The chapter examines the process of state building in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945, showing that mass uprooting shored up the demand for state-provided resources and weakened resistance to governance. It exploits the placement of the interwar border between Poland and Germany to estimate the effects of postwar population transfers on the size of the state. It then examines the political legacies of population transfers in post-1989 Poland.

Chapter 4 is about the fate of the families whose land the military regime’s big reservoirs flooded. It covers the twenty-year period from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, when reservoir floodwaters expelled farmers and Indigenous communities from their homes, sending them to uncertain fates. This chapter argues that the military government mostly ignored the social costs of its big dams because it felt pressure to build them quickly and cheaply and becuase it believed its pharaonic environmentalism would satisfy its critics. The military regime provided scant resources to help displaced communities transition to new homes and unfamiliar subsistence practices, and many were left to start anew with almost no financial compensation. For the generals, it helped that most of these people were poor and from racially marginalized groups that had little political clout. Nevertheless, organizations and community leaders associated with the Catholic Church – then under the influence of liberation theology – helped organize dispossessed communities, some of whom succeeded in earning more just compensation.

In 1559/60 the parliaments of England, Ireland and Scotland proscribed the practice of Catholicism in their respective kingdoms and prescribed Reformed religious settlements in its place. By the end of the sixteenth century the English and the Scots had become nations of Protestants, but contemporary estimates of the number of Irish Protestants ranged between 40 and 120 individuals. Protestantism in Ireland was born of conquest and colonisation in the seventeenth century. Yet the remarkable contrast in the outcomes of the Reformation across the Atlantic archipelago was not predestined. England and Ireland shared the same Tudor monarchs and the Pale around Dublin was, in effect, an appendage of England. Nonetheless, while Elizabeth I’s religious settlement was a ‘runaway success’ in England it failed to win any significant support in Ireland. Indeed, because Irish women were particularly loath to embrace the new religion no self-sustaining community of Irish Protestants was spawned in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the Scots created a Reformed Church establishment despite the wishes of their monarch, Mary Stuart, queen of Scots. This chapter adopts a comparative approach to help explain the experiences of Reformation in England, Ireland and Scotland before 1603.

This chapter aims to define the limits of religious toleration of the Eastern Orthodox Church in those areas of Europe which remained outside of direct Ottoman or Muscovite rule in the early modern period. The rudimentary confessional balance that had obtained between the Eastern and the Latin Churches in the kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Transylvanian principality and the kingdom of Hungary was disturbed by the arrival of Protestantism in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. The growing numerical strength and political influence of Evangelical nobles and burgesses necessitated the introduction of toleration as a state policy. When it was set in place, however, the politically emasculated believers of the Eastern Church were either effectively excluded from, or found themselves on the bottom rung of a tiered system of, official toleration. The survival of Orthodox privilege in Moldavia and Wallachia, and the full religious toleration granted by the Habsburgs to the South Slav peoples in exchange for their support in defending the imperial frontiers from the Ottomans, underscore the significance of political authority and instruments of violence in the hands of local élites for the preservation of traditional Orthodox identity.

Despite being inundated with publications on the subject historians today feel less confident than ever that they truly understand the Reformation. The prevalence of national paradigms, such as ‘confessionalisation’ in German Reformation studies and ‘revisionism’ in English Reformation studies, encourages scholars to focus their attention on local circumstances and on specific individuals in those localities without due attention to the bigger picture. The sheer volume of case-studies being generated risks the loss of an overall perspective, and threatens to obscure the magnitude and significance of the Reformation as a European phenomenon of the first order. It is critically important to appreciate the continental scale of the Reformation because it reflected the scale and severity of the crisis of authority that beset the Catholic Church during the half-century or so following Fr Martin Luther’s announcement of the sola scriptura principle. That crisis cannot be explained by reference to local circumstances only. It went to the very heart of the institution, and it posed an existential threat to the Catholic Church. Reformation historians have yet to explain convincingly why Luther’s challenge resonated with such devastating effects across the continent. This collection of essays reflects the impact of the Reformation across Europe and offers explanations of its impact.

During the past 2,000 years, Christianity has evolved from a small group of fishermen recruited on the Sea of Galilee to become the world’s oldest continuously operated religious institution and largest Abrahamic religion. Of all the Christian denominations, including Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholicism remains the largest denomination.1 In 2018, the population of practicing Catholics was equivalent to the population of the People’s Republic of China, or 1.33 billion adherents. Traditionally Europeans dominated the church (21.5 percent). However, the majority of global Catholics are now composed of North and South Americans (48.3 percent), while the fastest growing communities are in Africa, at more than 17 percent.

