Conscripts of secularism: nationalism, Islam and violence

ABSTRACT

In the currently resurging contestation about religion and nationalism in the public sphere, secularism has become one of the most intensively contested political concepts. Even staunch advocates concede that across Euroamerica, secularism has in many ways failed to deliver on its promise to guarantee state neutrality and free exercise of religion. However, scholarship critically investigating the effects of secularism is often unclear about what discrimination, harm, or violence it seeks to uncover, creating misunderstandings among secularism’s advocates and critics alike. This contribution suggests that there are three major analytical angles that should be distinguished: the liberal egalitarian critique, the decolonial critique, and the genealogical critique. To demonstrate the benefits and limitations of each perspective, the contribution draws on the case study of Christian national identity politics in Bavaria targeting Islam. It makes the case for the conscious combination of these three perspectives in the analysis of the ‘religion-culture-citizenship’ nexus.

KEYWORDS:

• Secularism
• violence
• Christian nationalism
• Islam
• decolonial critique
• Bavaria

Introduction

Is it possible not to notice that religion and nationalism are strategically divided and must therefore be considered in their joined operations?—Anidjar (2006, 67)

The reality is quite plain: the ‘end of the era of nationalism’, so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life or our time.—Anderson (1983, 3)

The question of how governments relate to Muslims and Islam in Western Europe has not only become one of the most contested political issues of the twenty-first century, it has also sparked some of the most dynamic academic debates across a variety of disciplines. Cultural warriors following Huntingtonian rhetoric continue to present Islam as a challenge, if not the crucial litmus test, to a host of virtues and values associated with the purported coherent cultural-political order of Europe, or ‘the West’ more broadly. In critical response to this, scholars have argued that the lives of Muslims are the battleground in which the paradoxes of secularism, the internal contradictions of the project of ‘Europe’, and the exclusivist nationalisms encapsulated in the ‘European Question’ (Anidjar 2013) are unfolding their violent potentiality. The different interventions made by Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), Jürgen Habermas’ Between Naturalism and Religion (2008), Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular (2003), and Saba Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety (2005) have contributed to an unprecedented intensification of critical scholarship focusing on a single political concept: secularism.

For many liberals, especially those working within the Rawlsian ‘shadow of justice’, secularism is a conditio sine qua non for fairness, liberty, and equality (Forrester 2019, 5). No matter whether one is an ardent supporter or a passionate critic such as William Connolly, author of Why I Am Not a Secularist (1999), there seems to be widespread agreement that even within a ‘post-secular society’ (Habermas 2008) secularism is a concept that has now become a defining element of Euroamerican political thought and institutions. Paraphrasing David Scott’s (2004) analysis of modernity and Duncan Bell’s critique of liberalism (2014), one could argue that most people living in Euroamerica today are conscripts of secularism.

However, an increasing number of scholars have argued that the political and ideational machinery tasked with the enforcement of secularism has been an instrument of vicious violence against swathes of Euroamerican denizens (see Abbas 2019; Fernando 2014; Mahmood 2016). Particularly Muslims and those racially marked as such have become objects of suspicion, surveillance, and persecution resulting from what Talal Asad calls the ‘ambition and fear’ mobilised by the secular state (Asad 2003, 8). The vibrant intellectual endeavour of what could be called critical secularism studies has directed its attention to the exclusion and suffering caused by the political operationalisations and institutionalisations of secularism. While most scholars seem to agree that secularism can have exclusionary effects, there exist fundamental disagreements about the material and ideational structures through which these are enacted, as well as their respective political and normative implications. For some critics of secularism the principal problem lies in liberalism, for some in the capitalist political economy it supports, for some in its historical connections with Islamophobia, Orientalism, and (neo-)colonial attitudes, for others in sexist and patriarchal stereotyping hiding behind the purported equality before secular law. Others argue that the problem is merely the unequal application of secular principles. The primacy of liberalism as a target of the critics of secularism is exemplified by Amir-Moazami’s (2018, 22) argument that we need to analyse the contemporary political constellation through the lens of a ‘secular-liberal matrix’ in which a variety of regimes of oppressions intersect and unfold. While the intricate relationship between secularism and liberalism has proven to be a very useful vantage point from which a diverse range of scholars have studied religio-political tensions across Europe and North America, other critics of secularist politics such as Habermas and Taylor are committed to liberal egalitarian principles.

