GeoJournal (2006) 67:253–265 DOI 10.1007/s10708-007-9068-x
The political geography of religion: historical state-church relations in Europe and recent challenges Hans Knippenberg
Published online: 3 May 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
Abstract Historical processes of state formation and nation building are crucial for an understanding of the geography of religions and churches in Europe. Each country has developed its own model of statechurch relations, giving rise to a ‘bewildering variety’ as Grace Davie aptly remarks. The aim of this paper is to bring some order to this variety by developing a framework for the comparative study of church-state relations based on Stein Rokkan’s famous conceptual map and recent extensions of it to Central and Eastern Europe by John Madeley. According to that framework Europe has been divided into three monoconfessional (Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Eastern Orthodox) blocs and two multi-confessional culture belts from Northwest to Southeast, and from Northeast to Southeast. This historical pattern has been challenged by secularisation, which started with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution (Western Europe) and the Russian Revolution (Eastern Europe until the velvet revolutions of 1989/1991) and then became widespread after the ‘cultural revolutions’ of the 1960s. A second challenge has to do with globalisation and its consequences, such as massive immigration and the rise of immigrant religions, and in general deterritorialisation, which means the
H. Knippenberg (&) Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Prinsengracht 130, Amsterdam 1018 VZ, The Netherlands e-mail:
[email protected]
disembeddedness of religion from its national territory. A third challenge concerns reterritorialisation at other (supranational, regional, transnational, and local) scales, of which the new territorial order of the European Union seems to be the most important. Finally, this paper serves as an introduction to the case studies on church-state relations in this special issue.
Keywords Europe Geography of religions Nation building Political geography State-church relations State formation
Cuius regio, eius religio For centuries, the religious landscape of Europe was richly varied. That variety not only reflects the different convictions of the European citizens, but can also be traced back to (past and present) politicalgeographical constraints (Knippenberg 2005, 201– 203). The implementation of the well-known principle of the 1555 Augsburg Peace Treaty, cuius regio, eius religio, re-affirmed in 1648 (Peace Treaty of Westphalia), is still vital factor for a proper explanation of the geographical distribution of religions and churches. This illustrates the crucial importance of European state formation and the relationship between state and religion or state and church for the geography of religions and the religious
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landscape. Political-military developments had a major role in shaping the European map of religions and churches. However, as we all know, rulers in Europe, as in most parts of the Western world, no longer decide on the religion of their subjects. The legitimacy of the authority of the modern state is no longer derived from God, but from the nation. Rulers have been replaced by parliaments as the nation’s representative. Consequently, the different nations in Europe now decide on the relationship between state and church or state and religion, and state and church have become more separated. That does not mean, however, that religion has been banished from the political sphere or that nations have no religious connotations any more. What it does mean is that each European state has developed its own relationship between state and church or state and religion. These relationships were described in the words of the British sociologist Grace Davie (2000, p. 15) as ‘a bewildering variety’. The first aim of this paper is to bring some order to this variety by developing a framework for the comparative study of church-state relations based on Rokkan’s famous conceptual map and recent extensions of it to Central and Eastern Europe by Madeley (2003). According to that framework, Europe has been divided in three monoconfessional (Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Eastern Orthodox) blocs and two multi-confessional culture belts from Northwest to Southeast, and from Northeast to Southeast. The second aim of this paper is to elaborate on how this historical pattern has been challenged by more recent processes, which could be labelled as secularisation, globalisation, deterritorialisation, and reterritorialisation. Based on these aims, this paper provides a general framework for the case studies on church-state relations in this special issue.
A theoretical framework The well-known political scientist Stein Rokkan (1979, 1981; see Flora et al. 1999 for an overview of his work) tried to bring some order in these processes of state formation and nation building. In his conceptual map of Western Europe, Rokkan has constructed a typology based on two dimensions, which represent different types of state-economy and state-culture interactions, as well as two geographical
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axes (West-East and North-South respectively). The West-East axis differentiates conditions of state formation, the North-South axis the conditions of nation building. Others such as Seiler (1993) have tried to extend Rokkan’s map to the East, enabling them to interpret some of the early political experiences in East-Central Europe in terms of Rokkan’s dimensions. In a way, the first dimension (the state-economy dimension) represents the long-term geographical gulf between Eastern and Western Europe with EastCentral Europe as a sort of buffer zone. In 1500, there was already a fundamental difference between the agrarian societies in the West and in the East of Europe (Blum 1978). In the West, serfdom and feudalism had almost disappeared. In the East, however, serfdom and feudalism continued, or were even re-introduced and continued to exist until the second half of the nineteenth century. The commercialisation of agriculture, industrial and commercial growth had strengthened the economic power of urban middle classes in the West and the political power of cities. As a result, there was increased differentiation in the West between the political and the economic system, between state and market, between the monarch and civil society. In the East this differentiation did not occur or was far less advanced and all the economic and political power remained in the hands of the landowners. In fact this concentration of economic and political power continued after the establishment of the communist regimes in the East. These different historical developments deeply affected state formation and nation building. In the West relatively modern, urbanised (small) stable states were formed. The East was the scene of the great (multi-ethnic) empires. In the West, state formation preceded nation building while in the East national states were formed when the empires in the East collapsed as a consequence of a rising ethnonational consciousness (Smith 1991). The second dimension (the state-culture dimension) refers to the state-church relationships, which developed after the Reformation. In Rokkan’s model, the Reformation is interpreted as the first major step toward the definition of territorial nations. Lutherans and Calvinists broke with the supra-territoriality of the Roman Church and merged the ecclesiastical bureaucracies with the secular territorial ones, thus
