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

Social Research, Winter, 2001 by Jose Casanova

In his thesis on the "clash of civilizations," Samuel Huntington (1993, 1996) has raised provocatively the argument that democracy may be a civilizational achievement of the Christian West and therefore not easily transferable to other civilizations or world religions other than through Western hegemonic imposition or through the conversion to Western norms. If the thesis is correct, it would follow that the third wave of democratization may have reached its civilizational limits and that few other countries are likely to attain successful transitions to stable democracies. Ironically, this is a view shared by Western hegemonists like Huntington, by postmodern critics of hegemonic Western universalism, and by some religious and political elites in non-Western countries who want to protect themselves and their societies from the contagion of undesirable elements of Western modernity. (2)

Huntington's vision of the impending conflict between the Christian democratic West and other civilizations, particularly "Islamic-Confucian states," has been widely and rightly criticized on many grounds, above all for his essentialism--that is, for the assumption that world religions have some unchangeable core essences. Huntington's (1991) own analysis of the Catholic wave of democratization can be used to question this assumption. Indeed, had Huntington developed his argument only a few decades earlier, before the Catholic aggiornamento, the formulation of the thesis could possibly have taken the form of the clash of the Protestant secular West against "the Rest," and Catholic culture could have been easily construed as essentially inimical to democracy. This, after all, was an old thesis, not totally without foundation in reality, that Tocqueville had already tried to refute in the 1830s. The thesis found particular resonance in Protestant America, where from the 1830s to the 1960s it took the expression of the alleged incompatibility between "Republicanism" and "Romanism." (3)

At the very least, and irrespective of how one judges the old anti-Catholic prejudices, the swift and radical transformation of the political culture of Catholic countries as the result of the official reformulation of the religious teachings of the Catholic Church puts into question the notion of the unchanging core essence of a world religion as dogmatically structured as Catholicism. The premise of an unchanging core essence should even be less valid for other world religions with a less dogmatically structured doctrinal core or with a more pluralistic and contested system of authoritative interpretation of the religious tradition.

The successful democratic transitions in South Korea and Taiwan, in addition to the persistence of democracy in Japan, put into question the validity of Huntington's thesis for the Confucian-Buddhist culture area, despite the attempts of political leaders in Singapore to defend a supposedly Asian authoritarian culture against Western cultural imperialism. The same could be said about the persistence of a much-tested democracy in India, despite the hegemonic project of a resurgent Hindu nationalism that challenges the institutions of a secular Indian state meant to protect religious pluralism. But it is in relation to Islam that Huntington's thesis has found the greatest resonance and has provoked the most heated debates.