V.M. Bader

The Governance of Islam in Europe: The Perils of Modelling

Recently, we have seen a shift from research on the internal structure and culture of Muslim religiosity to research on the way in which societies create opportunities for the development of Islam, or oppose them, and more particularly to the political opportunity structure and the institutionalised regimes and policies of governing Islam in Europe from a neo-institutionalist perspective. This introduction to the special issue discusses the concepts and perspectives of the governance and government of religious diversity, critically analysing the inherent problems of constructing patterns or models of the relationship between (organised) religions, societies, politics, nations and polities/states. My analysis opts for fairly disaggregated frames for the purposes of rich descriptions of cases, synchronic comparisons and diachronic changes, which are a precondition for asking the relevant explanatory questions: Why what happened happened here and not there? Why now and not then? This framework is used to critically assess the debate on whether a European regime of religious governance in general, particularly with regard to Islam, is emerging, and to introduce the contributions in this special issue that analyse different aspects of governing Islam in Western Europe.

The Cultural Conditions of Transnational Citizenship On the Interpenetration of Political and Ethnic Cultures

No reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public opinion more solicitude than the failure of the “melting-pot.” The tendency... has been for the national clusters of immigrants, as they became more and more firmly established and more and more prosperous to cultivate more and more assiduously the literatures and cultural traditions of their homelands. Assimilation, in other words, instead of washing out the memories of Europe, made them more and more intensely real. Just as these clusters became more and more objectively American, did they become more and more German or Scandinavian or Bohemian or Polish.... [This] is not, however, to admit the failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation of what Americanism may rightly mean. It is to ask ourselves whether our ideal has been broad or narrow—whether perhaps the time has not come to assert a higher ideal than the “melting pot.”... We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of the governed. All our elaborate machinery of settlement and school and union, of social and political naturalization, however, will move with friction just in so far as it neglects to take into account this strong and virile insistence that American shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and not what a ruling class, descendent of those British stocks which were the first permanent immigrants, decide that America shall be made. Randolph Bourne (1916/1977, 248ff)

Taking Pluralism Seriously Arguing for an Institutional Turn in Political Philosophy

There is a growing sense of dissatisfaction among political philosophers with the practical sterility and empirical inadequacy of the discipline. Post-Rawlsian philosophy is wrestling with the need to construct a ‘contextualized morality’ that is sensitive to the particularities and complexities of actual moral reasoning but does not succumb to the temptations of relativism. We argue that this predicament is due to its inability to take the pluralism of our moral universe, the multi-layeredness of our social reality, the indeterminacy of our normative principles and the complexity of our practical reasoning seriously. To incorporate these properties of the ‘human condition’ we have constructed a complex evaluative framework, balancing moral, ethico-political, prudential and realist criteria. We argue that political philosophy new style is well advised to adopt such a framework and to position itself, as a true ‘art’, between political philosophy old style and the social sciences. Thus political philosophy is better equipped to deal with the big tradeoffs of today, rekindle our utopian hopes and regain political bite.

Fairly Open Borders

Practical philosophy had much trouble in dealing with problems of first admission.1 In this chapter I do not give a comprehensive overview of the state of the art. Instead, I will present a committed, non-technical plea in favour of fairly open borders. Broadly speaking, two different moral arguments in favour of fairly open borders can be developed: the first one tries to show that free mobility is an inherent moral principle and should, therefore, be recognized as a universal and basic human right (Dummet 1992, Carens 1992). The second is a more indirect one which tries to show that states have a moral obligation to let people in as long as and to the degree that they do not live up to their moral obligations to guarantee universal and basic human rights to safety and subsistence. In this argument, free movement and open borders are not seen as intrinsic moral principles but rather as instrumental devices.

Culture and Identity Contesting Constructivism

Living in increasingly multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious cities in postmigration contexts provides opportunities and risks to different generations of majority and minority inhabitants. It also poses challenges for social scientists, political philosophers and, obviously, for politics. More and more theorists are convinced that processes of incorporating an ever increasing diversity of migrants into so-called postmodern societies necessitate a fundamental rethinking of crucial concepts like culture, ethnicity, community and identity. They also seem to believe that only differentialist, discourse theoretical or constructivist paradigms are appropriate frames in which to analyse the rapid dynamics of crosscutting cultural recreations, language crossings, contextualized constructions of communitites, shifting, hybrid, creolized, hyphenated, diasporic, transnational, multiple or minimal selves or identities. We are all constructivists now. The critical anthropological endeavour had started as a productive criticism of ‘primordialist’, ‘naturalist’, ‘essentialist’ concepts of a static, stable, homogeneous, shared, authentic, pure, apolitical culture necessarily coupled to one ‘people’ defined by ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic descent’. By moving ‘from culture to ethnicity’ it had analysed situationally specific mechanisms of drawing, maintaining and redrawing ethnic boundaries. This first paradigm shift of the 1960s, prominently connected with the writings of Barth, has been followed by a second shift, the constructivist turn from the early 1980s, which still dominates the field. Constructivists have merged ethnicity with identity completely, focusing on discourses and processes of identity-definition. Criticism of spatialized, D E B A T E

