Abstract
Borderlands offer a wide range of possibilities for exploring and understanding better the different ways in which people respond to and influence change. This applies not least to education and religion – two connected players in the continuous re-creation and consolidation of cultures and life chances. Their impact is felt at many different levels. Borders can be on the ground or in the mind, and their influence often extends some distance from the borderline itself. Border studies typically engage with issues that include intercultural discourse, peace and conflict, exchange, and subsidiarity.
The ideas and findings in this volume are drawn initially from a significant multi-disciplinary research programme that examined the politics, didactics, ideas and spatial settings of religious and civic education in four cross-border communities in the Baltic-Barents area (Norway, Russia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland and Germany). The book also includes related experience in other European countries, notably Denmark. Chapters focus on broader themes as well as localities, including the post-secular resurgence of religion in Europe, the role of the post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church, multi-religious and multi-ethnic public schooling, religious antagonism, the spatiality of religion, and religious and civic education. Space and place have particular meanings in these borderlands.
This rich and varied anthology of 13 chapters from 12 authors, covering several major themes across at least eight countries, might have struggled to achieve a clear focus. Some chapters are a challenging counterpoint to others, and occasionally the contrasts of style sit somewhat uncomfortably together. However, their critical juxtapositioning of different local experience and evidence is well suited to the editors’ core objective of ‘trying to understand the interplay between religions, borders, educations and normative statehood’ (p. 5). For a committed reader, broad thematic coherence emerges from evidential complexity.
The border between Norway and Russia, agreed in 1826, was designed to separate people of Russian Orthodox faith from people of Catholic and Lutheran faith. Since then, that border has provided opportunities for learning and sharing, opening the border zone as a rich world for the experience of the ‘other’. Edward Said warned against sweeping and reductive caricaturing of nations or ethnic groups, and he emphasized the disorderly reality of borders between countries. Borderlands are likely to have witnessed conflict and cooperation, inclusion and exclusion, wars of religion and imperial conquest – but also exchange, cross-fertilization, brokerage and sharing. The border can be a bridge for bonding and blessing.
The countries in this book have been fundamentally shaped by Christianity (predominantly Lutheran, Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox) and its historical hegemonic role. Yet, even in these countries, the significant ‘other’ is now increasingly Muslim. This development hardly features in the book, but the experience of other countries in Europe should be relevant to future studies. Christians might usefully reflect and build upon the rich but disorderly reality of the borderlands experiences of northern Europe, each with its unique features or dynamics and local mixtures of Christian, non-Christian and secular beliefs.
The experience across the borderland communities in this study demonstrates the interdependence between religious, political and territorial elements in culturally plural spaces. ‘Churches and states invest heavily in control over normative schooling’ (p. 5), especially religious education or civic education. In border zones, different school systems operate in close proximity, so there will be latent conflict but also potential for learning in religion and education. ‘If there is indeed a return of the religious in contemporary Europe, then the main available area for churches to promote religious and post-secular thinking is through public comprehensive schooling’ (p. 9). The twin cities of Valga-Valka in Estonia and Latvia, for example, display remarkable evidence of productive co-existence. Overall, however, it emerges from the study that there is a strengthening of national or ethnic homogeneity in contrast to the ‘other’ outside the border, with religious education carrying the symbols of the home nation. If religious and civic education tend to accentuate differences and divisions, might other school subjects offer better openings for border-crossing initiatives?
The ideas and evidence in this volume offer a good read and a point of reference for Christians who recognize the importance of their local or national borderlands, whether European or not, and who want them to be places of respectful engagement rather than division, dispute and dominance. The learning from borderlands at national or regional frontiers may also resonate with Christians living at and with different borders of challenge and opportunity. Are our borders bridges for relationship-building, sharing and learning, or primarily barriers for defence, separation and exclusion?