Religion and National Identities in an Enlarged Europe

By: Willfried Spohn and Matthias Koenig and Wolfgang Knöbl

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Synopsis: This volume analyzes the changing relationships between religion and national identity in the course of European integration. Presenting results from cross-national comparative research on elite discourse, media debates and public opinions in Germany, Poland, Greece and Turkey from 1990-2010, it examines how accelerated European integration and Eastern enlargement have affected religious markers of collective identity. Critically engaging with secularist assumptions in the social scientific literatures on nationalism and European integration, the collection demonstrates that the Europeanization of collective identities does not necessarily imply reducing the salience of religion. Rather, the emergence of a European polity can prompt the reactive reaffirmation of religious nationalisms and lead to the re-embedding of religious components of collective identity within broader transnational frameworks. As thecontributions in this book show, explaining such changing relationships between religion and national identity requires attention to long-standing civilizational traditions, short-term dynamics of symbolic boundary-making as well as institutional trajectories of state-church-relations.