Multiple Modernity, Nationalism and Religion: A Global Perspective

Abstract

The article develops a multiple modernity perspective that attempts to explain the global rise of religious and ethnic nationalism as a result of the contemporary worldwide multiple modernization processes with civilization-specific constellations of nation-state formation, democratization and religious change as well as secularization in the different world regions. For this purpose, the article first re-examines the exceptional case of Europe, showing that also here the dominating forms of secular nationalism entail, in differing combinations, also Christian components. Then a comparative tour through the various non-European civilizations is undertaken from the Americas to the Islamic civilization, Israel, Africa, India and Pakistan as well as Japan and China, demonstrating the varying religious and secular constellations of nationalism and national identity formation. As a result, the contemporary rise of religious and ethnic nationalism is explained as a reaction to the previous authoritarian imposition of the Western European model of state secularism within predominantly religious and multiethnic societies.

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