Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Hill, “No Place for Russia”

9780231704588In the debate between people who are enthusiastic about universal, market-based world values and those who are skeptical, I find myself in the latter camp. If the past twenty-five years have shown us anything, it’s that Samuel Huntington’s basic insight about the existence of different geographically- and historically-defined cultures, with incommensurable values, was correct. And yet, I have to admit, civilizational clashes are not necessarily inevitable. Sometimes, they result from many, many small decisions, disagreements, and mistakes that, over time, push nations to opposite positions and that magnify cultural differences.

A new book from Columbia University Press, No Place for Russia: European Security Institutions Since 1989, by William Hill (National War College) argues that the estrangement of Russia from the West since the Cold War was not unavoidable, a reflection of deep differences between Orthodoxy and the post-Christian West. Rather, it was the result of steps, all which seemed reasonable at the time, that Western institutions took, and all of which Russia–I think the author would say, rationally–perceived as a threat. And so here we are. The publisher’s description follows:

The optimistic vision of a “Europe whole and free” after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has given way to disillusionment, bitterness, and renewed hostility between Russia and the West. In No Place for Russia, William H. Hill traces the development of the post–Cold War European security order to explain today’s tensions, showing how attempts to integrate Russia into a unified Euro-Atlantic security order were gradually overshadowed by the domination of NATO and the EU—at Russia’s expense.

Hill argues that the redivision of Europe has been largely unintended and not the result of any single decision or action. Instead, the current situation is the cumulative result of many decisions—reasonably made at the time—that gradually produced the current security architecture and led to mutual mistrust. Hill analyzes the United States’ decision to remain in Europe after the Cold War, the emergence of Germany as a major power on the continent, and the transformation of Russia into a nation-state, placing major weight on NATO’s evolution from an alliance dedicated primarily to static collective territorial defense into a security organization with global ambitions and capabilities. Closing with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and war in eastern Ukraine, No Place for Russia argues that the post–Cold War security order in Europe has been irrevocably shattered, to be replaced by a new and as-yet-undefined order.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Alidadi, “Religion, Equality and Employment in Europe”

In June, Hart Publishing will release “Religion, Equality and Employment in Europe: The Case for Reasonable Accommodation,” by Katayoun Alidadi (Bryant University).  The publisher’s description follows:

The management of religious and ideological diversity remains a key challenge of our time, deeply entangled with debates about the nature of liberal democracy, 9781509911387equality, social cohesion, minorities and nationalism, foreign policy and even terrorism. This book explores this challenge at the level of the workplace in Europe. People do not surrender their religion of belief at the gates of the workplace, nor should they be required to do so. But what are the limits of accommodating religious belief in the work place, particularly when it clashes with other fundamental rights and freedoms? Using a comparative and socio-legal approach that emphasises the practical role of human rights, anti-discrimination and employment protection, this book argues for an enforceable right to reasonable accommodation on the grounds of religion or belief in the workplaces in Europe. In so doing, it draws on the case law of Europe’s two supranational courts, three country studies–Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK–as well as developments in the US and Canada. By offering the first book-length treatment of the issue, it will be of significant interest to academics, policy-makers and students interested in a deeper understanding of European and Western inclusion, freedom and equality in a multicultural context.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Eekelaar, “Family Rights and Religion”

In May, Routledge will release “Family Rights and Religion,” by John Eekelaar (Pembroke College, Oxford University).  The publisher’s description follows:

The interaction between individual rights, which are often seen in secular terms, and religion is becoming an important and complex topic not only for academic study logo-rt-cbut for practical policy. This volume collects a range of writings from journals, edited collections and individual books which deal with different aspects of the interaction within the context of family life, and which appear with their original pagination. These studies have been selected because they throw a sharp light on central elements of the role of religion in determining the structure of the rights of family members in relation to one another, both from an historical and contemporary perspective. While many of the writings are focused on US and European systems, selected writings covering other systems illustrate the universal nature of the topic. The studies are accompanied by a reflective commentary from the editor which sets the writings in a broad context of social, constitutional and philosophical thought, with the aim of stimulating critical thought and discussion.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

“Religious Interactions in Europe and the Mediterranean World” (Fukasawa et al, eds.)

