Das Abendland : The politics of Europe’s religious borders

Into Europe, into its borders

Borders and boundaries are constructions that create, shape, and define collective identities and the feeling of belonging to a political community. The idea of Europe, the claim for a European identity, and the socio-political construction of Europe throughout its history, has always been based on the definition of borders and boundaries between “us” and “them.” After all, borders and boundaries make the collective identity of social groups and communities and symbolically define the “we” group as different from strangers (Andrén, Lindkvist, Söhrman, et al., 2017; Baarth, 1969; Cohen, 1985; Delanty, 2006: 187; Paasi, 1996). Borders and boundaries—as well as processes of bordering, de-bordering, and re-bordering—are “central to any understanding of the social” and shape perceptions of the world (Rumford, 2006: 166). Borders and boundaries can even be considered more important than identity, or can be rather seen as the forces that establish the basic essential form of categorization and classification which identities adopt to differentiate themselves from outsiders (Newman and Paasi, 1998).

Defining Europe and its identity throughout history has constantly impinged upon the creation of borders or, more specifically, “soft” borders—which indicate a pre-institutional socio-cultural reality—that in turn have provided the mechanism for the creation of “hard” legal and institutional borders (Eder, 2006: 255–56). Religion was central in the bordering process of medieval, pre-modern, and early modern Europe. A complex and rarely peaceful interaction between Christianity (Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodoxy), Judaism, and Islam shaped the continent and defined its identity. The death of God and the age of secularization have not dispelled religion from Europe, its identity, and its politics. In fact, religion has regained a critical role within the public sphere, the tide of secularization has been arrested (Berger, 1999; Casanova, 1994), and the question of Europe’s religious borders is at the center of the political agenda—perhaps in a more ambiguous and complex way than before. In other words, Europe’s religious borders are today even more intrusive and critical than ever. They challenge established forms of political legitimacy, influence politics and policies, and demand a reformulation of the rights and duties of citizenship. An assessment of the old-new religious borders of Europe is of critical importance to understand where Europe is, what it might be, and what it might become. Thus, the aim of this article is not to present new empirical material but to discuss and review the existing literature on the topic and put well-known facts and events into a new framework: to problematize and re-conceptualize current European politics from the perspective of religion. We seek to map the interactions between religion and politics, and between religious meanings and the structure of power, political practices, and political language—interactions that are often below the conceptual radar of scholars, observers, and politicians.

In what follows, we argue that the religious borders that mark Europe as a more or less successful imagined community (Anderson, 1983) are multiple. There are four religious borders, which intersect with, conflict, and overlap with other cultural, ethnic, regional, and national borders: north-western Europe is Protestant, southern Europe is Catholic, the East is Orthodox, and the South and Near East are Muslim. Thus, often-invoked notions such as a clear historical separation of the Occident and Orient as in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) are really too simple to capture the actual complexity of Europe’s religious borders. Armando Salvatore (2016: 30) has contested “the quite lazy visions conveyed to us by several generations of Orientalists,” demanding instead that we recognize the far more complex geographical distribution of Islamdom. A more sophisticated interpretation would see the cradle of Islam within the wider area of the “Nile-to-Oxus region” (Hodgson, 1993: 105). We wish to contribute to the dismantling and overcoming of lazy and established Orientalist visions by recognizing the complex map of Europe’s religious borders and highlighting some of its “hot-spots,” and by foregrounding non-Orientalist tendencies that emerge from such a complex situation. Breaking with consolidated and narrow frameworks, this article aims to trigger a discussion of what alternatives to the status quo are possible and desirable. In short, we want to pose the question of what kind of profile the future Europe might have. We do not have an easy answer, but understanding and problematizing the religious borders of Europe is key to making sense of contemporary politics and to begin a search for a roadmap that would enable Europe—a continent increasingly diverse in a world increasingly interconnected—to escape the tragedies of the past and the predicament of the present.

Europe against Islam

With the recent large-scale Muslim migration, the refugee crisis, and terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels, Nice, Berlin, and London, Islamophobia has increasingly gathered momentum. Political discourse, especially but not necessarily on the far-right, has engaged with Islam from the perspective of religious borders, in order to defend Europe against a dangerous threat. We give several examples below.

First, European Union (EU) and member-states policies on refugees and asylum seekers vary greatly. In Germany, Angela Merkel’s government originally endorsed an open-door policy, whose overt aim was to integrate immigrants into the German social fabric. Perhaps the covert aim was influenced by a fear of Greek islands, which are seen as part of Europe’s frontier, being overwhelmed. Such a policy, however, was modified after the 2016 Berlin attack and in response to criticism from within and outside Merkel’s party. Other countries such as Denmark and Sweden have implemented restrictive migratory measures. In the summer of 2015, the government of Poland decided to select refugees from the Middle East on the base of their Christian faith (Wasik and Foy, 2015). Other countries soon followed the same line, applying a “Christian test” to migrants and discriminating against individuals and groups that had no Christian heritage. Countries situated on the main route of migration—Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and Macedonia—have erected razor-wire fences or have closed their borders to defend themselves and Europe from what they perceive as a civilizational threat.

