The British Journal of Sociology 2013 Volume 64 Issue 4

A Christian identity for the liberal state? Christian Joppke

Abstract It seems to be impossible for the liberal state to embrace a Christian identity, because ‘liberalism’ is exactly a device for separating state and religion. Discussing the implications of a recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights, Lautsi v. Italy (2011), I argue that this is not necessarily so. If paired with a liberal commitment to pluralism, a Christian identity might even be more inclusive of minority religions than a narrowly ‘liberal’ state identity, which has been the dominant response in Western Europe to the challenge of immigrant diversity, especially that of Muslim origins. Keywords: Liberalism; identity; religion; state; law

It seems to be a contradiction in terms for the liberal state to embrace a Christian identity. ‘Liberalism’ has historically emerged precisely as the force to dissociate state and religion, putting an end to the early modern European religious wars by secularizing politics and state power and by relegating religion to private or associational life.Then the talk of a ‘Christian identity’ seems to be tantamount to the demise of liberalism and regression to a bygone era. Note that in the USA ‘Christian nationalism’, which has struck deep roots in the Republican Party, even put one of theirs into highest political office for a while, connotes fight against ‘God-hating liberals’ and ‘secular humanism’ (Goldberg 2006: 4–5). However, as I shall argue, the opposition between a Christian and a liberal identity is not necessarily so, thus reconsidering an earlier argument that embracing a Christian identity was ruled out by the liberal state’s constitutional commitment to equality and neutrality (Joppke 2010: 134–7). At the level of church–state regimes, of course, nearness between religion and state is hardly a novelty in Europe. With the exception of devoutly Joppke (Institute of Sociology, University of Bern) (Corresponding author email: [email protected]) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12041

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secularist France, the Christian religion had never been quite expelled in Europe from the realm of the state – most famously perhaps in Britain, whose head of state is also the ‘defender of the faith’ and could not be one from outside the Anglican persuasion. But it is still true that such official Christianism is more a tacit leftover of the past, rarely and ever less proactively invoked in immigrant societies that have become culturally and religiously pluralistic. Note that the future British monarch has campaigned for becoming the ‘defender of faith’ in the generic singular, thus including minority faiths. The possibility of the liberal state to embrace a Christian identity thus appears unlikely at best, a provocation at worst – had it not surprisingly been vindicated by a recent decision of Europe’s highest human rights court, Lautsi v. Italy (2011), which will be discussed in some detail in this paper. But before tackling the possibility of a ‘Christian’ identity, it first has to be stated that ‘identity’ is a difficult business for a liberal state. Much in contrast to the identity-commanding Communist states of the past and some of the more extreme Islamic states of today, a liberal state leaves ‘identity’ to its citizens and the marketplace of ideas to define. If the state nevertheless enters this vexed terrain, its possibilities are further limited by the very nature of identity. One can extrapolate from Jon Elster (1983: ch. 2) that, like sleep, love, or happiness, ‘identity’ is a ‘state that is essentially a byproduct’ – by wanting it you will exactly not get it. This fact alone, whatever the ideological leanings of the state (liberal or not), would entail the impossibility of producing identity by the means available to the state, which is law, policy, and ultimately power. However, states are nevertheless pushed into the identity business by a whole number of factors, both structural and temporal. In structural respect, a state is a collective persona, like an individual not happening twice in the world, embodiment of a bounded society with a distinct past, presence, and future, and thus a unity that calls for symbolic expression. Like an individual, a state carries a name, an Eigenname, which makes it identifiable and selfidentifying among all other states. Hence, a state cannot but have an ‘identity’. This logic is especially strong in a democratic state, because such state must represent a society from the vantage point of unity and distinctness – it becomes a matter of majority preference and self-determination to have ‘its’ culture, religion, strivings expressed in the state. In temporal respect, contemporary globalization, particularly its peoplecomponent: international migration has raised the identity question with great intensity, even venom.As the task is to ‘integrate’ people from foreign societies and cultures into one’s own society, one is forced to reflect into ‘what’ they are to be integrated and what the ‘unity’ is that integration logically requires. The task of integration thus necessarily raises the identity question. The first part of this paper lays out the contours of ‘liberal identity’, which has been the dominant response in Europe to the challenge of integrating immigrants, particularly of Islamic origins, and against which the © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

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comparatively tender and unexplored ‘Christian identity’ option has to be mapped and evaluated. The second part tackles the possibility of a ‘Christian identity’, which has recently been judicially affirmed in the European Court of Human Rights decision, Lautsi v. Italy (2011). In particular, I distinguish between two subtly different ways of justifying the display of Christian crucifixes in public schools, which has been the issue in Lautsi: one, by way of universalism, which is exclusive of minority religions, and a second, by way of pluralism, which by contrast is inclusive of them. By opting for the second alternative, I argue, the Strasbourg court showed a way for a Christian identity to be made compatible with the precepts of liberalism.

Liberal identity in the face of Islam A central theme in European states’ recent ‘civic integration’ policies and citizenship tests for immigrants is a renewed engagement with liberalism as benchmark of integration (for overviews, see Joppke 2007, Bauböck and Joppke 2010, Wallace-Goodman 2012, Michalowski 2011). Bracketing minor nuances, British, Dutch, or Danish ‘norms and values’, to name just three countries that have been particularly busy in this respect, are at heart identical replicas of the liberal-democratic creed. Representative for all, here is what it means to be British: (R)espect the laws, the elected parliamentary and democratic political structures, traditional values of mutual tolerance, respect for equal rights and mutual concern; and that we give our allegiance to the state . . . in return for its protection. (Crick Commission, quoted in Joppke 2008: 537) This raises the paradox that immigrants are to be integrated into a particular ‘here but not there’, but that this particular ‘here’ cannot be adequately expressed and enforced by the means of law and public policy, which have to obey the strictures of nondiscrimination, neutrality, and equality. Underneath this liberal framing of integration, which is standard across Europe and the West, there is considerable variation in how far, or rather how deep, the liberal imposition should go. Is it enough for immigrants to be cognizant of liberal principles, understood as thin procedural rules that allow many groups and ways of life to coexist peacefully? Or is the expectation that immigrants embrace these principles as ethical maxims and adopt a liberal way of life themselves? Liberalism has always had these ‘two faces’ (Gray 2000), that of a modus vivendi to reconcile many different ways of life, and that of a way of life itself, that of rational and autonomous people. This is a useful distinction for mapping cross-national variation. Britain, for instance, has traditionally espoused modus vivendi liberalism, tolerating diversity as long as no ‘harm’ is inflicted on third parties (this is the tenet of Britain’s foremost liberal British Journal of Sociology 64(4)

