Theological and Secular Dimensions of the Modern State PDF

3 e theological and secular dimensions of the modern state Historical and contemporary perspectives1 John Loughlin Introduction: the diversity of the modern European nation-state e modern nation-state is a European invention founded on the development of both states and nations throughout European history (Alter 1994; Breuilly 1994). While all democratic nation-states share a number of common features, there is also a great diversity in how they express these features (Loughlin and Peters 1997; Dyson 2011). is diversity derives, at least in part, from the religious origins of the modern state, especially the creation of ‘confessional’ states by the Treaty of Westphalia, whi ended the European Wars of Religion in 1648. ese were initially Catholic and Lutheran states but were later joined by Calvinist states in the Netherlands, Scotland and, for a time, England. However, the roots of these states go ba even further in European history, and many of their features derive from theological and philosophical debates that pre-dated the Reformation and the Wars of Religion (Burns 1988). Today, these theological origins are almost entirely forgoen, and the nation-state is regarded by most historians and political scientists as the quintessential secular state, in the sense that it has completely discarded any religious dimension in its practical operations. In this apter, I seek to explore to what extent the modern nation-state still retains some of these older inﬂuences that shaped its development and to what extent this accounts for its present-day diversity. is, in turn, raises the question of what it means to call the nation-state ‘secular’, as well as the diﬀerent meanings and uses of this term. Today, the nation-state has become the dominant form of political organization and is associated with ‘modernity’ – with the rise of industrial capitalism and the creation of national markets, with the rise of the industrial bourgeoisie and various forms of liberalism, with liberal representative democracy and Weberian-type systems of public administration, etc. (Smith 1998).2 It is so familiar that we tend to take it for granted and assume that it is the ‘natural’ form of political organization, just as we assume that liberal representative democracy is the natural (and best) form of political practice. However, when considered from a historical perspective, it is clear that the nation-state is a relative newcomer; its emergence can be dated from about the time of the Fren Revolution, whi began in 1789 (Brubaker 1992). Before that point, there were types of political and social organization that were called ‘nations’ and ‘states’, but these were diﬀerent in important respects from contemporary nations and states (Spruyt 1994; Larkins 2010). Already in the eleventh and twelh centuries, we can see the origins of what would become the modern state in countries su as England, Scotland, France, Spain and Sweden, with their centralizing monars, while the term ‘nation’ (derived from the Latin natus, meaning ‘the place of birth’) was used to describe groups of people sharing a similar language or geographic origin in the Crusader armies as well as in the new universities in Oxford, Paris and Bologna. Furthermore, the Reformation encouraged the growth of a national consciousness with the creation of national ures in those countries that adopted Protestantism (Greenfeld 1992); this was mirrored in Catholic countries su as France and Spain that adopted Gallican forms of Catholicism (Ozment 1980). is also entailed a welding together of ethnic and national consciousness. We shall return to the problems of religion and secularism in the ﬁnal part of this apter. e religious dimension of political systems in the Middle Ages It was not inevitable that the modern state would take the form that it eventually did. In his book The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (1994), Hendrik Spruyt identiﬁes six diﬀerent forms of political organization that were in competition with ea other in Europe during the Middle Ages: the Holy Roman Empire, the papacy, feudal arrangements, territorial states, city-states and city leagues. e older forms among these were the papacy, the Empire and feudal arrangements, whi developed complex relationships of rivalry as well as collaboration. e principal competitors here were the Empire and the papacy, whi operated within a common understanding of the nature of religion, politics, the economy and society, but struggled with ea other for dominance within that system. Both parties accepted the notion of ‘two swords’, spiritual and temporal, and anowledged that the other had the right to exercise one of these swords. At the same time, the emperor oen aempted to usurp from the pope the exercise of the spiritual sword, and the pope tried to usurp the exercise of the temporal sword from the emperor. However, both parties operated within a system that accepted the idea that legitimation of any human activity derived from the Chur and theology. e question was thus who sanctioned any particular activity and decided whether it was legitimate. At the same time, in most parts of Europe, society was dominated by a feudal system of mutual arrangements of protection and service between lords (both temporal and spiritual) and their vassals (Blo 1989). e feudal system, largely a rural phenomenon, led to the emergence of great aristocratic landowners who also operated within the imperial/papal system, with greater or lesser degrees of autonomy from the pope and emperor. In some respects, the Holy Roman Empire and the Chur reﬂected this feudal organization of society, but in other respects they were separate from it. ree other forms of political organization developed that would eventually allenge the ﬁrst three. First, centralizing monars consolidated territorial states in England, Scotland, France, Sweden and Spain. It is important that we not view these states in an anaronistic way by thinking of them as equivalent to our modern forms of political organization that bear the name of ‘state’ (Mann 1986: 416–19; Poggi 1990: 34–68). During this period, monars were themselves constrained by the pan-European system dominated by the Chur and the Empire, and their claims to power and legitimacy could be made only in the terms laid down by the pope and the emperor. In addition, their claims to rule even within their own territories had to compete with those of the great feudal lords, who resisted any aempt to interfere within their own domains. At the same time, monars began to imitate the emperor, as in the fourteenth century, when the lawyers of Philip the Fair propounded the dual maxim according to whi the king was to be ‘emperor in his realm’ (rex est imperator in regno suo) and would no longer ‘recognize any superior’ (superiorem non recognoscens) (Herz 1957: 479). A new development emerged from around the eleventh century with the development of cities as part of a wider economic, cultural and spiritual renaissance renewal across Europe. is was a period of Chur reform, particularly under Pope Gregory VII (pope from 1073, d. 1085), who introduced greater uniformity and centralization in the Chur and imposed compulsory celibacy on parish clergy, thus creating a powerful clerical caste. Also in the eleventh century, new monastic orders su as the Carthusians (semi-hermits founded by St Bruno in 1084) and the Cistercians (founded by St Robert of Molesme in 1098 but whose most famous member was St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153)) emerged. ese monastic communities were found mainly primarily located in the countryside; however, at the same time, urban selements began to develop and expand, creating the great Gothic cathedrals that sprang up across Europe. Cities were emerging as powerful centres ready to allenge the feudal lords of the neighbouring countryside. During this period, new forms of religious life evolved, the most famous of whi were the Franciscans (founded by St Francis in 1209) and the Dominicans (founded by St Dominic in 1216). Like the older orders of monks, these new friars took vows, but notably not the vow of stability that had previously bound monks to the monastery they initially joined. Instead, the friars were highly mobile and travelled between the urban centres, preaing (in the case of the Dominicans) and practising evangelical poverty (in the case of the Franciscans). But in addition to these spiritual movements, new social classes were emerging, centred on the cra guilds and merants. In Florence, a new banking system was created to handle the growing commercial transactions between cities and other centres. Indeed, St Francis’s father was a merant in Assisi; the saint’s dramatic adoption of poverty as a lifestyle was a reaction against his father’s aﬄuence and the nouveaux riches of the cities. In most parts of Europe, cities were thus becoming important political centres. is was most evident in Northern and Central Italy and in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, although it can also be seen in the cases of London and Paris. In Italy, some cities became independent city- states: Florence, Venice, Milan, Siena, etc. In Central Europe, cities obtained statutes from the emperor granting them varying degrees of autonomy; there were over 50 ‘Imperial Cities’ with high levels of autonomy (Whaley 2011: 531–41). A further development of city government was the creation of leagues of cities, primarily for purposes of trade but also for mutual protection against rival powers. e best-known example was the Hanseatic League (thirteenth to seventeenth centuries), whi boasted a membership that varied between 70 and 170 cities. A similar institution was the Lombard League in Northern Italy. ere was oen collaboration between monars building territorial states and the cities, as they both opposed the feudal nobility in the countryside. In any case, there was a highly complex system of interrelationships among these competing entities: there were rivalries between the pope and the emperor and between the Empire and the princes and the centralizing monaries, with cities competing against ea other as well as supporting one or another of their other competitors (Bryce 2012 : passim). Besides these complex relationships among the diﬀerent political actors during the centuries before the Reformation, there were also serious divisions within the Chur itself (Burns 1988). Two principal issues were relevant to the later development of both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, as well as the evolution of the modern secular state. First, there was a conﬂict between conciliarists and caesaro-papists – that is, between those, su as Marsilius of Padua (c.1275–c.1342), who believed that the Chur exercised its authority through general councils that the pope might call and preside over but to whi he was also subordinate, and those who held that it was the pope who exercised this power and that his authority superseded that of general councils. e views of conciliarists and caesaro-papists became entangled with the struggles among the various political and spiritual powers. Second, Chur life went through cycles of corruption and aempted reform. Some reformers (su as John Wycliﬀe [d. 1384] in England and Jan Hus [d. 1415] in Bohemia) anticipated the later eﬀorts of Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, who regarded them as proto- Protestants. Although these dissidents were perceived as heretics by almost all the political and religious leaders of the time, they were a sign of what was to come, and their protests, although rooted in theological issues su as the nature of the Euarist, oen spilled over into the political domain. As a result, they were severely suppressed, and Hus himself was burned at the stake (Ozment 1980). Renaissance humanism Providing a baground to these conﬂicts was the development of the new solarship of Renaissance humanism that was, in