This book systematically studies the relationship of religious activism towards neoliberal globalization. It considers how religious organizations often play a central role in the resistance against global capitalism, endeavouring to offer alternatives and developments for reform. But it also examines the other side of the coin, showing how many religious groups help to diffuse neoliberal values, promote and reinforce practices of capitalism. Drawing on a unique set of case studies from around the world, the chapters examine a range of groups and their practices in order to provide a thorough examination of the relationship between religion and the global political economy.
This book systematically studies the relationship of religious activism towards neoliberal globalization. It considers how religious organizations often play a central role in the resistance against global capitalism, endeavouring to offer alternatives and developments for reform. But it also examines the other side of the coin, showing how many religious groups help to diffuse neoliberal values, promote and reinforce practices of capitalism. Drawing on a unique set of case studies from around the world, the chapters examine a range of groups and their practices in order to provide a thorough examination of the relationship between religion and the global political economy.
Religious Activism in the Global Economy: Promoting, Reforming, or Resisting Neoliberal Globalization?
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Religious Activism in the Global Economy: Promoting, Reforming, or Resisting Neoliberal Globalization?
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Overview
This book systematically studies the relationship of religious activism towards neoliberal globalization. It considers how religious organizations often play a central role in the resistance against global capitalism, endeavouring to offer alternatives and developments for reform. But it also examines the other side of the coin, showing how many religious groups help to diffuse neoliberal values, promote and reinforce practices of capitalism. Drawing on a unique set of case studies from around the world, the chapters examine a range of groups and their practices in order to provide a thorough examination of the relationship between religion and the global political economy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783486984 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Peter J. Smith is Professor of Political Science at Athabasca University, Alberta, Canada
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Religious Activism in the Global Economy
Promoting, Reforming, or Resisting Neoliberal Globalization?
By Sabine Dreher, Peter J. Smith
Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Sabine Dreher and Peter J. SmithAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-698-4
CHAPTER 1
Religion and International Political Economy — A Case of Mutual Neglect
Sabine Dreher
The new wave of religious activism since the 1970s has forced the social sciences in general and the discipline of International Relations (IR) specifically, to reconsider the role of religion in society, politics, and, to some extent, economics. Previously, religious activists were written off as remnants of traditions soon to be wiped out by the modernization process, and were, therefore, supposed to restrict themselves to the private sphere. However, beginning in the 1970s, religious activism emerged into the public sphere, often under dramatic or violent circumstances. Prominent examples of "public religion" (Casanova 1994) are the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s supported by the Catholic Church, Protestant fundamentalism in American politics and its role in the Republican Party, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and the emergence of a new form of global Islamic Jihadism with the 9/11 attacks against the United States. Somewhat overlooked in lists such as these is liberation theology in Latin America, but it shows that the demands of religious activists ranged from more progressive to more reactionary responses to modern life, though, it has to be said, reactionary responses are more prominent in the debate.
The reemergence of religion into the public sphere took many observers by surprise since secularization — the process by which religious institutions are subordinated to and separated from politics, economics, and society — was supposed to have relegated religion to the private sphere. In addition to the separation of religion from other spheres, social scientists also assumed that religion would simply disappear; yet, religious movements are now among the key oppositional movements in the twenty-first century according to Tugal (2002, 85). Moreover, Rinehart (2004, 271) points out that religious doctrines have emerged as real alternatives to communism, socialism, and liberalism.
In IR, this led to a debate on how to interpret the role of religion. On the one hand, there have been those who interpret the emergence of religious activism as a successful and dangerous challenge to the secular and territorial Westphalian system of sovereign states that needs to be contained. On the other hand, others have argued that religious activism is a reflection of the need for greater pluralism and authenticity in the international system, signaling the need for deeper structural and democratic reforms in global institutional arrangements.
According to this second perspective, the Westphalian state-centered system characterized by anarchy, hierarchy, and territoriality has been complemented (but not supplanted) by global governance and a global civil society (McGrew 2013; Kaldor 2003). The disaggregation of the state in the "post-Westphalian" system has created space for other identities that were suppressed: new social movements around women's rights; civil rights; peace and environment; movements around sexual identities; and right-wing, regional, and ethnic movements, to name just a few (Eisenstadt 2000; Badie and Smouts 1992). It is in this context of the emergence of identity politics against the modernizing, nationalist secular state that scholars in IR have discussed the "resurgence" of religion since the early 1990s (Huntington 1993; Thomas 2000; Hurd 2007; Rinehart 2004).
The problem with this scholarship on religion in IR is, however, according to Bellin (2008), that it did not integrate itself into a larger field of inquiry such as culture and IR or international political economy (IPE) but largely studied religion in isolation. One further and more important difficulty is its focus on the political aspect of the new religious activism while largely ignoring economic questions. Even within IPE, which unites students interested in the economic side of world politics, researchers have not studied the religious resurgence to a significant degree (Dreher 2012).