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manifesto, Mill 1982[1859]). ‘Multiculturalism’, commonly seen as the British mode of integrating immigrants, is a natural outgrowth of this philosophy (see Favell 1998). By contrast, France has traditionally espoused an ethical, soulmaking liberalism which goes there under the name of Republicanism, and whose collectivist pretensions let many doubt that this is ‘liberalism’ at all. After all, this ‘liberalism’, for which a noisily stipulated equality between the sexes is particularly salient, is mostly expressing itself in terms of prohibitions, first of the Muslim pupil’s headscarf in 2004, and lately in a drastic prohibition of extreme veiling in all public places, both of which seem difficult to reconcile with ‘liberalism’ under whatever colour (Bowen 2006; Scott 2007). However, French-style ethical or identity liberalism is currently gaining ground in Europe, especially in Denmark and the Netherlands, where to be ‘Danish’ or ‘Dutch’ is to subscribe to the kind of ‘particular universalism’ that had so far been the specialty of the French (see Mouritsen 2006). Even Britain, under Tory Prime Minister David Cameron, has recently embraced ‘muscular liberalism’, whose denunciation of a ‘passively tolerant society’ and of ‘state multiculturalism’ sounds more ‘French’ than ‘British’ indeed.1 It is not enough for a liberal society to ‘stand neutral between different values’, warns Cameron; instead, one has to be ‘unambiguous and hard-nosed about this defence of our liberty’. In the civic integration idiom that is now the standard rhetoric on immigrant incorporation across Europe, Cameron insists that ‘immigrants speak the language of their new home’ and that ‘people are educated in elements of a common culture and curriculum’2. Can liberalism be an ‘identity’? One may approach this question from two angles, either by seeking to identify a positive content or by negatively marking a boundary. Since the work of Fredrik Barth (1969) and the constructivism that he pioneered, to identify an unmoving content of identity would be sociologically naïve, and it has become de rigueur to stipulate the multiplicity and context-dependence of identities in the plural. Still, an exploration when we actually use the notion of identity, both academically and in practical life, is useful and informative. When we talk about the ‘politics of identity’, we tend to refer to social movements that revolve around ascriptive ‘givens’ of human existence, such as ethnicity, race, or sex, a facticity that is not within the realm of choice and therefore fatefully defines who we are. In this vein, philosopher Anthony Appiah (1994:152) defines identity as the ‘social categories’ in which we lead our lives and that are defining us more than we are defining them. An identity, one could say, is necessarily a particular, a ‘this and not that’, a ‘here and not there’ that provides human beings with a sense of fateful facticity. But then the notion of ‘liberal identity’ is difficult to sustain, because ‘liberalism’ is inherently universalistic, historically a mode for many particular ways of life and identities, particularly religious ones, to coexist peacefully. A writer sarcastically caught the paradox when he called a liberal ‘someone who won’t take his own side in a fight’ (R. Frost). From this would follow the impossibility © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

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of ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ identities also, as they are equally universalistic. But both have been undeniably a historical reality, and a decidedly combative and stance-taking reality at that. So by implication the possibility of liberal identity must be conceded, with the tension between its constitutive elements, ‘liberal’ and ‘identity’ duly noted. If a liberal identity is possible, qua ‘identity’ it must exclude. Because according to the sociologically dominant way of conceiving of identity, which is through the drawing of a boundary that distinguishes an inside (‘us’) from an outside (‘they’), the ‘us’ receives its content not from an unmoving content but from not being ‘they’.3 Therefore the importance of ‘Muslims’ and ‘Islam’ as the Other of liberalism, in demarcation from which ‘we’ only derive our sense of collective self. One perceptive observer (Triadafilopoulos 2011: 863) spoke in this context even of the rise of a ‘Schmittian liberalism’, which ‘aims to clarify the core values of liberal societies and use coercive state power to protect them from illiberal and putatively dangerous groups’. Going beyond mere ‘identity liberalism’ (Tebble 2006), which entails construing a boundary, ‘Schmittian liberalism’ sees in the ‘sharpening and defending’ of that boundary the essence of political life. 4 However extreme the engagement on the identity front, it is a risky game for liberals to play, because it defies the declared purpose of ‘integrating’ Muslims and Islam to which there is no alternative, precisely if liberalism is to be the framework of integration. The exclusive edge of liberal identity, targeting Muslims, is especially visible in a new brand of populist protest parties gaining ground in some small and traditionally ‘liberal’ north-west European countries, like the Netherlands or Denmark. As one analysis of the platform of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), created in 2006 by anti-Islam demagogue Geert Wilders, generalized the phenomenon, ‘to protect Western liberal values against Islam . . . seems . . . to become a new ideological master frame for national populist parties and movements’ (Vossen 2011).These new parties are progressive on ethical issues, defending the right of abortion, euthanasia, embryo selection, and women and gay emancipation, yet they frame this defence within a virulent attack on an ‘intolerant and backward Islam’ (Vossen 2011: 187) that is seen as main threat to a liberally defined national identity. The short-lived Dutch List Pim Fortuyn (LPF), which invented this liberal identity populism, tellingly embraced the model of France, campaigning for adding an article to the Dutch constitution that would confirm the neutrality of the state as ‘the mother of all constitutional rights’ (Akkerman 2005: 349). This ‘neutrality’ would come at the cost of suppressing the right to religious freedom and education, allow a French-style banning of the Islamic headscarf from all public functions, and thus constitute a radical departure from the still-multicultural Dutch way on religious pluralism. Liberal identity is no prank of populist parties. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), in three high-profile decisions on the Islamic British Journal of Sociology 64(4)

