The Vienna Conferences: Transcripts

“Religion, Secularism, and the End of the West”

Laxenburg/Vienna, Austria—June 3, 2005

Introduction

On June 3, 2005, the Center on Religion and Democracy at the University of Virginia, with generous funding from The Pew Charitable Trusts, sponsored a conference titled “Religion, Secularism, and the End of the West.” Held in Laxenburg, Austria, the conference was organized by Center fellows Joseph E. Davis, Slavica Jakelić, and John M. Owen.

The presenters and guests at the conference constituted a genuinely international group of scholars, clergy, and journalists: José Casanova, Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School; Nilüfer Göle, Professor of Sociology at the École des Hautes Études in Paris; William Galston, Professor and a Senior Research Scholar in the School of Public Affairs and the SPA’s Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland; Slavica Jakelić, Associate Director of the Center on Religion and Democracy and Lecturer at the University of Virginia; James Davison Hunter, LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor in Religion, Culture, and Social Theory and Executive Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia; Marcin Król, Dean of History at Warsaw University and a holder of its Erasmus chair; James Kurth, Claude Smith Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College; Michael Nazir-Ali, Anglican Bishop of Rochester, England; David Novak, J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto; Sylvia Poggioli, Senior European correspondent for National Public Radio; Olivier Roy, Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Lecturer at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris; and Timothy Shah, Senior Fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

In three conference sessions, participants presented short essays that launched vigorous debate about the nature, history, and future of the West. The discussion focused on the following questions: Is the history of the West to be identified with the complex geopolitical and economic circumstances of the Cold War, with the Western modernity project, or with the intertwined legacies of the classical culture of Greece and Rome, Western Christianity, and the Enlightenment? In light of the different interpretations of the history of the West, what does the thesis about its end mean? Does it account for the recent political developments in the relations between the United States and Europe or for the crisis of the Western understanding of modernity as a universal project? Or, does the crisis of the West rather indicate the declining confidence in, and the internal conflict among, the intellectual and cultural traditions upon which the West has been founded? What are the cultural signifiers of the crisis of the West? Are they to be found in the religious divide between the outspokenly religious United States and secular Europe or in a more complex phenomenon of multiple modernities that we are facing today?

Some conference participants pointed out that the crisis of the West could be seen as an aspect of the identity crisis of Europe—a crisis that reflects the major cultural challenges that the public religiosity of millions of Muslim immigrants as well as Christians from the “New Europe” present to secular and post-Christian Western Europe. The encounter between the Western (European) intellectual and political traditions of secularism and the public traditions of Islam and Christianity, it was suggested, has already had and will continue to have serious implications for the future of the idea and the project of the West.

What follows are the prepared remarks of several of the speakers.

TRANSCRIPT:

Jean Bethke Elshtain, University of Chicago:

What I have to say will be a little bit on the gloomy side, although I’m actually a very cheerful person, but I’m going to take my bearings from my friend and colleague, Bill Galston. In the paper that Professor Galston delivered day before last, he had the following to say: “As Muslims immigrate in greater numbers to Western liberal democracy, it is at least possible that they will undergo experiences comparable to those of Catholics in America.”

I’m not sure that those situations are precisely analogous, although I don’t have time to discuss that part, but Bill goes on to express the hope that over time, increasing “numbers of Muslims may decide that they can lead life consistent with their faith, even in societies they’re compelled to share with unbelievers.” I think this is of course a big maybe for Western Europe. For this accommodation, I’m not going to discuss it from the Muslim side or from the side of Western liberal democracy. This accommodation turns very much on Western liberal democracy retaining faith and confidence in its own projects. And this is a project that emerged not so much in opposition to faith, but in tandem with it over time.