Chapter four examines the political effects of Irish republican publicity campaigns in Britain on the British-Irish propaganda war between January 1919 and July 1921. It profiles the political languages and cultures of Irish republican-inspired organisations; assesses the publicity campaigns of the I.S.D.L. in British cities; and evaluates the import of Sinn Féin propaganda on British political opinion. In the absence of Sinn Féin representation at Westminster, this chapter submits, the responsibility of cultivating British public opinion rested heavily on Irish nationalist organisations in British centres. The I.S.D.L. and Sinn Féin, however, were fundamentally apolitical movements who failed to acknowledge their responsibility as de facto Irish political parties in Britain. The coordination of mass demonstrations, and cultivation of post-war political discourses, re-cast the I.S.D.L. and Sinn Féin as political associations with which the Irish ethnic group increasingly identified, as the War of Independence intensified. While they failed to establish the same level of ‘social esteem’ as the Irish Party in British political culture, Irish nationalist associations became the target of British state censorship and repression. In the war of words for British public opinion, consequently, the I.S.D.L. and Sinn Féin were recognised by British policy makers at Whitehall as prolific propagandists.

Chapter 6 investigates Augustine’s explanation, in De trinitate, of how the single paschal mystery of Christ’s dead and resurrected flesh harmonizes with our double paschal mystery, serving both as the sacrament of the spiritual death and resurrection of our interior man and as the example of the fleshly death and resurrection of our exterior man. As Augustine recognizes, the sacramentality and exemplarity of Christ’s fleshly death and resurrection are furnished to us on account of our spiritual blindness. In exegeting the theophany of God’s back to Moses, Augustine observes that living faith in Christ’s resurrection makes us friends with God and socializes us anew within the Catholic Church. Augustine articulates how Christ, the humble mediator of life, has vanquished the devil, the proud mediator of death, and his demonic and human associates, by the justice of Christ’s obedience unto death, and by the power of Christ’s resurrection to eternal life.

Chapter 10 examines the French far rights references to both Catholicism and laïcité in greater detail. Based on several dozen interviews with right-wing populist politicians, mainstream party representatives and faith leaders it reveals how the French far right rediscovered both religion and secularism as political wedge-issues and cultural identity markers against Islam. However, instead of a rapprochement with Christian policy positions, ethics and institutions, Chapter 10 finds open clashes between the Rassemblement National and Zemmour on the one hand and Frances Catholic Church on the other over social policy, the populist right’s identitarian conception of Christendom, and its secularist reading of laïcité, all of which suggested a further secularisation of Christian symbols in the hands of the populist right rather than a Catholic revival in French politics.

There were psychologists who insisted that psychology was a natural science and that the soul as a concept was essential to the science, which was to be as philosophical as it was experimental. Neoscholastic psychology illustrates well that a psychology has roots in a way of life, in a culture. The Neoscholastics represented—Edward A. Pace, Michael Maher, Desiré Mercier, and Albert Farges—supported the development of scientific psychology, although among this group only Pace actually conducted experiments, having studied with Wundt. Pace and Mercier addressed Catholic critics of psychology, critics who feared it would be materialistic. Not so, said these Neoscholastics, who articulated an empirical psychology with a Scholastic philosophical foundation. While the soul is not a phenomenon, its existence could be grasped from its effects, especially conceptual thinking and freedom of the will. These thinkers also addressed their peers in psychology who rejected metaphysical considerations in this new science.

Chapter 7 tackles what is by far the most diffuse and difficult arena in which to describe our theme of the social transformation of competition. Here the focus is on contestation in the arena of knowledge, ideas, beliefs, and truth claims. My narrative concentrates on the gradual emergence of the modern university out of its medieval forebearers, the disruptive impact of the Enlightenment, and the broader emergence of associational life in civil society. Here the range of corporate actors is more complex and varied, and interacts closely with those in the economic and political spheres. But competition is different here, because while economics and politics involve competition over more clearly limited resources (capital, market share, political office, administrative structures), truth claims can be, and are, produced cheaply and in abundance. The peculiarly pungent atmosphere of current social media-driven public debates is just the latest expression of this.

What do the religious institutional structures look like in Catholicism and Sunni Islam? In order to trace how religious institutional structures may shape the early evolutions of religious parties, this chapter explores the historical development of structures of religious authority and how they looked when religious parties arose. The focus of the analysis for each religion varies to reflect the historical trajectories of their religious institutions and what such different trajectories mean for the analytical narrative of this book. The analysis proceeds in chronological order and begins with Catholicism to be followed by Sunni Islam. In the case of Catholicism, the focus is less on the evolution of religious institutions and more on how divergence from orthodoxy and orthopraxy are handled within the Catholic Church. As the religious authority in Catholicism, the Church’s handling of divergences is key to understanding how it dealt with the rise of Catholic parties. In the case of Sunni Islam, the focus remains on the historical evolution of religious authority, paying close attention to the parameters of major shifts in the eleventh and early twentieth centuries.

In the early socialist period, a spectacular and uniquely Polish form of protest was born – the “defence of the cross.” At this time, as a secularization program known as “decrucification” was causing tensions between the socialist authorities and the Catholic Church, mass outdoor religious events emerged as a platform to voice protest against Communist rule. The most iconic and violent demonstration of this kind was a “defence of the cross,” which took place in the model socialist metropolis of Nowa Huta in 1960 and transformed into bloody street riots against the Communist authorities. The story of how the “defence of the cross” established itself as a popular form of anti-systemic protest in Poland also provides a window onto how women in particular devised creative modes of nonconformist behavior in the gray zone between religiosity and rebellion.