Religion and Politics in the Mediterranean: An Historical Perspective

Abstract

This article tackles the complex relationship between secularism, modernity, politics and religion in the Mediterranean by comparing the Spanish example with the Maghreb. The progress of modernity implies the emergence of “anti‐modern” processes. Logically, secularization, insofar as it constitutes an essential element on which modernism is based, can also provoke fundamentalist reactions. Both these processes are present in the social life of the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. The paper begins by tracing the tension between religion and politics in Spain. Two main issues were involved: the relationship between the Church and the State, and the response of the Church to secularization processes. Nineteenth‐century elites, closely allied with the Church, viewed secularization as inimical to the presumed essence of the Spanish character, and the identification of the nation with an anti‐modernist Catholicism has remained a recurring (if increasingly curtailed) theme in right‐wing and ecclesiastical thought. The Republican process of social modernization and the laicization of the State was brutally interrupted by the implantation of the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975). Under Franco, the nation became Catholic and the irreligious (or more precisely the secularists) “anti‐Spanish”. However, the Franco policy of economic liberalization gave rise to a curious “modernization without secularization and without democracy”. By the end of the Franco period the Church had distanced itself from the regime. Although the Church moved from being a cornerstone of the regime to becoming a factor in its de‐legitimization, the process of the Church's disengagement from politics (and right‐wing evocation of religious values) has not been easy. Whilst the Church has intervened forcefully in the past decades against what it considered the anti‐Catholic nature of some secularist reforms, its effects have been restricted by two independent factors: the growing recognition of the national diversity of the Spanish State, and the process of modernist secularization. The principals of religious faith, national identity and political citizenship can be increasingly separated. The authors find in the Spanish example parallelisms that allow them to approach in a different way the “modernity” of the Mediterranean North, supposedly connected with the triumph of reason over metaphysics, and the “backwardness” of the South, supposedly the result of a religion presumed to be intolerant and which imbues every aspect of life. They trace the Maghrebi movement from the modernist secular Arab nationalism of Bourguiba and Nasser to either contemporary religious nationalism, or political opposition to undemocratic regimes legitimated by religious fervour. The rise of political Islam is at present tied up with the situation of social instability which is, in its turn, a response to the continuous deterioration of economic conditions, to growing inequalities, and, particularly, to the incompetence of the political regimes. They suggest that this articulation seems to be an unrealistic solution of a populist nature, given that it is incapable of formulating a practical political and economic program expressed by an efficient historical tendency. They conclude that if democratization has proved possible in Hungary or in Poland, no insurmountable obstacle should be able to prevent it from being established in Pakistan, Algeria or Uzbekistan.