This is an exercise in free-ranging sociological comparison designed to show how socio-logic works and to index the most relevant themes. It links different relationships between politics and religion with different patterns of secularisation in Western and in Eastern Europe, using Britain and Spain as polar cases in Western Europe and the interlinked histories and cultures of Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania in Eastern Europe.
I deal first with Britain because it is a key instance of what has happened in the world’s first industrial nation in a relatively sheltered geopolitical environment. Britain is a very distinctive case but nevertheless illustrates themes that play out very differently elsewhere. It offers a major contrast to Spain, and both countries have transmitted their cultural templates to North America and Latin America. The pattern of religion and politics and of secularisation is perhaps even more different in Eastern Europe. Whereas Britain and Spain are ex-imperial countries with fairly well-defined borders (even though they have major peripheries, like Scotland or Catalonia), countries like Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania have alternately expanded their frontiers and been subjugated by neighbouring empires. They have existed in exposed geopolitical environments. Their borders have shifted and their populations have been decimated or forcibly transferred elsewhere, with the tides of war, the decisions of dictators and the consequences of alliances and treaties.
We now turn to Britain, in particular England. Henry the Eighth nationalised the Catholic Church and centralised the country in the 1530s, and England became officially Protestant under his son Edward, and effectively Protestant about 1570 under his daughter Elizabeth. Between 1642 and 1660 England was ravaged by revolutionary civil war that disestablished the Church and set up a religiously Puritan republic, with some developments anticipating democratic, anarchist and communist elements in later revolutions but mostly in Christian language. After all, a devout reading of the Bible easily leads to politically radical conclusions. Those conclusions included eschatological expectations, and led the Republic to invite Jews back into England, even though the major influx of Jews came in the late nineteenth century.
The memory of the civil war lives on today, and the republican leader, Oliver Cromwell, is commemorated as a hero of radical politics and reviled as a regicide. Moreover, the seeds of Cromwell’s revolution, and the principles of the English Bill of Rights promulgated in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–89, were exported to British North America and came to maturity in the American Revolution of 1776. In Britain there were further revolutionary possibilities in the 1790s, 1830s and 1840s, but violent revolution was avoided by combinations of reform and repression. Moreover, historians have argued about how far Evangelical Revivals from the 1730s on absorbed and redirected revolutionary energies. So much for a broader background: it shows that Britain differs not only from France and Spain but from almost anywhere in Europe, West or East.
The comprehensive coverage claimed by the Established Protestant Church was further undermined in the course of the Industrial Revolution from (say) 1760 on. During this period the dissident religious groups previously involved in the Puritan Revolution were affected by a major Evangelical Revival and they rapidly expanded alongside Methodism, a new movement initially part of Evangelical Revival inside the Established Church. Religion in nineteenth-century England became divided between a much more active Establishment and a very lively voluntary or Free Church sector. Between 1840 and 1950 England, like North America, became more religious than it had been in the long eighteenth century from 1690 to 1830.
The Established Church of England and the Free Churches created lively subcultures linked with the two main parties, Conservative and Liberal; and the Liberal Party drew energy at its local grass roots from the support of members of the Free Churches, who suffered civil disabilities and felt hostile towards the Conservatives and a largely Anglican elite. Thus the slow extension of the vote was associated with the emergence of mass parties that were far from anti-clerical, let alone antireligious, but associated either with an established Church largely dominant in the south and most rural areas, or with Free Churches mainly strong in the northern industrial areas and the west, above all Wales. This is very different from Spain and Latin America where liberalism was associated with anti-clericalism. The British Liberal Party was a lay party and against religious establishment but was often animated, as were parts of the Conservative Party, by Evangelical and other efforts to ameliorate the condition of the masses. The masses included increasing numbers of migrant Irish Catholics whose aspirations were on occasion supported by the Catholic Church. After 1918 the Irish Catholic working class and some in the Free Churches moved over to support the recently formed Labour Party, hitherto in alliance with the Liberals.