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headscarf in the past decade, has given it judicial licence, in each case allowing a suppression of religious freedom for the sake of liberal state values. In the first of its Islamic headscarf cases, Dahlab v. Switzerland (2001), the ECtHR found the headscarf, in this case worn by a public school teacher in the Swiss canton of Geneva, ‘difficult to reconcile . . . with the message of tolerance, respect for others and, above all, equality and non-discrimination that all teachers in a democratic society must convey to their pupils’.5 It is no small paradox to deny tolerance by invoking the ‘message of tolerance’, but it shows the exclusive possibilities inherent in even this most innocuous of liberal principles, ‘tolerance’. ‘The Court seems oblivious to the coercive nature of state intervention and any messages that this action might send about intolerance and discrimination’, commented a perceptive Australian jurist (Evans 2006: 10). The ECtHR’s second headscarf case, Sahin v. Turkey (2005) invoked, next to the principle of gender equality, the state-defining ‘notion of secularism’ in Turkey, which made the suppression of the Islamic headscarf in Turkish universities – a uniquely harsh measure among the member states of the Council of Europe – ‘necessary to protect the democratic system in Turkey’.6 If Turkey’s secularism, which is backed more by the military than by a liberal state establishment, passed constitutional muster, it was only logical that France’s secularism would just sail through. This occurred in the third great European headscarf case, Dogru v. France (2008), in which the Strasbourg court summarized the identity-confirming but liberty-repressing gist of its three headscarf decisions: (I)n France, as in Turkey or Switzerland, secularism is a constitutional principle, and a founding principle of the Republic, to which the entire population adheres . . . (A)n attitude which fails to respect that principle will not necessarily be accepted as being covered by the freedom to manifest one’s religion.7

Rebirth of a Christian identity in Europe? A Christian identity seems to be a most improbable refuge from the repressive possibilities of a hypertrophied liberal (or secularist) identity. Only consider its historical pedigree: to be Christian has been the earliest identity of ‘Europe’ as such, which emerged as a self-conscious entity exactly in response to a conquering Islam in the late medieval age (see Pirenne 1970[1939]). Perhaps therefore this obvious identity option has remained muted, if not absent throughout Europe’s integration-cum-identity struggles as triggered by the challenge of Islam. It flickered briefly in the German Christian-Democratic Party’s (CDU) plea for a Leitkultur (leading culture) that immigrants were to accept, but it proved too controversial to ever take off. Indeed, the reluctance © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

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of embracing a Christian identity should not surprise – this is what European secularism is all about. In light of it, identifying in religious terms would obviously be anachronistic, return to an era that the rise of liberalism had exactly brought to a close. Not to mention that a Christian identity would signal to the 20 million immigrant (not counting indigenous) Muslims in Europe that by definition they could not be part of Europe, and thus amount to the exact opposite of integration, and an exclusion far more categorical and irremediable than any liberal exclusion could ever be. Finally, as Christianity has been the historical religion to ‘exit from all religions’, to reiterate Marcel Gauchet (1997), putting European societies onto the track of secularization, it is only logical that these societies would no longer identify in explicitly Christian terms. However, Christianity is also the one particular that has shaped European societies and cultures more than any other historical force, so that its absence in contemporary identity discourses is conspicuous and counter-intuitive. Its high point has been the rejection of a reference to God or Christianity in the preambles to the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and to the draft for a Constitution of Europe. This rejection shows, as Joseph Weiler (2004: 34) put it, that ‘public space in Europe is laicist’. However, as Weiler further points out, to the degree that the function of a European constitution would be to express the ‘ethos’ and ‘telos’ of the uniting European societies, a reference to God or Christianity would not only be ‘constitutionally acceptable but necessary’ (2004: 19), because reflective of the ‘unity and diversity’ of the European state constitutions that nearly all contain religious references. The German Basic Law, for instance, has been created ‘in responsibility before God and human beings’; the Irish Constitution even enlists ‘our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ’ as having ‘sustained our fathers through centuries of trial’, echoing the religious nationalism that had fired Ireland’s independence struggles; the Danish Constitution names the Evangelical-Lutheran Church as the ‘Danish People’s Church’, which is ‘supported as such by the state’; the Polish Constitution, ingeniously, includes in the ‘We’ that makes up the ‘Polish nation’ both believers and unbelievers, that is, ‘both those who believe in God as the source of truth, justice, good and beauty, as well as those not sharing such faith but respecting those universal values as arising from other sources’; according to the unwritten constitution of the UK, the head of state is also the head of the Anglican Church. The examples from a European reality of mixing and blending more than cleanly separating religion and state could be prolonged. Not much of this reality can be found, or has even been suppressed, in the preamble of the drafted (and never implemented) European constitution treaty. Instead, it identifies, in its first paragraph, a free-standing ‘humanism’ as core of European ‘civilization’, defined by the values of ‘equality’, ‘liberty’, and ‘reason’. Religion only appears later and among other items, when the ‘cultural, religious and humanist traditions of Europe’ are mentioned. But this is a British Journal of Sociology 64(4)

