Towards a Postsecular International Politics

New Forms of Community, Identity, and Power

L. Mavelli

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137341778
• eBook ISBN: 9781137341785
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An investigation of the postsecular in International Relations and how an increasingly postsecular international politics is contributing to the emergence of new patterns of authority, legitimacy and power in the international system.

CHAPTER 1

TOWARDS A POSTSECULAR INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

Luca Mavelli and Fabio Petito

The postsecular transformation of the international society is the product of a growing dissatisfaction with existing secular arrangements and of an increasing awareness that “values such as democracy, freedom, equality, inclusion, and justice may not necessarily be best pursued within an exclusively immanent secular framework. Quite the opposite, the secular may well be a potential site of isolation, domination, violence and exclusion.”¹ The thriving debate on religion in international politics has only in the last few years seen the emergence of the postsecular as a new object of study. Following an initial focus on the “return of religion” and the “power of secularism” in international politics, the focus on the postsecular seems to encompass, at least in its very terminology, the idea of a paradigm shift. This is an attempt to move beyond the secular and thus the secular/religious divide, which can be considered one of the foundational dimensions of Western modernity. The question raised by the postsecular, then, is not just one of incorporation of the presence of religion or of the power of secularism into existing theoretical frameworks, but one of conceptual innovation to account for a transformation that invests the very structures of consciousness and power, and existing understandings of political community.

The importance of this transformation surfaces in the recent writings of Jürgen Habermas, who has described the postsecular as a “change in consciousness” that characterizes traditionally secular societies such as the European ones.² This change—prompted by the awareness of European citizens’ own relativity, the fact that religious organizations have increasingly taken up the role of interpreters of society’s thorniest ethical questions, and by a Muslim presence in Europe which forces Christian citizens to confront their own beliefs—reflects the awareness that “the modernization of public consciousness” can no longer be conceived solely as the secularization of religious sensibilities, but demands a reflexive cooperative effort of both secular and religious mentalities.³ The postsecular, Hans Joas concurs, “does not express a sudden increase in religiosity, after its epochal decrease, but rather a change in mindset of those who, previously, felt justified in considering religions to be moribund.”⁴ Hence, according to Hent de Vries, “the post-secular condition and its corresponding intellectual stance consist precisely in acknowledging this ‘living-on’ of religion” and in confronting the “issues of pluralism and social cohesion, . . . identity and . . . need for integration, respect for others (that is to say, for their beliefs and values), as well as the liberty in principle to express oneself” that emerge from this reflective condition.⁵

This understanding of the postsecular as a “change in consciousness,” “change of mindset,” and “acknowledgement” of the enduring relevance and importance of faith to modern life calls for an intellectual and sociopolitical reflection on the challenge of pluralism and raises a central normative question. Indeed, it is “a plea for a model of law and politics in which religious arguments are not excluded from political debate,”⁶ which crucially demands rethinking the very boundary between the religious and the secular. In a most basic formulation, then, the current debate on secularity and postsecularity can be interpreted as a successor to the communitarian/cosmopolitan debate and the debate on multiculturalism—that is, as a debate on the ethical basis, meaning, and extension of the political community. Whereas the focus remains on the possibility and limits of “the inclusion of the other,”⁷ in the postsecular condition the other to be included is no longer the “stranger” or the “culturally different,” but the bearer of religious sensibilities. Hence, in its original Habermasian formulation, the question becomes whether, how, to what extent, and at what benefit and risk for their cohesion and identity should political communities accept, authorize, or even support political expressions of belief.

If we agree with Andrew Linklater that the problem of community—its boundaries and transformation—has long been central to international relations theory,⁸ two main observations follow. First, while receiving in-depth attention in anthropology, political and social theory, philosophy, and religious studies, the exploration of the postsecular in international politics, save for a few publications,⁹ is still largely underdeveloped. Second, and following Linklater’s approach to the study of political community, an investigation of the postsecular in international relations should not be confined to the normative question of inclusion/exclusion, but should encompass a theoretical exploration of how the postsecular ethos is contributing to a transformation of the political community and to the emergence of new forms of identity and power,¹⁰ and to a praxeological exploration of how this transformation is brought about by political actors who draw and negotiate moral resources embedded in existing social arrangements.¹¹