Dilemmas of Ethnic Affirmative Action. Benign State-neutrality or Relational Ethnic Neutrality

Affirmative action policies are in the spotlights again, in America as well as in Europe. Taking stock of recent normative and political debates I clarify the concept and modalities of affirmative action. From my moral pluralist perspective of liberal, democratic socialism conflicting principles of moral and legal equality have to be balanced in a prudent and context‐sensitive way. Wherever severe structural inequalities among ethnic and national groups are reproduced and strengthened, affirmative action is morally required. Some rules of thumb with regard to appropriate modalities, aims, forgetting and public legitimation of affirmative action are discussed. A short comparison of the institutional contexts of the US and The Netherlands demonstrates that ethnic affirmative action is both more morally required and more difficult to realize and to legitimize in the US. Canadians and Europeans beware of an export of US‐American ideological gifts.

Citizenship of the European Union. Human Rights, Rights of Citizens of the Union and of Member States

Debates about the EU show that the holy trinity of absolute, indivisible sovereignty, nationality/citizenship and national identity/loyalty should be replaced by multilayered, pluralist concepts for descriptive, explanatory and normative purposes. Democratic pluralism criticizes replacement-strategies (of the nation-state by a European state, citizenship-rights by human rights, national obligations by European or global ones). It opts for productive complementarity guided by two principles: “proximity and accountability” and “correspondence of powers and democratic say” and for progressive transdomestic shifts. The inclusion of the articles on citizenship in the EC Treaty has, unintendedly, contributed to such a shift though it missed historical chances to develop a more democratic and social EU living up to minimal global obligations.

Non-governmental religious schools in Europe: institutional opportunities, associational freedoms, and contemporary challenges

The European Convention on Human Rights guarantees freedom of education, including opportunities to create and operate faith-based schools. But as European societies become religiously more diverse and ‘less religious’ at the same time, the role of religious schools increasingly is being contested. Serious tensions have emerged between those who ardently support religious schools in various forms and those who oppose them. Given that faith-based schools enjoy basic constitutional guarantees in Europe, the controversy surrounding them often boils down to issues of public financing, degrees of organisational and pedagogical autonomy, and educational practices and management. This introduction to a special issue on controversies surrounding religious schools in a number of Western European countries briefly introduces structural pressures that affect the position of religious schools and sketches the relevant institutional arrangements in the respective countries. We then go on to introduce some of the main concerns that frame the relevant debates. The paper concludes by introducing the various contributions in the special issue.

Sciences, politics, and associative democracy: democratizing science and expertizing democracy

Relations between science and politics are under pressure because urgent problems create an increasing external demand on sciences while inside sciences the old idea that “science speaks truth to politics” is increasingly seen as unfeasible and undesirable. We are not forced to choose between such an objectivist and a skepticist model. Associative democracy provides more fruitful interactions between sciences and politics in order to “democratize science/expertise” and to “expertize democracy” compared with the outworn institutional alternative of parliamentary democracy – incapable of solving risk-decisions because of limited and misguided information, lack of qualification and practical knowledge – and neo-corporatist “shifts from government to governance” – suffering from rigidity, exclusion of legitimate stakeholders, intransparency and lack of democratic legitimacy. It introduces contest where it matters most and where it is most productive: in the framing of issues, in the deliberation/negotiation on alternatives, and in the implementation and control of the chosen problem solving strategy.

Religious diversity and reasonable accommodation in the workplace in six European countries

After a period during which many in the West, especially Europe, expected religion to progressively fade away from public life, for various reasons religion has, over the last two decades, re-established itself as a phenomenon to be reckoned with in the globalized West. It has also become a favoured research topic for, amongst others, social scientists and legal scholars. While the European Union (EU) has a limited competency when it comes to matters of religion, in 2000 an important Directive was adopted, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of religion or belief in the area of employment. The EU’s interest, however, extends beyond the anti-discrimination framework, explaining why in 2010 it funded a three-year multidisciplinary project on religious diversity and secularism in Europe (RELIGARE). One of the areas of investigation, illustrating the various tensions that arise when religious claims are formulated in 21st-century Europe, concerned the area of employment and labour relations. This article provides an introduction – philosophical, legal and sociological – to a special issue with six contributions drawing from sociological data collected within the RELIGARE project. From a sociological perspective, these contributions illustrate the challenges and tensions raised by religion and belief both in secular workplaces (the individual religious freedom cluster) and in faith-based or religious ethos workplaces (the collective religious freedom cluster) in England, the Netherlands, Denmark, Bulgaria, France and Turkey.