part, inspired by a return to the authors of classical antiquity and a renewed interest in the languages of that period as well as Hebrew (Skinner 1978, vol. 1). e older wisdom of the Fathers of the Chur and the great solastic synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian revelation by the Dominican St omas Aquinas (1225–74) formed the intellectual context of the debates. From the fourteenth century onwards, however, mu of this solarship degenerated into sterile arguments over obscure theological points. Petrar (1304–74) has been called the ‘Father of Humanism’, alongside authors su as Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) and Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). Although these writers remained Christian, they aempted to go beyond solasticism, seeking inspiration in the classical wisdom of antiquity found in the works of writers su as Cato and Cicero. In Florence, Venice and the other Italian city-states, there was a great ﬂourishing of the arts, especially aritecture and painting. However, the humanist movement extended all across Europe; some of its leading lights were Sir omas More (1478–1535), the Lord Chancellor of England in the reign of Henry VIII, and Erasmus of Roerdam (1466/1469–1536) in the Low Countries. Humanist solarship aﬀected both religious studies and political thought. In terms of religion, its emphasis was a ‘return to the sources’ of the Bible – that is, to the original versions in Hebrew and Greek rather than the Latin Vulgate edition that had been produced by St Jerome in the ﬁh century. Erasmus produced a translation of the New Testament that had an enormous impact on theology at the time. On the political side, omas More’s Utopia (published in 1516) was actually a political critique of European society. Neither More nor Erasmus were revolutionaries, but they and other humanists were aware of scandals and corruption in the Chur. is also entailed awareness of the diﬃculties of the political system in whi the Chur was an essential element. As subsequently became clear, neither man would have dreamed of overthrowing this politico-religious system, but both were equally adamant that it should be reformed. Perhaps unwiingly, their humanist writings provided some of the tools that would be used by their contemporary Luther and the younger Calvin precisely to overthrow the older system. e books produced by Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press (invented around 1439) facilitated the diﬀusion of the writings of the humanist thinkers. e Reformation Luther, Lutheranism and the modern state e Reformation was a hiatus in European history that signiﬁcantly contributed to what would become the highly divergent political, social and economic systems of modern Europe. However, although it constituted a break with the previous system, it took place within the complex system outlined above and became bound up with the various conﬂicts already described; indeed, there are several continuities with the mediaeval period (Gregory 2012). e key ﬁgure who triggered these anges was Martin Luther (1483–1546). Luther had entered an Augustinian friary following a narrow escape from death as a young man. By all accounts, he was a very faithful observer of the Rule of his Order, aieving the position of sub-prior (second-in-command of the friary) and even representing the entire Augustinian Order on business in Rome (Beutel 2003: 5). However, his later writings make clear that although he observed the Rule externally, it had failed to transform him internally. is is probably what led to his later fulminations against ‘good works’ (the ascetic practices of the religious life as well as other practices, su as the pilgrimages and processions typical of mediaeval Catholicism) and his development of the idea that su ‘works’ could not bring about salvation; rather, only God’s complete remaking of the soul from the outside could accomplish this. However, Luther was also a very learned solar, and although he would later reject humanism as a philosophical movement (just as he rejected omistic solasticism), he was inﬂuenced by the humanists’ method of ‘returning to the sources’ and working in the original Biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek (Beutel 2003: 6). He was also inﬂuenced by their critiques of the corruption of the Chur and their disdain for what they regarded as some of the more superstitious practices of the time. Like them, he did not initially seek the division of Christendom or political revolution, but his impetuousness and the vehemence of his language would soon have that eﬀect. From a political perspective, three crucial documents penned by Luther represent the ﬁrst nails in the coﬃn of the mediaeval political and religious system, contributing to the advent of the modern nation and the modern state (although not yet the ‘nation-state’). e ﬁrst text, generally regarded as the ﬁrst step of the Reformation, was oﬃcially known as the Disputation of Doctor Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences (or, more commonly, The 95 Theses); it was nailed to the doors of the castle ur of Wienberg in 1517. is document was an indictment of the selling of ‘indulgences’ (remiances for time spent in purgatory aer one’s death), a practice that the pope and many other ecclesiastical leaders in the Chur engaged in at the time. Although this was later seen as a dramatic gesture, it was in fact quite normal to pin su documents to the door of a ur, since most people would read them on their way into the building to pray or aend a service (a bit like posting a message on Facebook today!). e theses were addressed to Pope Leo X, and Luther was convinced that the pope and other bishops would see the folly of selling indulgences once they read his arguments. In fact, the pope at ﬁrst ignored Luther; later, in the encyclical Exurge Domine in 1520, he condemned the Augustinian’s ideas as heretical. Luther was given 60 days to recant his statements or risk excommunication, but his response was to issue two further documents that were even more provocative. To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation was addressed to Charles V, who, at the age of 19, had just been elected Holy Roman Emperor (the English King Henry VIII was also a candidate) but had not yet been crowned. Luther hoped to persuade the young ruler to take his side against the pope. e address to the German nobility represented an important moment in the evolution of Luther’s ideas on both ecclesiology and the relations between the Chur and the political system. e address contains three basic ideas: ﬁrst, the notion of the priesthood of all believers, not just of the clergy; second, on a related note, the denial of the pope’s right to be the sole interpreter of scripture; and, third, the rejection of the pope’s right to call a general council of the Chur. Luther clearly hoped that the young Charles V (who, as emperor, would be a rival to the pope) might be persuaded by this aa on the pope’s legitimacy as spiritual leader of the Chur. Charles, however, followed the pope’s example and placed Luther under the ban of the Empire, eﬀectively making him an outlaw. e political context is crucial for understanding further developments in Luther’s theological journey and how this was ‘received’ in the Europe of his time. At the time, both the papacy and the Empire were quite weak; both sides were desperately seeking to maintain their hegemony against ea other and against other competitors – territorial monars su as France and the restless German princes. Some of the German princes, including the Duke Elector of Saxony (whose territory included Wienberg), were aﬁng under the yoke of the emperor and saw this conﬂict as an opportunity to gain further autonomy from him. Of course, many of the princes were also convinced by Luther’s arguments for reform, although this was clearly entangled with their political motivations. Ea case would need to be examined individually to assess whether the position adopted by a ruler was a maer of conviction or expediency, but certainly there are many cases in whi rulers swited sides when it suited their purposes. In 1520, Luther also published On the Freedom of a Christian, in whi he laid out a vision of a world in whi Christians were not compelled to obey the law but would live out their lives through love and service of ea other. As the Reformation progressed, Luther’s writings began to be employed not only by the princes (to emancipate themselves from imperial and papal control) but also by the lower classes (to emancipate themselves from princely control). e best-known example of this was the Peasants’ Revolt (1524–6) led by omas Münzer and the Anabaptists. Despite his declarations in favour of Christian ‘freedom’, Luther was horriﬁed by these developments and condemned Münzer and the peasants in the strongest terms, even calling for their torture and execution. In so doing, he revealed himself to be deeply conservative, both politically and socially, despite his theological radicalism. Luther’s ecclesiology also inﬂuenced his political ideas. For him, the ur was an invisible society of true believers motivated only by the love of God. As an institution, it should not rival the political powers in the way that the pope had rivalled the emperor. In fact, the Chur should not even carry out ‘good works’ su as caring for the poor or feeding beggars, as the mediaeval Chur had done. Luther did not believe that the Chur, understood as the society of faithful and loving believers, should exercise temporal power in the way that the popes had. Rather, the temporal power – the prince – should wield this sword, even over Chur aﬀairs su as the punishment of heretics or the excommunication of sinners. e temporal power should provide for the needs of the poor and needy but, more importantly, should suppress their mendicancy and idleness. On the other hand, Luther simply assumed that the temporal power would be Christian; he would not have been able to conceive of a secular state in the modern sense of the word. e prince was a member of the Chur, and his decisions would be taken in the light of the Gospel. Luther, true to his emphasis on looking to the Bible for lessons, viewed the Old Testament kingdoms as examples of rulership, whereas the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount were seen as pertaining to the practices of individual Christians within the ‘invisible’ Chur. Writing furiously in the throes of the political and religious disputes that he had sparked oﬀ and addressing new issues as they arose, Luther was not devoid of contradictions as his ideas evolved. ese ideas were a combination of the political ideas of medieval Catholicism and the notion of ‘Christendom’, but reduced to the level of a ‘state’ su as Saxony rather than a vast territory spread across Europe. is notion of scale is important, as it would lead to the distinctive concept of a state ur. In fact, Lutheranism was adopted by several German princes, but its most complete expression was eventually that found in the Scandinavian states and especially Sweden. In the German states, Catholic and/or Calvinist minorities remained (once the laer had emerged as the other main bran of the Reformation), whereas Sweden and Norway became purely Lutheran states. What is interesting for the analysis of this apter are the longer-term consequences of Lutheranism in the development of European states. ere seem to be two principal outcomes. e ﬁrst is a certain passivity on the part of the Lutheran ures in relation to the state, derived from Luther’s ecclesiological notion of the ‘invisible’ Chur and his devolution of several functions to the civil authorities. In the German states, this passivity has sometimes been seen as contributing to the Chur’s capitulation when it was confronted with powerful rulers su as Bismar and, even more disastrously, Hitler. e German state took on a mythical hue in Herder’s theories and was divinized in Hegel’s