Chapter five analyses the period between 1914 and 1989. Several sociological theories frame this period as one of rational planning, certain knowledge and control. Such beliefs were certainly prominent but they were related to uncertainty: The First World War ended in the fall of empires and social upheaval. Intellectual and political reactions were threefold: art emphasized a fractured world, social sciences accommodated uncertainty and political ideologies claimed to banish uncertainty and offered total control. Totalitarian states blended promises of certainty and determinism with a world of omnipresent threats and dangers. The Second World War was heavily influenced by their conviction that they had uncovered the hidden laws of history. After 1945, the advent of thermonuclear weapons caused widespread existential uncertainty. I interpret the strategy of deterrence as a pragmatic expression of minimal communication in an unpredictable world. The experience of insecurity and a breakdown of international society also spurred scientific ontologies of certainty. Modernization theory and Marxism dominated post-war social science and created the strategies that reaped tragedy in Vietnam.

What drives Islamists’ democratic commitments? Does modernization turn them into committed democrats? Or do institutions rein in their authoritarian tendencies through political socialization and democratic habituation? This chapter critically reviews three theories that define the scholarly debate surrounding these questions while providing a historical and political context to all three cases. It first explores the history of modernization in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia and discusses the role of socioeconomic factors on the democratization of Islamist parties. Then it discusses the impact of institutions on party behavior and ideology, specifically the inclusion–moderation thesis to test its claims against the evidence we now have with the rise of Islamist parties to power. This survey reveals the limits of the institutional and ideational effects of inclusion. The final section turns to the strategic calculations of Islamist actors to discuss the role played by external factors, including regional and international developments. The central claim of the chapter is that existing accounts offer only a partial explanation failing to address diversity of perspectives and internal conflicts within Islamist parties.

Chapter 2 addresses the diverse ways American diplomats employed their ideas of modernization when crafting policy and propaganda for Turkey. While Americans’ general understanding of what it meant to be modern remained consistently democratic, it was sufficiently malleable that it could accommodate contradictory conclusions about Turkish democracy as US interests shifted. State Department documents also reveal how American ideas about modernity were, with the cooperation of the Turkish government, consciously transformed into propaganda aimed both at encouraging Turkish modernization and advertising America’s modernity.

Niche construction theory, popular in evolutionary biology, can help us understand the lag between economic growth and political reform in highly interconnected states, where competition for resources drives adaptation via the selection of strategic opportunities, ranging from the predatory and parasitical to the symbiotic. A rugged or smooth fitness landscape, created by the system’s topology, determines how a society makes choices on the path toward its own fitness peak. No two societies will start from the same point or follow the same path to its local or global optimum. This makes it difficult to simply transfer strategies, norms, or institutions across cultures. Evolutionary social psychology (ESP) teaches that individuals and societies alike exhibit bounded rationality, practice heuristics, and imitate local models and cultures they know. ESP may also help explain why China’s developmental experience can be a more familiar starting point than a Western alternative, and more easily copied by other emerging nations. Nevertheless, disordered activity may keep the overall global system in balance.

This chapter introduces the research puzzle of the study, provides a brief background on Christians in Turkey and Muslims in France, and reviews existing work on religious minorities in these contexts. The chapter examines existing explanations (modernization theory, historical institutionalism, ideology and rational choice theory) and elaborates the argument of the book. It also discusses how the theory developed in the book can contribute to scholarly debates in the study of religion and politics. It defines relevant concepts and describes data sources and methodological tools.