On this score, the future for Western Europe at least may well be a bit grim. Now in the paper itself, I look at three factors. The first is demographic collapse and the generalization of an attitude I’m going to call anti-natalism; the second is the instrumentalization of human life, of which of course Western Europe alone is not guilty; and third, the denouement of religious and demographic faith. First, demographic collapse. As you know, it has long been gospel that the declining birth rate, defined as one that falls below replacement levels, is a sign that signals, among other things, a kind of hopelessness or even a cynicism about the future. Now, there are drops in birth rates that speak to issues like absorption of women in work life, and improved economic and life expectancies. I’m not talking about that.

I’m speaking rather of this attitude that I call anti-natalism. I was very struck by an extended report in the New York Times about the situation in Germany concerning the closing down of maternity wards, nursery schools, and elementary schools. I was mostly struck by the comments from men and women interviewed when they basically said they couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to be bothered with children. Women who had given birth told tales of being criticized by at least some of their peers for a kind of capitulation to maternalism.

Now, as I said, I’m not interested in arguing that women across the board should bear more children. My concern is with anti-natalism, and the pervasive attitude and frame of mind in reference. I take this attitude to include images of female fecundity, reminders to adults that we are both natal and mortal. Finally, recognition that we inhabit the world for but a brief time, and one day we will leave it in the hands of others. A repudiation or a loss of this cluster of concerns and imperatives is a serious thing indeed.

I go on in the paper to talk about a wonderful novel by the British novelist P. D. James, The Children of Men, which imagines the world in which all the men have become sterile and there are no new births. It’s a world that is literally dying, a world at the end of its tether. What’s fascinating in this world is that anti-natalism is accompanied by an attitude toward the elderly dictating, in effect, that they should simply be put out of the way. So in the Great Britain of the future, she imagines that the elderly are put through group ceremonies of euthanasia, which is really murder. they’re drugged, dressed in flowing white robes, tied together with weights attached to their legs and put through a dreadful quasi-religious ceremony called the Quietus, as they slowly shuffle off the ends of piers and go to watery deaths. This is a marvelous novel, and of course, an imagined world. I’m not suggesting we’re in that world or we're going to it; however, anti-natalism trails in its wake a more generalized animate against the entire human life cycle, the beginning and end, because our beginnings and our ends are moments in time in our life cycle in which we are completely dependant upon others. It’s that dependence that we are loath to acknowledge.

In the longer version of my paper, I referred to some reports from Germany of a growing refusal on the part of those who are about to die to plan for a funeral or memorial service. There is no kind of embodied remembrance of who is gone. There are also books; one of them entitled, Stiffs, about how scientists should make creative use of dead human bodies by fast-freezing them, dicing them up and then turning them into fertilizer. This was not science fiction. So I submit then that anti-natalism, to the extent that it becomes widespread speaks to a more generalized disregard for the life cycle of embodied beings. It embodies what Charles Taylor’s philosophers called “excarnation.”

Secondly, the instrumentalization of human life. The United States is not exempt from this, and we know from reports that were published, I believe in the British journal, Lancet, regarding Dutch state-sanctioned euthanasia, physicians readily acknowledging that they are euthanizing people without their consent. Hans Reinders has written recently of a crisis in the caring professions that’s developing in the Netherlands, given the more generalized attitude that there won’t be any future need for long-term care of the invalid and elderly because that problem will have been solved by state-sanctioned euthanasia programs.

Reinders has also written a book entitled The Fate of the Disabled in Liberal Society, having to do with this strange combination at the present moment of unprecedented access for persons with disabilities, and the growing trend of a kind of genetic fundamentalism. This is a normative vision of ideal, perfect human types that we can one day attain and eventually phase out all those types representing people with disabilities or some flaw that we no longer wish were here. Now, in a longer discussion, one would need to add unprecedented commodification and even the proposals from neo-market economists that claim we should have a market in babies, which would be a far more efficient way to allocate a scarce resource.

Thirdly, the denouement of religious and democratic states. I already talked about this interesting moment in Europe, but I want to talk back to that theme of integration expressed at the beginning of my comments. Will Muslims, faithful Muslims, not extremist Muslims, be prepared to share a way of life with those they see as unbelievers or infidels? Now I believe this hope requires belief on the part of the unbelievers, if you will. They need to believe that they have a culture that has its own excellence and is worthy of endorsement. If one is to see that their culture is defeatist about itself, it’s necessarily going to fail in this process of enculturation. I think one can see this in sort of an elitist version of the EU, where commercial concerns seem to trump other concerns.