In June, Routledge will release “Religious Interactions in Europe and the Mediterranean World: Coexistence and Dialogue from the 12th to the 20th Centuries,” edited by Katsumi Fukasawa (Kyoto-Sangyo University), Benjamin J. Kaplan (University College London), and Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire (University of Nice Sophia Antipolis).  The publisher’s description follows:

 The religious histories of Christian and Muslim countries in Europe and Western Asia are often treated in isolation from one another. This can lead to a limited and 9781138743205simplistic understanding of the international and interreligious interactions currently taking place. This edited collection brings these national and religious narratives into conversation with each other, helping readers to formulate a more sophisticated comprehension of the social and cultural factors involved in the tolerance and intolerance that has taken place in these areas, and continues today.

Part One of this volume examines the history of relations between people of different Christian confessions in western and central Europe. Part Two then looks at the relations between Western and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Islam and Judaism in the vast area that extends around the Mediterranean from the Iberian Peninsula to western Asia. Each Part ends with a Conclusion that considers the wider implications of the preceding essays and points the way toward future research.

Bringing together scholars from Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and America this volume embodies an international collaboration of unusual range. Its comparative approach will be of interest to scholars of Religion and History, particularly those with an emphasis on interreligious relations and religious tolerance.

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“Muslim Minority-State Relations: Violence, Integration, and Policy” (Mason, ed.)

In January, Palgrave Macmillan will release “Muslim Minority-State Relations: Violence, Integration, and Policy” edited by Robert Mason (London School of Economics and Political Science, UK). The publisher’s description follows:

This volume explores the dominant types of relationships between Muslim minorities and states in different parts of the world, the challenges each side faces, and the cases and reasons for exemplary integration, religious tolerance, and freedom of expression. By bringing together diverse case studies from Europe, Africa, and Asia, this book offers insight into the nature of state engagement with Muslim communities and Muslim community responses towards the state, in turn. This collection offers readers the opportunity to learn more about what drives government policy on Muslim minority communities, Muslim community policies and responses in turn, and where common ground lies in building religious tolerance, greater community cohesion and enhancing Muslim community-state relations.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Salomone on the Importance of Multilingualism

Our St. John’s colleague, Rosemary Salomone, has written an interesting column for University World News titled “Why English is Not Enough,” which reflects on the importance of language in understanding different cultural responses to events that attract global attention–including the recent, religiously-motivated murders in France. Here is a fragment, and a thought afterward:

Hearing American journalists and political pundits deconstruct the underlying issues was one thing. Hearing the French explain and defend their deepest convictions was quite another, even if one sharply disagreed with the underlying principles or policy outcomes. At the very least it gave grounding for a more informed response to the problems now confronting France’s criminal, educational and social welfare institutions in the wake of these recent events.

As debate on free speech and the press slowly recedes for now, and France’s (and Europe’s) ‘Muslim question’ takes centre stage, these observations give rise to a less obvious though consequential point on language and cultural competence.

Defining moments, like the attacks in Paris, should remind us that language is key to gaining an insider’s view and a sense of the ‘big picture’, which by the way also allows us to critically examine ourselves. Print and broadcast media, as well as the global blogosphere, still speak in many voices and worldviews and they are powerful shapers of ideas and opinions.

Though multilingualism is clearly important in the global economy, we should not underestimate the force of language and intercultural awareness in promoting global understanding and security.

Today it’s French. Tomorrow it could be Spanish, Chinese, Farsi or any other language depending on the vagaries of world events. With terrorism unwittingly binding the free world together, linguistic skills and the cultural doors they open are essential to both digging deep into differences, especially among our enemies, while finding common ground for mutual respect and joint action among present and potential allies.