These debates show that while critical secularism studies is a thriving field of inquiry, the various strands of the critique of secularism operate on different and often incongruent methodological and normative levels. Apart from the confusion around the effects of secularism, there exists fundamental disagreement as to what secularism is, how it is related to the secular, and how that influences the analytical frameworks we use to study both phenomena. As a result, different strands in the heterogeneous field of critical secularism studies struggle to understand, integrate, or effectively respond to each other’s intellectual and political projects. Consequently, scholars often talk past each other, for instance when scholars working on Islam in Euroamerica fail to understand how the different marginalising effects of secularism intersect, and how deeply they are enmeshed with nationalism and nationalism’s entanglements with Christianity and colonialism. This raises the question, what are the conceptual and normative foundations of different strands of the critical secularism literature? How do different critiques of secularism account for the role of nationalism? And what analytical purchase do different strands of critique offer for our understanding of the types of violence secularism facilitates and inflicts?

To address these questions, this contribution suggests distinguishing between three interrelated critical perspectives on secularism. They can be broadly categorised into 1) a liberal egalitarian critique, 2) a decolonial critique, and 3) a genealogical critique. In the second part of the contribution, I will demonstrate the analytical potential of each strand by analysing exemplary cases of interactions between Muslim groups and the state in Bavaria, Germany. The case studies demonstrate how within the federal liberal democratic constitutional order, nationalism, religion, culture, and race shape the politics of Bavarian secularism. Dissecting the different ways in which nationalism and secularism are inextricably entangled helps us to achieve both a more comprehensive and a more nuanced understanding of their potential and actual violent effects. The concrete symbolic and material reality of secular nationalist politics in Bavaria shows why we need to disaggregate the critique of secularism in order to understand its constitutive effects for ‘the New Europe’ (Bunzl 2005; Özyürek 2015).

In the following, violence is understood as harm inflicted from a wide array of actions and systems that include physical, psychological, emotional, and epistemological violence. It can also include the destruction that limits possibilities (Arendt 1969, 53), the violence exercised through the dehumanisation of people, the erasure of their ways of being and epistemic domination resulting in what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls ‘epistemicide’ (2014). Different forms of violence frequently enable and reinforce each other, which is why violence serves as a useful heuristic to capture an ensemble of phenomena that too often are treated as separate issues.

There are two caveats to the remit of this contribution: First, focusing on the critique of secularism does not negate the fact that secularism can also help to prevent violence, for instance through limiting states’ capacities to either enforce or ban religious expression. While the debate about the merits of secularism in liberal democracies is as alive as ever (cf. Laborde 2017), I aim to foster a better understanding of the different types of critique of secularism in order to provide a more refined grasp of its possibilities for both advocates and critics alike. Second, this contribution does not intend to address the manifold concrete political arrangements that are shaped by secularism in distinct ways across the globe. Andrew Copson, president of Humanists International, divides critics of secularism into those advocating for ‘Nations under God’ (Christian theocracies), ‘Islamic States’ (e.g. Saudi Arabia), ‘established churches’ (e.g. the Church of England), ‘nations under Marx’ (e.g. the USSR and Albania), ‘Romantic conservatism’ (e.g. Edmund Burke and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar), ‘community of communities’ (e.g. Dutch pillarisation), and those decrying the ‘Myth of neutrality’ secularism purportedly advances (Copson 2017, 66–88). As Copson himself concedes, the latter, which includes scholars like Talal Asad, offer the most challenging criticism to secularism as they neither advocate for a society where religion plays a decisive role in the organisation of public life, nor is atheism made a Staatszweck, a goal of the state. Instead, these approaches share a critical concern with the exclusions, power asymmetries, and violences that secularism, despite its professed intention to achieve the opposite, facilitates, produces, and enforces.

Secularism and violence: three strands of critique

The liberal egalitarian critique

A first strand of critique of secularism evolves around the analysis of some religious groups, in Europe particularly Muslims, being treated in ways that are unjustifiably discriminatory. This line of criticism identifies as a core problem that in the secular arrangements of liberal democracies groups like Muslim minorities are not treated equally and do not enjoy the same freedoms as their fellow citizens of other or no faith. In this sense, secularism, to the extent that it is considered to be a foundational element of and vitally dependent on liberal democracy (see Copson 2017; Fischer 2009), fails to live up to the expectations it sets for itself. Laborde’s disaggregation approach demonstrates convincingly to what extent, from a liberal egalitarian perspective, secularist principles should restrict religious practice in the public sphere, and how concrete political arrangements, for instance in France, Egypt, or Turkey, overstep the boundaries of ethically permissible restrictions (Laborde 2017, 36). In short, scholars advancing what can be called the liberal egalitarian critique argue that secularism fails to live up to its own standards. Supporting these arguments, scholars have provided forceful analyses of topics ranging from interpersonal and institutional Islamophobia (Abbas 2019; Meer 2013), the securitisation of Islam (Croft 2012; Edmunds 2012), financial and administrative discrimination of Islamic associations (Joppke and Torpey 2013), to the rejection of forms of sociality that do not conform to a purportedly required set of cultural values and practice, an argument made particularly by proponents of multiculturalism (Levey and Modood 2009).