I see two ways that are problematic about enculturation. One, the host culture is so thick and its boundaries are so rigidly policed, it has a difficult time letting strangers in, except exclusively on its own terms. The second occurs when the host culture is so thin that there seems little to enculturate into, save perhaps the most minimal sorts of laws, regulations of conduct, complying with certain procedures and entitled by the state benefits and so on. I’m probably out of time, but let me just say one or two more sentences. I just had a very interesting meeting shortly after the murder of the Dutch film maker, Theo Van Gogh, with mostly Dutch scholars and some people who had been in government. The rules of the discussion were that we could not attach names to comments when we left the room, but I had noted in a presentation I made in passing, European nihilism. A person who had been in the Dutch government at one point objected strenuously to the term. He said, “We’re not nihilist; we’re merely decadent.” He obviously saw that as a distinction that marked a real difference. So I would submit that to the extent that one thinks of one’s culture as decadent, the hope for the kind of enculturation that everyone is so concerned with will probably falter rather dramatically.

A couple of preliminary comments: First of all, although I was trained in political philosophy, I didn’t practice that trade. I’m going to address our topic on the level of practical politics. We don’t have to end there, but I do think we have to begin there. Second, in the process, I will from time to time be critical of my own country. I’m well aware of the moral ambiguities of this—particularly in a foreign land—but as scholars, we don’t have any choice.

Now, to begin, apocalyptic theories are always resting, but often unreliable. In recent decades, we’ve been treated to the death of the subject, the end of man, and even the end of history. On the other hand, dramatic discontinuities are not wholly unknown. Andrei Amalrik’s widely ridiculed prediction that the Soviet Union would collapse in 1984, which turned out to be off by only five years. Now, the organizers of this conference asked us to ponder the death of the West, which they define as the “once-cohesive cultural and political group comprising the societies of Western Europe and North America.”

But cohesive when exactly? While Western Europe avoided war for most of the 19th century, let us remember that the continent was divided between republicanism, aristocracy, monarchy, and empire; between Catholicism and Protestantism; between secularism and religious establishment; between culture and civilization. Meanwhile, the United States remained largely aloof from European culture and politics—not only from Catholic populations and monarchic governments, but also from the Protestant-dominated mixed regimes that once ruled the American colonies. For much of the 20th century, moreover, Western Europe was anything but internally cohesive, politically or culturally, and the United States stood at a political distance from even those European nations with which it was not at war.

As depicted by the organizers of this conference, then, the West came into existence no earlier than the late 1940s when the United States promulgated the Marshall Plan, helped safeguard renascent European democratic institutions, and spearheaded the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. If the West is now dead, it must then have expired not much past its 50th birthday. I recite this well-known history to make an obvious, but not trivial, point. The kind of unity the West enjoyed during the heyday of the Cold War was anything but the historical norm. It represented, rather, an extraordinary confluence of events that included not only the common Soviet threat, but also the period of maximum economic and social convergence between the United States and Western Europe.

That is not to say that all was smooth sailing. It is easy to forget the deep disputes that rocked the Western alliance almost from the moment of its formation. Events such as Suez, the French withdrawal from NATO’s military command, rancor over the Vietnam war, the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, German reunification, and conflicts in the Balkans that led the experts of the day to declare the intra-alliance conference insoluble, NATO in crisis, and the unity of the West shattered beyond repair. As we consider the alleged death of the West today, it is worth keeping these episodes firmly in mind.