Read the rest. I quite agree that the knowledge of foreign languages is important for these instrumental, political reasons (as well as for far more important intrinsic reasons, such as reading what the great minds of other civilizations have had to say). One thought that occurs to me on reading Rosemary’s piece, however, is that the instrumental reasons to learn a foreign language may be especially weighty today in the case of European languages like French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and so on. That is because it is in Europe, more than many other parts of the world, that cultural clashes of the sort we have just witnessed and are probably going to witness in the coming decades are most likely to occur.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

European Court Rules Clergy Cannot Unionize Over Church’s Objection

In a much-anticipated decision, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights ruled today, 11-6, that Romania did not violate the European Human Rights Convention when it refused to register a trade union that Romanian Orthodox priests had formed against the wishes of the Romanian Orthodox Church. The decision, with important implications for church autonomy, overrules a contrary judgment by a chamber of the court last year.

Article 11 of the European Convention grants citizens–including, the Grand Chamber ruled today, clergy–the right to form trade unions, subject to restrictions that are necessary to advance legitimate governmental interests, including the “protection of the rights and freedoms of others.” Here, the Grand Chamber reasoned, Romania had restricted the priests’ right to form a union in order to protect the autonomy of Romanian Orthodox Church. Among other things, the proposed union was meant to promote members’ ability to obtain representation in the Holy Synod, the Church’s highest authority, and to strike in order to advance members’ interests within the Church. By registering a union with goals like these, the Grand Chamber reasoned, the state would hamper the ability of the Church to organize and govern itself according to its own rules:

Respect for the autonomy of religious communities … implies, in particular, that the State should accept the right of such communities to react, in accordance with their own rules and interests, to any dissident movements emerging within them that might pose a threat to their cohesion, image or unity. It is … not the task of the national authorities to act as the arbiter between religious communities and the various dissident factions that exist or may emerge within them.

In other words, because the union posed a real risk to the organizational integrity of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Romania was justified in refusing to register the union–particularly given the wide “margin of appreciation” the Convention grants states with respect to church/state relations.

The Grand Chamber’s decision contains language suggesting a sweeping view of church autonomy, but one could also see it as somewhat narrow. The Grand Chamber noted that nothing would stop clergy from forming a union “that pursues aims compatible with the Church’s Statute and does not call into question the Church’s traditional hierarchical structure and decision-making procedures.” And it emphasized the the fact-specific nature of the inquiry, stating at one point that “national courts must … conduct[] an in-depth examination of the circumstances of [a] case and a thorough balancing exercise between the competing interests at stake.” The resistance to a categorical rule is reminiscent of the US Supreme Court’s analysis in Hosanna-Tabor, the “ministerial exception” case. A third-party submission by the Becket Fund and the International Center for Law and Religion Studies discussed Hosanna-Tabor, but the Grand Chamber did not expressly rely on the American decision in its own reasoning.

The case is Sindicatul Pastoral cel Bun v. Romania (July 9, 2013), available at the ECtHR’s website, here. The Becket Fund’s press release about the decision is here.

Posted on by Claudia E. Haupt

Says Who?

Just in time for my post on symbols, the New York Times picks up the topic as well. So this is page A1 news! Of course, the underlying issue—the treatment of religious symbols in the public sphere—is hardly new. But it continues to be contested and rich and fascinating to study in comparative perspective.

Let me focus in this post on the question of attribution and the role of individual religious expression as opposed to expression of a religious viewpoint or identity by the state. The Times story opens with a Roman Catholic archbishop reminiscing about visiting Brussels and encountering there “the insistently secular bureaucracy of the European Union.” The story continues with the statement “’They let me in wearing my cross,’ the archbishop recalls.” Should he have been surprised? The story then continues with “the rude surprise” that ensued after the Commission objected to crosses on commemorative Euro coins. But should that be surprising?