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‘misleading formulation’, as Weiler astutely points out (2004: 58), because it separates ‘religion’ and ‘humanism’, even builds up a ‘false opposition between religion and reason’ (2004: 58). In reality, the ‘humanism’ that Europe is asked to identify itself with first has religious, more precisely Christian roots. In one of humanism’s earliest formulations, Pico della Mirandola’s De hominis dignitate, human beings are called upon to be self-creating because they have been thus created by God, in his own image as God-resembling creatures (Di Fabio 2009: 52). In this spirit, Di Fabio, a conservative justice on the German Federal Constitutional Court, calls for a more relaxed attitude toward religion, a ‘reflexive enlightenment’ that is conscious of its Christian roots. And he warns against overburdening the European ‘national cultures, which are already wide open for international cooperation, with ever stricter standards of formal equality (and nondiscrimination)’. Instead, there has to be space for more ‘substantive, material freedoms’ (2009: 32). This is the German jurist’s circumscribed way of saying that there has to be space for a Christian identity, a term he carefully avoids. It is not by accident that only a Jew with impeccably cosmopolitan credentials, the noted Euro-lawyer Joseph Weiler (2004), would openly advocate a ‘Christian’ identity for Europe, as thicker, more historically grounded alternative to the mainstream ‘liberal’ identity option. For Weiler, acknowledging the ‘Christian roots’ is matter-of-fact ‘recognition of the objective importance of a particular historical-cultural reality’, constituting nothing less than ‘Europeanness’ (2004: 73). Indeed, what else except geography would Europeans have in common, which other historical force would similarly have shaped European societies across the whole range of their sectors, from economy to family to political life, bringing about the secularism, the humanism, the rationalism, perhaps even the solidarities that European societies rightly pride themselves of? If a Christian identity is nevertheless taboo in Europe, this is an astonishing fact that Weiler attributes to ‘Christophobia’ – fed by ‘Christian guilt’ over the Holocaust and by a political generation, ‘from Straw to Fischer’ (2004: 77), marked by the rebellious spirit of 1968. However, one may interpret the birth of uniting Europe, as in the famous Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, as in a thoroughly Christian spirit, to spread ‘peace in the world’, more concretely to make ‘any war between France and Germany not only unthinkable but also materially impossible’.Weiler even reads a Papal Encyclical, Redemptoris Missio of John Paul II (1990), which seeks to reinvigorate the Christian mission of conversion yet in full recognition of the moral autonomy of human beings, as a logo for Europe: ‘The Church proposes, she does not impose’ (quoted in Weiler 2004: 107). ‘Europe proposes, she does not impose’ would at the same time affirm her own identity while recognize the ‘Otherness of the Others’ (2004: 108). This Europe would be (in fact, already is) a ‘People of Others’ (2004: 123), where one has to exercise ‘civic tolerance’ to ‘regulations which were not drawn up by “my people” but by . . . people of © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

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Others’. Is there a more apposite answer to the ‘arrogance of the collective self’ (2004: 124) that Europe, of all places, had practiced to a bloody extreme in its dark past century? Of course, this spirited plea for a Christian identity has been made at European, not state level. Yet it is equally plausible (or implausible, depending on one’s view) for the states of Europe, because something that unites European states must be equally present at the unit level. In fact, the conundrum of Christian state identity has been played out in the disputes surrounding Christian crucifixes on public school walls, which first preoccupied the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany in 1995, and has recently preoccupied the European Court of Human Rights in its two Lautsi decisions of 2009 and 2011. At first, it seemed that the secularists would win the battle. In its ‘Crucifix’ decision of 1995 the German Constitutional Court eulogized the negative religious liberty of not having to ‘learn under the Cross’ as a kind of ‘privileged supreme basic right’ (Campenhausen 1996: 451), ranking it above the Bavarian state’s constitutional mandate to educate according to the ‘principles of the Christian confession’, not to mention above the positive religious liberty of the majority that has no problem with crosses in classrooms. In its first Lautsi decision of 2009, which rejected as incompatible with the European Convention of Human Rights a fascist-era Italian decree requiring the hanging of crucifixes in the country’s public schools, the European Court of Human Rights decided much like the German court had decided: (The) compulsory display of a symbol of a particular faith in the exercise of public authority in relation to specific situations subject to government supervision . . . restrict(s) the right of parents to educate their children in conformity with their convictions and the right of schoolchildren to believe or not believe.8 The court followed the plaintiff’s view that ‘(t)he concept of secularism required the State to be neutral and keep an equal distance from all religions, as it should not be perceived as being closer to some citizens than to others’.9 This distancing was all the more important in the context of obligatory schooling, where ‘dissenters are placed in a situation from which they cannot extract themselves’10, and where on top of it one dealt with ‘persons who were more vulnerable on account of their youth’11 and toward whom, moreover, ‘the State has a duty . . . to inculcate . . . the habit of critical thought’.12 Lautsi 2009 was a veritably ‘counter-majoritarian’ European court decision, celebrated by liberal jurists for taking ‘minority rights seriously’ (Mancini 2010a: 25, 26). However, it caused public uproar in Italy. For the Prime Minister (the one not known to be pious), ‘(t)his decision is not acceptable for us Italians. It is one of those decisions that make us doubt Europe’s common sense’ (Berlusconi quoted in Mancini 2010a: 6f). Rather more acidly, Joseph Weiler (2010) called the judgment an ‘embarrassment’, because it mistook British Journal of Sociology 64(4)