dialectic. In the Scandinavian countries, and especially Sweden, the Lutheran State Chur was also passive when confronted with a powerful centralizing monary and it was eﬀectively incorporated into the civil service. Second, Luther had recommended that the temporal power and not the Chur take responsibility for what we would now call social services. In Scandinavia, this eventually evolved into the famous Swedish model of the welfare state. It is true that this was established by the Swedish Social Democrats in the 1930s, who were not very sympathetic to the Christian ur, but the Social Democrats were undoubtedly practising a secularized version of the Lutheran conception of the state (Kahl 2005: 102–6). Two further comments might be made concerning Luther and Lutheranism’s contribution to the evolution of the modern state. e ﬁrst is that although Luther accepted the notion of ‘Christendom’, he conceived this to be at the level of a medium-sized state su as Saxony, whose Elector provided him with protection and for whi he designed a state ur. Unlike Sweden, Saxony was not an independent monary, but it is not diﬃcult to see how the notion of a ‘state ur’ could develop out of this ange in scale from the wider European political system (as described in the earlier part of this apter, where the ‘Chur’ spanned the entire European territory as it was then deﬁned) to the mu smaller territories of Saxony or Sweden. is was the beginning of the concept of ‘national’ Chures, whi would ultimately receive its consecration in the Peace of Westphalia. e second key notion that Luther encouraged was that of ethnicity. e very title Address to the German Nobility illustrates a consciousness of his own ‘national’ or ‘ethnic’ identity, as does the oﬀence Luther took at what he perceived as the Italian stereotype of the boorish, drunken German; in turn, he stereotyped the Italians as being corrupt and decadent. Saxony could not become a ‘German’ state, since Germans could be found throughout the Empire, but this was a powerful incentive towards the development of an ‘ethnic’ conception of nationhood. Calvin, Calvinism and the modern state Calvin (1509–64) was younger than Luther, but his inﬂuence on the future direction of the Reformation was just as profound; from the perspective of the evolution of the state, it was perhaps even more important. Although Calvin accepted many of Luther’s theological ideas, he also developed arguments of his own and interpreted some of Luther’s concepts in a diﬀerent way (Troelts 1931). e key diﬀerence between the political ideas of the two reformers lies in their conceptions of the relationship between civil and religious authorities. Luther gave the civil authorities mu greater power over ur maers than Calvin would have allowed. is may be a reﬂection of the diﬀerent circumstances in whi the two men worked out their theological ideas. Luther, as noted, lived in the relatively large state of Saxony, while Calvin lived mostly in cities (except for his early years in the kingdom of France). e more radical versions of the Reformation, whi Calvin adopted and further extended, were being elaborated by Zwingli in Zuri and Bucer in Strasbourg. In fact, Calvin was on his way to join Bucer when he was diverted to Geneva, where he would spend most of the rest of his life. e Swiss Reformation, of whi he became the leading ﬁgure, was thus fought out at the level of cities and cantons, thus on a mu smaller scale than in Saxony (Close 2009). Calvin’s principal ideas on the relationship between civil and ecclesiastical authorities are found in Book IV, Chapter XX of his Institutes. is is a more measured (that is, less violent in its language) document than Luther’s writings and is inﬂuenced more by Calvin’s humanistic learning and legal training than by the passion and heat of the bale that marked Luther’s writings. Calvin’s theology was dominated less by the notion of human sinfulness than Luther’s and more by an awareness of God’s glory that relativizes all human aﬀairs. Nevertheless, he held civil magistracy in high regard and demanded that Christians obey their rulers (a precept shared by Luther and contemporary Catholics). But Calvin’s experiences in Geneva would prove crucial to the evolution of his understanding of relations between the Chur and civil authorities. Even before the Reformation, the civil magistrates of Geneva (an imperial city dominated by a local prince- bishop) had won a certain amount of autonomy from the bishop. When the Reformation reaed the city, the magistrates were determined to keep it under their control. Calvin resisted these aempts at suppression and, in contrast to Luther, developed the idea that the Chur should be responsible for its own aﬀairs rather than be subordinate to the civil authorities. A long struggle between the two groups followed; at one point, Calvin was expelled from the city, but he was later allowed to return. Calvin gave more thought than Luther to the form the political system should take – that is, whether it should be a monary, aristocracy or democracy. Although he would have been happy with any of these systems if they were Protestant, he seemed to prefer aristocracy, democracy or a mixture of the two. Calvin also grudgingly recognized the right of Christians to resist unjust rulers. Calvin saw his own theology as a continuation of Luther’s and there are important similarities in the approaes of the two reformers: they shared similar critiques of the mediaeval Chur and of solasticism; both were inﬂuenced by humanistic solarship, especially the return to the original sources of the Bible; they had similar understandings of sola scriptura and sola fide; and both had an Augustinian pessimism with regard to human nature. However, there were also important diﬀerences, particularly in their ecclesiologies and sacramental theologies. Luther retained more of the Catholic ecclesiology, particularly with regard to the ministry, and more of the Catholic notion of the real presence of Christ in the Euarist. Calvin’s ecclesiology took a ‘presbyterian’ form, with ur government dominated by ‘elders’ who oversaw ‘ministers’ who were ‘called’ by the congregation rather than being appointed by bishops. is is not to say that the early Calvinist congregations were ‘democratic’ in our sense of the word, but certainly we can see here an important step towards the establishment of democracy. Later Calvinism also facilitated the abandonment of the mediaeval Chur’s ban on usury, whi led to a loosening of the constraints on the market. is liberated marketplace eventually developed into modern capitalism, as Weber noted (Troelts 1931; Weber 2002 ; Polanyi 2001 ). Radical Protestantism As hinted at above, both Luther’s (early) work and Calvin’s writings seemed to suggest that revolt against civil and/or religious authorities was permied if these authorities acted against God’s commandments and against a godly way of life. ese ideas were taken up by various sects in two diﬀerent ways. One tendency, exempliﬁed by omas Münzer, was to resort to violence in order to overthrow the current rulers and install a radical version of the Kingdom of God on earth. Aempts to do so were ruthlessly suppressed by the civil authorities in Lutheran, Calvinist and Catholic countries. e second tendency was to express disapproval of the sinful status quo through withdrawal from the world and the establishment of autonomous monastic-style communities seeking to live a godly life. is tradition largely derives from Menno Simons, a Dut Catholic priest who renounced the priesthood and embraced the Reformation. Today, the descendants of this movement can be found primarily in North America in the form of the Mennonites, the Amish, the Huerites, etc. Some of these groups have been prominent in modern peace movements. The Reformation in the British Isles: Anglicanism, Scottish Calvinism and Welsh Nonconformity Is there an ‘Anglican’ perspective on the relations between Chur and state? ere are, in fact, several diﬀerent perspectives that derive from the successive stages of the Reformation in England. Although Henry VIII was, in most respects, a faithful Catholic in terms of doctrine, he was also a representative of the Tudor dynasty, whi had been engaged in a process of centralization of the state from about the ﬁeenth century onwards. He should therefore be seen as one of the monars (alongside the Fren and the Spanish) who sought to assert the rights of the territorial state against the claims of the papacy and the Empire. e Tudor monars, like their predecessors, had also been concerned about neutralizing the claims of the English barons. While Henry was opposed to Lutheran theology and, in particular, Luther’s doctrine of the Euarist, he turned the religious turmoil of the early Reformation to his advantage by seing himself up as the head of the Chur of England (thereby ensuring that he could obtain a divorce) but also by seizing the vast holdings of the monasteries and religious houses of England, Wales and Ireland and selling them oﬀ, thus replenishing the royal coﬀers with mu-needed revenue. However, what was most important for the subsequent development of Chur–state relations in England was the establishment of a national Chur – the Chur of England, not of Rome. is gave a powerful impetus to the already existing sense of English nationality (Greenfeld 1992: 27–88) that only grew under the reigns of Henry’s successors to the throne (with the exceptions of Mary I and James II). Whatever the regime – monary, Cromwellian dictatorship or parliamentary constitutional monary – the Chur now ‘belonged’ to the nation and came to be seen as an essential element of Englishness. is aitude persists even to the present day (for the moment): the Chur of England is still the established ur of the country (but not of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland), and Anglican bishops sit in the House of Lords, the upper house of the legislature. As a consequence of the spread of the British Empire, Anglicanism became an international religious movement with a world-wide Anglican ‘communion’. In some cases, the Anglican Chur became the established ur of the British territory or colony. e key issue was whether subjects would pay tithes to the established ur as they did in Ireland and Wales when the Chur of England was established there. In these two countries, there were movements for disestablishment closely connected to Irish and Welsh nationalism that eventually succeeded (in Ireland in 1869 and in Wales in 1920). e Anglican Chur has survived in Ireland (as the Chur of Ireland) and Wales (as the Chur in Wales) and also in Scotland, where it is known as the Scoish Episcopal Chur. e Anglican Chur was also established in several colonies or parts of colonies in the United States: in Virginia in 1609, in the lower part of New York in 1693, in Maryland in 1702, in South Carolina in 1706, in North Carolina in 1730 and in Georgia in 1758. is meant that all the inhabitants of these states had to pay taxes to the Chur. ese arrangements came to an end with the signing of the Articles of Confederation and the creation of the federal United States. One of the aims of the Constitution was to prevent the creation of an established ur in the federation, but it also guaranteed freedom of religion in public life. In Canada, the Chur of England was established by law in Nova Scotia, New Brunswi and Prince Edward Island. However, my primary concern in this section is to explore the connection between anging ecclesiological conceptions of Anglicanism and their impact on ur–state relations. Although, as noted, the Chur of England passed through several diﬀerent phases, the overall position has been the Erastian notion that the state should have supremacy over the Chur. Constitutionally, the prime minister (even when the oﬃce-holder is an atheist, as Lloyd George was) must approve the appointment of Anglican bishops, although Gordon Brown promised reforms in this area when he became prime minister. At