None of this should be surprising to anyone accustomed to the U.S. concept of a free exercise and establishment distinction. Attribution is a central threshold question in the United States. We are very familiar with the attribution issue, because deciding whether the message is one attributable to the state or the individual determines whether the message is fully protected as a matter of free speech and free exercise or whether it is subject to Establishment Clause limits (which, by the way, does not automatically indicate a violation on the merits). When I talk about religious messages in the U.S. context, I must therefore distinguish between messages of the government and messages of individuals. (I’ve written about the intricacies of that question in the U.S. context in more detail here.)

This (from the U.S. perspective) familiar question of attribution is also gaining importance in the European context, and what makes it particularly interesting there is that we do not have this split into free exercise and nonestablishment in most systems. Take, for instance, the European Convention on Human Rights. The Convention itself contains no Establishment Clause-type provision. But in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) an interesting development is occurring. Article 9 contains the Convention’s religious freedom provision. In Article 9(2) we find the limitations clause (also a typical feature of continental constitutions). It states: “Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”

As I’ve discussed here, recent case law seems to be slowly developing the meaning of the limitations clause beyond the limit on individual free exercise that it originally was by focusing on the type of democratic society envisioned by the Convention. An indicator of that development is the ECtHR’s emphasis on pluralism in the sense of allowing citizens of all faiths as well as nonreligious citizens to flourish in a democratic society. And that leads to a limit to religious identification imposed on the state itself, as opposed to limit on the individual’s free exercise. In short, the clause might become a limit on the state’s identification with religion. This is where we ask the attribution question. And in a system without a distinction between free exercise and nonestablishment, the interesting point to me is that we’re now starting to ask this question in the first place.

So if we ask about attribution—a question that has not traditionally been asked in the European context precisely because those systems tend not to have an establishment clause-like provision—we ask about the state’s actions, or religious expressions, as distinct from the individual’s actions or messages. And if we set the problem up this way, we are creating a dichotomy that many European national systems do not recognize. And so I find myself wondering whether national concepts of the public sphere may be on a collision course with what the European Court of Human Rights appears to be tending toward.

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McCrea on The Veil Ban and European Law

Ronan McCrea (University College London) has posted The Ban on the Veil and European Law. The abstract follows. NB: The full text is behind a paywall.

This article argues that the fate of veil bans under European law is uncertain. It shows that European commitments to free speech and freedom of religion cannot accommodate an absolute ban justified solely on grounds of the offensiveness of the veil. However, a ban that applies to public face-covering in general (rather than a ban that only targets the veil), that relates to the specific (though admittedly broad) context of social life and that provides some exceptions allowing the veil to be worn in specific religious or expressive contexts, has a reasonable chance of being upheld by European courts despite the significant infringement of personal autonomy it would involve.

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Cumper & Lewis (eds.), “Religion, Rights and Secular Society”

This December, Edward Elgar Publishing will publish Religion, Rights and Secular Society: European Perspectives edited by Peter Cumper (University of Leicester, UK) and Tom Lewis (Nottingham Trent University, UK).   The publisher’s description follows.

This topical collection of chapters examines secular society and the legal protection of religion and belief across Europe, both in general and more nation-specific terms.

The expectations of many that religion in modern Europe would be swept away by the powerful current of secularization have not been realised, and today few topics generate more controversy than the complex relationship between religious and secular values. The ‘religious/secular’ relationship is examined in this book, which brings together scholars from different parts of Europe and beyond to provide insights into the methods by which religion and equivalent beliefs have been, and continue to be, protected in the legal systems and constitutions of European nations. The contributors’ chapters reveal that the oft-tumultuous legacy of Europe’s relationship with religion still resonates across a continent where legal, political and social contours have been powerfully shaped by faith and religious difference.

Covering recent controversies such as the Islamic headscarf, and the presence of the crucifix in school class-rooms, this book will appeal to academics and students in law, human rights and the social sciences, as well as law and policy makers and NGOs in the field of human rights.