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neutrality for secularism, rendering illegitimate, if not illegal, the many European church–state regimes, including Italy’s, where both spheres, the secular and the religious, are not strictly separated but meshed. A Catholic Church lobbyist to the Strasbourg court took the rule as ‘requirement that each nation rid itself of its national identity and implement a legal framework, similar to that of France, of pure secularism’ (Puppinck 2010a: 3). In addition to ‘outlaw(ing) Italian identity’, the decision would amount to a paradoxical outlawing of religion by means of religious freedom, celebrating an ‘absolutism of the individual’ (2010a: 8). In reality, a society’s ‘religious identity’ could never be ‘neutralized’, and if the ECtHR nevertheless tried to this very court would have to ‘cease its practice of closing at Christmas and Easter’ (Puppinck 2010b: 4). The ECtHR’s outlawing of the crucifix in its Lautsi 2009 decision occurred even though the Italian government had ‘raised the white flag of surrender’ already beforehand (Weiler 2010: 1), in demoting the contested symbol from ‘religious’ to merely ‘cultural’. Weiler denounces this semantic transformation as a ‘disingenuous secular canard’, ‘the opposite of pluralism’, because it expels religion from the public square (2010: 2). However, it is still a necessary transformation for making Christianity an identity option, because the state’s outright identification with religion qua religion would clearly be a violation of the liberal neutrality mandate. The demotion of ‘religion’ to the status of ‘culture’ plays on the fact that there is a difference in kind between separating state and religion, which is the touchstone of liberalism, and separating state and culture. With regard to the latter, ‘benign neglect’ is not possible, as argued trenchantly by Kymlicka (1995). The transformation of a religious into cultural symbol, which also undergirds the license of some German Land governments to be partisans of the ‘Christian-Occidental tradition’ while outlawing the symbols of Islam in their openly discriminatory headscarf prohibitions (see Joppke 2009: ch. 3), needs to be scrutinized further. The Italian administrative courts and the government of Italy, in their defence of the cross, argued that the cross is polyvalent, meaning different things in different contexts: if displayed in a church, it is religious; on a school wall, it is cultural. With respect to the latter, the Administrative Tribunal of Veneto argued: ‘The crucifix is the symbol of our history and our culture and, as a consequence, of our identity . . . and also of the principle of secularism’ (quoted in Mancini 2006: 186). Mancini denounces this reasoning as ‘confessional secularism’, which is ‘secularism compatible with privileges to Christianity’ (2006: 187), and thus the rendering ad absurdum of ‘secularism’ itself. However, as I would like to argue in the following, the Veneto court formula really includes two very different justifications for the crucifix: one by way of pluralism, and a second by way of universalism and stipulated superiority. It is one thing to say that the Christian cross represents ‘our history and our culture’, and therefore ‘our identity’. This © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

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points to a pluralism, where the legitimacy of the cross, as the expression of majority culture, would hinge on the public school’s openness to other religions at the same time. But it is quite another thing to say that only Christianity has given rise to the secular state, and that therefore one could be partial for it. This is what both the Administrative Tribunal of Veneto and the Italian Supreme Administrative Court seriously argued: ‘(T)he crucifix . . . may be legitimately displayed in the public schools because it does not clash with the principle of secularism, but, on the contrary, it actually affirms it’ (Mancini 2010b: 2633). This is no longer an argument by way of identity, pointing to a sheer facticity of history and culture, but of an intrinsic superiority of the Christian over other religions. As the Italian courts further argued, there is a perceptible affinity . . . between the essential core of Christianity, which . . . focuses on tolerance and the acceptance of the other, and the essential core of the Italian constitution, which is based on fundamental rights. (2010b: 2638) Consequently, if there is a ‘link between Christianity and liberty’, it would be ‘something of a paradox to exclude a Christian sign from a public institution in the name of secularism, one of whose distant sources is precisely the Christian religion’13. This peculiar ‘neutralizing’ of Christianity allows an insidious and explicit comparison with Islam, which is exactly denied these qualities and thus may be excluded (2010b: 2641). It is an argument not by way of pluralism but of superiority, which denies any particularism in privileging the Crucifix. It is viciously universalistic, in denying other religions (especially Islam) qua religion equal treatment by the state. Importantly, the Italian government, in its appeal of Lautsi 2009 to the ECtHR’s Grand Chamber, mostly played the card of national particularity, not that of Christian universalism.14 Certainly, the latter was not absent: ‘(T)he message of the crucifix . . . constitutes the basis of our democracies and of Western civilization’15. But Christian universalism did not constitute the gist of the argument, which was more in terms of national particularism. In the case of Italy, it happened to be that ‘national identity’ was ‘marked by a given religion’16. As the cross is ‘polysemic’, it could ‘equally be cultural and identity symbol’17. Its ‘passive’ and ‘deaf presence’ on the school wall could impossibly be taken as indoctrinating and ‘emotionally disturb’, as the plaintiff claimed – at least not more than ‘anarchist parents should be disturbed by the portrait of the President of Italy or the national flag’, which likewise adorn Italy’s school buildings.18 It was simply a matter of respecting majority culture, as the cross was ‘accepted and wanted by the very great majority (of Italians)’.19 However, the religion–culture distinction could not be driven too far. This is indicated in a parallel distinction drawn by the Italian government between ‘laicity’ and ‘neutrality’, the former being ‘exclusive’, the latter ‘inclusive’ of religion in the public realm. This pointed to two ways of dealing with religion, British Journal of Sociology 64(4)

