Church State Relations in Europe

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A framework for the comparative analysis o

churchstate relat ions in EuropeJohn Madeleya

Depart ment of Government at t he London School of Economics

Available onl ine: 04 Jun 2010

To cite this art icle: John Madel ey (2003): A framew ork for t he comparat ive analysis of churchst ate r elatin Europe, West European Politics, 26:1, 23-50

To link t o this art icle: htt p: / / dx.doi .org/ 10.1080/ 01402380412331300187

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A Framework for the Comparative Analysisof ChurchState Relations in Europe

JOHN T.S. MADELEY

Even a cursory overview of churchstate relations in contemporary Europe

reveals what Grace Davie calls a bewildering variety.1 And if closer

attention is paid to the details of different local patterns in respect of the

legal status of religious bodies, churches internal organisation, the impactof labour law, church financing and the legal status of priests, the overall

picture becomes even more bewildering.2 David Martins Toward a General

Theory of Secularization represents a heroic attempt to identify the key

elements which have combined in different historical contexts in Europe to

produce the complex mosaic as it stood at the end of the 1970s.3 However,

since then much has happened to change the picture in a number of key

respects; for example, the collapse of communism around 1989 represented

the end of an ice age for religious institutions in Central and Eastern Europe,

while in the West large-scale immigration has led to the mushroom-like

growth of multicultural settings. This article takes a step back in an

attempt to gain perspective on the new picture as it presents itself at the start

of the third millennium. It attempts to do this by both narrowing the focus

and broadening the scope of inquiry: the focus is restricted to the

institutional aspects of what is conventionally called churchstate relations

and the scope is broadened and deepened by extending it both spatially

and temporally.4

Stein Rokkans path-breaking work on nation building, cleavage

formation and the structuring of mass politics in Western Europe provides a

useful starting point for any attempt to develop a framework for analysing

churchstate relations in Europe. He was concerned to identify and explain

a much broader range of phenomena, namely, the principal contrasts in

political structures and processes which were observable in Western Europe

after World War II. Coming from the north of Norway, he was always

acutely aware of political variations across geographical space; for him,

patterns of politics in the widely dispersed parts of Europe varied greatly in

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terms of inherited systems of territorial control, the impact of cultural and

economic forces, and the mechanisms of representation, including both the

electoral and party systems. Faced with such a broad range of variations

across such a wide space he did not restrict himself to a synchronicapproach, however. Instead, he availed himself of the work of a number of

important historical sociologists and pioneered a historical-developmental

approach within European political science which has been widely

influential.5 What follows is a modest attempt to follow his lead 25 years

after his untimely death and establish a framework with sufficient

geographical breadth and historical depth to serve the purposes of

comparing and contrasting patterns of churchstate relations across the

whole of Europe.

Although, particularly in his later work, he followed the path of (almost)

infinite regress via the Vlkerwanderungen of Europes so-called Dark

Ages back to the Roman Empire, his most influential writings were basedon an ordered analysis of so-called critical junctures and their

consequences, starting with the momentous conflicts of the Reformation

period. The choice of starting-point was quite deliberate and explicit:

The developmental model to be explored posits clear-cut time limits

to its operation:

its terminus a quo is the conflict over the cultural-religious identity

of the emerging nation-state in the sixteenth century;

its terminus ad quem is the establishment of universal and equal

electoral democracy and the freezing of party alternatives, inmost countries during the 1920s and the 1930s, at any rate before

World War II.6

It was his view that critical junctures, which occurred in the case of the

Reformation and French Revolution centuries ago, had generated

contrasting systems of power and opposition which continued to shape and

inform the politics in the post-Second World War era. Thus the

ReformationCounter-Reformation conflicts were seen to have generated

the first of two dimensions of opposition, which he referred to under the

common heading of the National Revolution. The second of these, which

also related in part to churchstate conflicts and tensions, he saw as arising

out of the French Revolution, as its influence was spread across Continental

Europe in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Other, more

material interest-based dimensions of conflict generated through the

Industrial Revolution between opposing interests in the commodity and

CHURCH AND S TATE IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE24

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labour markets were also presented as being of great significance, of

course, in the fixing of the decisive cleavage patterns which underlay

patterns of modern mass politics. These more materialistic cleavages based

on class and market position, in addition to dominating the politicallandscape, also added a distinctive twist to issues affecting churchstate

relations. In Rokkans sequential analysis they did so within the context of,

and under the constraints given by, pre-existing patterns of conflict deriving

from the National Revolution cleavage structures. Thus, the sharp division

in Latin Europe between revisionist social democracy on the one hand and

revolutionary anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists and Marxist factions on the

other were seen as developing within a force-field where culture wars

between the Roman Catholic church (and its allies) and radical anti-clericals

(and their allies) were already ongoing. The distinctiveness of the Latin

pattern of what Martin dubbed reactive organicism, then, was seen to

derive as much if not more from the distortive impact of the earlier, ratherthan otherwise relatively straightforward impact of the later, cleavage base.7

Rokkan argued that the activation of the ownerworker cleavage, which

generated mass working class parties in all countries of Western Europe

before World War I, was the one feature which made for similarity across

party systems, while the impact of the cleavages rooted in the National

Revolution made for the decisive contrasts which it was his particular

concern to identify and explain.8 The distinctive ideologies, movements and

organisations which made politics so different in different parts of Europe

were in his analysis all seen as implicated in particular approaches to issues

related to, if not solely concerned with, churchstatesociety relations.

