Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Walter Russell Mead on Religious Identity and the Eurozone

Over at Via Meadia, Walter Russell Mead has an insightful post on the issues of religious identity that surround Greece’s possible exit from the eurozone. One often hears Europe described, sometimes disparagingly, as a Christian club. That’s certainly how Muslim Turks see it. But it may be more correct to see Europe as a Western Christian, as opposed to an Eastern Christian, entity. Of the 17 eurozone members, only two, Greece and Cyprus, are historically Orthodox. Greece is on the brink of  ruin, and Cyprus’s economic fortunes are closely tied to Greece’s. Many Greeks feel intensely bitter about the way other European countries have treated it and do not seem to care too much about remaining in the eurozone. Many other Europeans apparently feel the same way about Greece. If Greece does exit the eurozone, Mead predicts, it will  find solidarity  in a relationship with a similarly alienated Orthodox country, Russia. Mead explains why:

Americans often don’t “get” the Russia-Greek connection. In Ottoman times, Orthodox Russia was the protector of Orthodox Christians in the great Islamic empire and frequently used its diplomatic clout to defend the rights of its co-religionists. Greece looked to Russia as a reliable ally during much of the troubled period after modern Greece gained independence from the Turks.

The feeling is reciprocal. Russia received the gospel from Greek Christians. The Russian tsars married into the Byzantine royal house; the word tsar (or czar) is the Russian form of Caesar, indicating the strong Russian sense that Orthodox Moscow, after the fall of Constantinople, was the “Third Rome.” Much of modern Russian identity and sense of a unique place in the world is wrapped up in its civilizational connection with Byzantine culture and religion.

Mount Athos, the center of Orthodox monasticism and the spiritual heart of Greece, looms large in Russia. No less a person than President Vladimir Putin has made pilgrimages to this site.

In the 1990s, the late Samuel Huntington wrote a controversial book, The Clash of Civilizations, which discussed, among other things, the Orthodox/Western fault line that runs through Eastern Europe. At the time, Huntington’s work was dismissed as reductive, even offensive, particularly by some Orthodox, who resented the suggestion that they weren’t fully part of Western culture. Shared religious identity really does matter, however, and Huntington was surely on to something, as Mead’s analysis of the present situation demonstrates.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Kupchan, “No One’s World”

Perhaps somewhat peripherally related to religion proper, but No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (OUP 2012), by Charles A. Kupchan (Georgetown) looks to contain much of interest for folks who think about law and religion.  The publisher’s description follows.

The world is on the cusp of a global turn. Between 1500 and 1800, the West sprinted ahead of other centers of power in Asia and the Middle East. Europe and the United States have dominated the world since. But today the West’s preeminence is slipping away as China, India, Brazil and other emerging powers rise. Although most strategists recognize that the dominance of the West is on the wane, they are confident that its founding ideas–democracy, capitalism, and secular nationalism–will continue to spread, ensuring that the Western order will outlast its primacy.

In No One’s World, Charles A. Kupchan boldly challenges this view, arguing that the world is headed for political and ideological diversity; emerging powers will neither defer to the West’s lead nor converge toward the Western way. The ascent of the West was the product of social and economic conditions unique to Europe and the United States. As other regions now rise, they are following their own paths to modernity and embracing their own conceptions of domestic and international order.

Kupchan contends that the Western order will not be displaced by a new great power or dominant political model. The twenty-first century will not belong to America, China, Asia, or anyone else. It will be no one’s world. For the first time in history, the world will be interdependent–but without a center of gravity or global guardian.

More than simply diagnosing what lies ahead, Kupchan provides a detailed strategy for striking a bargain between the West and the rising rest by fashioning a new consensus on issues of legitimacy, sovereignty, and governance. Thoughtful, provocative, sweeping in scope, this work is nothing less than a global guidebook for the 21st century.  

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Conference: Religion and Civilization in International History (March 8-9, 2012)

Here is a call for papers for the Twelfth Annual Harvard Graduate Student Conference on International History, to be held in Cambridge in March. This year’s theme is “Religion and Civilization in International History.” Details are below.

The ConIH Committee invites graduate students to submit proposals for the Twelfth Annual Graduate Student Conference on International History to take place at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts on March 8-9, 2012.