the same time, the Chur of England could not aieve hegemony in the same way that the Chur of Sweden did by eliminating all rivals. For one thing, in England (but also in Scotland, Wales and Ireland) there was mu greater religious heterogeneity: the Chur of Scotland was Calvinist but co-existed alongside the Anglican Episcopal Chur, the Roman Catholic Chur and various smaller Protestant sects su as the Free Presbyterians (the ‘Wee Frees’); in Wales nonconformists (Methodists, Evangelicals, akers, etc.) were stronger than the established Chur of England; in Ireland the majority of the population remained Catholic, with an Anglican Anglo-Irish aristocracy dispersed across the entire island, a strong Presbyterian minority in Ulster and a variety of Protestant sects. All of this meant that although the state (the monar and the organs of government) remained in Anglican hands, it had to come to terms with the wide variety of other Christian faiths. is may be one of the factors that led to what political scientists call Anglo-Saxon pluralism. Interestingly, in (Protestant) Anglophone Canada, this notion of political pluralism, expressed through ‘multiculturalism’, contrasts strongly with the situation in (Catholic) ébec, where there is a more statist notion of politics and where ‘interculturalism’ rather than ‘multiculturalism’ is the dominant approa. Roman Catholic perspectives As with the other theological traditions, there is no one Catholic position with regard to ur–state relations. We must distinguish here between the papacy (whi, as noted on p. 53, was a temporal as well as a spiritual power in the Middle Ages) and the diﬀerent ecclesiastical situations in various parts of Europe. First, even before the Reformation, there were tensions between advocates of conciliarism (su as Marsilius of Padua, who held that the supreme spiritual authority of the Chur lay with councils of bishops) and the advocates of papal monary (who saw the pope as the supreme authority). Temporal rulers ose sides in this debate, generally less out of theological conviction than political expediency; there were even cases of advocates switing position depending on whi ruler was supporting them (Ozment 1980). Following the Reformation, the political situation anged dramatically, with the rise of political nationalism and the ﬁrst signs of the modern state (particularly in Protestant Europe). ere were diﬀerences among Counter- Reformation Catholic theologians – su as the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), who promoted monary, obedience and hierary (Höpﬂ 2004), and others, including the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (c.1492– 1546), who (drawing on a revived omism) emphasized the common good (Nemo 2002: 176). e papacy itself looked on developments in post- Reformation Europe with disfavour; this eventually became a systematic opposition to modernity that reaed its culmination in Pius IX’s notorious Syllabus of Errors (1864). It is true that between the Reformation and the promulgation of the Syllabus there had been the Fren Revolution and the looming spectres of anarism and radical Marxian socialism. Furthermore, particularly within Catholic countries, liberal nationalism and Republicanism had taken on a vicious anti-clerical aspect. In Italy, the Risorgimento was in full swing; the Papal States themselves were gradually whiled away until the pope was reduced to his enclave in Rome. Catholic ecclesiology in the nineteenth century, in addition to believing the Catholic Chur to be the only true Chur, also conceived it to be an embaled fortress besieged by the forces of Protestantism and modernity – nationalism, liberalism, freemasonry, socialism and revolution. e Syllabus can be seen as a panied reaction to these threats from without. is began to ange when Leo XIII, elected pope in 1878, moderated the extreme stance of Pius IX by beginning to come to terms with modernity at least to some extent in, for example, his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). Nevertheless, the hierary of the Catholic Chur maintained an ecclesiology (the ‘fortress’ model) that was a reaction against the Protestant Reformation, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the Fren Revolution and the rise of the modern state and industrial society. is lasted until the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) adopted a radically diﬀerent approa with its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium 1964) and Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes 1965). e papal position on ur–state relations rejected the Lutheran and Erastian idea that the state should have supremacy over the ur; it viewed itself as exercising a ‘spiritual sword’ that was superior to the ‘temporal sword’. Although it ﬁnally came to accept that the modern state, even in Catholic countries, would not submit to the spiritual authority of the pope, it still sought to obtain for itself a special position in these countries that would give it an important role in public aﬀairs. In some countries, su as the newly independent Ireland (1922) and Franco’s Spain (1936–76), it certainly did occupy su a position. In others, su as Italy and the countries of East and Central Europe before Communism, it approximated this position through the system of concordats. e Holy See, recognized as an autonomous and sovereign state in its own right, also built up a diplomatic corps in many countries (whi still exists today). However, it is also necessary to consider the positions of diﬀerent hieraries. Although the papacy looked askance at the growth of nationalism, in practice several Catholic countries also became ‘Catholic’ nations. is was true of France and Spain – particularly the former, whi developed a variation of ecclesiastical nationalism known as Gallicanism that opposed ultramontanism (i.e. primary loyalty to the pope). is allowed the Fren and Spanish mon ars an important say in the appointment of bishops and lower clergy, even though (in the context of the conﬂicts brought about by the Reformation) these kingdoms remained within the Catholic fold. When modern nationalism spread across Europe aer the Fren Revolution, some countries (su as Ireland and Poland) used their Catholic faith as an important element of their national identity. is led to some curious situations, su as when, in the laer half of the nineteenth century, the British government allied with the Vatican to condemn the revolutionary Republican movements in Ireland. Irish nationalists responded by saying, ‘We take our religion from Rome and our politics from home’ (quoted in Keogh 1986: 68). ere were also Catholic thinkers and movements that were sympathetic to the ideals of liberalism and democracy, su as Lammenais and Lacordaire, who published the journal L’Avenir (Nemo 2002: 603–8). However, su ﬁgures tended to incur condemnation from Rome and sometimes ended up leaving the Chur. Central to these developments was ecclesiology. e Catholic version of ecclesiology had become somewhat unbalanced aer the Council of Trent (1545–63) and the extreme positions adopted by Pius IX. It was almost as though Catholic teaing was deﬁned by emphasizing whatever distinguished Catholicism from Protestantism: devotion to Mary, the promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, papal infallibility, Catholic devotions su as the rosary, etc. Of course, Protestants also adopted the opposite unbalanced and exaggerated positions – for example what has been called ‘bibliolatry’ or even iconoclasm. It was only during the twentieth century that more balanced positions began to be developed, with the Nouvelle théologie in Catholicism3 and the growth of the ecumenical movement beginning in the 1930s. On the Catholic side, the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) was the culmination of this trend; it also had a profound impact on ur–state relations. It is true that the Vatican oen established relations with unsavoury regimes su as Franco’s Spain and the 1941 Ustaša puppet regime led by Ante Pavelic´ in Croatia.4 However, beginning in the 1960s, the Catholic Chur was oen in the vanguard of movements for democracy and social justice in Africa, Asia and Latin America as well as in the developed world. e modern nation-state We now turn to the impact of religion on the evolution of the concept of the modern nation. In her book Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (1992), Liah Greenfeld asserts that the modern nation began with the Protestant Reformation, particularly the English Reformation. She argues that England led the way by deﬁning itself as a Protestant nation in contrast to Catholic France, whi was the second modern nation. Germany, Russia and the United States followed distinctive ‘roads’ to modernity, but in ea case religion played an important role. It should also be noted that the Reformation, by introducing the principle of ‘national’ ures – the Chur of Sweden, of England, of France, etc. – consolidated the notion of a nation as identiﬁed with a particular confession and with a particular state. e 1648 Treaty of Westphalia ended the Wars of Religion through the application of the principle of cuius regio, eius religio – ‘the religion of the ruler will be the religion of the state and people’ – an idea that had been in circulation since the 1555 Peace of Augsburg. Westphalia featured two elements that became important in the subsequent development of the nation and the state: ﬁrst, it consolidated the existence of state ures and, second, it introduced the principle of non-intervention of one state in the internal aﬀairs of another, thus clarifying the notion of ‘sovereignty’. Modern international relations is a secularized version of this principle. e development of the modern democratic state also progressed in the period aer the Reformation, principally during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. is occurred through the three great revolutions of this era: the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’ in England, whi consolidated parliamentary government against absolute monary; the 1776 American Revolution, whose 1778 Constitution established the world’s ﬁrst modern federal system; and the 1789 Fren Revolution, whi created the modern unitary nation-state (the ‘one and indivisible Republic’) and the notion that the ‘nation’ was identical to ‘the people’. ese revolutions gave us the three currently dominant forms of the state: the ‘union’ state of the United Kingdom (that is, formed by the ‘unions’ of England with Wales, Scotland and Ireland, respectively), the American federal state and the Fren unitary state. Most modern states subsequently adopted one of these three forms; the majority have opted for the federal or unitary models, although in recent years there has been a growing interest in the model of the ‘union’ state. ese revolutions and state forms were the result of many political, economic, social and religious factors, as well as the inﬂuences of political philosophers and theologians; the best known of these include Maiavelli, Hobbes, Bodin, Montesquieu and Rousseau (who vacillated between Roman Catholicism and the Reform tradition). My argument is that these diﬀerent ways of organizing the state according to speciﬁc concepts of nation and state derive, at least in part, from the diﬀerent and competing theologies of the ur, of ur and state, and of ur and politics that were actively debated in the most crucial period of nation- and state-building in the sixteenth century. However, my interest here lies in what the consequences of these positions were for subsequent political organization and the development of political theory, even in its most secularized expressions. e contemporary situation: religion, secularization and ‘post-secularism’ Do these historical and theological considerations have any relevance to the contemporary state? anks to the secularization processes initially identiﬁed by Peter Berger (1967) and more recently propounded by