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through French-style exclusion or would-be Italian inclusion. Therefore, perhaps, the Christian universalism formula was largely avoided: it risked going too far down the road of secular universalism, where all religion is banned from the public square. The confounding of laicity and neutrality had exactly been the main objection to the ECtHR’s first Lautsi decision in 2009, which was reproached for calling ‘neutrality’ what was in reality an ‘a-religious or anti-religious attitude’20. ‘Neutrality’ proper was ‘incompetence of the state in religious and moral questions’, which was ‘not the same as ignoring the cultural tradition of one’s own people’21. The Italian government’s crucial move, however, was pairing the plea for national particularity with an endorsement of religious pluralism. As it pointed out in its memoire to the Strasbourg court, religious pluralism is a reality in Italian schools: no problem here with veils on the part of female Muslims, the beginning and end of Ramadan are ‘often’ celebrated, optional religious instruction in all faiths is available, and no exams are scheduled for Jews on Saturdays. In fact, ‘pluralism’ had been the mark of the Italian state’s attitude toward religion at least since the 1990s, whose own laicità, unlike French laïcité, ‘does not imply state indifference towards religion; but a duty of the state to safeguard religious liberty in a context of confessional and cultural pluralism’ (the Italian Constitutional Court, quoted in Pin 2011: 121; emphasis supplied). Then it would be an ‘absurdity to withdraw the cross while the symbols of other religions are maintained’22; indeed, ‘the religion of the great majority of Italians would be sacrificed and discriminated’23. The legitimacy of the Christianity-as-national-particularism stance, that is, its capacity to be still inclusive and integrative in a context of religious diversity, hinges on whether ‘religious pluralism’ is truly an Italian reality. For one, Susanna Mancini, an Italian liberal jurist who is not friendly to her government, says it is: (R)eligious symbols such as the hijab are commonly worn in Italian public schools . . . Italy’s tradition of political and cultural compromise, its positive attitude towards religious phenomena, the constitutional recognition of the plurality of legal orders and the protection of collective rights, has proved a particularly suitable platform for minority religion accommodation. (2006: 182) That being the case, why should, in turn, the majority religion be denied? This, one must agree, would be ‘abuse by a minority’, as the Italian government protested in its memoire to the Strasbourg court.24 When overturning the lower chamber’s 2009 decision, on 18 March 2011, the Grand Chamber in essence took the Italian government line, defending the cross as a matter of Italian national identity, not of Christian universalism. Technically, this outcome was squarely continuous with previous Strasbourg court decisions, as the court invoked the doctrine of ‘margin of appreciation’ © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

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that had already guided its previous decisions touching on sensitive matters of culture and religion: ‘(T)he decision whether or not to perpetuate a tradition falls in principle within the margin of appreciation of the respondent state’.25 But also substantively, there was certain continuity, if only in terms of a ‘double standard’ (Ronchi 2011) that had marred Strasbourg jurisprudence all along. One could summarize it as ‘secularism for the Muslims’ and ‘pluralism for the Christians’. While the Islamic headscarf was gunned down by the heavy artillery of ‘enlightenment rationalism’, toward Christianity a milder approach of ‘value pluralism’ prevailed (Danchin 2011: 706). If, in Dahlab v. Switzerland (2001), already the vague and uncorroborated suspicion that the headscarf ‘might have some kind of proselytizing effect’ was enough to allow prohibiting it,26 in Kokkinakis v. Greece (1993) a much more drastic and unambiguous act of proselytism by members of a Christian sect, intruding in their ‘victims’ homes, was deemed an act of ‘bearing Christian witness’, protected by the religious liberty clause (Article 9) of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR).27 And in Otto-Preminger-Institut v. Austria (1994), the Austrian government’s banning of a film showing ‘God the Father’ as a ‘senile, impotent idiot’ was justified by a need to respect ‘the religion of the overwhelming majority of Tyroleans’, who were declared protected under ECHR Article 9 from ‘feel(ing) the object of attacks on their religious beliefs in an unwarranted and offensive manner’.28 This included a questionable interpretation of the Article 9 right to freedom of religion as including a ‘right to protection of religious feelings’ 29, which certainly was not available for Muslims in similar conflicts between the freedom of expression and their religious sentiments30. At least with respect to the Strasbourg human rights court, it is thus not correct to argue that ‘constitutional courts throughout much of Western Europe have advanced, by and large, a secularist or irreligious approach’ (Hirschl 2010: 177). In reality, the majority religion had always fared better in the Strasbourg court than minority religions, in particular Islam.31 This caveat duly noted, the ECtHR’s 2011 Lautsi decision still is to date’s most potent legal vindication of a Christian state identity in Europe, reversing the militant secularism that the German Constitutional Court had championed in its Crucifix decision fifteen years earlier and that the Strasbourg court’s own lower chamber had affirmed only two years ago. However, if mellowed by pluralism, a Christian identity must not offend liberal sensitivities, and it might even prove superior with respect to making space for minority religions, especially Islam. One can only be surprised by how long and how thoroughly it could have been suppressed by liberal etiquette, which was upheld not least by secularist courts, from the German Constitutional Court in 1995 to the Strasbourg court in 2009. To take the wind out of the sail of Europe’s chronic populisms and to forestall a political backlash against too much ‘liberalism’, it may be also politically apposite to British Journal of Sociology 64(4)

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recover a Christian identity, but only in the way suggested in the Strasbourg court’s Lautsi 2011 decision: by way of gentle pluralism, not of triumphalist (in effect exclusive) universalism. Lautsi 2011 might be read as showing the changing political winds in Europe, where multiculturalism is in full retreat32 and where the majority asserts itself over the minorities. However, the irony of the court’s pluralist defence of the majority religion is that this requires a modicum of multiculturalism that today is notionally repudiated from Berlin to The Hague to London (see Joppke 2014). Moreover, it would require a more relaxed attitude to the religious claims and symbols of minority religions, in particular Islam, which had previously been rejected in a kind of ‘imperial liberalism’ (Danchin 2011: 747) by the same court. Interestingly, this opening could not be achieved under the ‘liberal’ but only under the ‘Christian identity’ flag.

Conclusion The case for a Christian identity is not to deny that it has been marginal and insignificant if compared with the renewed engagement with liberalism as the unifying creed of a pluralistic society – this has clearly been the dominant trend in responding to Europe’s great immigrant challenge, which is largely a challenge of integrating Muslims and Islam. Certainly, the conflict over the Christian cross in public spaces, which at first seemed to have been won by militant secularism, has more recently turned into a surprising reaffirmation of majority culture, which after Lautsi can no longer be so easily dismissed as a source of state identity. However, the crucifix conflict is at best peripherally and indirectly connected with the Islam issue, perhaps even not at all. Note that the plaintiffs in the two important legal crucifix challenges, Germany 1995 and Italy 2009–11, were not Muslims but militant atheists, so that Christianity only encountered here its own secularist children. Precisely because of the incomplete integration of Europe’s 20 million Muslim immigrants, no Western European state would sanely consider itself a Christian state. Pace Weiler, at the European level also the standard reference to ‘Christian’ is almost exclusively in the negative terms of a ‘Christian Club’ that ‘Europe’ could never, never afford to appear let alone be. The marginality of Christian identity discourse is both surprising and unsurprising. It is surprising if the measure is the nonchalantly Islamic identities of most Muslim-majority societies. Not mentioning the explicitly and militantly Islamic republics of Iran or Sudan, one must note that even secular states in Muslim societies (like Egypt) define themselves in Islamic terms, with formulaic references to the religious precepts of Sharia framing their secular laws. As Islam expert Jocelyne Cesari (2004: 44) writes, ‘there is no nation within the Muslim world that does not claim Islam as a foundational element © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

