Secular War

Myths of Religion, Politics and Violence

Stacey Gutkowski

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857729521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How have long-standing and unconscious secular assumptions about religion shaped the post-9/11 climate and its wars? Stacey Gutkowski explores this little-examined, yet crucial, element of British perceptions of and policy towards Jihadism over the last decade, to draw critical conclusions about the relationship between war and the secular. She points to a surprisingly coherent body of secular beliefs that have fuelled policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and counter-terrorism, and that have had mixed results - responsible for both positive strategies and tragic errors. The theory Gutkowski develops on the impact of this secular approach to warfare holds a broader global significance, and cannot be viewed as just a British phenomenon. This book addresses ongoing and critical debates, such as the 'overreach' of Western liberal interventionism in the Middle East, and speaks to policy-makers, security analysts and students of IR, Foreign Policy and Security Studies.

CHAPTER 1

A SHARED CULTURAL PALETTE: EUROPEAN ORIGINS OF BRITISH SECULAR WAYS OF WAR

The next two chapters aim to challenge the idea that the British experience during the 9/11 wars rose fully formed, phoenix-like, from the rubble of the Twin Towers, from British history exclusively, or only from British colonial and postcolonial encounters with Muslims. Though the British experience during the 9/11 wars was shaped by a European and Western past, it is not of that past. The 9/11 wars were intellectually and culturally novel in many ways. In particular, they were the first time in which liberal-secular societies were self-conscious of themselves as liberal-secular people fighting a ‘non-liberal’ political enemy that both they and the enemy had designated as religio-political. Still, the 9/11 wars were not entirely sui generis. This chapter argues that the historical contingencies of European warfare between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries led to the emergence of three interrelated myths about religion and violence which reappeared in British security logic after 9/11.

These myths are three variations on what Cavanaugh has called the myth of religious violence.¹ These are:

• That Westerners are not the kind of irrational people to fight wars in the name of religion. War is such a serious endeavour it should only be fought over the politics of the state.

• That non-Western Others have a tendency towards forms of religion that can be dangerous or unruly. This demands the firm hand of the state or even ‘the West’ to keep them in line, to the point of using force.

• That, with the exception of the Vatican, it is better for religion to be confined to and kept under the control of states so that unruly non-Western others will not be bad international citizens and will not pose an existential threat to the global order.

These myths came about through three particular ‘war moments’: intra-European wars after the Peace of Westphalia; the European imperial ‘small wars’; and the development of the current international order in the wake of the Second World War. These are explored in turn.

This genealogical account of some of the origins of post-9/11 secular ways of war is explicitly a fragmented, partially realized history, revealing its constitutive moments only with hindsight. This account is not intended to explicate any pre-9/11 wars in situ. Nor is it intended as a universally applicable history of the UK and all other ‘Western’ powers. My intention is to notice a shared history, but then to problematize and expose multiplicity rather than to homogenize. This narrative is set out not as something fixed but as an invitation to explore this multiplicity. Careful archaeological attention to fragments of history, dormancies, contradictions and disjunctures, self-consciously looking back through a contemporary lens, can illuminate our multiple presents. Additionally, this is not a teleological or determinist argument. The argument of this chapter is not that the post-Westphalian, post-Enlightenment era has been marked by the progressive extension of secular epistemology and political assumptions into all aspects of human life, including war, through the actions of Western powers. Historians have demonstrated effectively that there is nothing inevitable about either secularization or desecularization.² The same must be said for the impact on war, as Chapters 4–7 will demonstrate.