Here we need to look back to signs of secularisation beginning in the 1880s, and to the social and intellectual radicalism emerging between 1880 and 1914 – some of it secularist, some even Marxist. All the same, the churches were numerically at their height in 1905 just before the Liberal victory of 1906; and that victory led to the first instalments of the welfare state as Liberalism finally abandoned laisser-faire economics. The Free Churches greatly increased their representation in the 1906 Parliament and this period broadly saw an end to their major grievances. The 1914–18 war did not undermine the churches, but the Irish Rebellion and the creation of the Irish Free State ended Irish nationalist representation in the Westminster Parliament. As Simon Green has argued, that change, together with the decline of a Liberal Party identified with the Free Churches, broke the link between rival political parties and rival religious bodies, so that both Labour and Conservative parties became multi-denominational.1 The Labour Party had a Marxist wing, but its main roots were in Scottish and Welsh Protestantism as well as in English Methodism, and in some industrial areas it relied on Irish Catholic votes. The Anglican Church could now resume its representative national role, and some of its leaders, including some in its more Catholic-minded wing, drew on earlier traditions of Christian Socialism to support an emerging consensus in favour of welfare. In the 1920s welfare was further extended from the Conservative side under the Unitarian Neville Chamberlain, as well as supported by the Labour and Liberal parties.
From the mid-1920s on most of the indicators of religious vitality moved downward, except those for the Roman Catholic Church, which only experienced decline once the Irish migrants became mobile and more integrated in British society. Eventually Ireland itself – including the strongly Protestant North and the Republic – as well as the other national peripheries of Scotland and Wales moved closer to the lower English levels of practice and even of belief. Simon Green concludes that by the end of the Second World War it made little difference whether politicians claimed membership of a religious body or exercised a modicum of moral prudence.2 Looking further ahead to the end of the century, he suggests that politics had as much difficulty in fostering long-term commitment as religion, so maybe religion and politics suffered from a common situation.
This does not mean that the churches, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, became privatised. Indeed they spoke on the condition of the inner cities, ecological sustainability, the moral hazards of commercial greed, the integrity of the family, the just war and nuclear war. They maintained an informal alliance with the politics of welfare and criticised the neo-conservative policies of the Thatcher governments between 1979 and 1991. The Established Church also offered a protective umbrella for minorities, including a Muslim minority today numbering about 5 per cent. When it came to the legal regulation of the intimate life of citizens, the Established Church either recognised that it was powerless or positively supported changes, for example those proposed by the Wolfenden Report of 1957 in favour of decriminalising homosexual behaviour and made into law in 1967. Though religious people, particularly devout Catholics, were conservative on the issues of abortion and euthanasia, many Christians shared in a broad utilitarian consensus based on minimising harm and increasingly on issues like homosexuality and contraception, official Catholic teaching did not even convince Catholics.
But what were the causes of the diminution in religious commitment, and maybe commitment more generally? Some of the causes are long term: the alienation of many in the working classes, especially men, from the culture of the churches; the ethos of large cities and the relativism stimulated by mixing in a pluralist environment. Then there is the emergence of distinct spheres (social differentiation), each with its own ethos and professional dynamic partly supplanting the clergy, for example in education or social work. Finally, there are the intellectual changes of the last two centuries. One such change was the Romantic movement, with its pursuit of self-expression and individual autonomy, its worship of nature and the natural, as well as its propagation of nationalism through a mutation of religious themes.
All these causes have varied consequences in different countries. Much depends on whether the nation emerges in defiance of religion as in France, or in alliance with it as in much of Eastern Europe, or on whether Church and state are separated as in the USA or closely linked as in Poland and Romania. Perhaps we can agree about the impact on religion and religious authority of the differentiation of distinct and autonomous social spheres, and of individual autonomy. Yet individual autonomy is very far advanced in the USA and nevertheless finds acceptable expression within the churches, including homosexuality, divorce and family disintegration. The same is true of the shift from the moral economy of scarcity which at one time included the imperative of child-bearing where perhaps one in two died in childhood and the survivors were potential economic assets, to an economy of affluence where even serious self-indulgence is more stupid than morally wrong. Affluence, especially when combined with the fruits of modern technology, provides endless alternative forms of entertainment, rivalling or surpassing the provision found in the churches. Yet affluence in the USA turns out to be entirely compatible with active Christianity, so even the impact of a moral economy of affluence depends to some extent on historical and cultural context.