The historian Niall Ferguson argues that this time is very different. He offers three reasons. First, familiarly, the primary reason for creating the alliance—namely, deterring the Soviet attack on Western Europe—is no longer operative. Through the collapse of the Soviet Union, differences long suppressed by or subordinated to the imperatives of common defense resurfaced with a vengeance. Second, Europe and the United States have not reached a shared assessment of Islamist extremists. For Americans, Islamist-inspired terrorism has effectively replaced Soviet communism as a moral danger. For Europeans, this threat is not nearly as grave as that of the former Soviet Union, and therefore it does not warrant the same degree of unity or forcefulness in response. On the contrary, as the Spanish election showed, many Europeans believe that distance from rather than solidarity with the United States offers the best hope for security. With at least 15 million Muslims within the European Union—which is 3 to 5 percent of the population and upwards of 10 percent in France—European nations must carefully weigh the impact of foreign policy on their internal security. The third principal fact that Ferguson cites is the ongoing weakening of organized religion in Europe and the result that today’s European conservativism has less and less in common with the religiously inflected conservative movement in the United States.

The thrust of Ferguson’s argument is that the growing trans-Atlantic estrangement has less to do with American conduct than with changes in the world and within European societies. But how plausible is this thesis? Consider a thought experiment. Suppose Al Gore had been inaugurated as president in January of 2001. Would the United States have withdrawn so abruptly from international understandings, such as the Kyoto Protocols and the International Criminal Court? Would the tone of our European diplomacy have been as dismissive? Would a Gore administration have rejected NATO’s offer of assistance following al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center? It’s hard to believe that these episodes, which I could multiply ten-fold, have not had a significant effect on relations between the United States and Europe.

Another historical counterfactual: Suppose the Bush administration had overthrown the Taliban, organized the promised international posse to get bin Laden dead or alive, and then stopped? Recall the motto proclaimed after September 11th by the editors of Le Monde: “We are all Americans.” Would the alliance be in such disarray today if the current administration had not made its fateful decision to invade Iraq, a decision so unpopular in Europe that Gerhard Schroeder felt compelled to jeopardize half a century of intimate German-U.S. ties at the height of a bitterly contested election? One does not need to believe that American foreign policy since 2001 has been seriously flawed—although, as you may have guessed, I do—to contend that this policy has contributed significantly to the gap between the United States and the principal nations of Europe.

Of course, the alliance had to change after the Soviet threat disappeared, but there is a difference between change, even mental change, and the pervasive fraying of ties that we see today. It would be superficial, however, to suggest that recent U.S. policy choices are chance events. I mentioned earlier that despite long-standing differences of religion in public culture, the decades following World War II were a period of unusual convergence of domestic circumstances between Europe and the United States. Since then, however, these gaps have widened significantly. American labor unions weakened more quickly than did their European counterparts. Many Americans came to question the moderate social democratic premises underlying the New Deal, Fair Deal, and Great Society, and to endorse in their place the free market conservatism that Europeans dubbed neo-liberalism.

Protestant fundamentalists, Catholic traditionalists and Orthodox Jews formed an unprecedented entente in the United States against what they regarded as immoral public policies in the increasingly licentious public culture. Moreover, the basic structure of American politics has been transformed. Forty years ago, each of the major parties contained significant liberal, moderate and conservative elements. The result was that American politics tended to converge toward a moderate center and shifts in the relative power of the parties did not produce huge changes in policy.

Since then, however, our politics have been sorted out ideologically. There is now a recognizable liberal party and a recognizable conservative party with a diminishing overlap between them. Compared to forty years ago, today’s American moderates have far less political power than their share of the electorate would warrant, and because there are more conservatives than liberals, this sorting out process worked to the advantage of the minority of Americans—a significant minority, however—who regard themselves as conservatives. In comparison to the Nixon era, today’s Republicans in the executive branch and in the legislature are far more likely to speak with a conservative voice. That voice—nationalist, pro-military, skeptical of international law and institutions, socially traditionalist and overtly religious—is not one that most Europeans enjoy hearing.

