An initial glance suggests that it is difficult to generalise about relationships between religion and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). In the former Yugoslavia, for example, religion may be associated on the one hand with Serbian anti democratic ethno-nationalism and on the other with Bosnian Muslim appeals to Ottoman Islam as a model of pluralism and religious toleration features which may be considered among the prerequisites of democratic development. I In Poland the same Roman Catholic Church which acted as an ideological and institutional force in support of democracy against state socialism appears in the postcommunist period as an opponent of democracy when it seeks to bypass parliamentary procedures to ensure that its own position is enshrined in legislation on abortion and religious education. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the process of making sense of this confusing evidence by developing an interdisciplinary approach to the interaction between religious traditions and processes of democratisation. In particular, I would like to bring phenomenological and sociological insights to bear on the political science framework within which democratisation is usually considered. One of my contentions is that this process has been significantly hampered by assumptions about secularisation found in many analyses of democratisation, which have led either to neglect or to poor conceptualisation of the role of religion, and hence to failure both to explain existing evidence adequately, and indeed to gather appropriate evidence in the first place. I use the term secularisation in two senses. First, I use it to refer to a prereflective assumption about the declining significance of religion in modem societies. Here, I am concerned not with the truth of this proposition, but with its social consequences, specifically the neglect of religion as a possible factor in democratisation. Second, I use it in the sense explicitly formulated by sociologists. However, the latter is only one factor contributing to the former, and both reflect wider cultural and historical forces. For example, Casanova has shown how church-state relations in northern Europe in the eighteenth century shaped 'the Enlightenment critique of religion', which has in turn influenced the development of secularisation theory.3 As a result, Mestrovic argues, 'most social theories derived from the Enlightenment [have] held