This then is my thematic index for thinking comparatively about secularisation and the relation of religion to politics in Western and Eastern Europe. One of the most important is the way a religious, ethnic or ethno-religious conflict between groups firms up solidarity, especially where one of the groups constitutes a compact and geographically rooted minority. Moreover, a minority of this kind, whether or not with a distinctive territorial heartland such as one finds in Brittany and Wales, will first resist impulses for a dominant centre and then assimilate. In Britain the religious minority in the voluntary sector lost impetus with the loss of grievances, and so did the Catholic minority in Holland, which was very compact as well as having territorial heartlands in the south of the country.
Of course, people migrate out of an ethnic or religious minority. People have been leaving the peripheries of Ireland, Wales and Scotland for England, the British Empire and the USA for a very long time. Catalonia has looked towards Paris as well as Madrid and has received a massive flow of migrants from the south of Spain. Millions of Ukrainians are now in Canada, the USA, Argentina and Brazil. And this is to say nothing of politically or economically forced migrations, most notoriously deportations to Siberia, and the appalling effects of enforced famine in Ukraine. The borderlands of Eastern Europe are also ‘bloodlands’ where countries and peoples have expanded to the east or to the west, where enclaves like the Swabian Germans of Romania or the Bulgarians of Ukraine have settled for centuries, or like the Lemkos in post-World War Two Poland have found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and been forcibly removed elsewhere. To be at a border may motivate you to hold fast to your traditions, especially when you fear the hostile power on the other side of the border. Greeks, Hungarians, Serbians and Bulgarians have pictures in their heads of historical and mythic borders extending far beyond their present ones, and harbour illusory visions of their own ethno-religious homogeneity that lead to expulsions or refusal to recognise subcommunities. People also migrate to ex-imperial countries for economic reasons, so that Britain, France and Spain have more religiously diverse populations, including Muslims and non-European Christians, whose practice is often relatively high.
If we now turn to Spain, it is a square country with a natural centre which became the capital, Madrid, natural borders and several peripheries. After 800 years of war the country was unified under a Catholic monarchy, just as England was unified under an anti-Roman Catholic monarchy. That meant that Catholicism and Protestantism came to define the two countries, in particular in their rivalry with each other. Arguably Spain and England were early examples of nationhood achieved by a strong monarchy enforcing religious unity rather than through the mass mobilisations led by the Romantic intelligentsia in the nineteenth century. Jews and Muslims were eventually expelled from a united Spain, just as Jews and Christians left under the harsh regime of the Muslim Almohads in the years after 1147.
Apart from the early unification under a monarchy and the subjugation of the Church to monarchical control, Spain and England followed radically different paths. The Enlightenment in Spain, though manifested in the common European neo-classical style, was dependent on a centralising and anti-clerical Bourbon royal power in pursuit of economic reform in the absence of a middle class. This is very different from England where it flourished in the life of the middle-class coffee house. The English (and Scottish) Enlightenment had an extended life for over a century, and included thinkers from all the main religious traditions, Anglican, Scottish Presbyterian and also dissenting, in particular Unitarians. Perhaps one easily forgets the association of Enlightenment with orthodox as well as dissident forms of Christianity, and the way an orthodox Christianity emphasising lay initiative and individual conscience can eventually undermine confessional states. There was no equivalent in England of the Carlist movement supporting a legitimist cause and having some relation to North-Eastern separatism, except maybe the rebellions sparked off in Ireland in 1689 and in Scotland in 1715 and 1745 in favour of the Catholic Stuarts.
Both Spain and Britain had peripheries based on geography, but whereas in Britain these peripheries were defined by semi-mythic histories of ethnic difference with a variable link to language and by the pre-eminent role of different Christian churches – Calvinist in Scotland, Ulster and Wales, Catholic in most of Ireland – in Spain they were defined by elements of a local Catholic nationalism: strong in the Basque country but rather exclusive, sometimes violent and linked to race; weaker in Catalonia and more closely linked to language and culture.3 Both regions were economically advanced. The link between the politics of the peripheries and the political divides of the nation was very different in Britain and Spain. Each periphery in Britain in the nineteenth century generated a distinctive political culture, but – with the very partial exception of Ireland, North and South – these cultures were linked to the overall rivalry of Conservatives and Liberals. In Spain, however, a massive and often violent struggle built up between Republicans and Catholic monarchists cross-cutting the struggle between autonomy and centralisation. Affected by a socialist, anarchist and syndicalist left in twentieth-century, Catalonia was both autonomist and anti-clerical. Britain was not torn apart by conflicts over religion as such and liable to turn violent and anarchic. Religion was diffusely related to national identity, but Anglicans did not identify the very existence of the nation with the dominance of their Church. Religious trade unions and political parties have had no place in British politics.