Steve Bruce (2002), whose work is inspired by sociologists su as Weber and Durkheim, religion has largely been consigned to the purely private sphere and is no longer seen as relevant to contemporary politics, except in the negative sense of its exclusion. e sociological version of the secularization thesis involves a rather crude reading of modern European history that holds that, with increasing ‘modernization’ and the emphasis on scientiﬁc explanations of the world and more ‘rational’ forms of social organization, ‘religion’ will eventually disappear or at most be conﬁned to the sphere of private individual beliefs and activities (rather like bird-wating or stamp- collecting). Following Max Weber’s dismissal of religion as being unworthy of a rational being, this became a dominant paradigm in the social sciences, not just in sociology but also in other disciplines su as political science, international relations and economics (Gregory 2012: 299). It would appear that secularization in the sense described above did occur in Western European countries; however, in recent years there has been a vigorous debate about the original thesis. Die-hards su as Steve Bruce have dug in their heels, refusing to abandon the theory that religion would disappear or become irrelevant. Other sociologists, political theorists, theologians and historians have adopted more nuanced positions. Berger (1999) now admits that the original thesis was wrong, at least in its prediction that religion would disappear. It has not disappeared; on the contrary, it seems to be alive and well even in the United States, the world’s most ‘modern’ state, although Berger does think that the prediction may be more accurate as a description of Western European trends (Berger et al. 2008). is ange of position is based on empirical realities. Far from disappearing, religion seems to thriving in most parts of the world (Milethwait and Wooldridge 2009). e secularization thesis largely holds in Western Europe and some countries similar to Europe (su as Canada, Australia and New Zealand), but not in other parts of the world su as the United States, Latin America, Africa and Asia. Even China is experiencing a revival of religious faith and practice; given the enormous size of its population, China’s absolute numbers of religious believers and practitioners outnumber their equivalents in Europe. Furthermore, the liberation of the former Communist states of East and Central Europe and the Soviet Union has also led to a revival of religion in several countries in that region. is is admiedly uneven, ranging from the strong Catholic presence in Poland to the majority atheism of the Cze Republic (Slovakia, by contrast, is also strongly Catholic). e 2004 EU enlargement meant that large numbers of Poles, Lithuanians and other East and Central Europeans who were practising Catholics arrived in Britain and Ireland, helping to reanimate declining parishes in these countries. Finally, the presence of large Muslim immigrant populations in several European countries and the rise of militant Islamism have placed the question of religion on the public and political agendas through issues su as the status of women, Muslim aitudes towards homosexuality, sharia law, etc. Negative reactions to Islam have led to the questioning of multiculturalism and aitudes of tolerance in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany, while the Fren have resorted to the traditional notion of laïcité on issues of dress codes in sools and in public places (with regard to the burqa and the hijab). In addition to these recent manifestations of religion in European states, there is also the fact that even though religious practice has declined, ures and other religious organizations have never completely gone away. Chures are constitutionally and legally recognized in all European states and by the European Union (Doe 2011). Furthermore, they are responsible for the delivery of a range of public services. e key question is how this recognition and this involvement in public service delivery relate to liberal representative democracy. We will examine these three aspects of the religious question in turn. Nevertheless, even if there are empirical manifestations of religion at the level of society, it is not the case that states are becoming more secular. John Milbank (1990), founder of the theological sool known as ‘radical orthodoxy’, claims that, in reality, what we think of as ‘secular’ institutions and the social theories that try to describe and explain them actually have a religious foundation. In other words, they are not fully ‘secular’, in the sense that they have completely escaped their religious or even theological roots. My argument in this apter is related, although I think one can also speak of the ‘secularization’ of concepts and phenomena that may have their origins in theological constructs. is is what has been argued above with regard to the development of European states su as Sweden and the Netherlands: the original theological concepts have been all but forgoen, but the content of those concepts still plays a role in shaping the form of the state and the political, policy and administrative culture of that state (Kahl 2005). In his sociological writings, David Martin has long been a critic of the cruder versions of the secularization thesis; he asserts that religion and society have always existed in a dialectical relationship with ea other, and that this is true in the modern era as well as of previous periods (Martin 1978). Charles Taylor (2007) argues a similar point in his massive volume when he states that it was the reforming eﬀorts of the Christian ur – even before the Reformation itself – that laid the foundation of the modern secular state. So, how secular is the modern state? We now turn to this question. Constitutional and legal recognition of religious groups e Treaty of Westphalia was originally established to end the Wars of Religion that had followed the Reformation; these conﬂicts had divided the Holy Roman Empire, although religious conﬂict had broken out in other parts of Europe as well. Although the term ‘Westphalian state’ is today taken to refer to a state that does not intervene in the aﬀairs of other states, its original meaning entailed a recognition of the confessional state. One consequence of this was the phenomenon of ‘established’ ures in Protestant Europe and a special recognition of the Catholic Chur in Catholic Europe. is arrangement still largely holds today in several European states. Chur– state relations in Europe can be described as a spectrum; at one end, there are the established ures of England, Norway, Denmark and (until 2000) Sweden. At the other end of the spectrum, there is France, where since 1905 there has been complete separation of ur and state and a distinctive concept of laïcité. In between, there are various arrangements that regulate ur–state relations, su as concordats between the Holy See and the state, as is the case in Italy and in some of the former Communist states. Ireland’s 1937 Constitution granted ‘special recognition’ to the Catholic Chur; however, this clause has since been removed as part of the reconciliation process between the two parts of Ireland (there is a large Protestant population in the North). Even if their constitutions do not explicitly mention religious groups, many countries have passed legislation to regulate religious activities, and, in practice, many public services, su as education and health care, are delivered by religious organizations. In the United States, there was also the separation of ur and state following the establishment of the Federation; the First Amendment to the Constitution (1791) forbids the establishment of religion but also guarantees its free exercise. Unlike in France, this was not designed to stiﬂe religious expression in the public sphere but rather to ensure that no one ur dominated over others, as had been the case in some of the European countries (including England) from whence most of the original colonists came. e result has been a lively presence of mostly Christian groups as well as mu smaller numbers of other faiths in American civil society and even an assumption that all political leaders will profess a religious faith. At present, it is highly unlikely that an atheist will be elected to high public oﬃce. In contrast, in some European countries candidates tend to play down any religious aﬃliation, the most notorious example being perhaps British prime minister Tony Blair, who wanted to convert to Catholicism but waited until he le oﬃce to do so. Alistair Campbell, his ‘spin doctor’, notoriously said, ‘We don’t do God!’ (Daily Telegraph, 4 May 2003). e question of the place of religion in the European Union was debated during the Convention on the Future of Europe, whi was presided over by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. e Convention was an aempt to draw up a ‘Constitutional Treaty’ for Europe, a document whose preamble laid out some of the values and principles of the European Union. One issue was whether Christianity or even ‘religion’ should be explicitly mentioned in this preamble. e member states were divided on the question, with countries su as the UK, the Scandinavian countries and France being opposed and others, including Poland (then a candidate for EU membership), Spain (under Aznar), Italy and Malta (also a candidate), being in favour. Interestingly, this represented a division between northern (Protestant) Europe and southern (Catholic) Europe. France, although traditionally Catholic, opposed the reference on the grounds that it would interfere with its tradition of laïcité. In the end, the references to Christianity and ‘religion’ were dropped in favour of a vaguer reference to ‘spiritual’ traditions. Nevertheless, the Constitutional Treaty (and the subsequent Lisbon Treaty) gave constitutional recognition for the ﬁrst time to ures and religious groups as organizations of European civil society. Religious groups and the delivery of public services Religious organizations, mainly Christian denominations but also other groups su as Muslims, Jews and Sikhs, are involved in the provision of a wide range of public services, many of whi are delivered on behalf of the state. e largest sector here is education, where, despite the eﬀorts of secular liberals to remove the ur from this sphere, many sools are run by religious organizations. is is the case in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands (where about 70 per cent of sools are ur sools), Italy, Spain, Germany and even France (where Catholic sools are termed les écoles privées). ere are also a growing number of Muslim, Jewish and Sikh sools. Other services provided by religious organizations include health care, social services, orphanages and care for the elderly, immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Many of these services are at least in part funded by the state, but also in part by the religious organizations themselves through donations from their members. Of course, the mere fact that religious organizations provide these services does not mean that all those involved in delivering the services and all those who beneﬁt from them are believers. For example, many of those who tea in Catholic sools may not be practising Catholics or even believers. Similarly, many pupils in these sools come from homes that are highly secularized and only nominally Catholic (if at all). Nevertheless, the delivery of these services ensures that religious organizations do in practice still occupy a place in the public sphere. A basic issue that has arisen in contemporary Western societies is to what extent these organizations remain free to practise their own beliefs and whether there may be limits to this. We now turn to the question of religious freedom in political theory. Contemporary approaes to religious freedom in political theory Rawlsian secularism Political theory in the Anglo-Saxon world has been