.

Christian Democracy legitimated the political entrepreneurs and much of the normative content of European integration—a far cry from the secularly infused, multilateral actions of the emerging European polity as a civilian superpower at the outset of the twenty-first century. The transatlantic divide in the 1940s and 1950s was tempered by religious commonalities and a shared anti-Communism. Half a century later, neo-conservative American Catholics are highly critical of European integration and thus at odds with pro-European Catholics and the Vatican. The transatlantic rift over Europe thus has important religious undercurrents that exacerbate an unprecedented wave of anti-Americanism spreading across Europe in the aftermath of the Iraq war.⁶⁵

Katzenstein and Keohane 2007.

The religious differences between Europe and the United States also point to the relevance of the idea of multiple modernity when applied to domestic developments in the United States and Europe. The sharp and ideologically charged divide between “retro” and “metro” America⁶⁶

Sperling et al. 2004.

may become a possible future for an enlarged Europe, one that to many Europeans is less desirable than the comforting image they hold of a Europe united around consensual, secular principles of democratic welfare states that seek to maintain their economic competitiveness and peace in international politics.

Conventional renderings of the historical origins of the modern European state system and religious politics are intellectually suspect. And so is the neglect of religious politics by scholars of Europe's contemporary international and transnational relations. Religion continues to lurk underneath the veneer of European secularization. Reinsertion of religious issues into European politics is beginning to occur, brought about by transnational religious communities which after many decades are “returning” to a Europe bent on enlargement. These communities bring with them very particular notions of European identity and European union, indeed of modernity itself, that challenge the notions of European unity to which “secular Europe” has grown so accustomed over the last half century. What is even more striking, however, is that these challenges posed by religious conceptions of European union and European identity will be reinforced in the coming years by European religion's embodiment of a form of social and political diversity that may not succumb readily to the unifying effects of Europeanization. The fractious implications of that diversity are real, and they are likely to be recognized as an increasingly prominent element of European politics in the coming years, as Europeans themselves may have to grapple not only with the spirituality of others, but with their own as well. Problematic legal and undefined cultural Europeanization leave ample space at the core of the European polity that is beginning to be reoccupied by these kinds of religious issues.⁶⁷

Iankova and Katzenstein 2003; Katzenstein 2005, 167–73.

In brief, Europe is poised for a renewed encounter with religious politics, reviving troubling memories and posing formidable challenges for a secular polity built on Christian foundations.