The Civil War beginning in 1936 between Republicans and Catholic nationalists in Spain and the subsequent imposition of Catholicism under Franco, including the suppression of local autonomy, were inconceivable in Britain. Nor can one imagine an elite Anglican group operating like Opus Dei in Spain under Franco to initiate a technical and business revolution and influencing the transition after Franco’s demise.4 Of course, the struggle in Ireland between Britain and the Republicans between 1916 and 1922 involved a symbiosis of Catholics with Republicans, but the social dominance of the established Protestant Church of Ireland had long ceased to be an issue. English attitudes to Ireland included a dislike of the Irish as politically troublesome, and there was also ambivalence towards them, with some regarding Catholic Ireland as dominated by priests and backward, and others regarding it as enchanted and uninfected by Protestant materialism
One element in my thematic index was the spread of the lower religious vitality of the centre to the peripheries even as these peripheries have gained greater political and cultural autonomy. In Spain that relationship is made more complicated by long-term historical differences between the north and the south that have led to higher practice in parts of the north and north-east, and a more colourful folkloric religion in the south. All the same, the Basque country, for example, much of which was strongly Catholic, has moved closer to the national norm. That norm shows sharp declines in belief, practice and clerical recruitment since the 1980s, partly as a reaction to the control exercised by Franco, even though the Church eventually distanced itself from the more authoritarian aspects of the regime and challenged its control of appointments.5 The other reasons for decline, tourism apart, are standard ones already noted in Britain, such as industrialisation, urbanisation and the shift from a moral economy of scarcity to one of affluence, except that in Britain these mostly operated over a much longer timescale.
Changes have been so rapid that the Church, initially neutral towards the rival Social Democratic and Popular parties, has tended to support the more conservative Popular Party. As elsewhere, any attempt to control the intimate life of citizens seems doomed to failure, as the birth rates throughout most of Catholic Europe dramatically indicate. If even Ireland and Spain, both at the level of government and in the practice of lay Catholics, reject a political or legal subordination to official Church teachings, a shift has occurred that is most unlikely to be reversed. In Britain a Christian couple were not allowed to adopt on account of their negative views about homosexuality, while Spain has legalised same-sex marriage. So there is convergence after a history of divergence. However, we shall see that Eastern Europe is different.
Before that we might ask how far the British and Spanish empires reproduced their cultural templates in their colonial territories, thereby creating a situation where English and Spanish are the two pre-eminent international tongues, between them including over a billion people for whom they are first languages. Spain helped Americans in their revolutionary war, while Britain helped the Spanish colonies in their revolutionary wars, as well as helping expel the French in Spain in alliance with the Spanish army and the guerrillas. The two imperial systems were very different, given that Britain had a primarily commercial empire that made no attempt to convert whole populations to Protestantism, and in many areas inhibited missionary activity even though there was a relationship between the expansion of empire and the work of missionaries. In the very broadest terms, Spain exported a template of Catholic hegemony often in conflict with liberal anti-clericals of the kind that led up to the Mexican Civil War, while Britain exported a Protestant pluralism that characterised North America, Australia and British Africa, with the two established churches, Presbyterian in Scotland and Anglican in England, sometimes achieving a local shadowy dominance. Moreover in Canada, as in Britain, ‘enlightenment’ could be disseminated through the churches.6 In any case the contradictory messages found in the Bible could include a rhetoric of liberation diffusely available throughout the Anglo-Saxon world for ‘ringing the liberty bell’, for example among the blacks of Africa and North America. Indigenous and subject peoples in Latin America also used the rhetoric of Christianity, including its millenarian eschatology, against Spanish hegemony.
