Civil society and religion: retrospective reflections on Catholicism and prospective reflections on Islam

Social Research, Winter, 2001 by Jose Casanova

ONE of the most surprising and unexpected aspects of the global resurgence of civil society has been the role that religion has played in this emergence. It was surprising and unexpected at least for most social scientists and for all those who took for granted the main premises of the theory of secularization: that religion in the modern world is likely to decline and become increasingly privatized, marginal, and politically irrelevant (Casanova, 1994b). Insofar as this global resurgence is intrinsically linked with the "third wave of democratization," one can easily follow its flows from Southern Europe (Spain) to South America (Brazil), to Eastern Europe (Poland), to East Asia (Philippines and South Korea), to South Africa. In all these cases--and one could add many others--the role of religion, of religious institutions, and of social movements that either had a religious identity or were influenced by religion, was significant. In particular, the Catholic Church and Catholic groups played a crucial role in many of those democratic transitions--to such an extent that Samuel Huntington (1991) and others (Casanova, 1996) have argued rightly that the third wave of democratization was predominantly a Catholic wave. Roughly two-thirds of the 30-some countries that have undergone successful transitions to democracy since the mid-1970s were Catholic. Huntington (1993, 1996), however, is more famous for his thesis that the third wave of democratization may have reached its civilizational limits; that other civilizations, particularly Islam, are based on principles that may be essentially incompatible with democracy and that, therefore, the public mobilization of Islam is unlikely to be conducive to democracy and the emergence of civil society; and that the civilizational clash between Islam and the West may replace the geopolitical clash between the superpowers during the Cold War.

In this paper I would like to examine both theses. In the first part I reconstruct analytically the transformation of Catholicism that made it possible for it to play such a significant historical role. In the second part I use these retrospective reflections as the point of departure for an analysis of the contemporary transformation of Islam in order to examine whether it could possible play a similar role in the democratization of Muslim countries and in the emergence of Islamic civil societies.

I. Retrospective Reflections on the "Catholic Wave"

It should not be surprising to find Catholics playing a crucial role in politics in countries such as Spain, Brazil, or Poland, which are or were at the time almost homogeneously Catholic. But a few distinctions are necessary to clarify the argument concerning the role of religion in civil society formation or in processes of democratization:

1) It is important to keep in mind that this was a historical first for the Catholic Church. In other words, it was the first time that the Catholic Church had played a consistently proactive, positive role in the processes of democratization. In previous waves of democratization the church and Catholic groups in general had been almost consistently on the other side of the democratic barricades, either resisting democratization or adapting to it at best lukewarmly. Thus, one can hardly make the argument that Catholicism is intrinsically--that is, "essentially"--democratic or has elective affinities with democracy or with civil society. On the contrary, one could argue that the third wave of democratization could only be a Catholic wave precisely because so many (indeed, a majority) of Catholic countries at the time still had authoritarian regimes, many of them initially supported by the church and by Catholic militant groups.

2) However, Catholic groups also played a prominent role, disproportionate to their size, in recent democratic transitions in countries where they constituted small minorities--South Korea and South Africa, for example, countries where Catholics comprise less than 10 percent of the population. Therefore, Catholicism itself, or more precisely the official reformulation or aggiornamento of the Catholic tradition connected with the Second Vatican Council, has to be taken seriously into account as an independent factor, since it appears to have had sociohistorical repercussions even in non-Catholic countries. In this respect, it was a Catholic wave not just because the countries where it occurred happened to be Catholic, but because the transformation of Catholicism was itself an important independent factor in producing the wave.

3) Moreover, Catholicism was not the only religion that played a positive role in civil society formation and democratization throughout the third wave. Other religious groups played equally positive roles in various places: Lutherans in East Germany, Protestants as well as Catholics in South Korea, Episcopalians and various other churches in South Africa, and in Romania, a Hungarian Unitarian minister, who triggered that country's revolution. Thus, although my retrospective analysis is mainly based on a reconstruction of the transformation of Catholicism that made possible its new historical role in processes of democratization, the analysis can be generalized into one exploring the potential role of religion in civil society formation.