Workshop 14: Ethno-Confessional Mobilizations and Secular Nationalisms in the Balkans and the Middle East: The Myth of Religious and Secular Nationalisms as Antipodes
Abstract
This workshop aims to problematize the thesis that religion had been and remains both an independent and crucial cultural identity and a historical force of politics in Balkan societies, which has returned with vengeance following the end of socialist atheism, and served as the main ‘conflict substance’ for the violent mobilization of nationalists in the former Yugoslavia. Similarly, in Turkey, to some extent in Greece, and in the Middle East, as this argument would have it, the suppression of religious liberties and institutions (as part of the decades of modernization reforms), led to the lasting resentment among the population, who is now casting votes for political parties who reaffirm and extol the majority population’s religion as the basis of social identity and the main national and state symbol. These popular theses draw their legitimacy in part from the fact that very little study has been conducted on the ideologies and practices of secularism in the Balkans and the Middle East in general, and virtually none have been conducted with the aim to draw a comparison between the postcommunist Balkans and post-Cold War Middle East – we will make this original analysis and comparison the starting aim of our workshop proposal. Our second task is to argue that the modernizing secularism and current religious revivals in politics are by no means antipodes and archenemies to each other on either ideological or practical social and policy levels.
Description
The general task to explore in this workshop is to evidence and explain how in the post-Cold War period nationalisms based on ethno-religious homogeneity have been gaining strength. In this endeavor we define nationalism as a state-led, majority-generating exclusivism, which circumscribes political and other rights of individuals based on the ascribed group cultural (including religious) characteristics and original residence territory.
In order to explore this issue, we ask the question: Why have both ethno-religious and secular (‘civic’) nationalisms in the regions of the Balkans and the Middle East continuously generated identitarian conflicts, both intra- and inter-state? In other words, we seek to posit that it is nationalism as a system of exclusion-via-grouping that is the problem, rather than the distinction between ethno-religious and civic forms of social and civil identity.
In Turkey, as well as further in the Middle East, both secularists and Islamists have generated, or, better, hijacked from one another versions of ethno-nationalism that caters to their states’ majorities only. Militant secularism has been one of the foundational elements of the Republic of Turkey, as Islam has been considered as one of the main reasons for the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Syria has been a country ruled by a secularist regime, which has its roots in the strict Baath party-style authoritarianism relying on the Alawite minority. In both countries, secularism has historically been one of the most important political control levers to keep the large Sunni majority under control. Nonetheless, in both countries one can observe that established versions of secularism have come under increasing pressure. In Israel and Greece the state has been tacitly and overtly inviting the clergy to generate the discourse and practices of religious exclusivity that would question and test the citizenship rights of autochthonous minorities. The Bulgarian communist regime's coercive assimilation campaign towards the Muslim Pomaks in the 1970's and the Muslim Turks in 1984-1989 resulted in forced expulsions of the people of Turkish origin to Turkey: an estimated number of 900,000, comprising approximately 10 percent of Bulgaria's total population. However, the new post-1989 regime in Bulgaria has abandoned the old leadership's coercive policies towards the minorities. Bulgaria would make for an interesting case, as the postcommunist governments have apparently limited the space for ethnic nationalism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the clergy of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church has not been mobilized to produce cleavages between the majority and minority confessional groups.
In the socialist Yugoslavia, as we aim to demonstrate, the secular nationalisms with their titular ethno-nations, (by republics and provinces) have ‘mutated’ during the 1970s and 1980s into ethno-confessional ones. The resurrection of religious symbols in the numerous acts of commemorations of the Serbian, and, later, Slovenian and Croatian, historical figures could not have been materialized without the leading role of the last generation of Communist secular nationalist apparatchiks-turncoats, switching to ethno-religious national identity. The grandiosity of religiously colored ceremonies and their transformation into pan-ethnic national cultures could not have been accomplished without the (latent) predisposition of the Yugoslav socialism for paradoxes, where the societal and political role of major religious (Christian and Islamic) institutions had been severely circumscribed, first, by the politics of the League of Communists since 1945, and, second, by the lacking of major collective (grassroots, underground) religious sentiments and devotion among the ordinary people. In short, the churches owe their dramatic success in coloring the post-Yugoslav nations with their symbols precisely to the lacks and gaps of actual religious belief, on the one hand, and, on the other, to their unburdened keenness to step into public limelight in the role of ethno-homogenizers and para-political accomplices of ex-communist national leaderships. Akin to the processes in the Middle East, the leading religious institutions in the individual states have transformed into something opposite of being pan-ethnonational or ethno-inclusive. Religious institutions have also adopted the view of the world community as a threat to ‘their’ ethnic community, while placing in the center of universe the ethnos organized as church and state living in a symbiosis.
Hence, we aim to document and compare how both secular and ethno-religious nationalisms simultaneously produce the titular majorities and minorities (both defined by ethnicity and/or religion), where their ‘groupness’ is sustained as significant by the cleavage in which minorities must legitimize their civil and social status through manifest loyalty.
Our task would be to seek and solicit from the workshop contributors the best comparative methods (through case studies) for making a critical analysis of the sequence from secular to ethno-religious phases of the state-led majority-generating exclusivism.
Macro Context:
The Cold War divisions of the world, based on the state-sustained military-industrial globalization, stood in the affinity with secular nationalisms, while the current stage of economic globalization is of a fragmenting, anti-state form, and affirms ethno-religious, or culturalist nationalisms.
In the process, religious systems have been applied over various ethno-national projects. Church officials have become religious entrepreneurs tasked with the de-secularization of society. The politicization of religion has been followed by the confessionalization of public life, whose aim is to certify and ensure privileges for dominant ‘peoples’ via their given-at-birth denomination.
Further (on the ideological plane), the religious monopoly over defining identity features of the (majority) citizens in these new nationalisms actually strengthens the secularization process: religion is being transformed into ideology (David Martin, 2005), resulting in the profanization of religion (Weber). The paradox of the takeover of the grand secular utopian visions and ideologies by religious fundamentalisms is that in the process the latter become secularized.
One of the final questions would be to explore why and how the secularist and religious political factions have for long maintained their antipode positions as major stakes in the political competition.
We will solicit papers where each contributor would write a country case-study, and we, as co-directors, shall offer (apart from our own case studies) a synthesizing comparative and theoretical analysis. We would select at least one paper for each country in the regions under study, and make sure that there would be a stimulating match between the junior scholars finalizing their first large field study and senior colleagues that would prompt original theoretical and comparative historical debates.
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