Migration from Protestant countries was encouraged by radicals in Latin America because they associated them with modernity and progress, even though Protestantism only affected small sectors of the population until the mid-twentieth century with the rapid expansion of Pentecostalism and Evangelical churches ‘in renewal’. The opposition to this expansion paralleled a similar opposition in Eastern Europe. Even when some pluralism was accepted, the traditional mainstream churches and the cultural nationalists alike supported local tradition and laid the blame for religious and cultural intrusion on America, some of it associated with new styles of popular religious music and participation.
In Eastern Europe we look at the shared histories of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine. We begin by surveying geopolitics on a large scale before focussing on the gateways from Asia into the European peninsula, one of which is the contested borderland of Galicia, while another borderland lies further west in Transylvania. These are both areas where nationalism became associated with the Uniate Church. The Uniate or Greek Catholic Church has a significant presence on the western borders of Ukraine and Romania respectively, and in these areas it coexists with other churches in a pluralist environment. These gateways in the south-east of Europe, situated where its protective mountains begin, lie at the junctions where expanding Asian empires, whether Islamic or Orthodox (at least by tradition), and empires controlling the European heartland, whether Catholic or (later) Protestant (at least by tradition), come into contention. The long-term vista is provided first by waves of invasion from Asia, including the devastations wrought by the Golden Horde, and then by the struggles between Russia, Austria or Austria-Hungary – later Germany, and the Ottomans.
Religious, political and nationalist cultures are affected in a very complicated way both by imperial triumph and experience of defeat or alien domination. Russia switched to communism with defeat in 1917 and back to Orthodoxy with effective defeat in 1989. Turkey and Germany both repudiated part of their historic faiths with defeat in 1917. Britain and America were most religious at the height of their power in 1870 and 1950 respectively; and from 1947 to 1989 America contrasted its religious faith with the atheistic ‘evil empire’ of Russia. Poland and Ukraine have been from time to time incorporated in Russia, and relate their religion to their victimhood. But Poland, though it has its own imperial history, including much of the territory of what is today Ukraine, has acquired an exclusive relationship between being Polish and being Catholic, whereas Ukraine is very broadly divided west and east. Even Lithuania, which shared its glorious past with Poland, has a less exclusive relationship with Catholicism.
Starting with Lithuania we find Catholicism powerful but not unchallenged, especially now that modernisation has introduced western-style consumerism, particularly among the younger age groups. There is a very close relation between being ethnically Lithuanian and being Catholic, just as there is between being part of a Russian community of some 5 per cent and being Russian Orthodox or an Old Believer. However, the initial assertions of Lithuanian cultural identity in the nineteenth century were associated with an emerging middle class which, though it included clerics alongside liberal intellectuals, also looked back to a pre-Christian paganism preceding the inclusion of Lithuania in Christendom by political fiat. The Catholic hierarchy regarded the Lithuanian cultural renaissance with some reserve, in particular because it might alienate and marginalise the Polish minority. All the same, the failed revolution of 1905 mobilised the whole country, including the peasantry alongside the intelligentsia, and the Catholic Church played a major role in the nationalist movement culminating in independence in 1918. It was during the political and economic trials of the later nineteenth century that perhaps one-quarter of the population emigrated, as also happened in Galicia.
The Church dominated the political arena through Christian Democratic and allied parties up to 1926, when Lithuania was taken over by a secular authoritarian regime with a populist and nationalist agenda but found it politic to compromise with the Church. During the Soviet occupation (1940–41, 1944–89) the Church was the only institutional vehicle of national resistance. It projected an image of suffering that united those who might otherwise have been lukewarm to religion, including some whose primary focus might have been language and the authentic culture of the folk or the Helsinki human rights agenda. However, after independence this alliance weakened, and members of the intelligentsia divided into a minority for whom the Church was still the primary focus of Lithuanian identity and others who to this or that extent invoked Lithuanian history in general and the pre-Christian past. There is also some tension between some younger priests and members of the older generation, for example over such powerful folk icons as Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn, Vilnius, a devotion that extends to neighbouring countries, especially Poland, as well as North America.