The Myth of Religious Violence and the Rise of the Modern State

William Cavanaugh has demonstrated powerfully that the myth that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence, an idea that has so captivated the modern Western imaginary after 9/11, originated in European political theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau used the Thirty Years’ War as fodder for their Enlightenment critiques of religion.³ The early modern theorists presented these ‘religious wars’ as primarily having been fought over theological doctrine, albeit embedded within a web of social, political and economic grievances.⁴ This was not descriptive history but aspirational mythologizing. These Enlightenment thinkers valorized the Peace of Westphalia as a turning point for rational men; by founding the modern state, men had given themselves the opportunity to leave ultimately irresolvable matters aside for the sake of peace and security, turning their attention to the forging of political and trade relationships that might ensure stability and flourishing in this world. The myth was based in history – the French Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years’ War had precipitated a near-total breakdown of civil and moral order.⁵ But the conclusions drawn about religion in the framework of this myth were formulated with an eye to extolling the virtues of reason and the state.

The historical relationship between religion and war is far more complex than the myth would allow. From the medieval period to the mid-nineteenth century, Christian symbolism and institutions were an important part of the habitus and, to a greater or lesser extent, the discourse of political leaders and soldiers alike. From the mid-eighteenth century, nationalist idioms took precedence, still conditioned by Christianity, but it is only after the Second World War that the habits and discourse of European politicians and soldiers have been predominantly shaped by a secular worldview. Still, most of the practices and strategic objectives of war from the medieval period through to today have been areligious – to secure territory and resources, to avenge a perceived injustice, to kill the enemy. It is the explanatory framework used by those involved that has shifted over time. For example, the more than 200 years of military campaigns associated with the Crusades were sanctioned by religious leaders, capitalizing on reawakened piety among the laity, and led to violence against not only Muslims but also Jews and Orthodox Christians. However, while the framework was Christian, the Crusades were also driven by the political, economic and geostrategic rivalries around the Mediterranean. The post-Reformation French Wars of Religion and Thirty Years’ War in Europe were similarly multi-causal, though Christian sectarianism was a vital, constitutive element.⁶

While religion remained salient in the discourse, habits and symbols of intra-European warfare from the medieval period through to the mid-twentieth century, myth and history diverged from the nineteenth century onwards. Historically, there were important relationships between Christianity and European proto-national consciousness in the early modern period, which continued through the late nineteenth century.⁷ For example, the period between the Napoleonic and American Revolutionary Wars and the early twentieth century was unusual in the history of the British Army in so far as Christianity took on a heightened symbolic significance. This was evident in church parades, the blessing of standards and changes to uniform styles to accommodate Bibles and prayer books.⁸ The French Revolution was an important exception. The nationalist uprising targeted all aspects of the ancien régime, including its clerical support. Supporters launched attacks on Catholic and Protestant clergy and churches, while maintaining an attachment to Christian ethical imperatives. Though the campaign eased in the late 1790s, the churches remained subject to harassment and persecution. The advance of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies beyond the borders of France spread the Revolution’s anti-clerical and in some cases anti-Christian policies.⁹ However, the secularizing dynamic of the French Revolution was impeded by the persistence of Christianity in nationalisms in Europe. The emergence of historical-materialist Marxism as a popular doctrine in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, rather than the French Revolution, was the catalyst of a post-1914 shift in the way Europeans thought about their wars with each other.

The aftermath of the First World War marks a pivotal moment in the marginalization of Christianity from the habitus of European war. The war itself had seen a revival of Christianity in Europe. European churches had mobilized in favour of the war, and there were outbreaks of piety among the French and British armies.¹⁰ The working and intellectual classes in Europe had become increasingly nonreligious from the middle of the nineteenth century (though with regional variations, in particular between northern and southern Europe). However, Christian heritage persisted within the European worldview, providing a loosely shared cultural point of departure, particularly among the middle classes. It was these classes that invoked Christian rhetoric over the course of the First World War, with clergymen and the institutional Churches playing an important role in the construction of various European nationhoods.¹¹