Second, far-right parties and populist forces everywhere in Europe have mobilized protests and demonstrations against the alleged “Islamization” or Islamic “rape” of Europe (as depicted in the infamous cover of a conservative Polish magazine at the beginning of 2016). They have opposed the building of mosques and minarets and rejected the politics of integration in favor of immigrants coming from Muslim countries. The combative Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has repeatedly warned that Islam can potentially destroy Europe’s Christian roots and values. In general terms, it has been argued that far-right politics use Christianity as an identity marker rather than as a faith, putting Christendom above Christianity (Marzouki, et al., 2016), and defending Christian spaces rather than “actual Christian values” (McDonnell, 2016: 21; Roy, 2016; Stanley, 2016). Occasionally, far right movements have described the defense of European religious values with some ambiguities in terms of its “Judeo-Christian heritage.” Insofar as the Qur’an has recognized Jesus as a prophet and Mary as his mother, we should perhaps speak of the “Judeo-Christian-Islamic” heritage. Far-right parties have often found themselves at odds with the official position of the Catholic Church as well as other churches or with other groups that have welcomed migrants in the name of religious values such as fraternity, compassion, and charity.

Right-wing parties and movements, as well as liberal forces, have voiced deep anxieties about admitting Turkey to the EU. Liberal Europeans have argued that Turkey’s admission to Europe would put secular values in jeopardy (those such as gender equality and individual freedom). In contrast, for religious Europeans Turkey is seen as a serious threat to the Christian roots and identity of Europe. And yet liberal, secular, and “progressive” voices against Turkey’s accession to the EU could not completely hide the traces of a narrative of a “civilizational threat.” Liberal intellectuals, observers from different sides of the political and cultural spectrum, and leftist and Christian Democratic politicians have time and again claimed that Turkey lacks “cultural affinity” and does not share European, or more generally, western values and history (Yegenoglu, 2006: 253–254; Levi, 2015).

As Talal Asad (2003: 164) has written, “in the contemporary European suspicion of Turkey, Christian history, enshrined in the tradition of international law, is being re-invoked in secular language as a foundation of an ancient identity.” To put it differently, Gerard Delanty (1995: 151) has argued that the issue of “cultural incompatibility” is emerging here. Thus, there is a striking continuity between the old and the new discourse of Christendom. More precisely, the attempts at an identification of Europe through borders are in fact a re-identification through the repositioning of older borders. Turkey has taken the role of the “Other” of Europe (Neuman, 1999). But the Turkish Other is in fact “an archetype of boundary construction” disconnecting and distinguishing Europe “from the rest of the world” (Eder, 2006: 263); it is the “Other” that, since the Middle Age has been perceived and represented as the political, cultural, and existential threat to Europe. The debate on Turkey’s accession to Europe has revived the old narrative of Europe’s southern and eastern borders where Europe “was and still has to be defended from its threatening Other” (264). In the course of the debate, the difference between Christianity and Islam has arisen from its historical slumber, turning the fight for Europe, and for what it might mean, into a battle at the southern and eastern borders over contrasting and conflicting, yet constitutive narratives. The cultural and religious divide is based on a narrative construction and symbolic articulation, and not, or not exclusively, on any rational argument. The modern struggle has transformed Turks into Muslims.

Another set of issues relating to the place of Islam in Europe falls in the legal realm. In April 2016, Latvia banned niqabs and burqas—despite the fact that only a handful of women wear veils in the entire country—mirroring a similar ban implemented in France since 2011. Latvia’s Ministry of Justice called the ban a “preventive” act to protect Latvian culture and tradition. A month later, in May 2016, a Swiss regional authority compelled two Muslim students aged 14 and 15 to shake their teacher’s hand at the beginning and end of lessons, following a longstanding Swiss tradition that is a sign of respect. Previously, a controversial exemption from such a tradition had been granted to the two teenage brothers whose interpretation of the Qur’an prevented them touching a member of the opposite sex. More generally, Shari’a tribunals have spread in Europe and in the United States. Clearly, the growth of the Muslim community will also increase the demand for Shari’a tribunals and arbitration at least in domestic disputes. The resulting growth of legal pluralism, often seen as an erosion of national sovereignty, is both an important practical issue and an interesting topic in the sociology of law and jurisprudence. How will Shari’a be integrated into the European legal system and banking arrangements? Can Shari’a be modernized to meet the challenge of secularity and modernity? Critics of “creeping” Shari’a in particular and legal pluralism in general are typically concerned about the erosion of sovereignty (Cohen, 2012).

