Religious Newcomers and the Nation State: Political Culture and Organized Religion in France and the Netherlands

Abstract

Since 9/11, the most controversial domestic political issue in Western Europe has been how to integrate Muslim immigrants and their native-born children. The scholarly literature on this topic has shown explosive growth over the past decade, not only in English but also in most of the other major European languages. This compact collection of essays edited by Erik Sengers and Thijl Sunier thus joins a crowded field. The book begins with the premise that “the diverging reactions to Islam in different European nations are best explained by the different discourses of nationhood and the disparate civil cultures in those countries” (p. 11). Such a thesis is no longer novel in this literature; several earlier studies that the work cites make essentially the same point. What Sengers, Sunier, and the other Dutch, French, and American writers do contribute, however, is a much more detailed historical analysis of how the national political cultures (the editors prefer the term “civil cultures”) of the Netherlands and France interacted with the cultures of such earlier religious minorities as Dutch Catholics and French Protestants. The authors demonstrate that even among native-born members of the dominant ethnic group in each country, the precise meaning of such core elements of the political culture as French “laïcité” or Dutch “toleration” was and is highly contested and in flux. Depending upon which version of these concepts the most politically powerful wing of “natives” adopts, today's Dutch and French Muslims will have greater or lesser difficulty practicing their religion and achieving popular acceptance in mainstream society.