dominated by the work of John Rawls, the American political scientist whose book A Theory of Justice (1971) provided a philosophical underpinning to the kind of secularist liberal democracy described above, although he did modify his position on religion in his later work Political Liberalism (1993). Rawls was concerned with how to reconcile the principles of equality and freedom in a society marked by inequality and unfairness. In A Theory of Justice, he develops two principles of justice: the liberty principle, establishing equal basic liberties for all citizens, and the equality principle, whi would guarantee liberties that represent meaningful opportunities for all in society and ensure distributive justice. However, in order for the members of a society to agree to these principles, Rawls introduces a mind-game, arguing that the actors should start from what he calls an ‘original position’: from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ they should agree on certain basic rights and the redistribution of beneﬁts. is is based on the idea that they would thereby set aside knowledge of their own personal aracteristics and their own place in society (their social class, religion, economic situation, etc.) as well as what he calls ‘comprehensive doctrines’ (doctrines that make negotiation diﬃcult, of whi religion is the most striking example), using ‘public reason’ in order to arrive at a consensus on the basic rules of co-existence. It is here that religious believers might part company with Rawls, as he assumes that religious beliefs are inherently incompatible with ‘public reason’. However, the intellectual and cultural elites who have come to dominate Western institutions and the academy since the 1960s tend to agree with Rawls on this point. As omas Farr has argued, ‘Rawlsian assumptions about the inherently anti-liberal and anti-rational aracteristics of religion are widely shared among intellectuals in the West and the United States, including both secularists and many Protestants and Catholics’ (Farr 2008: 49). Rawls’s work has provoked a heated debate, with critiques issued by solars from a wide variety of intellectual traditions, including the communitarian Miael Walzer (1983), the libertarian Robert Nozi (1974) and Amartya Sen (2009), whose resear is centred on ‘capabilities’. But most of these solars would probably agree with Rawls’s position on the negative consequences of religion for liberal democracy, as well as with the precept of restricting religious belief and practice to the private sphere. Others, however, see a more positive role at least for certain religious traditions, perceiving them as potentially necessary to support democracy; far from suppressing su traditions in the name of democracy, these solars argue, they should be actively encouraged. In fact, Rawls himself later adopted su a position in the 1993 book Political Liberalism, although it is the early Rawls that has been most inﬂuential. Before examining this more positive understanding of religion and politics, it will be useful to consider another secularist position that diﬀers from the Rawlsian approa: ‘value pluralism’. Value pluralism is approa, whi stems from the theories of Isaiah Berlin, has been developed by Joseph Raz (1986), John Gray (1995) and, more recently, Peter G. Danin, who has applied it to the principle of religious freedom in international and domestic law (see Danin 2008a, 2008b). Value pluralism rejects the Rawlsian idea that there is something called ‘public reason’ capable of supplying a ‘meta’-liberal legal framework that takes precedence over any particular value system, including a set of religious beliefs. In his Four Essays on Liberty (1960), Berlin argues that, ‘[i]f the claims of two (or more than two) types of liberty prove incompatible in a particular case, and if this is an instance of the clash of values at once absolute and incommensurable, it is beer to face this intellectually uncomfortable fact than to ignore it, or automatically aribute it to some deﬁciency on our part whi could be eliminated by an increase in skill or knowledge; or, what is worse still, suppress one of the competing values altogether by pretending that it is identical with its rival – and so end by distorting both’ (quoted in Danin 2008b: 2). In The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Berlin suggests that value systems may be ultimately ‘incommensurable’; that is, no one value system may be placed in a hierary of more or less true beliefs (Berlin 1998: 9). ey are diﬀerent sets of beliefs that simply represent divergent interpretations of the good life that are valid within their own communities. Gray accepts this position but argues (unconvincingly, in my opinion) that this is not the same as moral relativism. e political consequences of su an approa are very diﬀerent from those of Rawls’s legal liberalism; in fact, value pluralists argue that diﬃculties should be resolved not through law but through politics and debate (although Peter Danin has developed this perspective from the point of view of international and domestic law). What is positive about this approa from the perspective of religious freedom is that it seriously considers the substantive content of religious beliefs and practices, arguing that these should be respected as varying accounts of what their adherents perceive to be the good life. is also seems to imply that the Rawlsian meta-legal framework for managing plurality based on the ‘original position’ and the ‘veil of ignorance’ itself represents a deﬁnition of the good life that has no inherent superiority over any other account, despite its claims. However, there is also something inherently relativistic about the ‘value pluralism’ approa, in that it seems to deny the possibility of developing an approa that derives from our common humanity and that could form the basis of relationships among diﬀerent groups and between these groups and the state. It is diﬃcult to see how ‘value pluralism’ diﬀers from the Western ‘multiculturalist’ approa that it criticizes – except that, unlike the laer, it does not denigrate Western Christian culture or view this as inferior to other cultures (Bloom 1987: 36). Alfred Stepan’s twin toleration thesis e underlying assumption of the Rawlsian approa is that ‘religion’, as a comprehensive doctrine that is alien to ‘public reason’, is diﬃcult to reconcile with liberal democracy and should therefore be conﬁned to the private sphere. Challenging this idea is a third approa that has been developed in recent years by Alfred Stepan of Columbia University (Stepan 2005). Stepan and the Spanish political scientist Juan Linz conducted an extensive empirical resear survey in various parts of the world on the relationship between religion and democracy. eir primary focus was the question of whether religion and democracy are compatible. ey found that democracy is indeed possible, although not inevitable, in countries with majorities of believers, including Islamic countries. In his apter summarizing the ﬁndings of this resear project, Stepan argues that religions su as Islam and Christianity are actually quite complex and may contain a variety of diﬀerent currents of thought – what he calls ‘multivocality’ – some of whi may be amenable to democracy (Stepan 2005: 12). In actual practice, there are a number of democratic states in whi religion is fully recognized and accepted by the state – for example Hindu-dominated India, with its Muslim, Buddhist, Jain and Christian minorities, and Muslim Indonesia. Other su democracies include the Orthodox countries of Romania, Bulgaria and Greece (although this country only recognizes the Orthodox Chur). Several countries of Western Europe are democracies with established ures or in whi religious groups are present in the public sphere through their provision of public services su as education and health care (see also Doe 2011). Furthermore, following the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Chur has been one of the prime movers in the third wave of democracy in Latin America and Africa (Huntington 1991). However, Stepan also recognizes that some strands within religious groups, including both Islam and some branes of Catholicism, are not conducive to liberal democracy. Some Muslim groups reject democracy that is based on the notion of ‘sovereignty of the people’, since only Allah is sovereign. In Catholicism, the Chur historically refused to recognize the legitimacy of liberal democracy, accepting it only aer the Second Vatican Council. Furthermore, there is a strand of intégriste Catholicism that nostalgically clings to old conceptions of Chur and rone or, even more sinisterly, to extreme right-wing ideas (Le Nouvel Observateur, 14 November 2011). It is with this baground in mind that Stepan has proposed what he calls the ‘twin toleration’ thesis.5 He argues that the Rawlsian approa of secularism cannot succeed in societies with signiﬁcant religious communities; in fact, it is likely to be counterproductive by alienating su communities from mainstream society. Almost no liberal democracy has actually followed the Rawlsian approa, nor is any likely to do so. According to Stepan, this is because democracy ‘is a system of conﬂict regulation that allows open competition over the values and goals that citizens want to advance’, but there are democratic boundaries within whi su competition takes place (Stepan 2005: 5). is requires the negotiation of a democratic covenant between civil and religious authorities – the ‘twin toleration’ of ea by the other. Government permits both private and public religious activity, including activities designed to inﬂuence public policy, within very broad, equally applied limits. Religious individuals and communities agree to avoid actions that ‘impinge negatively on the liberties of other citizens or violate democracy and the law’ (Stepan 2005: 10–11). e Stepanian approa could have a number of positive eﬀects, both for the practice of democracy and for the religious organizations that are present in pluralistic societies. First, it would enri democracy itself, as it would embrace religious groups, with all their ri knowledge of humanity and experience in delivering a wide range of services that beneﬁt the common good. Robert Putnam has spoken of ‘social capital’ as essential for the functioning of a democratic society, and religious groups make an important contribution to this capital (Putnam 1993). In the United Kingdom, the current coalition government’s ‘Big Society’ programme has strong aﬃnities with Catholic social teaings; the involvement of ures and other religious communities in this programme could contribute to the enhancement of social capital (Loughlin et al. 2013). Furthermore, some of the underlying principles of liberal democracy and human rights have their origins in religious concepts: the intrinsic dignity of human beings, the equality of all people by virtue of their common creator and heavenly father, the imperative to love one’s neighbour as oneself, etc. Contemporary lists of human rights are oen secularized versions of these principles, but by themselves they have lile intrinsic justiﬁcation. Without this philosophical and ethical underpinning and without a truly humanistic understanding of these rights (that is, imbued with an integral humanism), they could come to be manipulated by powerful lobbies and groups that may be promoting something that is less than human. Second, the twin toleration approa would help religious organizations to adapt themselves to democracy. As mentioned above, no major religious group – Christianity, Islam, Hinduism or Judaism – is ‘univocal’; rather, they are made up of diﬀerent tendencies, some of whi are more compatible with democracy than others. Stepan’s approa would encourage these laer tendencies to come to the fore, and this may help the group as a whole to become more successfully integrated into a pluralist, democratic society. In fact, this approa may be important in