Today, while the Church remains a powerful force, and indeed helped swing the vote in favour of joining the European Union (EU), it faces a younger generation less conscious of external threats and with a fading memory of the intense emotions raised, for example, by Soviet attempts to replace the three crosses on the hill above Vilnius with communist symbols. There are even some young people who seek a more ‘modern’, participatory and personal faith in the autonomous Lithuanian variant of the charismatic mega-church (along lines similar to the Living Word in Uppsala, Sweden, and the Faith Church in Budapest) known as Word of Faith. Most of the people attracted to the so-called ‘New Religions’ in Lithuania, and likewise in Latvia, are in fact charismatic Christians. So far as nationalists are concerned, devoutly Catholic or otherwise, modernity, especially when it comes from America, takes second place to local tradition, as indeed it does throughout Eastern Europe. Rapid economic development, some affluence, along with tourism and consumerism have had an impact, and perhaps some 25 per cent now describe themselves as having no religion, a much higher figure than in Poland but about the same figure as one finds in Ukraine.
Polish Catholics in Lithuania are a rather compact ethno-religious group of nearly 7 per cent in and around Vilnius. Lithuanians and Poles not only share some common history but have more recently experienced nationalist rivalry, especially when Poland occupied part of the country after the Great War. Most Polish Lithuanians live and move within their own community and its educational, cultural and political institutions as well as having their own festivals and devotional sites. At the same time, parishes often have services in Polish as well as Lithuanian and priests are bilingual, and Poles do not question the authority of the Lithuanian Catholic Church.
Poland is the most believing and practising country in Europe, in part due to the role of the Catholic Church in standing in for the nation under foreign rule. It is also homogeneous, following the westward shifts in frontiers since 1945 and the elimination of the Jewish population by the Nazis. The historical sequence in Poland parallels the sequence in Lithuania, including a period of authoritarian rule between the wars. Romanticism uses religious imagery in a generic rather than a Christian way to express love and suffering, and Romantic poets and writers in Poland recast Christian messianic imagery to project the providential mission of the nation. Perhaps language under the influence of Romanticism was the core value for Poles, while under the communists the emphasis moved to religion.
There is no need here to rehearse the precise roles played by the Polish Catholic Church, the Polish Pope and the Solidarity trades union in the Soviet collapse. Domination by an atheistic regime resting on Soviet power rapidly created a duality between good Catholic patriots and bad atheistic communists, so that by the end of the 1980s the Catholic Church emerged as the most trusted institution in Poland and the key player in the politics of liberation and the establishment of democratic freedoms. This moment when the Church appeared to be the one rock of continuity and trust was experienced in several countries and, though weakened, has not entirely disappeared. Under dictatorial rule the broad symbolic resources of the Church did not need to be attached to concrete political policies beyond liberation, so that even in countries where the Church was relatively weak, as in the DDR and Bulgaria, opposition emerged behind its banners. People did not know what the Church stood for, but they intuited what it was against. The Church represented non-violent opposition with a human face.7
Unfortunately the Catholic hierarchy in Poland translated its accumulated moral capital into the right to speak for post-communist Poland, even though that capital rested on broad symbolism not adherence to Catholic teaching, particularly in intimate matters. Changes were made in the law respecting abortion and religious education in schools without a full debate of all concerned parties within civil society. As in Ireland after a similar experience of foreign rule, the Church felt it had the right to dominate politics and even suggest how people should vote. Again, as in Ireland in 1937, a new constitution made explicit reference to God. However, there were now many people, including strongly practising Catholics, who felt able to choose over a much wider range than previously. The Church was now more differentiated and varied, and while one group might be represented by Radio Maria with its rather xenophobic and anti-Semitic tendencies and fear of Western Europe, others were ready to support left and liberal parties rather than the overtly Catholic party of Lech Walesa. As in Ireland, the Church remained secretive, not only about cooperation under communism, which happened in every country, but on issues relating to priestly abuse. When similar secrecy was exposed in Ireland, the Catholic hierarchy initially failed to realise that moral capital earned generations ago could be squandered, particularly when a newly independent intelligentsia was in charge of new media.8
In Ukraine no one version of Christianity has represented the nation against external domination. We could construct a typology running from situations where religions divided the nation and where it united the nation. In Albania three different confessions divided the nation north, centre and south; and its dictator, Enver Hoxha, actually forbade any exercise of religion. In Italy the nation was divided down the middle by the Papal States and by those who thought of Italy as a federation under the Pope and secular nationalists like Byron, Mazzini and Garibaldi, who focussed on the role of Piedmont and sought to create a mythology of the Risorgimento as a kind of analogy of the Resurrection. Greece, by contrast, could appeal directly to the Resurrection even though its nationalism combined a memory of suffering under Ottoman imperialism with a classical and a Byzantine heritage. In Ireland the unity of Irish identity and Catholicism was actually reinforced after independence in 1922 by partition from a North where the Protestants were in the majority and the Catholics regarded themselves as second-class citizens. In a situation where the Protestant majority in the North was only 60 per cent, religious solidarity was reinforced on both sides of the divide.
