Taking religious and cultural pluralism seriously: The global resurgence of religion and the transformation of international society

Millenium

Volumn 29, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 815-841

  Thomas, Scott M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BATH   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 0001364552     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (111)

1. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996 [1908]), 17-18.
2. Scott M. Thomas, 'Religious Resurgence, Postmodernism, and World Politics', in Religion and Global Order, eds. John L. Esposito and Michael Watson (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000).
3. Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992).
4. James Mayall, 'International Society and International Theory', in The Reason of States, ed. Michael Donelan (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978),
5. See Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order and Changing Societies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968)
6. Ira William Zartman, Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994).
7. Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War: Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993);
8. Jeff Haynes, Religion in Third World Politics (London: Open University Press, 1994);
9. David Westerlund, ed., Questioning the Secular State: The Worldwide Resurgence of Religion in Politics (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996).
10. Hedley Bull, 'The Revolt Against the West', in The Expansion of International Society, eds. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
11. Robert Lee, Overcoming Tradition and Modernity: The Search for Islamic Authenticity (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997).
12. John Finn, 'Human Rights in Vienna', First Things, no. 37 (1993): 4-8;
13. George Weigel, 'What Really Happened at Cairo, and Why', in The 9 Lives of Population Control, ed. Michael Cromartie (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1995);
14. Mary Ann Glendon, 'What Happened in Beijing', First Things, no. 59 (1996): 30-36.
15. Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991).
16. Esposito and Watson, Religion and Global Order, Ken R. Dark, ed., Religion and International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000);
17. Jeff Haynes, ed., Religion, Globalization, and Political Culture in the Third World (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).
18. Thompson defines a political myth as 'a tale told about the past to legitimize or discredit a regime'. See Leonard Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 1.
19. This is the view of theorists of modern liberalism, including John Rawls, Judith Shklar, and Jeffrey Stout, but the rise of toleration in the modern world is a more complicated story than the political mythology of liberalism wants to tell. See Carl J. Nederman and John Christian Laursen, eds., Difference and Dissent: Theories of Tolerance in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).
20. The provisions laid out in the Treaty of Münster are a striking example, given the contemporary examples of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, of religious toleration. Not only were the princes and electors unable to impose religious faith in their domain, they had to allow freedom of movement to minorities who resisted the faith of the majority. For a recent review of the treaties see, Klaus Bussmann and Heinz Schilling, eds., 1648: War and Peace in Europe, vol. 1 (Munich: Bruckmann, 1998).
21. Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions (Leicester: Leicester University Press 1991), 13-15.
22. Robert H. Jackson, 'The Political Theory of International Society', in International Relations Theory Today, eds. Ken Booth and Steve Smith (Oxford: Polity Press, 1995)
23. Robert H. Jackson, 'Pluralism in International Political Theory', Review of International Studies 18, no. 3 (1992): 271-81.
24. This social definition of religion has increasingly been accepted by scholars of early modern Europe, and the transition to a 'modern' understanding of religion is now usually placed in the seventeenth century, see John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), esp. 170-71;
25. Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
26. Mack P. Holt, 'Putting Religion Back into the Wars of Religion', French Historical Studies, no. 18 (1993): 524-51.
27. For an anthropological perspective see, Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 1-54. Asad criticises Clifford Geertz's notion of 'religion as a cultural system', because it assumes that religion can be examined as a symbolic system separate from religious practices and disciplines. According to Asad, this understanding of 'religion' is a construction of Western modernity rather than a universal concept, and it authorises the politics of a liberal modernity, which defines 'politicised religions' as a threat to both reason and liberty.
28. Parts of this section are indebted to William T. Cavanaugh, 'A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State', Modern Theology 11, no. 4 (1995): 397-420.
29. The focus on the relatively small number of weird and wild groups in Early Modern Europe, e.g., 'popular religion', heretics, witches, magic, superstitions, 'dissidents', and etc., has distorted our image of the time. See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Alters: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
30. MacIntyre's overall argument, in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (London: Duckworth, 1990) needs to be recognised here. MacIntyre examines how the medieval anthologies of Thomas Aquinas and works by later commentators separated his discussion of law and the natural law from the context of his theology in the Summa. The eventual separation of virtues and practices from tradition and community in the way MacIntyre describes contributed to the development of the modern concept of 'religion' as a set of privately held doctrines or beliefs as well as it helped legitimate the modern separation of ethics from theology.
31. Cavanaugh relies on Wilfed Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1962) for the development of religio as a concept.
32. See Cavanaugh, 'A Fire Strong Enough', 404.
33. Unlike Bossy and Cavanaugh, Bull's brief discussion of the abovementioned book by Grotius does not recognise the change in the conception of religion which took place during this time. See Hedley Bull, 'The Importance of Grotius', in Hugo Grotius and International Relations, eds. Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury, and Adam Roberts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
34. Thomas Hobbes, 'Leviathan', in Cambridge Text in the History of Political Thought, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 120 emphasis added.
