International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   This essay examines the relationship between “religion” and “nationalism” in contemporary international relations. We also consider the issue of “transnational religious actors,” with a focus on three, rather diverse, examples: the Roman Catholic Church, the Organisation of The Islamic Conference (OIC), and al Qaeda. Our discussion commences with a focus on secularization, in order to locate the issues of religion, nationalism, and religious transnationalist actors within an appropriate intellectual and ideological context. Until recently, religion's perceived lack of significance in international relations dovetailed with two fundamental assumptions of Western social science: (1) rationality and secularity go hand in hand, and (2) “modern” societies have political, economic, and social systems which evolved over time due to a process of “secularization,” serving publicly to marginalize or “privatize” religion ( Casanova 1994 ). A corollary of this view, evident in many theories of modernization and political development, is that the successful future of the integrated nation-state can only lie in secular participatory politics. The end result of a process of secularization is secularism : the state or quality of being secular, invoking terms like “worldly” and “temporal,” and lacking reference to a transcendent order involving a divine being, such ... log in or subscribe to read full text