In Ukraine the proportions belonging to different religious confessions shifts from Uniates in the West, who are about 6 per cent overall, to the Kiev Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church and the autonomous Ukrainian Orthodox Church closer to the centre, until in the East the Moscow Patriarchate is dominant. The linguistic map also shifts from Ukrainian in the West to Russian in the East. These shifts find some echo in the division between those who look politically to Western Europe and those who look to Russia. These divisions were a major element in the Orange Revolution in 2004 sparked by suspected electoral fraud on the part of the pro-Russian political forces. Initially the revolution was a ‘liminal’ event as people came together and achieved a fervent sense of non-violent community. Yet, corruption and political dealing can all too rapidly resume their accustomed sway, as also happened in Romania after the liminal events at the end of 1989 and again in Moldova in 2007. There are always major groups who counter-mobilise to recover the ground lost in the brief moments of revolution The 2011 government declared the Orange Revolution of no great significance, just as some 2014 revolutionaries declared ‘the Great Patriotic War’ of no great significance.
One source of trouble lies in the history of borderlands that are also zones of transition. Like most nations in the transitional zones of Europe lying between rival empires, Ukraine has its own memory of a time when it extended over a large area and of other times when it was ruled over or wholly or partly incorporated in the Mongol Empire (as the existence of the Crimean Tatars bears witness), Poland-Lithuania, Austro-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire or Russia. The story of the rise of Ukrainian nationalism is too complex to rehearse here, though it seems clear that Russophilia was quite common among the Slavic population and that strong cultural links with Russia were formed. As always, culture heroes are invoked and poets write of devotion to the nation: in Ukraine poets like Taras Shevchenko; in Moldova Mihai Eminescu, at least for the Romanian section of the population. There has to be national poet or writer to express national aspirations and call up a history of heroism and suffering. The socialist writer Ivan Franko is particularly interesting for the idea of Galicia: he also compared the search for a Ukrainian homeland to the quest of the Jews and translated Byron, among other nineteenth-century Romantics. England lacks such figures, lacking a history of confusion and external oppression.9
The appalling anarchy and the infighting of rival groups, including the famous Ukrainian Riflemen, after the First World War was only brought to a tragic end by the incorporation of parts of western Ukraine into Poland, while most of Ukraine became a constituent Republic of the Soviet Union. To begin with this occurred under conditions favourable to cultural identity with the rapid progress of education and urbanisation, but then after 1928 there was a forced industrialisation and collectivisation which resulted in near-genocide, the suppression of Ukrainian culture and attacks on the cultural elite and all the churches. Throughout the Soviet period Ukraine remained the most religious part of the Union, and half the functioning churches were located there. Today regular practice may be as high as one in three, though it is at its highest in the far west of the country and lowest in the east. The attacks on religion included the suppression of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church and the Uniate Church. In the Second World War, though some Ukrainians fought with or cooperated with the Nazis, millions of Ukrainians died fighting in the Red Army. The large Jewish population of L’viv was decimated. The Ukrainian population of L’viv today is often of relatively recent rural origin. After the confusion and devastation of the war, Ukraine became the spearhead of Soviet industrialisation until the breakup of the Union.
These are the barest outlines of an incredibly complex history providing a backdrop to the particular problems of religion and the politics of identity in a zone of transition. In Western Europe a comparable zone of transition between France and Germany became a focus for the bridging institutions of the EU as these built on a mythic structure of the Middle Kingdom of Charlemagne and a Catholic–Protestant rapprochement. That solution seems not possible in Ukraine. Instead we have multiple histories and something like the rival memories that haunt the northern borderlands like Latvia and Estonia, in spite of attempts to promote a straightforward narrative of national restoration. On commemorative and public occasions it is politically significant which church the officiating priests belong to, and the tensions between them in Ukraine are very like those in the divided Orthodox Church of contemporary Bulgaria.