The debate on the European Constitution and the clash between liberal and progressive values on the one hand, and more traditional/religious views on the other, is another point that belongs to the legal dimension. Another crucial issue is the question of citizenship—or how to integrate Muslims into Europe through it (Schiffauer, 2005; Turner, 2007, 2011). This is important to understand: the identities and associations of individuals in modernity are often fragmented around secular citizenship, ethnic identity, and religious membership. One might argue that this split between secular citizenship within the state and religious membership in the church goes back to St Paul and St Augustine; but in the modern world of global labor markets and global migration the question is much more complicated. Generally speaking, religious membership is transnational while citizenship, arising on the back of state sovereignty, is national and exclusive. Various proposals for the modification of citizenship have been suggested in the social science literature—semi-citizenship, flexible citizenship, post-national citizenship—but the debate remains controversial and ridden with tensions and ambiguities.

Europe as das Abendland

In all these issues, apart the semantic and linguistic conflation and confusion—between Islam, Muslim, Arabs, fundamentalism, and terrorism—what it is striking in this persistent anti-Islam narrative is its “religious” bottom line. The question of Europe’s core values and the place of Islam in Europe are framed and seen through the paradigm of religion, making it become a significant part of a larger “quest for a European identity” (Betz and Meret, 2009: 313), and thus for a “re-bordering” of Europe. This is not a new phenomenon. In fact, a central recurrent aspect in the history of Europe’s self-representation since its foundation has been the construction of Islam as a “constitutive outside” (Derrida, 1973, 1988; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 127–134; see also Cardini, 2000; Delanty, 1995: 9; Hay, 1957; Hourani, 1991; White, 2000: 74; Yegenoglu, 2006: 247–248). Current phenomena such as the migration wave and the refugee crisis are seen and depicted as a threat to Christian European civilization, not dissimilar to the Arab (in the 7th and 8th centuries) and the Ottoman (in the 16th and 17th centuries) invasions. Now as in the past, the proponents of these views maintain that Europe must be defended from the Islamization of the continent. This primitive scheme does not take into account the historical examples of peaceful co-existence and creative exchanges between the two faiths—in almost all countries in the Middle East, as well as in Spain, Sicily, the Balkans, and the Polish Commonwealth (in which the first Muslim Tatars settlers arrived in the 14th century).

In this context, Germany and Austria have seen the resurgence of a once common but more recently discarded term: das Abendland. The term refers to a German debate about Europe, which unfolded especially from the late 1910s to the early 1960s. Translated rather imprecisely as “the Occident” or the “West,” the literal translation of das Abendland is quite poetic: “the Evening Land,” or the place where the sun sets. Far-right parties and movements in Germany and Austria have time and again used the term as a synonym for Europe and its Christian identity: “Abendland in Christian Hands” is the central rallying cry of the Austrian Freedom Party, in which Norbert Hofer came close to winning the presidential elections in 2016. The term is also part of the name of the German nationalist and anti-Islam movement PEGIDA (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, or “Patriotic European against the Islamization of the Abendland”). For right-wing activists, the Abenland and its kindred notions of political stability, prosperity, and order are seriously challenged by the “Islamization of Europe,” which threatens to turn the continent into a realm of chaos, war, and poverty.

Outside German-speaking Europe no other parties, movements, or politicians refer directly and consciously to the word Abendland, the meaning of which is untranslatable. Yet, everywhere in Europe, the rhetoric of far-right parties as well as the whole public discourse of Europe as a Christian entity that must be defended from the political and existential threat of Islam are profoundly reminiscent and imbued with the symbolism of the Abendland (Forlenza, 2018). This is important to understand: the Abendland trope has not only reappeared in German-speaking Europe but also, under different terms, in other European countries, to mean a specific Christian-conservative understanding of Europe.

The term and concept of Abendland emerged in the context of medieval Europe. At the time, however, the term had merely a geographical significance, although it soon began to assume a cultural connotation (for a conceptual history of the term Abendland, see Conze, 2005; Faber, 1979; Forlenza, 2017: 263–266; Pöpping, 2002; Schild, 1999). In the 19th-century German Romanticism, the Abendland trope became ideologically loaded; it referred to Europe as a community of people that first emerged in antiquity and then coalesced in the medieval period under the force of Christianity: the Holy Roman Empire. The 19th century ideologically loaded meaning of Abendland implied a conscious differentiation from the South-East (the non-Christian realm, primarily Islam, but also Russia). A crucial aspect was also the reference to the medieval period, and thus to the pre-Reformation era. The 19th-century call for the Abendland was in fact a call for a re-Catholicization of Europe; it was a Catholic project hostile to Protestantism.

