ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the institutional aspects of what is conventionally called church– state relations and the scope is broadened and deepened by extending it spatially and temporally. Stein Rokkan's path-breaking work on nation building, cleavage formation and the structuring of mass politics in Western Europe provides a useful starting point for any attempt to develop a framework for analysing church–state relations in Europe. The policy of ruthless repression symbolised by the Spanish Inquisition also presented an omen of a new, rising religious intolerance, which established the repressive monopoly structures of the confessional state across Europe. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century Europe knew three mono-confessional culture areas of major size located severally across the eastern, southern and northern margins of the Continent: the Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran. The implicit assumption of this Rokkanian exercise in mapping Europe is that it makes a difference which confession, if any, is dominant in a particular society or group of societies.