There is little research on whether the new religious activism has had any impact on the neoliberal globalization project that not even the 2008 economic crisis was able to derail. On the contrary, the main theme coming out of the crisis has been that there is a need for more, and not less, of the same (Centeno and Cohen 2012). Neoliberalism is defined here as a project of global market making (McMichael 2000) with the goal to abolish all state regulations that are seen as impediments to economic growth (or the freedom of maneuver for business, whether nationally or globally), while the surveillance and regulatory capacity of the state are strengthened to better implement these reforms. This combination of a free economy and a strong state is the hallmark of the neoliberal revolution according to Gamble (1994). But it is startling to see that the crisis of 2007-2008, the biggest crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, has not completely delegitimized neoliberal ideas, and that we are, instead, pondering the "strange non-death of neoliberalism" (Crouch 2011).
This persistence of neoliberal thinking is unexpected since it has not been a resounding success in economic terms. While neoliberal policies have increased profit rates for firms and lowered inflation, they have also reduced overall growth rates of the economy, increased global economic instability through recurrent financial crises, amplified global and national economic inequality, facilitated corporate corruption in the absence of state regulation, increased rent-seeking by firms, and boosted public and private debt (Piketty 2014; Rodrik 2007; Stuckler and Basu 2014; Wilkinson and Pickett 2010; Crouch 2011). This persistence of neoliberalism, despite its many negative effects, and an increasing movement of resistance (see below), begs the question of how to explain the staying power of neoliberal ideas and policies. Of course, as Crouch (2011) points out, corporate power is one key factor, but it cannot account for the popularity of neoliberal policies in elections.
The argument presented in this volume is that there is a form of religiosity that promotes neoliberalism. This volume thus complements research in IPE with regard to neoliberal globalization. It shows that IPE scholars will have to pay more attention to the study of religion if they want to understand both the continuity and the ever-increasing fissures within the neoliberal project. Indeed, as this volume highlights, one of the more interesting ideas on how to resist neoliberal globalization (buen vivir) is coming from religious social movements. At the same time, the volume showcases forms of religiosity within each religious tradition that are highly compatible with the neoliberal globalization project and its post-Fordist insistence on flexibility and adaptability (Harvey 1989).
The purpose of this introduction is to outline the debate on religion in IR and its three limits: the absence of economic questions, the Westphalian presumption, and the approach to the analysis of religion. This discussion will lay the groundwork for the introduction of a constructivist social movement approach to the study of religion. The proposed typology ("promote," "reform," and "resist") is derived from a discussion of neoliberal globalization and its contestation by global civil society. The various case studies presented in this volume show that religious activism has promoted, reformed, or resisted neoliberal globalization. Religious activism is, therefore, an explanatory factor in the staying power of the neoliberal project but, at the same time, also a significant challenger to its predominance.
THE DEBATE ON RELIGION IN IR AND ITS LIMITS
The debate on religion and its role in world politics has largely been shaped by the 9/11 attacks, even though there had been a number of prior studies (Huntington 1993; Juergensmeyer 1993). It was Samuel Huntington's argument (1993) — that the future of world politics would be characterized by a clash of civilizations — that dominated the debate in IR about culture, identity, and religion after the end of the Cold War and specifically after 9/11. Huntington and others (Winfield 2007; Lewis 2002; Juergensmeyer 2008) portrayed religion, especially the Islamic religion, as a violent attack on the secular values of the free world. In the eyes of these authors, the "free" and now "secular" world appears as the key unit that needs to be defended in a new global conflict, and each new terror attack strengthens this argument.
The prominence of violent religious actors resulted in scholarly research largely focused on religious violence. Juergensmeyer's (1993; 2008) documentation of current events and movements seemed to confirm Huntington's prediction of a clash. Juergensmeyer clarified this debate substantially by pointing out that religious nationalism will lead to a new form of global confrontation between secular and religious forces as the two are diametrically opposed and fight over the same terrain. In his view, accommodation of secularism to religion or of religion to secularism is unlikely and difficult to bring about. For Juergensmeyer (2008, 17), it is a question of either secular or religious nationalism as both are ideologies of order.
Secularism in this specific pattern of argumentation has taken on the appearance of an immutable force that has specific features — one of which is supposed to be a strict separation of politics from religious interference and where any expression of religiosity, even the simple wearing of a headscarf, is seen as an assault on this secular order. The "secularist" camp (Winfield 2007; Philpot 2002; Lewis 2002) claims that a secular order is a precondition for democracy and prosperity since religious ideas and practices are often undemocratic and irrational, and impede economic development (Kuran 2011). For the secularist, the Westphalian peace treaty of 1648 marked the end of the intrusion of religion in public affairs by cementing the separation between politics and religion. It turned religion into a private affair centered on the individual but strictly separated from politics, and left international politics to the more rational calculations of states (Philpott 2002). According to Thomas (2000), this "Westphalian presumption" even requires the relegation of religion to the private sphere in order to pacify international politics.