Given all these changes, must the alliance eventually fragment? Are the nations of the West fated to drift apart until Europe and America are as remote from one another as they were throughout the nineteenth century? I don’t think so, and here, briefly, are my reasons. In the first place, we are all democracies now, joined by a shared understanding of political legitimacy. Recent political science research supports the conjecture that democracies are far less likely to be antagonistic to one another than they are to non-democracies. Second, as William Drozdiak has argued, the economic ties between Europe and the United States go very deep. Third, there are reasons to believe that the foreign policy differences between Europe and America have peaked and will decline significantly for reasons that I go into at greater length in my paper. The American intervention in Iraq is very unlikely to be the template for the immediate future of American foreign policy. The war has become very unpopular in the United States. The American military is having a hard time sustaining even the Iraq venture, let alone intervention in the rest of the Axis of Evil countries.

To conclude, relations between the United States and Europe will never again be what they were at the height of the Soviet threat. The issue is not whether a vanished past can be restored—it surely can’t be—but whether tectonic shifts are inexorably pulling the two continents further apart. My thesis is that the future of the West is more a matter of choice and less of fatality or destiny than most pessimists will allow. The alliance can persist as a shared yet altered venture, but only if its members will attend more to the values and their interests than to their passions. Because the United States is by far the richest and most powerful member of the alliance and the only nation on Earth with a genuinely global reach, it is up to us to take the first step. In the words of Timothy Garton Ash, whose most recent book, Free World, should be required reading for every Western reader, “Most states aim to maximize and leverage their power, but the challenge for America is to exercise a degree of voluntary self-restraint unusual among states.” It would be foolish for the United States to pretend that it does not have the pre-eminent power that it has. It would not be foolish for the United States to act is if it had somewhat less power. The mark of mature greatness for nations as well as individuals, one might say, is the confidence to act with magnanimity. Thank you.

The issue is to what extent the huge Muslim presence in Europe relates to the identity of the West and, specifically, of Europe. As I said this morning, the problem is not a problem of multiculturalism. We use the language of multiculturalism, but this language doesn’t work. In fact, I would say that the two models used by Europe in the 1980s to deal with immigration—assimilationism and multiculturalism—have both failed. What is assimilationism? For the French model, if a person speaks French, acts French and so on, they are French, which means easy access to citizenship. And the other model is multiculturalism.

Both models have failed. Why? Because the fading away of cultures of origin doesn’t necessarily lead to individual assimilation. We have the casting of identities in different ways, one being the religious way. So religious identities are not the consequence of cultural identity, but instead are superseding or replacing cultural identities. This is very important, and is currently happening in Europe.

So the issue now is: What does it mean to have a “Western Islam?” Is it Islam in the West or is it something different entirely, a Western Islam? If you ask the public for an opinion, they'll respond by saying they would like to see a Western Islam, something different. But what do they mean by this? They mean liberalism, a change in theology. What they are looking for is a good civil Islam, an Islam where men and women are seen as equal, where punishments like cutting hands and so forth are surpassed, where apostasy, though not encouraged, is accepted.

Of course, we do not have this “liberal Islam” presently. But sometimes we have a liberal Muslim theologian, typically a computer engineer or a medical doctor, who has access to conferences, to TV, but has no weight, no influence—often a nice guy, though (laughter).

I also think that, yes, Islam is becoming Western. But Westernization doesn’t mean liberalism. During the last 2,000 years, the Catholic Church hasn’t changed its theology. The liberalization, if I can say that, of the Second Vatican Council was a consequence of the acceptance by the Church of secularization and democracy, but not the cause of the acceptance by the Church of the political system of democracy. The Church, at the end of the last century, accepted modernity because it had no choice; the Church accepted it for political reasons after political debate and not theological debate. This is exactly what is happening now with Muslims in Europe.

When European Muslims today discuss education, assimilation and so on, they don’t speak about what’s in the Koran. Rather, they speak about what is good for the community: how to deal with the different possibilities, what is on the market, how the government is treating them, and so on. If you go to a meeting of the French Council of the Islamic Faith you will not hear a single word of religion discussed between members. Instead, they discuss politics, power, social issues, personal development and things like that.