The term Abendland became a political catchword after the First World War, with the publication of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (poorly translated as The Decline or sometimes The Downfall of the West). Spengler had a Protestant background. Yet, the Abendland was appropriated by a group of German Catholic thinkers to reimagine Europe as a civilizational organic order. These Catholic thinkers advocated the resurrection of Carolingian Europe, whose timeless religious and spiritual values were seen as the real and only viable alternative to the materialism of Russia and America.

National Socialism preferred the symbolism of the Reich and Mitteleuropa to the Abendland trope. However, the Abendland did not disappear completely from German public discourse. In particular, in the last years of Second World War, the term became a buzzword of Nazi propaganda. Hitler, in this reading, was the heir of Charlemagne, and the Nazi movement claimed to be the historical force called to defend Europe and the West against Jews and Soviet Communism.

In the context of the intellectual reorientation after the end of the Second World War, German society reverted to concepts not polluted by Nazism. The Abendland idea blossomed once more. The focus was on the renewal of a Christian, supranational European community—in which Germany could find its place on the basis of shared religious values—and the “spiritual reconstruction” of the world “shattered” by the atheism of Nazism (Forlenza, 2017: 271). With the onset of the Cold War, the Abendland assumed a strong anti-communist tone. Consequently, “the Abendland’s emphasis on Christianity as a civilizational link prevailed over the Catholic critiques of Luther and the Reformation” (282). Thus, Catholics and Protestants could make a common front under the umbrella of the Abendland, which came to embody (western) European-Christian superiority over the un-Christian East. After all, the Abendland was a “sufficiently diffuse and imprecise” symbol, allowing “multiple forms of appropriation” and “appealing to different constituencies” due to its flexibility (282).

After the Second World War and through the early 1960s, the Abendland trope spilled over the border of West Germany. Its German proponents met several times with politicians and intellectuals from Austria, France, and Spain to elaborate a continental plan for Europe-as-Abendland. Crucially, as we will see below, after the Second World War the Abendland trope was also picked up by the Catholic-Christian Democratic founding fathers of Europe—the German Konrad Adenauer, the French Robert Schuman and the Italian Alcide De Gasperi—who imagined the process of integration as the reenactment of the spiritual unity of the continent against the threat coming again from East, but this time in the shape of the enormous Bolshevik enemy (Forlenza, 2017).

The Abendland has outlived Christian Democracy and the Cold War, and in contemporary European politics it functions as a marker for the definition of the borders of “Europe” through a southern or southern-eastern external “Other”: Islam, Turkey, citizens of non-EU countries, and refugees.

From Orientalism to the multiple religious borders of Europe

For many scholars, the continuous references to Christianity in European politics—which comes predominantly but not exclusively from the extreme right—and the civilizational perspective embedded in the discourse of Europe-as-Abendland rearticulates the idea of Orientalism as exposed by Said (1978). As Roger Brubaker has argued, the distinction between Christianity and Islam is located in “a developmental time” and in political, cultural, and geographic spaces. It is also “mapped onto a series of normatively charged oppositions: between liberal and illiberal, individualist and collectivist, democratic and authoritarian, West and East, modern and backward, and secular and religious.” Thus, Christianity (or better Christendom) is invoked as the “civilizational ground” of secularism (Brubaker, 2017: 1200). Secularism is a value to defend because it grows on Christian soil. Yet, Orientalism does not reflect the present condition of Europe anymore; it is too simplistic to describe the current condition of European politics and does not capture the complexity of Europe’s borders.

There are other religious borders that shape alternative and contrasting narratives of what Europe is and what it might be—borders that also shape policies, national and international politics, and relations of power.

For example, at the eastern borders of Europe, the first schism of Christianity, mixing and meshing with geo-political and socio-cultural issues, still generates instances of civilizational excitement. Russia has a complex relationship with Europe-as-Abendland. Vladimir Putin has embraced Orthodoxy in a nationalist vein. The head of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has repeatedly claimed that Russia is the last remaining bastion of the true Christian faith (and civilization), launching a sort of holy war against Islam (making common front with Putin). Religion plays a critical role in shaping Russian domestic and international politics. Likewise, the ROC has a critical role in shaping the Russian political system and sustaining the mission of Great Russia under the firm direction of Putin. Putin and his political elite move in close coordination with the ROC to sacralize Russian national identity. This is a fundamental factor that influences crucial aspects of contemporary Russian politics—from its authoritarian drift to its international attitudes and behavior.