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of national unity’. Compared with this, the pejorative connotation or nearcomplete absence of ‘Christian’ in the public identities of Western European or Western states in general is astonishing. A church lobbyist to the Strasbourg human rights court boasted that ‘20 European countries (had joined) Italy’s side’ in the fight for ‘the legitimacy of Christianity in Europe’ in the Lautsi case. However, this is a highly skewed section of ‘Europe’ because, with the exception of Austria, no single Western European country or pre-Enlargement member of the European Union was among them. Instead, the list of amici curiae in the Lautsi case includes only central, eastern, and south-eastern European countries, including Albania, Bulgaria, Malta and San Marino, as well as non-European Ukraine, Russia and Armenia. In fact, it was exclusively Catholic and Orthodox countries where Christianity was anything but embattled or waning, and most of them with distinctly weak or questionable liberaldemocratic credentials, that felt compelled to pick up the fight for Christianity. This intimates the unsurprising part of the lesser relevance of Christian identity discourse in the face of Islam. The ‘Europe’ that most Muslim immigrants meet is Western Europe.This is the most deeply secularized of all corners of the globe, both at the level of everyday life, where the churches are empty, but also at the formal, institutional level, where even states with established state churches or officially recognized churches are unrepentantly secular and professedly‘neutral’ toward religion.The real issue in the Islam challenge is a vitally felt religion meeting a thoroughly non-religious (but not other-religious) environment. This is exactly how the leader of the Catholic Church sees it too: The real opposition that characterizes today’s world is not that between various religious cultures, but that between the radical emancipation of man from God, from the roots of life, on one hand, and from the great religious cultures on the other.33 To unduly Christianize the reception context would not just build an opposition between contemporary Christianity and Islam where there is none, but would also evoke the ignoble, 1000-year long confrontations between both religions in the making of European civilization (see Pagden 2008). Therefore the silence of Christianity is most roaring at the level of ‘Europe’ itself, especially in that most delicate matter that everyone knows is centrally about the ‘Christianness’ of Europe: Turkey’s stubbornly denied bid for entry. Moreover, a Christian identity is extraneous to the state, emerging in society, while a liberal one emerges from the state’s own constitutional infrastructure. Let me explain. In the Italian case, Christian identity figures as ‘national identity’ that the state qua democratic nation-state cannot ignore. Note that 84 per cent of polled Italians had rejected the secularist Lautsi 2009 decision (Pin 2011: 98, fn. 7), making it not just opportune but a democratic requirement for the Italian state to loudly disagree with it. Catholicism is still a source of considerable friction, particularly in Italian state development that had long British Journal of Sociology 64(4)

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locked the fledgling secular state into a ferocious battle with a politically ambitious and recalcitrant Vatican. Even recently, the demise of the Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana, DC) in the early 1990s led the Catholic Church to adopt a directly political role and engage in a veritable Kulturkampf against certain government projects, such as legalizing euthanasia, in vitro fertilization, or same-sex partnerships (see Donovan 2003). By contrast, a liberal identity is much less strenuous for the state because it is endogenous to it, qua the state’s being liberal and constitutional. There is a much more intrinsic alliance and congruence between ‘liberal’ and ‘state’, both being political matters, than between ‘Christian’ and ‘state’, where one is religious and the other political.34 But is it correct, as this reasoning suggests, to speak of Christian and liberal identity as alternative or competing identity options? For tackling this question, let us recall the central point of this paper: liberalism properly understood, as low on identity and high on pluralism, is perfectly compatible with a Christian identity, and this combination may even be superior to a hypertrophied ‘identity liberalism’ (Tebble 2006), if not ‘Schmittian liberalism’ (Triadafilopoulos 2011) in mastering the contemporary immigrant challenge. Accordingly, there is common ground but also the possibility of friction between both identity options. With respect to common ground, Christianity and liberalism belong to the same cultural formation, Europe, viewed from different phases of its evolution.35 They relate to one another like genesis relates to validity, Christianity laying the roots for liberalism to evolve. Moreover, what both share is a boundary-transcending universalism, with liberalism even shedding its roots in a (in fact, any) particular culture and becoming a universal mechanism to politically organize a differentiated society. Although both may be different words for the same thing observed over time, the eventual emancipation of liberalism from its historical-cultural roots still makes it separate in kind from the Christian fact. Note that in the crucifix struggle ‘Christian’ became a code word for national particularism, for national identity as such. The Maltese justice on the European Court of Human Rights, wildly disagreeing with the first Lautsi decision that had outlawed the cross, railed against ‘bankrupt(ing) centuries of European tradition’ and ‘rob(bing) the Italians of part of their cultural personality’, and he denounced Lautsi 2009 as ‘historical Alzheimer’s’ and ‘cultural vandalism’36. A similar, historically and culturally specific defense of liberalism would be difficult to imagine; instead, a defense of liberalism could only be conducted on principled grounds. Any society with more than one religion needs liberalism, providing the rules for civic co-existence, even those parts of the world where liberalism has not endogenously emerged. This is the ‘validity’ (as against ‘genesis’) of liberalism, impossible to ignore by any religion anywhere, Islam and Muslim societies included (for a compelling defense of liberalism qua secularism, see Taylor 1998). © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

