Theories of European integration and religion: a critical assessment

Abstract

Religion has been for centuries a touchstone for thinking about European political history in its various forms. European integration is a major development in continental politics in modern times. Its relationship to religion in collective imaginaries is dual. On the one hand, the European Union (EU) may be envisioned as the final product of the political and cultural disenchantment which had its roots in the Enlightenment, a rationalist process relying on economic interests to overcome warlike passions, among them religious ones. From this angle, the EU appears as foreign or even hostile to religion. On the other hand, European integration is reputed to have been conceived of and created by Christian Democracy, conveying a moral vision of politics and in some cases a culturalist one when defined as a ‘Christian club’. These two conceptions coexist and alternate depending on circumstances and audience. Each theory of European integration carries a specific vision of the modernity promoted by Brussels. Interpretations range from defence of a realistic continuity in international politics still dominated by nation-states and power relations to the suggestion of a radical innovation represented by a new kind of supranational organization constraining national interests and perhaps more likely to handle post-modern political claims. The question is whether the EU is comparable to the nation-state on the key points of the classic theory of European modernity: presence of a centre likely to subsume social and cultural diversity, agency of institutions on society, mutual autonomy of social spheres (politics, economy, society, culture), rationalization of individual and collective behaviour. The purpose here is to assess how, and with what effects, mainstream conceptual frameworks used in European studies may integrate the religious factor in its interactions with the emerging European political order. It must be said that, until recently, European studies in general had dealt little with religion. This is due to three factors. The first is their functionalist intellectual inheritance from international relations and political economy. The second is the supposed exceptionalism of the EU as a sui generis political system emancipated from this type of anthropological question, despite the fact that the relation with the sacred has been constitutive of all political powers in human history. The third is the lack of empirical substance as regards the absence of religion in the initial competences and scope of European institutions.