The collaboration between the ROC and Russia—based on a theologically inflected vision of Russian exceptionalism—is in fact reminiscent of the pre-revolutionary time of the Czar, who was seen as God’s chosen absolute ruler and who embodied the unique set of values of Russian Orthodoxy. In The Clash of Civilization, Samuel Huntington argued that it was only in the West that the secular and the sacred are separated. Elsewhere in the world, the situation is very different. “In Islam,” he wrote “God is Caesar; in China and Japan, Caesar is god; in Orthodoxy, God is Caesar’s junior party” (Huntington, 1996: 70).

The Soviet Union wreaked havoc on the Church (Ramet, 1993). Soon after the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the ROC began to work to reestablish its role in Russian society. The ROC could take advantages of the fertile and receptive terrain created with the spiritual vacuum that followed the dissolution of Soviet atheism. Yet, the ROC had to compete with the groups of Western missionaries—Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witness—who arrived in Russia to re-evangelize and re-sacralize the atheist nation. In response to this, in 1997 the ROC convinced the Russian government to introduce a law that restricted the religious freedom of “foreign” faiths and confessions. This put the ROC back in its unique and enviable role as an active maker and fabricator of the emerging national culture (Greely, 1994; Kääriänen and Furman, 2000; Papkov, 2004; Sudo, 2005).

Russian nationalism went hand in hand with the growing influence of the ROC on society and the simultaneous disappearance of other confessions. Official political support in favor of the ROC triggered the process that led to increasing restrictions on the rights of citizenship and to the weakening of the fledgling Russian democracy. Religious freedom is usually the first freedom banned by authoritarian political authorities; its demise signals that the political-cultural atmosphere is polluted and that other freedoms will be soon questioned.

In this context, when Putin took power, he understood the role of the ROC in boosting nationalism. He also saw that the ROC shared his vision on the role of post-Cold War Russia in Europe and the world. Thus, he favored the ROC in many ways—for example passing a law that returned to the ROC all the properties seized in the Soviet years, or ordering state-owned and controlled firms to fund the reconstruction of churches destroyed during Soviet times. Putin must have been quite pleased when Kirill (the “patriarch of Moscow and all Rus”) declared on the eve of the 2012 presidential election that “the prosperity and stability” that Russia had enjoyed with Putin in power was a “miracle of God” (Soroka, 2016).

The ideological cement of the alliance between Putin and the ROC represents the sacralized vision of Russia national identity and Russian exceptionalism (Agadjanian, 2017; Fisher, 2012; Knox, 2005). To the proponents of this ideology, Russia is neither Western, European nor Asian; it is a unique political community imbued with a unique set of values and principles that are divinely inspired. This view is clearly hierarchical and organic: the state rules, the ROC supports the state, and Russians follow the state and the church.

It is precisely this ideological construct that has provided the justification for Putin’s repression of his opponents, as well as for the ROC’s active collaboration with the Kremlin in the suppression of dissenting civil and religious groups. Russian exceptionalism and the influence of the ROC also shape Russian foreign politics (Blitt, 2011; Coyer, 2015; Pomerantsev, 2012). The mission of the Kremlin is to expand its influence and authority over Eurasia through a strong central state and political-military means in close collaboration with the ROC, which acts as the cultural weapon of the Russian nation. To the proponent of Russian exceptionalism—Putin and his circle, Kirill and his collaborators, and intellectuals such as Alexander Dugin—the conflict between Russia and the West is a religious and spiritual struggle. Europe’s wars of religion did not end in 1648.

Ukraine: Moments of religious and political electricity

These political and religious developments in Russia have been particularly evident in the Ukrainian crisis. Once again, religion is not the only thing at play here; it is however, as recent studies have highlighted, a central aspect of the crisis that intersects and interacts in various ways with other features of national and international politics (Kozelsky, 2014; Suslov, 2016; Wanner, 2015). The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has overtly supported Kiev. Most fighters on both sides of the war are Eastern Orthodox. But some fighters, especially on the pro-Russian side, see the war as the last episode in the ancient struggle and rivalry between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism. The war in Ukraine is a civil, not a religious war. But precisely because it is a “civil” war, the conflict both conceals and unveils a spiritual and not just a political fracture. The clash is between two Christian civilizations: on one side (the Atlantic), there is the secularized Christian-Catholic West, which in the effort to separate church and state has been extreme in implementing the principle of “Give to Caesar” by reducing faith to the private sphere and denying it a space in public life. On the other side, there is a re-enactment of Moscow’s Third Rome caesaropapism, inherited from Byzantium, which wants to reaffirm and revitalize the religious presence in society subjugating it to a political plan of imperial rebirth.

