Religion and Social Integration ‘Crises’ in North Western Europe: Some Conclusions

Abstract

My investigation of religion-related social integration crises in four North West European societies in the period 2001–11 began with the English case and the riots in some Northern English cities of 2001. In concluding I shall start again with this case, bringing it together with the Dutch, French and Northern Irish evidence we have now considered, and with my findings across each of the dimensions examined (segregation, media, institutional forms of multiculturalism and secularism, far-right and post-liberal mobilisation and national cultural trauma). Since much attention has been given to factors which shape conflict and influence the construction of prejudice, and especially to the negative role of the media in this, attention will also be given here to the media’s positive role in enabling resistance to dominant media stereotypes and to contributing to the construction of anti-racist, anti-Islamophobic solidarity, drawing primarily on Dutch evidence, as this case study examined media most intensively. Finally, I will return to two key questions raised in the introduction. First — adapting from Brewer et al.’s aim, articulated in the Northern Irish context, to theorise the ‘relationship between religion and peacemaking in conflict societies where religion is perceived to be part of the problem’ (2010: 1019) — I ask ‘where religion is perceived to be part of the problem for social integration in multicultural societies, how can it also be part of the solution?’ Second, to re-address a core question for the sociological tradition, updated for contemporary societies, and also highly politically relevant: ‘what does a democratic, multi-ethnic, multi-religious society need to hold itself together?’KeywordsSocial CohesionSocial IntegrationPublic SphereReligious SymbolDutch CaseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.