At the heart of this approach, which underpins the structure of this volume, lies the idea that the postsecular transformation of international politics signals a crisis of existing secular formations and their capacity to promote more inclusive communities that may advance democratic participation, equality, and freedom. Until recently, international relations scholars have been reluctant to engage with the possibility that the secular order may also be a framework of exclusion, control, and violence, as this would challenge one of the central (and contentious) assumptions of the discipline, namely, the idea that secularization (the privatization and marginalization of religious belief) is essential for the possibility of modern international politics. This assumption has its roots in the mythical origin of the international system, the peace of Westphalia, which, according to the conventional narrative,¹² brought to an end the so-called wars of religion by laying the seeds of a new political institution, the liberal-secular state “secured from theological strife and contestation,”¹³ which marked a progressive disjunction between religion and politics. This traditional account has been the object of numerous criticisms that have stressed, among other things, how the Westphalian settlement was characterized by a process of “migration of the holy” from the Church to the State,¹⁴ which de facto resulted in “a de-differentiation among church, state, and society at the territorial level.”¹⁵ While a fully fledged exploration of this perspective would be beyond the scope of this chapter, it suffices to say that this argument questions one the main assumptions of the discipline of International Relations, namely, the idea that the international system is based on an epistemic framework marked by the separation (albeit imperfect) of knowledge and faith, reason and emotions, the phenomenal and the noumenal, rational and irrational—all of which find a synthesis in the master narrative of the secular/religious divide.

Already in 1948, Hans Morgenthau, in his Politics Among Nations, was warning against the alleged secular rationality of the international system.

Superstition still holds sway over our relations within society. The demonological pattern of thought and actions has now been transferred to other fields of human action closed to the kind of rational enquiry and action that have driven superstition from our relations with nature. As William Graham Sumner put it, “The amount of superstition is not much changed, but it now attaches to politics, not to religion.”¹⁶

For Morgenthau the primary illustration of this demonological approach was the United States’ “indiscriminate opposition to Communism.”¹⁷ Indeed, the Cold War was “a global conflict between the god-fearing and the godless,”¹⁸ in which “Christianity was appropriated by Western propagandists and policy-makers for their anti-communist arsenal,”¹⁹ and where a US president, Ronald Reagan, would encourage Americans “to pray for the salvation of all those who live in totalitarian darkness” and to “pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do . . . they are the focus of evil in the modern world.”²⁰ The Cold War, according to Stefan Rossbach, should be understood in the framework of a history of Western spirituality, as it was underpinned by several religious traditions, including apocalypticism, Manichaeism, millenarianism, and Gnosticism.²¹ For Raymond Haberski, the Cold War encompassed a fusion of God and nation, which made the Cold War an instantiation of American civil religion.²² However, the religious and spiritual dimensions of the Cold War have for the most part been neglected. Historical and international politics accounts have in fact privileged a more instrumental-rational focus on ideology, balance of power, and nuclear deterrence.

This, to be sure, is not to suggest that the religious dimension made the Cold War irrational, but that an approach based on the separation between material and spiritual, superstition and reality, rational and irrational, secular and religious makes it impossible to fully grasp a historical phase that transcends and encompasses all these categories. Indeed, if we read Morgenthau’s observation in the framework of Max Weber’s theory of secularization, it becomes clear that the categories of rationality and irrationality are not the direct expression of, respectively, the secular and the religious. According to Weber, religion is the first form of rationalization, which strives to account for “the experience of the irrationality of the world.”²³ For him, irrational is a “world of undeserved suffering, unpunished injustice and hopeless stupidity”²⁴ and religion is the attempt to make meaningful the “unjust suffering” and the “unequal distribution of individual happiness,”²⁵ hence it represents an attempt to bring rationality into a seemingly irrational and chaotic world. For Weber, however, the growing theoretical and empirical mastery of reality that characterizes the process of modernity contributed to push religion into the realm of the irrational and to enthrone science as the primary form of rationalization.

This has resulted in an underlying crisis of meaning following the awareness that human beings are alone in a meaningless universe, and in an idea of rationalization understood primarily in instrumental terms that has left human beings hostage to the impersonal and anomic forces of modernity. The reappropriation of the moral intuitions of faith, which for Habermas is the core of the postsecular ethos, is thus a distinctive attempt to redress the irrationality of the modern secular world by drawing on the resources of religious traditions. Hence, whereas for Habermas the irrationality of secular modernity manifests itself in the disruptive forces of “markets and administrative powers” and “the pathologies of neo-liberal modernisation and globalisation” that “are displacing social solidarity,”²⁶ for Morgenthau the irrationality of secular modernity is represented by a demonological approach that has elevated the concept of evil to central political category. The “War on Terror” of the Bush administration is possibly the most recent illustration of this situation. By reproposing the Manichaean discourse of “good versus evil”—the idea that “God is near” and with his help “we can overcome evil with greater good”²⁷—and combining it with modern technology of warfare in a broader neoliberal (imperial) logic, the War on Terror blurs the divide between the secular and the religious, confronting us with a postsecular narrative. This narrative draws on both secular and religious imaginaries in the same way as normative accounts that advocate a greater role for religion in the public sphere do, thus suggesting that the postsecular discourse can underpin completely different political goals and logics. Yet, why do we call this discourse postsecular, rather than, say, postreligious?

The immediate answer would be that, following the process of secularization, which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Towards a Postsecular International Politics
• Part I Theories
• Part II Cases
• Part III Actors
• List of Contributors
• Index