developing democratic theory and practice; it may be that new forms of democratic expression will develop as a result. In contrast, secular Rawlsianism, multiculturalism and value pluralism all tend to reinforce the more anti-democratic tendencies within religious groups, either forcing them into or encouraging them to maintain a marginalized position. Encouraging these organizations to participate fully in the public sphere may thus be good for democracy itself. It is obvious that the Stepanian approa can only work if the principle of religious freedom – understood in both its individual and collective senses – is fully respected. e implementation of the principle of religious freedom in domestic politics and in international aﬀairs In modern society we ﬁnd a somewhat paradoxical situation. On the one hand, many authors have anowledged that the 1960s ‘secularization thesis’ has failed to materialize; on the contrary, religion is still alive and kiing in almost all parts of the world. Peter Berger, one of the original proponents of the thesis, has now declared that he and other sociologists of the 1960s were mistaken, at least with regard to countries outside Western Europe and Canada (Berger 1999), although Bruce (2002) is still holding fast to the original secularization theory. Two journalists from the Economist, John Milethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, published a book in 2009 entitled God Is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith Is Changing the World. Monica Duﬀy To and her colleagues conﬁrm this idea on the level of global politics (To et al. 2011). On the other hand, in recent years there has been a rise in the denial of religious freedom in all parts of the world, both in the form of aas by aggressive secularism in Western countries and in the remaining Communist regimes and the denial of religious freedom to religious minorities in countries with a hegemonic religious majority (Farr 2008: 334, fn. 39). e laer trend is primarily found in Muslim countries, but it can also occur in countries where other faiths are dominant (e.g. in Russia and Greece, where Christian Orthodoxy is the dominant religion). Undoubtedly, the two phenomena are closely related. It is intolerable to some secularists that religion should leave the private sphere; indeed, many feel threatened by the more extreme tendencies within religious groups su as radical Islamism and the evangelical Christian right. Nevertheless, the principle of religious freedom is itself a fundamental freedom and it is important to resist aempts to undermine it. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘[e]veryone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to ange his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaing, practice, worship and observance’. e European Convention on Human Rights includes a similar article – Article 9 – that seeks to protect freedom of thought, conscience and religion. Recent developments in Western states and elsewhere indicate that the provisions of these articles are not being comprehensively respected. A valuable source of information in this regard is the International Religious Freedom Report, whi is drawn up ea year by the US State Department. e report for 2011 states, ‘Governments restricted religious freedom in a variety of ways, including registration laws that favored state-sanctioned groups, blasphemy laws, and treatment of religious groups as security threats.’ e report identiﬁes what it calls ‘ronic and systemic violators of religious freedom’: China, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea and other countries with authoritarian governments. However, the report also ronicles violations of religious freedom across the world, including those in Western developed countries. Although not mentioned in the State Department’s report, these infringements range from the closure of Catholic adoption agencies in the UK because of their refusal to allow homosexuals to adopt ildren to the aempt in Italy by a Finnish atheist to remove cruciﬁxes from sool classrooms. ere have also been a series of controversies over the wearing of religious symbols or clothing (in France, Belgium and the UK) and over whether Christians may refuse to participate in abortions or civil partnership ceremonies for homosexuals. With ‘homosexual marriage’ now a legislative reality in France and the UK (in England and Scotland), these tensions could become more pronounced. We should not compare the position of European Christians with the violent persecution of Christians taking place in other parts of the world; however, there seems lile doubt that the human right of religious freedom of these individuals is being denied in some instances.6 One of the problems has been in the way that Art. 9 of the European Convention and Art. 18 of the Universal Declaration are interpreted. Courts and administrations in some countries (including the USA and the UK) and in the Council of Europe have interpreted these provisions to mean that individuals exercise their freedom by being allowed to ‘worship’ or pray as individuals. is individualist interpretation seems to stem from the secularist Rawlsian perspective of liberal democracy, whi argues that religious groups have no right of voice or presence in the public sphere. However, the articles can also be interpreted as meaning that religious groups have the right to express and practise their beliefs as organized communities. ese would represent group rights rather than the rights of individuals. e notion of group rights has been developed by Kymlia with regard to linguistic and cultural minorities, but it could also be applied to religious minorities (Kymlia 1995). Furthermore, by this argument, su organized religious communities would have as mu right to participate in the public sphere as any other group and would have an equal right to try to inﬂuence public policy. e Rawlsian approa leads to a situation in whi a secularist approa is regarded as somehow superior to a religious perspective and where it alone has a right to be heard. is leads to a secularist interpretation of the law and this seems to underlie some recent legal judgements in the United Kingdom and the European Court of Human Rights. Despite mu evidence to the contrary, some English judges have argued, rather arbitrarily, that the Judaeo- Christian tradition has lile relevance in the interpretation of English law. Freedom of religion in international affairs It is interesting that the academic discipline of International Relations (IR) has traditionally paid lile aention to the phenomenon of religion. is is undoubtedly because the dominant approaes in IR – realism, neo-realism and liberal institutionalism – all accept the secular nationstate as the key actor in international aﬀairs (Farr 2008: 53). International aﬀairs are conceived of as a system of ‘anary’ (in the literal sense of there being no world government, not in the popular sense of ‘aos’) in whi national self-interest is the dominant driving force that motivates states in the international arena. States are regarded as unitary actors driven by self- interest and power, in the same way that individuals in society are thus driven. IR theorists have tended to share the Enlightenment and Rawlsian secularist idea that ‘religion’ is inherently irrational and should not enter into relationships between states. is secularist mentality, dominant in many departments of foreign aﬀairs in Western states, is oen shared by international organizations su as the UN and the World Health Organization. ‘Religion’ is seen at best as irrelevant and at worst as an obstacle to development programmes. is is despite the fact that the majority of the world’s population is religious in some sense and that religious organizations and NGOs are oen at the coal face of development programmes. Conclusions A number of points emerge from these reﬂections. First, religion and even theology have been crucial in the development of the modern Western nation and state; the various theological traditions derived from the Reformation led to the diversity of understandings of the nation and the state in Europe and elsewhere. Second, despite the eﬀorts of secularism to remove religion from the public sphere, religion and religious organizations remain important, both constitutionally and legally, as well as in the delivery of a range of public services delegated to them by the state in many countries. ird, there are diﬀerent understandings of the way in whi religion aﬀects democratic practice. Most Christian ures would accept that Western states are secular institutions; nevertheless, they would insist that a healthy democracy requires that they be recognized as actors in the public sphere rather than conﬁned to the private sphere. Some secularists, in contrast, would prefer to remove religion entirely from the public sphere and even from the delivery of public services. In theoretical terms, this might be seen as a conﬂict between the versions of democracy proposed by Alfred Stepan and John Rawls, respectively. Notes 1 is is a revised version of ‘Religion, Secularism and the Modern State: Politico-eological Reﬂections’ in Ferran Requejo and Camil Ungureanu (eds) (forthcoming), Democracy, Law and Religious Pluralism in Europe: Secularism and Post-Secularism, London: Routledge. 2 However, the nation-state has also been associated with non- and even anti-democratic political regimes, su as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, China, Albania and the former Communist states of East and Central Europe. Japan, the ﬁrst Asian nation-state, is another example. 3 During the inter-war period and aer 1945, there was a ﬂourishing of theological debate in the Catholic Chur, led by the Jesuits Henri De Lubac and Karl Rahner, the Dominican Yves Congar and the young Josef Ratzinger. 4 Contemporary European liberalism Exclusionary, enlightened or romantic? Gina Gustavsson Introduction What is the state of contemporary European liberalism? According to an emergent literature on immigration and ethnic relations, this question has become increasingly diﬃcult to disentangle from the heated debate over how to handle the growing presence of Islam in Europe. Consider, for example, the wave of veil bans and mandatory citizenship tests for immigrants that swept across Europe at the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century. As we will see later in this apter, many of these measures promote a shared European identity of liberalism, rather than a speciﬁcally national one (Joppke 2004, 2007). Indeed, the largely secular majority seem to experience the growing Muslim immigrant minority as a threat not only to their national identity as Fren, English or German, but also, conspicuously, to their ideological identity as liberals (Sniderman et al. 2004; Sniderman and Hagendoorn 2007; Adamson et al. 2011; Triadaﬁlopoulos 2011). is is the baground against whi contemporary European liberalism must be understood. is apter takes a closer look at what is oen described as a repressive turn in European liberalism, a turn towards a tougher, exclusionary liberalism that is generally believed to have its roots in the Enlightenment liberalism of Immanuel Kant. e turbulent beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century has placed these concerns at the top of the agenda for European politicians, intellectuals and citizens alike. In Mar 2004, Europe experienced its ﬁrst large-scale Islamist terrorist aa along the lines of 9/11: the Madrid train bombings. In the same month, the Fren affaire du foulard, whi had been heatedly debated for over a decade, culminated in a legal ban on wearing the Muslim headscarf and other conspicuous religious symbols in public sools. Later that year, eo van Gogh, a Dut ﬁlm-maker and vehement critic of Islam, was murdered by a Muslim fundamentalist in an Amsterdam street – and before the year was out, the Dut populist Geert Wilders had founded the new self- avowedly liberal Freedom