Muslims in Western Politics

4. Religion, Muslims, and the State in Britain and France: From Westphalia to 9/11

4 Religion, Muslims, and the State in Britain and France: From Westphalia to 9/11 Jorgen S. Nielsen Britain and France have been offered by many social and political scientists as two distinct models of how a west European democratic nation-state should set about absorbing recently immigrated ethnic and religious minority communities . France has been portrayed as representing an “assimilationist” model in which the individual is integrated directly into a secular republic as a citizen, while the United Kingdom is said to represent an “integrationist” model in which communities are absorbed—or an individualist versus a communalist approach (e.g., Kepel 1997). I investigate these claims with specific reference to Islam and show that the distinctions between the two countries are more of form than of substance, and that under the impact of changing environments, particularly in the political field, they were converging even before the impact of developments that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Church-State Relations Fetzer and Soper (2005; see also their chapter in this volume) have recently argued that the various church-state relations inherited by contemporary European Religion, Muslims, and the State in Britain and France ·  states have been a factor underrated by scholars in their discussions of the processes of local accommodation of the growing Muslim presence. They refer to existing discussions of church-state relations which traditionally identify three types:1 1. Countries where the relationship is governed by a concordat, such as has traditionally been the case in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Some scholars would include, at least partially, Germany in this category. 2. Countries with a state church, such as Denmark, Finland, Norway, and, until quite recently, Sweden. England might also be included, as could Greece. 3. Countries with separation between church and state such as France, the Republic of Ireland, Belgium, and Holland. This particular typology works if viewed from a constitutional perspective with a Catholic bias. Seen from a north European angle and a Protestant bias, a slightly different typology might make better sense (e.g., Vetvik 1992): 1. There is a laicist type with a sharp separation between church and state, as in France and the Irish Republic. Over the last several decades the Netherlands has moved in this direction. 2. The concordat type that follows the Napoleonic precedent includes countries like Italy, Spain, and Portugal, even though legislation has in some cases moved beyond this.2 3. Countries with some form of domestically arranged “establishment.” These can be subdivided into two types: a. Countries where churches, and occasionally other religions, function within the legal framework of some kind of recognition, whose privileges usually extend equally to all recognized churches. They include Austria, Germany, the Alsace-Moselle region of France, Wales and Scotland, and the “free churches” in England. b. Countries that have churches which are somehow incorporated, in varying degrees, within the state structures. Denmark is probably the purest example of this, and England would fall into this category as well, at least as regards the Church of England. Recently, a major critique of such traditional typologies has been suggested by Silvio Ferrari (2003). He argues that, while they may describe the constitutional positions, they are of little use in analyzing the situation on the ground, and that they attribute excessive importance to legal and constitutional arrangements which are often, in fact, fossils with little practical impact. One might give as an example the sharp contrast in realities between France and the Irish  · Jorgen S. Nielsen Republic, both of which have a regime of separation or laïcité. Building on the work of François-Georges Dreyfus (1993), Ferrari suggests that it is much more useful to talk of a European model in which differences among the various countries should be considered along three dimensions: 1. The protection of individual rights of religious freedom, a tradition that has grown out of European history since the eighteenth century and is currently expressed in article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights. 2. The degree of withdrawal of the competence of the state in religious matters and the autonomy of religious confessions. 3. Selective collaboration between the state and religious confessions. The proponents of this approach are explicit that this model is a west European one, one which arises out of the history of medieval Catholic Christendom , and that it therefore does not transpose readily to Orthodox Eastern Europe, or by implication...