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An ‘identity’, we argued in the beginning, is by nature a particular, not a universal, marked by a boundary that demarcates ‘us’ from ‘them’. At the state level, both liberalism and Christianism fall short of this, as both can be found in many a state society (in fact, all Western societies, with the exception of Israel). As formulas for integrating diverse immigrant societies, both identities are subject to the ‘paradox of universalism’ (Joppke 2008), because both cannot define the ‘here but not there’, ‘this but not that society’ into which immigrants are to be integrated. Rogers Smith argued compellingly that true national identities are grounded in inherently singular ‘stories of peoplehood’ (Smith 2003). Accordingly, this paper’s narrow focus should not let us forget that many more identities than a ‘liberal’ or ‘Christian’ are possible, and that they are incidentally more plausible. (Date accepted: May 2013)

Notes 1. David Cameron, ‘Speech on radicalization and Islamic extremism’, downloaded from www.newstatesman.com. 2. David Cameron, ‘Speech on radicalization and Islamic extremism’, downloaded from www.newstatesman.com. 3. This sociologically dominant view of identity is confirmed by social psychology, especially Henri Tajfel’s ‘identity theory’. 4. I owe this observation and formulation to a sharp anonymous review. 5. ECtHR, Dahlab v. Switzerland, decision of 15 February 2001, at par. 13. 6. ECtHR, Sahin v. Turkey, decision of 10 November 2005, at par. 114. 7. ECtHR, Case of Dogru v. France, decision of 4 December 2008, at par. 72. 8. ECtHR, Case of Lautsi v. Italy, decision of 3 November 2009, at par. 57. 9. ECtHR, Case of Lautsi v. Italy, decision of 3 November 2009, at par. 32. 10. ECtHR, Case of Lautsi v. Italy, decision of 3 November 2009, at par. 55. 11. ECtHR, Case of Lautsi v. Italy, decision of 3 November 2009, at par. 31. 12. ECtHR, Case of Lautsi v. Italy, decision of 3 November 2009, at par. 56. 13. The Administrative Tribunal of Veneto, paraphrased in ECtHR (Grand British Journal of Sociology 64(4)

Chamber), Lautsi and Others v. Italy, decision of 18 March 2011, at par. 15. 14. See Memoire du gouvernement Italien, 30 June 2010, Requête n. 30814/06 Lautsi c. Italie. 15. Memoire du gouvernement Italien, 30 June 2010, Requête n. 30814/06 Lautsi c. Italie, p.12. 16. Memoire du gouvernement Italien, 30 June 2010, Requête n. 30814/06 Lautsi c. Italie, p.4. 17. Memoire du gouvernement Italien, 30 June 2010, Requête n. 30814/06 Lautsi c. Italie, p.12. 18. Memoire du gouvernement Italien, 30 June 2010, Requête n. 30814/06 Lautsi c. Italie, p.13. 19. Memoire du gouvernement Italien, 30 June 2010, Requête n. 30814/06 Lautsi c. Italie, p.2. 20. Memoire du gouvernement Italien, 30 June 2010, Requête n. 30814/06 Lautsi c. Italie, p.11. 21. Memoire du gouvernement Italien, 30 June 2010, Requête n. 30814/06 Lautsi c. Italie, p.23. 22. Memoire du gouvernement Italien, 30 June 2010, Requête n. 30814/06 Lautsi c. Italie, p.21. © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

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23. Memoire du gouvernement Italien, 30 June 2010, Requête n. 30814/06 Lautsi c. Italie, p.23. 24. Memoire du gouvernement Italien, 30 June 2010, Requête n. 30814/06 Lautsi c. Italie, p.23. 25. ECtHR (Grand Chamber), Lautsi and Others v. Italy, decision of 18 March 2011, at par. 68. 26. ECtHR, Dahlab v. Switzerland (2001), at par. 13. 27. ECtHR, Kokkinakis v. Greece, decision of 25 May 1993, at par. 48. 28. ECtHR, Otto-Preminger-Institut v. Austria, decision of 20 September 1994, at par. 16 and 56. 29. Three dissenting judges criticized the majority decision in Otto-Preminger: ‘The Convention does not. . . guarantee a right to protection of religious feelings. . . More particularly, such a right cannot be derived from the right to freedom of religion, which in effect includes a right to express views critical of the religious opinions of others’ (Opinion of three dissenting judges, ECtHR, Otto-Preminger-Institut v. Austria, decision of 20 September 1994, at par. 6). 30. While Otto-Preminger’s protection of majority religious sentiments (and converse repression of free speech) was confirmed later (in its Wingrove v. United Kingdom decision of 20 September 1994), the Strasbourg court rejected as inadmissible a Muslim claim to extend British blasphemy law to the protection of Islam, which was

triggered by the publication of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1989 (see König [forthcoming]: 15f). 31. In a comprehensive review of Strasbourg jurisprudence on religion, König (forthcoming) argues that since gaining greater institutional autonomy in the 1990s, the ECtHR has emerged as a strong ‘agent of secularization’ throughout, affecting also extant majority religion privileges. However, he concedes that this trend ‘has met recurrent limitations when touching upon religiously impregnated national identities’ (p.12). Lautsi 2011 seems to be a case in point. 32. See Joppke (2014), critiquing the opposite view of Vertovec and Wessendorf (2009). 33. Cardinal Ratzinger, ‘On Europe’s Crisis of Culture’ (lecture given in the convent of Saint Scholastica, Subiaco, Italy, 1 April 2005) (http://www.catholiceducation .org-articles-printarticle.html?id=4548). 34. Though a strong case can be made for ‘political theology’, even after Carl Schmitt (Kahn 2011). 35. Homologous to ‘muscular liberalism’, there has even been an episode of ‘muscular Christianity’ (in Britain’s imperial encounter with rebellious India). See van der Veer (2001: 85–94). 36. ECtHR (Grand Chamber), Lautsi and Others v. Italy, decision of 18 March 2011, concurring opinion of Judge Bonello, at 1.1 to 1.4.

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