Party, whi advocates the banning of the ran and the Muslim veil in the name of liberty. In the subsequent year, 2005, Islamist terror stru London. A few months later, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad; according to the editor, this was an aempt to ﬁght ba against self-imposed censorship among liberal intellectuals and artists on the topic of religion. e publication sparked violent protests throughout the Muslim world as well as in European countries, most notably the UK. e cartoon controversy also gave rise to an intense European debate on freedom of spee and of religion, a debate that quily came to include the problematic topic of the Muslim veil. At the heart of this debate lurk the elusive nature of liberalism and its oen slippery core concepts of freedom and tolerance. e aim of this apter is to clarify the nuances of various types of liberalism – and the related ideals of freedom – that take centre stage in these debates. In the following analysis, I ﬁrst brieﬂy summarize the core aspects of liberalism, whi is best understood as a family name shared by a number of concepts at odds with one another. e subsequent section turns to consider the empirical rise of a repressive or exclusionary liberalism in Europe, most notably exempliﬁed by the recent surge in bans against the Muslim veil. I then return to political theory to understand the roots of this liberalism, whi are oen traced ba to the Enlightenment and its ideal of reﬂective autonomy. is is followed by a section on public opinion, in whi I use survey data to investigate the support for these diﬀerent ideals of liberty in European public opinion. Finally, I consider some recent critiques of the theoretical framework of ‘enlightenment liberalism’, suggesting that there is a need to focus in more depth on its neglected cousin: ‘romantic liberalism’. is results in a novel theoretical framework for assessing contemporary debates within liberalism. e liberal family e political theorist Miael Freeden proposes that liberalism exists in three forms: ﬁrst, in the world of abstract principles, there is liberal political philosophy; second, in the contemporary world of politics and debate, we ﬁnd liberalism as an ideology; and, third, in history, liberalism takes the shape of a certain narrative (Freeden 2004: 5). Because this apter is not an exercise in conceptual history or a semantic analysis of the use of the term ‘liberal’, we need not dwell on deﬁnitions of liberalism as a political label or historical concept. Instead, let us focus here on its ﬁrst shape: liberalism as a political philosophy.1 In the ﬁrst apter of The Making of Modern Liberalism, Alan Ryan suggests that the varied nature of liberal thought should discourage us from trying to establish exactly what liberalism is once and for all; our focus should instead be on liberalisms in the plural (Ryan 2012: 22). Nor do we here need to establish any more than the external borders of what I suggest we call the ‘liberal family’. In other words, we need a minimal deﬁnition of liberal political theory that excludes other families, su as conservative or socialist political theory, but still leaves room for considerable variation between the diﬀerent members of the liberal family. e lowest common denominator among the liberal family members is undoubtedly their overriding – critics would say obsessive – concern with individual liberty, as can indeed be deduced from the etymology of the word ‘liberalism’ itself. Under the section on liberalism in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy , the British philosopher Maurice Cranston laconically observes: ‘By deﬁnition a liberal is a man who believes in liberty’ (Cranston 1967: 459). More recently, Gerald Gaus began his book Contemporary Theories of Liberalism with the following words: e liberal tradition in politics is, ﬁrst and foremost, about individual liberty. Although its roots go far ba in the history of political thought, liberalism emerged as a distinct political theory as a call for freedom of spee and of thought. (Gaus 2003: 1) e author then goes on to quote the famous Oxfordian John Plamenatz, who said that freedom of thought ‘is an idea whi emerges slowly in the West in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and yet today, in the eyes of the liberal, it is this liberty whi is most precious of all’ (Gaus 2003: 1). Indeed, it is the defence of this liberty of the individual that we ﬁnd at the centre of the canonical works of liberal philosophy, su as John Loe’s Two Treatises of Government (Loe 2005 ), Benjamin Constant’s Principles of Politics Applicable to All Representative Governments (Constant 1999 ) and ﬁnally John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (Mill 1991 ). e state, liberal philosophers typically argue, should not concern itself with the fostering of good, virtuous citizens, but rather with upholding its citizens’ rights to cultivate themselves in the manner they see ﬁt. A crucial element of liberalism in this philosophical sense is thus that it seeks to prioritize the right over the good (Manent 1995: xvi). e reason I say ‘seeks’ is that, as we shall see later in this apter, many contemporary liberals concur with John Rawls that the liberalism of J. S. Mill, for example, builds on a certain conception of the good, a certain idea of what constitutes the best and highest life (Rawls 1993: 98). However, there is no doubt that Mill understood his purpose in On Liberty to be the separation of politics from the pursuit of the good life. His goal was undoubtedly to defend a separation between politics and ethics (albeit for ethical reasons, according to some interpreters).2 In summary, in the words of liberal theorist Brian Barry, the core of liberal political philosophy is the following: e basic idea of liberalism is to create a set of rights under whi people are treated equally in certain respects, and then to leave them to deploy these rights (alone or in association with others) in pursuit of their own ends. (Barry 2003: 538) With its declaration of this universal right to pursue one’s own good in one’s own way, and its links to a cosmopolitan view of justice and human rights, liberal philosophy is typically uncomfortable with the nationalist project, if not entirely in opposition to it. is is not to deny that liberalism historically developed in close alliance with nationalism throughout the nineteenth century; this is evident, for example, in the case of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805– 72), one of the central ﬁgures behind the uniﬁcation (il Risorgimento) of Italy, who was just as mu a commied liberal as he was a national romantic (Vincent 1997: 277). However, during the later part of the twentieth century contemporary liberal parties in Europe were consistently the least nationalistic and the most cosmopolitan and pro-European (Magone 2011: 356–9). Moreover, we are concerned here with liberalism as a political philosophy and how it has been invoked in debates, rather than with liberalism in history or in relation to party identiﬁcation. Of course, a few liberal theorists, most notably Will Kymlia and David Miller, have argued for the need to combine liberal principles with a sensitivity to the individual’s need to belong to a culture or nation (Kymlia 1989; Tamir 1993; Kymlia 1995; Miller 1995). Nevertheless, the majority of liberal theorists have remained lukewarm (if not altogether cold) in response to demands for national belonging or cultural similarity. It is fair to say that in liberal thought individual liberty typically takes priority over the need to identify with a given community, culture or nation (Beiner 2003). Liberalism in the European debate Hard-line trends in liberalism In the less philosophical and more empirical literature on immigration and citizenship, liberalism has been typically viewed as the ar-enemy of any political force that seeks to limit cultural and ethnic mixing, close national borders or diﬀerentiate citizenship (Holliﬁeld 1992; Soysal 1994). Yet, this opposition between liberalism on the one side and culturalism on the other has been increasingly allenged by recent events in European politics. Solars of immigration policy and ethnic relations have suggested that European liberalism is currently undergoing a major shi on the levels of both policy and discourse. ey claim that, rather than defeating nationalism, liberalism is now in the process of replacing it, quily assuming the role of the principal ideology of belonging in Europe today. e three main examples they return to are veil bans, mandatory civic integration tests and an increasingly harsh public debate that aracterizes Muslim immigrants as the intolerant ‘other’, for example in the Muhammad cartoon controversy of 2005 (Rostbøll 2009; Kostakopoulou 2010: 842–3; Rostbøll 2010; Adamson et al. 2011). It is worth nothing that these trends are oen viewed as examples of the alleged turn away from multiculturalism. However, while European politicians have certainly announced the ‘death of multiculturalism’, the extent to whi this rhetorical shi has been paralleled by a ange in policy is questionable (Kymlia 2010) – as is, indeed, the extent to whi multiculturalist policies can ever have been said to play an important role in (for example) republican France.3 In any case, what concerns us here is not the purported death of multiculturalism, but rather the birth of a new liberalism that plays a pivotal role in the harder line that many European governments have adopted towards immigrants and Muslim citizens.4 Adam Tebble has suggested that we are currently witnessing the rise of ‘identity liberalism’, a particularly aggressive and exclusionary version of the liberal ideology. Among his most vivid examples is the famous Dut immigration video from 2006 whi tests the liberalism of would-be immigrants by showing them pictures of topless women, young people smoking marijuana and gay men kissing ea other. is video certainly sends a strong message of the uncom-promisingly radical identity of Dut culture and the non-negotiable duty of all immigrants to adjust themselves to these liberal values (Tebble 2006: 474). Other solars have suggested that this new liberalism is inspired by Carl Smi’s view of politics as ‘based on the identity-constituting process of distinguishing between friends and enemies’. In the paradigm of this ‘Smiian liberalism’, immigration policy becomes a weapon in a civilizational struggle between ‘us’ and ‘the other’; neutrality and compromise are thus construed as impossibly naïve, since they represent the ﬁrst step down the treaerous path of losing one’s own cultural identity (Triadaﬁlopoulos 2011: 871). e Swiss minaret referendum vividly illustrates this toughened liberalism. In November 2009, a majority of 57.5 per cent of the Swiss electorate surprised mu of Europe by voting ‘yes’ in a referendum on a constitutional amendment banning the construction of minarets in Switzerland. Although at the time of the referendum there were only four minarets in Switzer land, the pro-ban campaign posters featured a Swiss ﬂag almost entirely covered by pointed bla minarets, together with the ominous ﬁgure of a burqa-clad woman. e minarets bore a conspicuous similarity to roet missiles, and their menacing presence on the Swiss ﬂag also invoked associations with the spread of some form of pestilence or infection spoiling the previously clean nation of Switzerland. Despite this overtly racist imagery, the pro-ban campaign presented itself as the defender of the universal values of liberalism, whi were portrayed as under threat from supposedly unenlightened Muslims (Lentin and Titley 2012: 128–31; Pra 2013: 198–200). Perhaps the crudest case of liberalism as an identity that diﬀerentiates enemy from friend can be found in the near-exhilaration with whi several inﬂuential liberal opinion-makers have reacted to Islamist terror aas. For example, the Fren nouveau philosophe Pascal Bru

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