When Pope Francis and Putin met in 2015, the clash between the two borders, the eastern and the western boundaries of Christianity, was played out fully. The topic of the meeting was “specific international problems,” or the situation in Ukraine as seen from a religious perspective. Ukrainian Greek Catholics abandoned Orthodoxy in 1595–1596, returning their obedience to Rome but keeping the Byzantine rite. Moscow has always seen this move as the most specious maneuver: the Trojan horse to export Western Catholicism into Eastern Orthodoxy. For Putin and the Orthodox patriarch Kirill, the 1595 move is the original sin, the religious rather than political fracture of (Christian) Europe in two. It was, in Putin’s eyes, the first step towards an association with the EU, with a surprising convergence between economy and liturgy. The Ukrainian Greek Catholics joined Rome, but kept their own rites. Today the Ukraine signed the association agreement with the EU (and the West) but without losing its own administrative and bureaucratic liturgy, and more importantly without losing monetary independence.

The East versus the secularization of the West

The border between Orthodoxy and western European Christianity (Catholicism and Protestantism) has generated numerous confrontational issues on many different levels. The Greek Orthodox Churches and the Orthodox churches of Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia are the most outspoken critics of secularism and the moral decadence of Europe and more generally the West, which they see primarily as a product of the weakness of Western Christianity, and an inevitable consequence of the (Western specifically liberal) separation of church and state.

Thus, the Orthodox churches in Europe joined the struggle for recognition of Christianity in the European constitution, but with even more zeal than the Catholic Church and some of the Protestant churches in northern Europe. The Orthodox vision of Europe is much more anti-modern, anti-Enlightenment, and anti-liberal than the Catholic vision no less the Protestant one. As the Russian Metropolitan Kirill put it in 2001, “liberal ideas are diametrically opposed to Christianity” (Ramet, 2006: 165).

The official representatives of the Eastern Orthodox churches, with the exception of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, have been critical and outspoken in their opposition to universal human rights. The bishop of Athens Christodoulos repeatedly spoke out against human rights, condemning them as a Western Christian heresy, and insisting that granting homosexual couples the same rights as heterosexual couples would be equivalent to legalizing a sin. The Orthodox Romanian Church waged a battle against the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, prior to Romania’s EU accession and ratification of the charter. Until then, homosexuality had been criminalized in the Romanian penal code. The cancellation of this provision was a prerequisite for Romania’s accession to the EU—much to the anger and disappointment of the Romanian Orthodox Church (Ramet, 2006: 167–69). Homosexuality and gay rights have become one of the contested topics between Orthodoxy and liberal human rights supported EU institutions and charters. The rejection of LGBT rights has come to epitomize for many Orthodox churches their opposition to the liberal human rights regime as a whole (Stoeckl, 2014: 12–13). The junior ecclesiastical ranks of Orthodox churches everywhere in former eastern Europe are even more vociferous against Rome, the Papacy, Catholicism, and western Europe and continually accuse them bending to secular principles as well as being weak in the defense of Christianity against other cultures. The point here is that Abendland did not include Orthodoxy; it was opposed to Orthodoxy as much as it was opposed to Islam. The key word of Orthodoxy is eastern, or better “eastern border.” This is a Christianity that had battled for centuries with Western Roman Catholicism just as much as it has battled with Islam.

The reasons for such an opposition and, more generally, for the Euro-skeptical attitudes of Orthodox churches are several. First, Orthodox Christianity did not have to deal with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the secular forces of modernity in the same way as Catholicism, which had to come to terms with democracy, political modernity, and human rights (Forlenza and Thomassen, 2018; Forlenza and Turner, 2018; Moyn, 2015; Thomassen and Forlenza, 2016). Conservative and anti-modern attitudes within Catholicism have never disappeared. Especially in the matter of sexual and family life, conservative religious attitudes are gaining ground in various European countries—Poland, Italy, France—but also within many sectors of the church hierarchies (Turner and Forlenza, 2016). This is notwithstanding the fact that the Gospel, as it has been argued, “requires that the naturalness of the family be trumped by the supernatural demands of faith” (Beiner, 2011: 45). Yet, the Second Vatican Council profoundly transformed the Catholic attitude toward political modernity, democracy, and human rights. This also had global consequences: the “third wave of democratization” (southern Europe in the 1970s, Latin America and the Philippines in the 1980s, and Poland in the late 1980) was mainly a “Catholic” wave (Casanova, 1996; Huntington, 1991).

Drawing on the work of David Martin (1978), José Casanova (2006: 11) has explained the outcome of western European clash between religion and secularism—between Catholic Christianity on one side, and modern science, capitalism, and state on the other—as follows:

the Enlightenment critique of religion found here ample resonance: the secularist genealogy of modernity was constructed as a triumphant emancipation of reason, freedom, and worldly pursuits from the constraints of religion; and practically every “progressive” European social movement from the time of the French Revolution to the present was informed by secularism.