35. Stephen D. Kranser, 'Westphalia and All That', in Ideas and Foreign Policy, eds. Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
36. Roland Robertson, 'Globalization and the Future of Traditional Religion', in Religion and the Powers of the Common Life: God and Globalisation, vol. 1, eds. Max L. Stackhouse and Peter J. Paris (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000).
37. Roger Epp, 'The English School on the Frontiers of International Society: A Hermeneutic Recollection', Review of International Studies, 24, no. 3 (1998): 47-63.
38. David R. Mapel and Terry Nardin, eds., International Society: Diverse Ethical Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
39. Adam Watson, 'Hedley Bull, States Systems and International Societies', Review of International Studies 13, no. 1 (1987): 147-53.
40. B.A. Roberson, ed., International Society and the Development of International Relations Theory (London: Pinter, 1998)
41. Timothy Dunne, Inventing International Society: A History of the English School (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).
42. Timothy Dunne, 'The Social Construction of International Society', European Journal of International Relations 1, no. 3 (1995): 367-89.
43. MacIntyre's emphasis on social tradition has led to a misunderstanding regarding his political leanings. Kelvin Knight goes so far as to say that the idea that MacIntyre is a 'political conservative' is 'absurd'; this claim is based on a mistaken understanding of his social theory: those who prioritise tradition are conservatives; MacIntyre prioritises tradition, therefore, he is a conservative. On the contrary, his radical Aristotelian project, rooted in the politics of the local community, is at odds with the 'communitarianism' which emerged in the US in the mid-1980s because MacIntyre believes this critique of liberalism does not go far enough, it is still part of the institutional framework of the modern bureaucratic nation-state and the market in (a structurally unjust) capitalist society. See Kelvin Knight, 'Introduction', in MacIntyre Reader, ed. Kelvin Knight (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 20-24;
44. Kelvin Knight, 'Revolutionary Aristotelianism', in Contemporary Political Studies 1996, eds. I. Hampshire-Monk and J. Stanyer, vol. 2 (Nottingham: Political Studies Association, 1996), 885-96.
45. Nevertheless, MacIntyre's critique of the Enlightenment project and of liberal modernity has endeared him to religious 'neo-conservatives' in the US. They seem to have overlooked his social and economic critique of liberal capitalist society, see Edward T. Oakes, 'The Achievement of Alasdair MacIntyre', First Things, no. 65 (1996): 22-26;
46. Gilbert Meilaender, 'Still Waiting for Benedict', First Things, no 98 (1999): 48-55.
47. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2d ed. (London: Duckworth, 1985)
48. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988).
49. Alasdair MacIntyre, 'Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority', in MacIntyre Reader, 53-68.
50. Erik Ringmar, Identity, Interest, and Action: A Cultural Explanation of Sweden's Intervention in the Thirty Years War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
51. Adda Bozeman, The Future of Law in a Multicultural World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), ix.
52. Adda Bozeman, The Future of Law in a Multicultural World Ibid., xii-xiii.
53. Politics and Culture in International History (New Brunswick, NS: Transaction Publishers, 1960, 1994).
54. Wight, International Theory, 13-15.
55. The seminal role of Pope John-Paul II should be mentioned in this regard, including certain important encyclicals, such as Centesimus Annus (1991) and Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) as part of the emerging debate on democracy and international civil society. See Kenneth L. Grasso, ed., Catholicism, Liberalism, and Communitarianism: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition and the Moral Foundations of Democracy (London: Rowman and Lilllefield, 1996).
56. Alasdair MacIntyre, 'How We can Learn what Veritatis Spendor has to Teach?', The Thomist 58, no. 2 (1994): 171-95.
57. Andrew Linklater, 'Rationalism', in Theories of International Relations, eds. Scott Burchill and Andrew Linklater (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). Linklater appears to subordinate the role of theologians, natural law theorists, and the role of the Catholic Church in upholding the Rationalist tradition to a more critical-emancipatory project of liberal modernity, which he and Dunne connect to the 'cosmopolitan turn' in the later writings of Bull and Vincent.
58. For the Bull-Donelan debate in the ES on natural law, and the general status of natural law theory within the ES, focusing on Donelan, Bull, Vincent, and more recent interpreters, see Dunne, Inventing International Society
59. Roberson, International Society.
60. MacIntyre, Whose Justice?, esp. 326-48.
61. Michael Donelan, Elements of International Political Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 38-55.
62. On the later works of Bull and Vincent see, Dunne, Inventing International Society,
63. Nicholas J. Wheeler, 'Pluralist or Solidarist Conceptions of International Society', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 21, no. 3 (1992): 463-87;
64. Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
65. Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977), 21-45.
66. Nicholas J. Rengger, 'Culture, Society, and Order in World Politics', in Dilemmas of World Politics, eds. John Baylis and Nicholas J. Rengger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
67. Wight, Systems of States, 34.
68. Epp, 'The English School on the Frontiers of International Society'.
69. Mayall, 'International Theory and International Society'.
70. Medley Bull and Adam Watson, 'Conclusion', in The Expansion of International Society, 425-35.
71. Wight, Systems of States, 35.
72. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2000);
73. David Martin, Does Christianity Cause War? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997);
74. Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
75. Wight, Systems of States, 26-34.
76. One of the states-systems Wight had in mind existed during the Amarna period (1440-1220 BC). Cohen and Westbrook have recently argued that the ancient near east empires established a truly 'polycultural' international system that cut across religions, languages, and cultures, and it was not until the present global international society that this was this repeated. See Raymond Cohen and Raymond Westbrook, eds., Amarna Diplomacy: The Beginnings of International Relations (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2000).