Following the Armistice, European despair over the loss of life and military stalemate prompted wider reflection on modern European civilization as a whole, including its moral and intellectual underpinnings. Christopher Coker’s War in the Twentieth Century provides a masterful reading of this.¹² Christianity as a moral and intellectual resource suffered from such scrutiny, with many theologians equally paralyzed by the calamity of intra-European war. In the inter-war period, any reference to the human condition as a cause of war had simply become unfashionable, giving way to various identifications of capitalism, German militarism and bourgeois social conditioning as the casus belli.¹³ That Christianity had played a role in the run-up to and course of war – a militaristic German war theology had been produced out of the injection of religious thinking into the secular realm of German politics between 1860 and 1918 – was largely overlooked in Europe after the war.¹⁴ In Britain and France, Christianity had in many ways lost the intellectual battle prior to the First World War to political ideologies, including socialism and liberalism. The experience of war stripped away many of its social and political moorings as well.¹⁵

During the inter-war period, Marxists and fascists moved from ideological proponents to material potency, capturing state power through force or election in Russia, Spain, Italy and Germany. These new ideologies (often erroneously called ‘secular religions’) would offer an all-encompassing intellectual framework and conception of human agency that once had been provided by Christian theology in Europe. That said, on the far political right, fascism drew breath from Christian symbolism. For example, fascists in inter-war Italy invoked Catholic symbolism in building a collective – and ultimately violent – nationalist identity. Berezin has written:

The Mass for the Martyrs inserted fascist ritual practice into the most sacred part of the liturgy. At the moment the priest raised the Eucharist, and turned to the audience, a trombone sounded, the troops presented arms, and the fascists raised their arms in a Roman salute. As the priest consecrated the Eucharist, the fascists consecrated themselves and blurred the distinction between what was sacred and what was secular – what was church and what was state.¹⁶

By contrast, classical Marxism, drawing on Feuerbach, had intellectually resisted traditional organized Christianity as an ‘opiate of the masses’ or an instrument of class repression, and communist parties followed suit in the inter-war years.¹⁷ But this was also not a clean intellectual or temporal break. For example, some of Locke’s theological ideas became secularized into some of the foundations of Marxist (as well as liberal) political thought.¹⁸ There was intellectual continuity from Christianity on the left and right.¹⁹

Secularization was, however, not merely ideological but material as well. The spread of the industrial revolution throughout western Europe in the late nineteenth century and accompanying urbanization had seen individuals increasingly divorced from traditional centres of authority, including the rural churches. This was particularly true among the working classes but also filtered through to the middle classes. However, with the onset of a worldwide economic depression and the remobilization of the German military during the inter-war period, the existence of the gods became the least of European concerns. The Second World War was, after all, conceived by both sides in part as a war for (Christian) civilization.

The Second World War provided some hiatus from a march towards the secular in many European societies. Again, Christian clergy on both sides of the war in Europe offered bellicose justification through claims of the defence of Christian civilization. In Hitler’s ideology, the assertion of Aryan Protestantism required the death of religious Others, most prominently Jews but also Catholics. We should also not forget the Pacific theatre. The Japanese – non-Christian – ‘cult of death’ was seen as justification for the Allies to wage ‘war without mercy’ there.²⁰ But religion is always a double-edged sword, eager for blood as well as for healing.²¹ While the Vatican famously failed to take a stand against fascist slaughter, institutional Christianity also provided a charitable apparatus for Europeans affected by the war. It also provided a comforting framework of habits – prayer, hymns, communal worship – in times of suffering. In some cases, it was also offi...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. A Shared Cultural Palette: European Origins of British Secular Ways of War
• 2. Developing Secular Habits in War: the Northern Irish Troubles
• 3. The British Secular Habitus up to and including the 9/11 Wars
• 4. War in Afghanistan: From Secular Hysteresis to a Culturalist Approach, 2001–2010
• 5. War in Iraq: Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Question of Secular Democracy, 2003–2004
• 6. War at Home: Pastoral Power and Secular Regimes of Security in Britain, 2005–2010
• 7. Restructuring the Secular Habitus
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back Cover