As Rokkan clearly explained, the limitations of time (sixteenth centuryto the 1920s) were suggested by the geographical focus of his model on the

competitive political systems of Western Europe; it only applied to the

territories and the polities which were immediately affected by the clashes

between Reformers and the Roman Catholic Church and the consequent

strains between secular and religious powers.9 By the same logic, in order

to develop a necessarily more extended model for the analysis of

churchstate relationships across the whole of Europe, from the Atlantic to

the Urals, it is necessary not only to move eastwards in spatial terms but

also further backwards and forwards in temporal terms. The natural

terminus a quo for an all-Europe model would then be 1054, the

conventional date for the decisive schism between Latin Catholic, and

Greek or Eastern Orthodox, Christianity. And the natural terminus ad

quem would be the reopening of Central and Eastern Europe to competitive

democratic politics since 1989.

25CHURCHSTATE REL ATIONS IN EUROP E

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As Rokkans intellectual executors point out in their comprehensively

annotated commentary on his core works, extending his model

geographically is not an easy task:

The fundamentally different historical development of the EasternEuropean nation-states would have complicated his already complex

model even further. In order to be able to arrive at general conclusions

despite this complexity, Rokkan always advocated developing region-

specific models. The end of the division of Europe that resulted from

World War II would have forced him to think more about how to

delimit the region Europe, i.e. about the long-term effects of its

historical boundary-building: the division of the Roman Empire into

an eastern and a western empire, the confrontation between the

Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches, the long isolation of

the emerging Muscovite empire from the West, the carving-up of the

East under the despotic Ottoman Empire, the autocratic Russian

Empire, and the absolutist Austrian Empire, and finally the totalitarian

Soviet Empire.10

Since the focus here is restricted to identifying the institutional aspects

of churchstate relations, however, the task can be made less daunting by

removing one of the sources of complexity which is not directly relevant

and substituting a confessional one.11 The latter is, hypothetically at least,

both relevant and, arguably, of wider significance in identifying and

defining differences between East and West in Europe.12 Churchstate

relations in the world of Eastern Orthodoxy are collectively quite

distinctive, relative to both Catholic and Protestant patterns, and cantherefore be expected to have direct implications and consequences for

patterns of political conflict in the successor states of the former empires of

Eastern and Central Europe. The map Religious Europe 1900 illustrates

the spatial distribution of the major confessions as they existed in the last

days of the established empires. As will be seen, the broad lines of this

confessional map of Europe have survived the violence and destruction of

the great wars of the twentieth century and can still be detected today

despite large-scale alterations in state boundaries. Figure 1 represents an

attempt to clarify the overall picture by presenting an adaptation of

Rokkans conceptual map of Western (and, in part, Central) Europe, as

established by Flora et al. in its most complete form, and extending it so as

to embrace Eastern Europe. It indicates schematically the significance of

both the principal mono-confessional blocs and the intervening multi-

confessional belts, which have provided the context for widely differing


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patterns of churchstate relations. Identifying the nature of the connections

between these structures and their contexts would require a major research

effort, however; all that can be attempted here is to identify some of the

principal features such an effort would have to address.

THE LONG SHADOW OF THE PAST: CONTEMPORARY EUROPES

CONFESSIONAL STRUCTURE

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century Europe knew three mono-

confessional culture areas of major size located severally across the eastern,

southern and northern margins of the Continent: the Orthodox, Catholic and

Lutheran. One can even say that there were, and are, several religious

Europes, each with its own range of variation attaching to local or regional

religious traditions.13 In each the confessional state pattern was

institutionalised for most if not all of this period so as to make membershipof the political community coincident with submission to the locally

dominant creed. This rule was typically adhered to even in adjacent subject

territories which contained populations of mixed confessional loyalties;

here the adherents of dissident or minority traditions were typically

excluded from holding public office and sometimes even effectively denied

the right to hold land or have their marriages officially recognised.

Nowadays almost all the punitive sanctions which underwrote church

establishment in the age of the confessional state have been removed.

Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights of 1951 guaranteed

to everyone the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this

right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either

alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his

religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance. The only

limitations on these freedoms should be such as are prescribed by law and

are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public order, health

or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Despite the almost completely successful abolition of discriminatory

legislation and controls in this area, however, the heritage of the European

confessional state is still around for all to see. Geographical patterns of

adherence to particular confessional traditions, which were once created

and/or reinforced by these now discarded means, are still very much

in evidence.

The second edition of Barretts World Christian Encyclopaedia provides

figures for adherence to different religious traditions in all the 50 or so

territories which make up Europe as of 2000.14 A brief analysis of the


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MAP1

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FIGURE1

ANADAPTATIONOFROKKANSC

ONCEPTUALMAPOFEUROPEINCORPORATINGTHETERRITORIES

ONCECOVER

EDBYTHERUSSIANANDOTTOMA

NEMPIRES

Geopolitical

type>>

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Rome:

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influencedby

Romanlaw:

Protestant

Religiously

Mixed:Protestant

&Catholic

Seaward

peripheries

Iceland:from

13Cunder

Norway;from

16C,Denmark

Scotland:united

withEngland

1707

Wales:subjected

15C

Ireland:subjected

16-17C

Seawardempire

nations

Norway

Denmark

ENGLAND:

consolidated

11C,

majoroverseas

empire1720C

City-state

Europe

Hanseatic

League:loose

federationof

citiesaroundthe

BalticandNorth

Seas1316C

Neths:Provinces

unitedagstHabs-

burgs,indep.1648

Switz:confedn

1291,indep1648

Landward

empire-nations

Sweden:state-

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PRUSSIA:state-

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nucleusfor

unificationof

GermanReich,

1870:

GERMANY

Landwardbuffers

Finland:under

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underRussia

Estonia,

Latvia,

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Lithuania

Poland

Bohemia:Moravia

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bjectedby

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extendedfrom

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Belarus

Ukraine

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political

>

Seaward

peripheries

Seawardempire

nations

City-state

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Landward

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ndwardbuffersLandward

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Geopolitical

Church State Relations in Europe

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