Second, in contrast to the hierarchical and transnational nature of Catholicism, autocephaly (the right of each Orthodox dioceses or groups of dioceses to elect its own bishops) does not resonate well with European integration and the idea of pooling or even giving up national sovereignty. Over time, autocephaly has become a principle of almost absolute autonomy of the national churches, but at the same time involves a close connection between the church and the state. Thus, to the extent that the EU has expanded eastward, it has been confronted with an anti-liberal and anti-Western vision of Christianity. If the future of Europe involves some reconciliation with the East, it will be a troubled future (Byrnes and Katzenstein, 2006; Haynes, 2009; Leustean, 2012).

The Border within: Protestant versus Catholic Europe

The eastern/western border, which simultaneously unites and divides, is one part of the story. Another crucial part is the border that fractured the unity of medieval Christian Europe as the Abendland in 1517, when the Augustinian friar Martin Luther nailed his criticism of church corruption to the door of the Wittenberg castle church. Four hundred and ninety-nine years after Luther initiated the Reformation, forever changing Christianity and the world, Pope Francis advocated atonement and reconciliation. As a journalist reported, “visiting the cities of Lund and Malmo in southern Sweden for a joint commemoration of the Reformation, the Pope observed the anniversary of Luther’s protest against the sale of indulgences by noting the beneficial impact it had on Catholicism” (Anderson, 2016). Is it a time for reconciliation? Possibly. Yet, the Reformation still functions as a divisive boundary generating symbolism, pervading discourses and mentalities, and shaping politics.

The process of European integration was initiated by Catholic politicians, who were able to inscribe into the institutions of Europe some of the central tenets of more traditional Catholic social thought, such as subsidiarity (then encoded in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty) and personalism. ¹ Historian Wolfram Kaiser (2007) has rightly argued that the networks of transnational Christian Democracy shaped the process of integration. And transnational Christian Democracy in the early postwar years was fully controlled by Catholics. ² Political Catholicism possessed the transnational network that would support Jean Monnet’s plan for coal and steel integration—the beginning of a process that culminated in the EU. Furthermore, as we have mentioned above, visions of Europe as Abendland elaborated in the 1920s by German Catholic intellectuals and philosophers exerted a strong influence on the language, thought, and vision of the Catholic-Christian Democratic “founding fathers” of the process of European integration (Schuman, Adenauer, and De Gasperi; see again Forlenza, 2017).

At the beginning of this process, the Protestant Christian Democratic parties of the Netherlands considered integration as the rebirth of Catholic-Vatican Europe, a new Holy Roman Empire, representing a Counter-Reformation or indeed a Catholic plot (Kaiser, 2007: 262; Zwart, 1997). The same skepticism was one of the reasons why Norway voted against membership in the EU in 1972 and again in 1994. Iceland and Switzerland could be considered “natural” members but have always refused to join. Other Nordic-Protestant countries, even when joining the community, have always feared handing sovereignty to a supra-national community. Thus, the Nordic countries did not join the EU until strategic and economic concerns forced them to become members. However, once inside the community, these counties have often played the role of “reluctant,” if not “obstructive,” partners (Leustean and Madeley, 2010: 5). For example, Denmark and Sweden did not join the monetary union.

An argument can be made that the non-participation of the UK in the European project was not (or not only) an act of self-exclusion, as argued by Alan S Milward (2002) but also the consequence of cultural, ideological and even religious differences between Britain and continental Europe. Britain did not share with continental Europe the symbolism, culture, and tradition of political Catholicism (Forlenza, 2017: 267; Kaiser, 2007: 231–237). At the time of British entry into the European Community (1973), no less a figure than the Reverend Ian Paisley, who considered himself a sort of second or new Luther, protested against the association with “Old Mr Redsocks” (the Pope) and the “whore of Babylon” (the Catholic Church). In 2002, Stephen Wall—head of the European Secretariat in the UK Cabinet Office and Tony Blair’s most senior advisor on Europe from, 2000 to 2004—drew a line of continuity between the anti-Catholicism of the Reformation and the present-day criticism of the EU: “our whole history as an island is an important factor. There are certain aspects of the Reformation and anti-popery that find an echo in modern euro-skepticism” (Madeley, 2009: 123). It still needs to be examined if these historical and cultural aspects profoundly imbued with religious meanings had an influence on Brexit. Quite crucially, the most critical threat to the EU has come, not from angry Greek citizens, or from nationalists in Spain, Ireland, Italy or eastern Europe—but from the British or more precisely the English, who are consistently Euro-skeptics and less supportive of the EU than the citizens of the other member states, as Brexit has demonstrated. In making this claim, we do not want to overlook important internal divisions between northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England, which once more demonstrated that the United Kingdom is an archipelago of national communities.