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accentuating the cultural and religious significance of the territorial borders (Flora et al. 1999, p. 144). This second dimension divides the European peninsula once dominated by the Roman Church into three slices from North to South: Protestant domination (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland), Protestant domination with a significant Catholic minority (United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland), and Catholic domination (France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Austria, Belgium). The North-South axis reflects the conditions for rapid cultural integration and nation building at state level: the early closing of the borders in the Protestant North versus the continued supra-territoriality of the Church in the Catholic South (Rokkan 1979, p. 80). Recently, John Madeley (2003) elaborated on Rokkan’s ideas and expanded his conceptual map further to the East using Rokkan’s model to construct a theoretical framework for the comparative analysis of church-state relations. By doing so, it was also necessary to expand Rokkan’s model further backwards and forwards in time. While Rokkan starts with the Reformation and the ensuing conflicts over the cultural-religious identity of the emerging nationstates in the sixteenth century, a natural beginning for an all-Europe model would be 1054 when the schism between Western and Eastern Christianity took place. While Rokkan ends with the establishment of universal and equal electoral democracy and the ‘freezing’ of party alternatives, in most countries during the Interbellum a natural end of an expanded model would be the (re-)opening of Central and Eastern Europe to democracy from 1989 onwards. Rokkan died in 1979 and therefore did not experience the fall of the Berlin wall and the opening of the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe for so many years. The end of this division would have forced him to think more about the long-term effects of Europe’s historical boundary-building, such as the division of the Roman Empire in an Eastern and Western part, the confrontation between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, the long isolation of the emerging Muscovite Empire from Western Europe, the carving-up of the East under the despotic Ottoman Empire, the autocratic Russian Empire, and the absolutist Austrian Empire, and finally the totalitarian Soviet Empire (Flora et al. 1999, p. 88). Neither did he foresee the scope and speed of the European unification.
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In order to reduce the complexity of an expandedto-the-East model, Madeley removes the stateeconomy dimension from the original Rokkan model and substitutes it with a confessional dimension which is, hypothetically at least, relevant and of wider significance in identifying and defining differences in state-church relations between East and West in Europe (Madeley 2003, p. 26; see also Prodomou 1996). This new confessional dimension divides Eastern Orthodox Europe from Western Roman-Catholic and Protestant Europe and in fact corresponds to Huntington’s (1996) divide between Western and Orthodox civilisations. Others have argued that this divide ‘threatens to become a new watershed equally as imposing as the Iron Curtain’ (Kolossov and O’Loughlin 1998, p. 265) or even ‘a far more fundamental division… than the relatively recent opposition between communist and noncommunist Europe in the post-war period’ (Davie 2000, p. 3). In general, church-state relations differ greatly between Eastern and Western Christianity, and this divide can be expected to have direct implications and consequences not only for political conflicts in the European states, but also for the religious landscapes involved. Figure 1 shows Madeley’s adaptation of Rokkan’s conceptual map as established by Flora et al. (1999) in its most complete form, and extended to Eastern Europe. Somewhat surprisingly, Madeley put Roman Catholic Poland and Lithuania on the East side of the East-West fault-line, probably because both territories were under the influence of the Russian Empire. The adapted conceptual map indicates the significance of three historical mono-confessional cultures blocs: a Lutheran North, a Catholic South, and an Orthodox East, divided by two historical multi-confessional culture belts, one from NorthWest to South-East, and one from North-East to South-East. Figure 2 is a rough map in which this historical pattern, with its striking continuity (see Knippenberg 2005 for more details), is superposed on the current political map of Europe. Figure 1 of Kocsis’ paper on Hungary in this special issue provides a more detailed version of this map. This map reflects the breaks in the unity of European Christianity, the 1054 Schism and the 1517 Reformation, which were responsible for the development of at least three ‘entangled religious Europes’ as Re´mond (1999, pp. 20–23) called it: Catholic
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GeoJournal (2006) 67:253–265 Ge o p ol i t i c a l type>>
S e aw a r d peripheries
Se awar d e mp ire n a t io n s
B eyon d reach of Rome: P rote stan t> >
I ce l a n d : f r o m 13C under Norway; from 16C, Denmark
← Norway
Territories once under Roman Empire and/or i nf l u e n ce b y Roman law: P ro tes tant
Scotland: united w i t h E ng l a n d 1707 W a l e s: s u b j e c t e d 15C
Re ligi ou sl y Mixed: P ro t e st a nt & Catholic
I r el a n d : s ubjected 16-17C
C atholic
CounterReformation Territories: Catholic
B rit tany : s u b j e ct e d 1 6 C
City-states
D e n ma r k →
Engl and : co ns o lidated 11 C, m a j or ov e r s e a s empire 13-16C
H an s e a t i c League: loose fede rati on of ci ties 1 3-16C
Landward empire nat ion s
Landward buffers
Landward empires
