ABSTRACT
Introduction The ongoing resurgence of the religious factor in politics across the world is most frequently traced back to changes which occurred in the turbulent 1970s. Thus, for example, Gilles Kepel in his 1994 volume The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World pointed to changes occurring in 1977, 1978 and 1979 as indicating a decisive reversal of modernising and secularising trends which had dominated the post-Second-World War era: the electoral breakthrough of Israel’s Likud Party in May 1977, the election of Pope John Paul II in September 1978, and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran leading to the proclamation of Iran’s Islamic Republic in February 1979 (Kepel 1994: 6-7). Also writing in 1994, as the introduction to this volume points out, José Casanova adopted a similar chronology with his claim that ‘[w]hat was new and became “news” in the 1980s was the widespread and simultaneous character of the refusal to be restricted to the private sphere of religious traditions . . . in all three worlds of development’ (Casanova 1994: 6). It might, however, be claimed that the single most significant contribution of religious actors to the world of politics – in Europe at least – occurred approximately three decades earlier with the launching of the project of European integration under Christian Democratic auspices. The reason why this might have been overlooked in claims about a supposed ‘religious resurgence’ in recent decades is that the latter is now associated with such spectacular events as those of 9/11 in 2001 or, in the case of Europe, 11 March 2004 in Madrid and 7 July 2005 in London. Compared to the demonstration effects of events such as these, the origins of the European Union (EU) in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) some fifty years earlier appear ostentatiously humdrum. If the degree of dramatic effect has affected the resurgence claims it might be that the timing of Kepel’s Revenge and Casanova’s ‘news’ is wrongly calibrated or even wrongly identified at least so far as Europe is concerned. It might even be the case that what is being witnessed in Europe at the start of the third millennium of the common era is not so much a rise in the influence exerted by religious forces in politics as a rise in the salience of religious or religion-related issues regardless of outcome. This is consistent, to be sure, with a purported pro-
gressive refusal of religion to be restricted to the private sphere, but it suggests a different dynamic from that proposed by Kepel and Casanova – not so much a resurgence of the religious factor as heightened incidence of controversies in which religious groups and individuals have become involved – a level of incidence which has only been amplified by a growing resistance to religious influence on the part of secular liberals. In short, increased salience of religion-related issues might as much reflect the incidence of struggles to neutralise as to maximise religious influences in politics. The relevance of such developments to issues of citizenship, secularisation and democracy is patent and wide-ranging in its possible ramifications. This chapter will touch on only a few of these as they have arisen in connection with the political project of European integration. It looks at the involvement of religious-political actors (both individual and collective) in the launching of the political project of European integration after the Second World War and over the fifteen years from 1992, when the EU’s ambit was extended northwards and eastwards from a membership of fifteen countries to one of twenty-seven. The comparison suggests that the impact of religious-political actors, in particular political parties of religious inspiration, which ranged themselves in support or opposition to the project, varied markedly between those two time periods in both degree and direction. In attempting to understand these variations, three explanatory hypotheses are briefly reviewed which suggest that one of the reasons for the hypothesised rise in secular(ist) resistance to religious influences of recent years is associated with the revival of intra-as well as interconfessional differences among the religious themselves. In short, it would appear that instead of religious voices having greater impact in Europe recently than they had in the 1945 to 1965 period, the issue is now more and more whether religious voices – themselves progressively seen as discordant and conflicting – should have a significant role in public affairs at all. Without doubt, fifty years on from the signing of the Treaty of Rome on 25 March 1957, the place of religion and the role of religious actors in the halting process of European integration remains controversial. Thus there has been the debate about a possible invocatio deo (literally, an invocation of God, in particular a reference to the contribution to European culture and values of the Christian religion) in the draft preamble to the stalled Constitution for Europe, the objections raised on religious or religion-related grounds to the eventual admission of Turkey to the EU, and the failure at the jubilee anniversary of the Treaty of Rome itself explicitly to acknowledge the importance of religious influences in the beginnings of the Union. These have each caused hackles to be raised and harsh things to be said which seem to belie the notion that such skirmishes are merely symbolic or even essentially trivial. With the rest of the world, including the USA, in Peter Berger’s words seeming – against common expectation – to have become ‘more furiously religious than ever’, it cannot be easily assumed that in Europe these should be regarded as mere ‘noises off’ which can be readily ignored (Berger 1999: 2). While Norris and Inglehart’s analysis of secularising and de-secularising trends across the world supports the view that Western
Europe continues to defy an otherwise widespread shift towards a resurgence of religion as such and as a factor in politics, others argue that claims about European exceptionalism are overdone (Casanova 1994; Davie 2002; Greeley 2003; Norris and Inglehart 2004). In addition, it is the principal thesis of the 2006 Bynes and Katzenstein edited volume, Religion in an Expanding Europe, that the process of ‘European enlargement will feed rather than undermine the importance of religion in the EU’ as ‘transnational religious communities in the European periphery are reintroducing religion into the center of Europe’ (Byrnes and Katzenstein 2006: 2). Even if this thesis proves to be well founded, it can be argued that such a political resurgence of the religious factor is only likely at best to recapitulate, albeit under very different circumstances, the shift which occurred in the immediate post-war period when Christian Democracy first emerged as a – or perhaps the – central party actor on the stage of West European politics.