Historical actors have used religion and civilization as potent tools for the creation and recreation of cultural and political identities, as well as other types of social cohesiveness. Studying religion and civilization, as distinct but often closely related concepts, raises questions about the theological underpinnings of the international order and international law, as well as the civilizational references that religious movements use to define their transnational missions within national, imperial, and other supranational frameworks. ConIH consequently invites graduate students from all continents and disciplines to submit studies that explore the international dimensions of religion and civilization.

We welcome submissions that examine religion and civilization in Read more

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Delahunty on Trade and Islamist Terrorism

In attempting to come to grips with Islamist terrorism, some observers, particularly in the West, have suggested that poverty provides the ultimate explanation. Islamist terrorism thrives, the argument goes, because Muslim societies are poor; if Muslim societies experienced economic growth – through trade with the outside world, for example – terrorism would be much less a problem. In an excellent new paper, Terrorism and Trade: A Reply to Professor Bhala, Robert Delahunty (St. Thomas – Minnesota) debunks this argument. He notes that studies repeatedly fail to show a significant empirical link between terrorism and poverty, particularly the poverty which results from a lack of trade with the outside world. In fact, Islamist terrorism in the twenty-first century, like communist terrorism in the nineteenth century, is principally a middle-class phenomenon. Both the leadership and ranks of jihadist movements are made up of educated, upwardly-mobile professionals with ties to the global economy. Like other economic explanations, Delahunty suggests at the end of his paper, the “counter-terrorism through trade” argument may be a way for secular-minded Westerners to avoid coming to terms with the ultimate explanation for religious and ideological terrorism, namely, that its motivations are primarily religious and ideological. There is much more in the paper which, as usual with Delahunty, is remarkably erudite and lucid.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Byrnes on Transnational Religious Communities and US Foreign Policy

Timothy Byrnes (Colgate) has published Reverse Mission: Transnational Religious Communities and the Making of US Foreign Policy (Georgetown University Press 2011). The publisher’s description follows. – MLM

Many Catholic priests, nuns, and brothers in the United States take a strong interest in US policies that affect their “brothers and sisters” abroad. In fact, when the policies of their native government pose significant dangers to their people internationally, these US citizens engage actively in a variety of political processes in order to protect and advance the interests of the transnational religious communities to which they belong. In this provocative examination of the place of religion in world politics, Timothy A. Byrnes focuses on three Catholic communities—Jesuit, Maryknoll, and Benedictine—and how they seek to shape US policy in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Based on years of fieldwork and on-the-ground interviews, Reverse Mission details the transnational bonds that drive the political activities of these Catholic orders.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Another Augsburgian Interlude

This one from eminent constitutional scholar and historian Michael McConnell (Stanford law school):

The idea of civil control over the Church was difficult to maintain during the days of a single universal Catholic Church with its headquarters in Rome.  Church-state relations in those days almost inevitably consisted of conflict and negotiation between two institutionally separate authorities: the Church in Rome and the civil power, usually the monarch, in various nations of Europe.  Neither could completely control the other.  With the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation, however, governmental power over each national church became more feasible.  Indeed, with the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, the principle that the prince had authority to determine the religion for his nation (“cuius regio, eius religio”) became a staple of international relations.

Michael W. McConnell, Establishment and Disestablishment at the Founding, Part I: Establishment of Religion, 44 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 2105, 2191 (2003).  — MOD

Posted on by L&R Forum

Toft, Philpott & Shah on God’s Century

Take a look at the recently published God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (2011), by Monica Duffy Toft (Harvard), Daniel Philpott (Notre Dame) and Timothy  Samuel Shah (Georgetown). The authors are political scientists, but the book’s discussion of religion’s influence on global politics will be important for law and religion scholars, particularly those whose work is comparative.

book cover“Over the past four decades,” the authors write, “religion’s influence on politics has reversed its decline and become more powerful on every continent and across every major world religion.”  They attribute religion’s growing sway not so much on a rise in piety, but to the fact that religion today enjoys more independence from political control than ever before.  This independence has allowed religious leaders to act on behalf of liberal public goods like democracy and conciliation.

Of course, some religions support liberal democracy more than others.  For example, the authors write, “religious leaders from the Catholic Read more