It is this rational, peaceful, and secular order that is under attack by irrational and violent religious forces. In the eyes of the secularist, they question key values of the free world with their different interpretation of the organization of public space and, specifically, women's comportment (see Schyff and Overbeeke 2011; Cote-Boucher and Hadj-Moussa 2008; Falkenhayner 2010 for critical analysis). Philpot (2002) even argues that the 9/11 attacks ended the Westphalian sovereign state system because they highlighted the existence of a nonstate religious authority that was able to assault a sovereign state. Some authors have concluded from this debate that secularization as such has come to an end and is being reversed (Berger 1999), and that we need to speak about post-secularism.
Predictably, the argument that religion undermines the political order has been countered by its opposite: religion may represent a corrective to such an order, which can be as violent and irrational as the religious order. For example, the Catholic Church supported the resistance against Communist regimes in the 1980s; the Jubilee Debt campaign changed the nature of the debate on global debt by declaring high debt burdens as morally wrong and in need of cancellation or at least reduction (Shawki 2010); liberation theology in Latin America contributed to a critique of modern capitalism (Lowy 1996). These examples showcase that religious activists are not only a problem for modernity and democracy but also present important interventions into specific modern problems. From this perspective, some religious activists can be integrated into the public sphere as one voice among many and their integration will not necessarily mean an end to secularization or the state system (see chapter 2).
Another group of authors concludes that the real problem is not religion but specific secularist assumptions about religion. Following Talal Asad (1993), they focus on the idea of secularism itself and its various forms. Their main contribution is to distinguish between a passive secularism that accepts some forms of religious expressions whereas more authoritarian secularism perceives any religious activism immediately as a threat (Kuru 2007). Hurd has even argued that there is not really a resurgence of religion but an increase in authoritarian secularism (Hurd 2007) and, for her, the debate is better conceptualized as a struggle over authoritarian definitions of religious and secular spheres. Hurd's and Kuru's works point to the fact that there are a variety of secular regimes — for example, some allow for a surprising degree of expression of religiosity while others restrict all or some religious expression — and that the emphasis on a singular secular Westphalian state system may be problematic (see chapter 2). From this perspective, the emergence of religious activists signals a need for a more plural order that is more accommodating than the existing Western-dominated order. Modernity in this view is not unilinear but there are multiple ways to be modern (Eisenstadt 2000). For Thomas (2000), the reemergence of religion indicates a return of authenticity that had been undermined by modernization processes. Theoretically, this second set of authors encourages us to see religious activists in a more positive light and to accept that they are making valid contributions to debates in the world polity about an international order characterized by great power imbalances and inequality of life chances, though this second camp is not discussing these economic questions either.
By focusing on the political aspects, the debate in IR ignores one key insight from research on secularization: the importance, but also the intensity, of religion diminishes with increased prosperity according to Norris and Inglehart (2010); conversely, religious fervor increases in times of existential insecurity. Given that the neoliberal globalization project and the support for repressive regimes have dramatically increased existential insecurity during decades of failed structural adjustment programs, we should not be surprised by the recent resurgence and increase in extremist forms of religion. Except that the connections are not drawn; problems of economic insecurity created by neoliberal globalization are not systematically seen as an explanatory factor for the religious resurgence. While the "Westphalian presumption" will be problematized in more detail in chapter 2, the next section will introduce a constructivist perspective on religion — here defined as the study of religious movements and their frames — as the key unit of analysis. This is necessary as both sides in the debate in IR rely on an essentialist understanding of religion stemming from their origin in "world religion" thinking.
A CONSTRUCTIVIST PERSPECTIVE ON RELIGION
A largely overlooked aspect of the debate in IR is its problematic understanding of religion. Both sides rely on an essentialist understanding of religion assuming that religion has an irreducible component that can be identified by the researcher. Both Thomas (2000) and Juergensmeyer (2008), for example, present religious activism as the expression of a community. Juergensmeyer's argument about religion as an ideology of order in direct opposition to secular nationalism has already been outlined, but Thomas (2000) who comes from the opposite camp expresses a similar idea when he postulates that religion needs to be defined in a "social" way, as a "community of believers" (Thomas 2000, 820; Bosco 2009, 94). In other words, both camps share the idea that there is an essence to religious activism that necessarily also shapes actors' preferences and choices. However, there are two problems with this approach.
First of all, feminist and postcolonial analysts have criticized the description of religious activism as the authentic expression of a community. For feminists, the authentic expression of a community usually ends up being one specific male voice of this community that ignores some of the female perspectives that may have a different view on polygamy, wife beating, child marriage, or divorce (Okin 1999; Moghadam 2007) even while accepting the religious viewpoint as such. Postcolonial authors, in contrast, emphasize the social construction of religion in a geopolitical context influenced by imperialism and colonialism. Bosco (2009) therefore pushes for a more refined definition of religion in the discipline of IR that avoids orientalism and essentialism.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Religious Activism in the Global Economy by Sabine Dreher, Peter J. Smith. Copyright © 2016 Sabine Dreher and Peter J. Smith. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd..
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