What is Westernized is religiosity—and here I make the distinction between religiosity and religion. Religiosity is the relationship between the believer and the religion. Religiosity is Western, individualist and based on achievement, self achievement, the reconstruction of the faith community, the recasting of identities, the insistence on salvation, and all these things. You have the Christianization of Islam. But of course the trend is not towards religious liberalism, the trend is towards modern fundamentalism. Young European Muslims are closer to Protestant “born again” than they are to conservative traditional Muslims. And it’s clear that the two religions, or religious schools, which are converting, are the Salafi for the Muslims, sometimes the Sufi, but usually the Salafi, and the evangelical Protestants for the Christians, and they are competing. Go to Chiapas in Mexico, and now you have a mosque built by Spanish converts to Islam and an evangelical church, and they are fighting—competing over the same market, which is the collapse of the Catholic Church.

The last point is, of course, this Westernization doesn’t always take the form of fundamentalism. But Salafism is adapted to Westernization; it’s white Salafism, and it’s working in the second generation. Young Muslims find in Salafism a way to adapt to the West, a way to acknowledge their deculturation. So the issue is deculturation; the issue is not dealing with other cultures. The other cultures are dying. The guy who killed Theo Van Gogh didn’t speak a word of Arabic. He was a Berber, by the way. Although born into a migrant family from Morocco, he was a Dutch citizen who spoke Dutch; he didn’t even mention the presence of the Dutch Army in Iraq. He did not care about Palestine and Iraq. Everything was placed within the context of Islam in Holland. But they’re not all Salafi, of course.

And now the debate is in the news, but it’s not Western values against Oriental values. No. When Muslims joined the debate in the West, they joined the Western debate. And what is the Western debate about? It’s about the relationship between nature and freedom. Abortion, gay marriage, bioethics—this is the debate. And Muslims don’t really think any differently about these issues than conservative Christians, and, so, they join with the conservative Christians on these issues.

When Pim Fortuyn entered into Dutch politics some years ago on an anti-Islamic agenda, it was not to defend traditional European values—absolutely not. Pim Fortuyn decided to go into politics to defend the rights and freedoms of homosexuals, which is not the traditional European point of view. Pim Fortuyn said: We fought against the Catholic Church and we won, so now we have freedom, and these Muslims are coming in and trying to undermine that, so we have to fight them the same way we fought the Catholics. And many conservative Muslims would like now to join conservative Christians on these issues, including abortion, which doesn’t mean anything in the Shariah. Abortion has never been, and is not, a hot issue in any Muslim country. But when Muslims want to proclaim their faith, to show their faith, in the West, what are they speaking about? Abortion, and even divorce. You have Muslims now aligning with Catholics and Protestants to fight the laws on divorce, because they say divorce is the end of the family, and the family is the basis of all of our religious values.

The expression of radicalism is 90 percent an expression of adaptation. Let’s take the last example. We have in Europe only one mostly Muslim religious migrant group which makes a linguistic claim—they want Arabic to be recognized as one of the official state languages. And where is this group? In Belgium, of course. In Belgium you exist only if you have a linguistic claim. If you don’t have a linguistic claim, you don’t exist. So, these guys created the Arab-European League, which is a very interesting title, and one of the recommendations they are making is that Arabic should be the fourth language of Belgium. So, they’re all Belgians! (Laughter.)

Thank you. My presentation will be complementary, I hope. Olivier Roy told us the ways in which Muslims are adapting to the countries in which they live, even with their Islamic radical politics. I will try to show to what extent this is a national origin differentiation, or at least a civilizational differentiation, because I will try to show how Europe is adapting itself to Islam. So, I will not speak for Islam but for Europe. Olivier spoke for Islam, so it’s a nice exchange.

So the question that most relates to our theme may be: In the West, can we ask the question of the end of Europe, especially in relation to the constitution (the treaty or constitution) and the referendums in two major countries— France and the Netherlands? Also, what is Europe today? What is the cohesiveness of Europe, and how are we going to define the European project? More than ever, I think, these questions are on the table.