77. R.J. Vincent, 'Edmund Burke and the Theory of International Relations', Review of International Studies 10, no. 2 (1984): 205-18
78. R.J. Vincent, 'The Cultural Factor in the Global International Order', The Yearbook of World Affairs 34 (1980): 252-64.
79. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977), 315-17.
80. Peter Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, WI: Wm. B. Eerdmans/Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999).
81. Bull, The Anarchical Society, 317.
82. Bull, The Anarchical Society, Ibid., 38-52.
83. Alexander Wendt, 'Collective Identity Formation and the International State', American Political Science Review 88, no. 2 (1994): 384-96
84. 'Constructing International Politics', International Security 20, no. 1 (1995): 71-81.
85. Alexander Wendt, 'Anarchy is What States Make of It', in International Theory: Critical Investigations, ed. James der Derian (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).
86. Alexander Wendt and Daniel Friedheim, 'Hierarchy under Anarchy: Informal Empire and the East German State', International Organization 49, no. 3 (1995): 689-721.
87. Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)
88. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 204-25.
89. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 205-21.
90. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 221 emphasis in original.
91. Alasdair MacIntyre, 'An Interview with Giovanna Borradori', in The MacIntyre Reader, 255.
92. MacIntyre, Whose Justice?, 354-55.
93. According to MacIntryre, Durkheim described how the breakdown of traditional forms of social relationship increased the incidence of anomie, a form of deprivation, a loss of membership in those social institutions in which norms, including the norms of tradition-constituted rationality, are embodied. 'What Durkheim did not foresee', MacIntyre explains, 'was a time when the same condition of anomie would be assigned the status of achievement by and a reward for a self, which had, by separating itself from the social relationships of traditions, succeeded, so it believed, in emancipating itself...What Durkheim saw as social pathology is now presented wearing the masks of philosophical pretension'. See Whose Justice?, 368.
94. Anthony D. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
95. The great cartographer, Abraham Ortelius, wrote in one of the entries of his Geographical Encyclopaedia (1578), 'For Christians, see Europeans'. See John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Rennaissance (London: Fontana Press, 1993), 5-6.
96. Charles Taylor argues the political dimension of the shift from what he calls substantive to procedural notions of ethics was anticipated in Grotius' theory of legitimacy and is evident in the rising prominence of social contract theory. Instead of defining the legitimacy of the state in terms of regime type or some conception of the good society Grotius argued we should define it by the procedures which led to creation. Thus, Grotius thought regime type did not matter as long as it came about through consent. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 86-87.
97. Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury, and Adam Roberts, eds., Hugo Grotius and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
98. Mark W. Janis and Carolyn Evans, eds., Religion and International Law, 2d ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1999).
99. John Witte, et. al., Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective (The Hague: Martinus Nijoff, 1996);
100. Harfiyah Abdel Harleen, Oliver Ramsbotham, et.al., The Crescent and the Cross: Muslim and Christian Approaches to War and Peace (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998);
101. David R. Smock ed., Perspectives on Pacifism: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Views on Nonviolence and International Conflict (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 1995);
102. Cynthia Sampson, 'Religion and Peacebuilding', in Peacemaking in International Conflict: Methods and Techniques, eds. I. William Zartman and J. Lewis Rasmussen (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 1995).
103. Stephen Chan, 'Hans Küng and a Global Ethic', Review of International Studies 25, no. 3 (1999): 525-30.
104. The ICRD (www.icrd.org) was established in Washington, DC after the publication of Douglas M. Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, eds., Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
105. Jean Bethke Elshtain, 'Really Existing Communities', Review of International Studies 25, no. 1 (1999): 141-46.
106. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Really Existing Communities Review of International Studies 25, 1 (1999): 141-46. Ibid.
107. This group includes Peter Kreeftr, Gilbert Meilander, Stanley Hauerwas, Robert C. Evans, Jonathan Wilson, David W. Gill, and Mary Ann Glendon, the law professor at Harvard who led the Vatican's delegation to the UN Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995). Of course theorists of virtue-ethics are not all the same. See Mary Ann Glendon and David Blankenhorn, eds., Seedbeds of Virtue (New York: Madison, 1995)
108. Nancy Murphy, Brad J. Kallenberg, and Mark Thiessen Nation, Virtues and Practices in the Christian Tradition: Christian Ethics After MacIntyre (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 1997).
109. Michael J. Shapiro, 'The Events of Discourse and the Ethics of Global Hospitality', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, no. 2 (1998): 697-713.
110. Max Maddox, Religion and the Rise of Democracy (London: Routledge, 1996).
111. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996).