We are not arguing that Catholicism has been the only or the even main factor impacting the beginning and expansion of the process of integration. After all, the examples of Finland and Estonia (which unlike other Nordic countries are within the EU and within the Eurozone) would alone counter such a claim. Furthermore, other political cultures—the socialists, the liberals, and the federalists—have supported the integration and the process has been evidently influenced and largely shaped by the combination of other factors: the Cold War; the political, institutional and economic situation; and the concerns of Realpolitik. We are instead gauging the role of religion in politics, and highlighting how religious meanings have interacted and intersected with structure of powers and political practices. In short, we want to illustrate the often subtle and indirect ways in which religion can influence apparently secular political phenomena. Interestingly enough, recent studies—which combined data analysis and nuanced theoretical perspectives—have convincingly shown that historically Catholics have been more supportive of European integration than Protestants (Nelsen and Guth, 2015). Although there are possible and significant exceptions—with political movements and citizens in Poland, France, and Italy opposing the EU for its social and economic policies in the context of the widespread European and global crisis—the general picture looks to a large extent accurate.

At a more general level, southern Europe is Catholic and a sense of social justice, deeply embedded in Catholic social teaching, shapes some of the more important examples of welcoming societies and of integration efforts at the grass-roots level. In addition to this, Pope Francis’s message regarding the treatment of refugees attempted to close the gap between the message of Jesus and the work of the Vatican. Rome must be a Christian community more than a political actor following the demands and issues of Realpolitik. Francis has repeatedly invited Catholics to offer shelter to migrant families. But the Catholic world is deeply divided between those who support a more progressive and open-policy agenda, and those who defend a more traditional and conservative view. Consequently, the Pope’s appeal constantly meets criticism from conservative Catholics (but also from Orthodox churches and other Christians), right-wing parties, which claim to follow the true Christian inspiration, and politicians such as Viktor Orbán. However, it is worth noting that in April 2016, the Pope, the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church Bartholomew I, and the Archbishop of Athens visited Lesbo, where 25,000 migrants were being detained in squalid conditions. The three religious leaders made an appeal to protect and respect the refugees.

Conclusion

One must first start from the fact that religion is not a remnant of the past. Quite the opposite, it still shapes borders and boundaries within Europe and between Europe and what it is not. Hence, it shapes and influences political identities, politics and policies, symbolism and international relations. One must likewise first start from a critique of the legacy of Said. His notion of an endless Occidental and Oriental border is too simple to describe the present condition of Europe. The border is not only between Christianity/Occident/the West and Islam/Orient/the East, as Said would have it. Furthermore, the West cannot be reduced to a common entity under the rubric of Christianity, as Huntington assumes and thereby underestimating the separation between Catholicism and Protestantism. As we have shown above, there are four religious and thus four cultural-symbolic borders: north-western Europe is Protestant, southern Europe is Catholic, the East is Orthodox and increasingly nationalist, and the South and Near East are Muslim. In contrast to both Said and Huntington, we argue that this scheme of the four-fold structure of religio-cultural borders applies to European divisions within Europe. In other words, the divisions and borders are now re-signifying Europe internally, and not only separating the West from its outside world. Putin’s visit to Greek monasteries near Thessaloniki in 2016 was a perhaps unconscious move in this definition of European boundaries in term of religions.

To expose the limitations of Orientalism means also to highlight that attempts to define Europe as Christendom are likely to fail. As Robert Kaplan has written, “the new migration,” driven by war and state collapse, “is erasing the distinction between the imperial centers and their former colonies.” Therefore, “Orientalism, through which one culture appropriated and dominated another, is slowly evaporating in a world of cosmopolitan interactions.” To this observation, Kaplan (2016) further argues, “Europe has responded by artificially reconstructing national-cultural identities on both the extreme right and left, to counter the threat from the civilization it once dominated.” Yet, the cultural purity and the values that Europe craves in the face of the Muslim-refugee influx are impossible in a world of global labor markets and international exchange, which are deepening and extending religious and social diversity. Kaplan (2016) writes that the intriguing question for us is “what, in a civilizational sense, will replace Rome?” In other words, what will replace its ability to provide a fragmented world with cohesion and an overarching framework of unity? For while the empire “certainly had its evils,” the “ability to govern vast multi-ethnic spaces around the Mediterranean” provided a political solution that ensured stability and peace. Europe cannot expect to enjoy the sort of post-Christian civil religion that Rousseau had proposed as a solution to social and religious divisions.