And what is interesting in these cases, both in France and in the Netherlands, is that they’re the two countries where Islam has become a very important subject of public debate. The assassination—the murder—of Theo Van Gogh created a very important debate in the Netherlands that almost ended up with a multiculturalist discourse, harkening back to traditional Dutch values against migrants. And in the case of France, which has never been very inclined towards a multiculturalist discourse, but very much republican instead, the debates have also ensued. I will refer to two in particular: the headscarf issue and the Turkish membership issue. Although these two debates seem totally disconnected in terms of the objective problems they raise, in the minds of many, they are very much related.

And among those who voted “no” to the EU constitution, both in the Netherlands and in France, the migrant Islamic issue and the Turkish membership issue were integral in these referendums. So what is important to emphasize is that, more and more, the encounter between Islam and Europe is becoming a decisive factor in the self-definition of the Western people. I utilize the French example because this is the example I know best, and also because I think the French will consider France as either exceptional or marginal, or, to the contrary, consider the country as experiencing this encounter with Islam in a more advanced way, leading to the making or the unmaking of Europe.

One of the main themes is, perhaps, the “publicness” of Islam, the recognition of Islam publicly—this is what we are observing more and more today. Sarkozy, the Minister of Interior, who has an important future in public life, was one of the first to publicly recognize Islam in France with the development of a framework for the French Council of Muslim Religious Practice. More important, however, is how these public debates have changed the public consciousness and social imagery of the French people in the last two years. The headscarf issue, referring to Muslims already within Europe, and Turkey, currently at Europe’s door, may serve to shift the political frontiers and alliances and cleavages that have existed in France for a number of years between the left and the right. But more than that, the recognition of the problem publicly has had an impact on politics. So the ways in which Islam became both publicly recognized and defined are also important.

First, the headscarf debate. In speaking of the headscarf debate it is important to note that this is not the first time this debate has taken place. Indeed, the debate started ten years ago. But in the last two years it became a very passionate nationwide debate, ending, as you know, with a legislative ban after a very important discussion and the creation of a 20-member commission of “wise people” by President Chirac. The commission released a report, which supported the ban, but also studied French secularism in efforts to temper France’s secular tradition with its pluralistic reality—but nobody heard them. Their positions were totally ignored and almost mocked. But the ban took place.

The headscarf issue triggered a much more important debate on French laïcité. At the beginning of the debate people were saying, well, we’re not going to discuss secularism, French laïcité, in relation to a piece of cloth, but that’s what happened. In the end, laïcité was re-appropriated as French exceptionalism. There was the problem of public schools, which also defined French citizenship on the basis of the individual, and, therefore, the issue of women’s rights became more and more central. So this debate changed, in relation to the Muslim migrant population, the ways in which the French people labeled them. Originally, in the 60s and 70s, it was the male figure of the travailleur émigré, or migrant worker, which defined the migrant population. Later came the second generation of young migrants defined mainly by unemployment, and today it is the Islamic veil of girls. This is again a paradox because the perception of the migrant population became feminized with the veil. Moreover, religion and religious difference became a public claim, a public visibility in practice, which disturbed the law. It’s not the ideas we’re speaking about, but the performative qualities.

The first issue I want to touch on in relation to the headscarf debate is the gender issue, which is becoming more and more central in defining the encounter between Europe and Islam. More than feminism for equality, a kind of republican feminism happened. In other words, the value of secularism became more important than equality among women. This was coupled with a civilizational discourse aimed at emancipating these girls from their male oppressors.

The second debate was on Turkish secularism, and here a different set of values were mobilized—not secularism in relation to Turkey, but on the contrary, European identity. That was very important. Until then, the European project was never discussed at the societal level. Rather, it was always some kind of elite project for Eurocrats. But with the question of Turkish accession, a very passionate debate was triggered, begging the question: Who are we? Who are we in relation to the headscarf? We are secularists and laic, and we are egalitarians on the issue of race and gender.

