The Modes and Norms of Governance of Religious Diversity in Europe: Convergences and Divergences

Abstract

Demographic and state-building trends in recent decades have led to increasing religious diversity across Europe. This new and complex religious pluralism has challenged or been seen to challenge both Christian and secular dominance as other faiths jostle for recognition. In this way, contemporary forms of religious diversity and debates about freedom of religion have become prominent and consistent features of political and public debate. Europe today hosts a wide variety of church-state relations as well as of legal, institutional and political arrangements related to state-religion connexions. Despite some common features, there are variations in type and degree which owe something to distinctive political, institutional, theological and historical inheritances. Yet, from their different starting points and in their own ways, European states face the same broad question: how to adapt existing church-state relations and norms of secularism to this new religious diversity. Within these debates, Islam and Muslims have become a particular concern for many in Europe. For those states faced with new significant Muslim populations, the accommodation of Muslims has come to be the dominant issue in relation to religious diversity (notably in Western Europe), but the same concern has also found a home in countries with historic ethnic Muslim populations as well as those with negligible Muslim populations (as in parts of Eastern and Southern Europe). In this, all European states are having to balance national pressures and majority privilege for how this diversity should be managed and what challenges it poses. This panel presents findings from the Horizon 2020 GREASE project (coordinated by Anna Triandafyllidou) that address the broad question of state-religion relations along with variations that can be found in the governance of religious diversity in Europe. GREASE compares relevant norms, laws and practices, with a particular focus on the integration of minorities, with the aim of deepening our understanding of the comparative governance of religious diversity. The papers in this panel present comparative analyses of country case studies within three European regions, Western Europe (France, Germany, Belgium and the UK), Southern and South-Eastern Europe (Italy, Spain, Albania, Bosnia Herzegovina, Bulgaria and Greece), and Central Eastern and East Eastern Europe (Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Hungary and Russia). Drawing on a typology of modes and norms of governance developed by the project, the papers explore commonalities and divergences between the individual countries within each region and suggest to what extent the regions can be said to represent a mode of governance that distinguishes them from each other. The papers draw out important legal, institutional and cultural factors that bear on norms in the governance of religious diversity in each country and region, especially as they relate to assertions and conceptions of nationhood in more inclusive or exclusive terms. To do so, the papers explore what norms operate in the different contexts, how these norms interact, particular inflections that shared norms come to have in different contexts, and recent changes that have been taking place and their possible implications for the governance of religious diversity.

Title	Details
Religion as a state's tool: comparing Russian and Hungarian experience	View Paper Details
Governing Religious Diversity in Western Europe: Moderate Secularism and Conceiving Freedom of Religion	View Paper Details
State-Religion Relations in Southern and South-eastern Europe: Between Secularism and Majoritarian Nationalism	View Paper Details