Civil Society and Religion: Retrospective Reflections on Catholicism and Prospective Reflections on Islam
Author(s)
Casanova, Jose
Abstract
ONE of the most surprising and unexpected aspects of the global resurgence of civil society has been the role that religion has played in this emergence. It was surprising and unexpected at least for most social scientists and for all those who took for granted the main premises of the theory of secularization: that religion in the modern world is likely to decline and become increasingly privatized, marginal, and politically irrelevant (Casanova, 1994b). Insofar as this global resurgence is intrinsically linked with the “third wave of democratization,” one can easily follow its flows from Southern Europe (Spain) to South America (Brazil), to Eastern Europe (Poland), to East Asia (Philippines and South Korea), to South Africa. In all these cases–and one could add many others–the role of religion, of religious institutions, and of social movements that either had a religious identity or were influenced by religion, was significant. In particular, the Catholic Church and Catholic groups played a crucial role in many of those democratic transitions–to such an extent that Samuel Huntington (1991) and others (Casanova, 1996) have argued rightly that the third wave of democratization was predominantly a Catholic wave. Huntington (1993, 1996), however, is more famous for his thesis that the third wave of democratization may have reached its civilizational limits; that other civilizations, particularly Islam, are based on principles that may be essentially incompatible with democracy and that, therefore, the public mobilization of Islam is unlikely to be conducive to democracy and the emergence of civil society; and that the civilizational clash between Islam and the West may replace the geopolitical clash between the superpowers during the Cold War. In this paper I would like to examine both theses. In the first part I reconstruct analytically the transformation of Catholicism that made it possible for it to play such a significant historical role. In the second part I use these retrospective reflections as the point of departure for an analysis of the contemporary transformation of Islam in order to examine whether it could possible play a similar role in the democratization of Muslim countries and in the emergence of Islamic civil societies.