What are we in relation to Turkish membership? They are not like us. The first example started with Giscard d'Estaing, who argued that Turkey belonged to a different civilization, a different culture. Another European Commissioner added that there was nothing wrong with defining one’s identity in counter-distinction to “the other.” He stated that one needs “the other” in order to define oneself. That very same European commissioner stated that if Turkey enters Europe, this would mean forgetting 1683. That was the victory over the Ottoman army?

MR. OWEN: Right here in Vienna.

MS. GÖLE: In Vienna, exactly. A right wing party, again, in Vienna, created a political campaign, which stated: We do not want Vienna to become Islamic.

So past memories and migration in Europe also appeared. That’s very important. The “othering” of Islam took place. I think it’s important—the “othering.” We haven’t tried to find the commonalities—not seeing that Turks wanted to be Euro-Turks or that Muslim populations in France are becoming French and even claiming their French citizenship. On the contrary, we have been “othering” and distancing.

The anti-Americanism that James Hunter spoke about also played a very important role. In what way? Americans are communitarian in the minds of French defenders of the Republic, and multiculturalism, the American model, is something they don’t want. In relation to the headscarf issue, that’s how the republican values were re-appropriated. Secondly, this also extends to Turkish candidacy, because America wants Turkey to enter Europe.

So, there are several things that we learn from this. First, we learn how we define our public life, because at the level of the nation-state, public life was defined by the Republic’s ordination. Now, if we think of ourselves at the level of Europe, what does the public want? What is this commonness? How we are going to imagine it? This is the first thing: What is public life? In the French case, the Republic took over the public, in my mind. That is, in the public there is the Republic, but here the Republic subrogated to the public, or took over, at least.

And secondly, Europeanism and republicanism are negotiated, because the recent vote against the constitution meant, in many respects, that the French don’t want Europe; they want a republic. But what kind of a republic is that? This brings me to the question of universalism, because the Republic was a universalist project, whereas Europe, or Europeanism, is becoming an identity project. How do we define the West? As an identity or as a project?

So they are not both things. Western heritage, history and so on are of course very important. Western heritage becoming a source of the essentialization of identity almost undermines the Western project, or the universalists. These two questions—the headscarf issue and Turkish membership—are almost a kind of test for the limits of universalism. In a way, we gave up universalist claims. Huntington is that. Huntington means, I want to be in my hole; I don’t want to be disturbed; I don’t have any claims; I don’t want to propose anything; I don’t have anything to offer. That’s universalism. So we go back to the question of civilization.

Again, during the 18th and 19th centuries civilization meant universalism for both of these projects. Non-Western people—Arabs, Turks, Indians—turned towards the West because it meant a universal project, positivism. Positivism backed up the universalist project. From Auguste Comte to Jöntürkler in Turkey, in the Ottoman Empire—Jöntürkler was inspired by the positivist Comtian school. The debate between culture and civilization was a very important debate in the Turkish case. And as Norbert Elias has reminded us, culture was the German definition, whereas civilization in the French sense always meant universalism. But today, civilization is written as a culture, so there is a kind of important shift, historically speaking, in the definition of the West. The West today gives up the universalist definition of civilization.

I think, as Casanova said, maybe the fracture between Europe and America is also a means for competition in the definition of the West. That’s why I’m a pro-European saying maybe there are other ways of dealing with Islam, which, more and more, is becoming a decisive factor in the accepted definition of the West.

Perhaps the European project can be a project of the opening up of new ways of dealing with difference. Can we think of Europe as something more than a model, a civilizational entity? It’s not evident, but maybe this is what is at stake. Or rather, are we observing that Europe and United States, in terms of the ways each are dealing with Islam, are getting much closer than many Europeans would claim? Are we going to draw boundaries or create hyphenated identities: Muslim-French, Muslim-European-Islam, Euro-Turk? That’s how I read it—for me, the end of the West is the end of its universalist claim.