In many countries placed precariously in vast and easily penetrated zones of transition both memory and history are haunted and contentious, and these are manifest in the fields of religion and politics. Not only will histories and memories vary in different regions in Ukraine but also in the diasporas of Europe and North America: Galicia is now a haunting memory in the USA. Many will favour one kind of history, especially in the schools, because it assists political mobilisation; others will adopt an East Slavic and more Russian-oriented perspective, or they may adopt various regional and ideological perspectives. At the same time, multi-ethnic and transnational histories may portray Ukraine as a zone pointing both to Asia and East Central Europe. Meanwhile, the politics of identity and of commemoration and their manifestations in religion fragment. The treatment of Mazepa as a past historical figure illustrates this fragmentation. Because Mazepa, fearing for his own autonomy, left Peter the Great to side with Charles of Sweden, he was anathematised in Russia and by the Russian Orthodox Church; and later in the Soviet period he was condemned as a figure of bourgeois nationalism. In independent Ukraine he appears on a stamp, but his memory and commemoration have been a source of tension within Ukraine and between Ukraine and Russia. Galicia in the west is a cockpit rather like Belgium, divided historically by ethnicity, language, class and appalling violence, as in 1846 and both world wars. It has played an important role in Ukrainian nationalism; and the Greek Catholic Church of the region, with its strong western orientation, has experienced a renaissance. The Roman Catholic Church mostly serves ethnic Poles and Hungarians. One further source of tension arises because in Soviet times official morality required the privileged and wealthy to hide the fact, whereas now differences are openly flaunted.
The tension between pluralism and centralisation is political and religious. Since Ukraine is a zone of transition it is the most plural of the large successor states to the Soviet Union, and there is rivalry between traditional churches for position and control of assets. In particular there is a rivalry between the western churches, with the Orthodox of the Moscow Patriarchate expressing the more favourable attitude to Russia in the east, especially among older people in the cities, and even cooperating with the communists. The official visit of the Patriarch to Ukraine was supported by the Russian government. Whereas in Russia and Belarus there is a clear hierarchy of political acceptability between traditional and non-traditional churches, this is much less pronounced in Ukraine. There has been a considerable expansion of Pentecostal, charismatic and Baptist churches, perhaps making up 2–3 per cent of the population. These churches represent transnational flows from and to Ukraine, although, of course, the traditional churches also have transnational connections.10
I have selected my areas of comparison largely to bring out the themes of most interest to sociologists: centre and periphery; the role of ‘the Other’ in reinforcing solidarity, different degrees of homogeneity and pluralism, of the identification of nation and faith, and the role of memories of defeat and oppression, and of past cultural and political splendour. I have also emphasised the importance of geography for a compact seaboard nation like Spain; for nations like England and America, protected by sea and maybe able to pioneer different degrees of pluralism; and for countries like Ukraine and Poland exposed to movements of peoples and conflicts of empires. Whether the pattern of transnational religious pluralism represents the global future is one of the many questions sociology is not equipped to answer.
1 Simon Green, The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change c.1920–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
2 Green, The Passing of Protestant England.
3 Daniele Conversi, The Basques, Catalans and Spain: Alternative Routes to Nationalist Mobilisation (London: Hurst, 1997).
4 John Allen, Opus Dei: an Objective Look at the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 2005); Joan Estruch, Saints and Schemers: Opus Dei and its Paradoxes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
5 Audrey Brassloff, Religion and Politics in Spain: The Spanish Church in Transition, 1962–96 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
6 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, ‘Secularisation or Resacralisation? The Canadian Case, 1760–2000’, in Callum G. Brown and Michael Snape (eds), Secularisation in the Christian World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).
7 Irena Borowik, Church–State Relations in Central and Eastern Europe (Warsaw: Zaklad Wydawyniczy, 1999).
8 Borowik, Church–State Relations in Central and Eastern Europe.
9 Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
10 Catherine Wanner, Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). I should mention that in Soviet times many thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses were deported by what was known as ‘Operation North’ to Siberia, along with many clergy of the Greek Catholic Church, including its leader, who spent 18 years in the Gulag.