Hypocrisy, the double standard of expectations towards Muslims in Europe to integrate, to prove loyalty to the constitutional order, to learn about western traditions, to advocate liberal sexual norms, to condemn terrorism, and to positively influence other Muslims, among others, is a key element of this line of thinking. In the broad tent of liberal egalitarian critique, the concept of nation-ness often features as an idea that sanctions unequal treatments depending on religion, national origin, racial stereotyping or perceived cultural difference. The interests of a nation and/or a nation-state are linked to the interests of a particular cultural, religious, economic, and political history, so the argument goes, and are thereby used to naturalise the privileged status of a particular social stratum. The practices advancing these discriminatory framings and legal constellations range from statements made by the highest echelons of the formal state apparatus, for instance several German ministers of the interior proclaiming ‘Der Islam gehört nicht zu Deutschland’ (Islam does not belong to Germany), to legal prohibitions of Islamic headscarves in state schools, while Christian nuns teaching in state-sponsored schools are still allowed to wear their habit (cf. Mahmood 2016). The basic argument of this line of criticism is that unequal treatment is unjust, and that discriminatory treatment restricts the equal enjoyment of citizens’ rights and liberties, which is insufficiently justified by the reference to culturally specific and hence necessarily exclusionary understandings of the nation. These approaches are particularly useful in illuminating the exclusivist and racist implications of many conservative, nationalist, and far-right political projects, as well as the exclusivist effects of many left-wing anti-religious agendas. The violence this line of critique enables us to scrutinise is primarily the harm caused by unequal application of liberal egalitarian standards. In short, it is best suited to criticise the violence of inequality facilitated by preferential treatment as well as direct and indirect discrimination of people of a particular cultural-religious background over others. This focus on equality, however, fails to account for the ways in which colonial legacies and racialised tropes still shape secular politics today, which is at the heart of the decolonial critique.

The decolonial critique

The analytical depth and comprehensiveness of what could be called the decolonial critique goes far beyond the claim that secular liberal states do not live up to their own promise of state neutrality and equal treatment of citizens. Instead, it is argued that the emergence and maintenance of existing Euroamerican states and secularism as one of their founding principles has been deeply enmeshed with and is predicated upon exploitation, exclusion, and violence. A frequent implicit or explicit point of reference is Said’s analysis of the imaginary self-constitution of the West in Orientalism (1978) and the way in which media continue to cast Muslims as Europe’s Other in his Covering Islam (1981). Broadly following Said’s critique of this particular discourse within western aesthetic and intellectual productions, scholars have investigated ways in which discourses about what it means to be German (Özyürek 2015), French (Parvez 2017), or British (Gilroy 1992) have produced and prevented different possibilities of being in the world. The mutually co-constitutive effects of secularism and nationalism in preventing certain ways of being can be interpreted as an instance of violence in Arendt’s sense: while power is as much productive as it is repressive, violence destroys power, it limits possibilities (Arendt 1969, 53).

Decolonial critiques of secularism set out to reveal the entanglements with imperial and colonial forms of knowledge and the institutional legacies and renaissances that relay their power in Europe today. While not all such contributions directly refer to post-colonial and decolonial theory and practice, their contributions share the common attempt to provincialise and deconstruct the alleged naturalness of secularism and the nation-state and thereby reveal their culturalist-essentialist and (neo-)colonial tendencies (cf. Chakrabarty 2000). In this vein, scholars have criticised the Eurocentric assumptions of theories of secularism (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012), the exoticisation and Othering of Jews and Muslims in Europe’s ‘race-religion constellation’ (Topolski 2018), the colonial and ahistorical temporality in which Muslims are conceived (Amir-Moazami 2011; Hernández Aguilar 2018) and the imperialist, patriarchal ‘moral crusades’ justified by the ‘new common sense’ that Muslim women need saving (Abu-Lughod 2013). One particularly fruitful iteration of the decolonial critique is the literature on the making of the Muslim subject, which seeks to investigate the power/knowledge formations that shape and constrain the possibilities of being Muslim (Mahmood 2005; Mas 2006).

The violence investigated by most studies advancing a decolonial critique could be called the violence of subjectivation (see Mas 2006, 603). Subjectivation is a process through which the very possibilities of being a Muslim, a ‘black man’ (Fanon 1986, 4), a citizen, a person in the world, are being produced, conditioned, and limited, on a material, cognitive, and psychological level. The primary vehicle through which secularism facilitates these processes and their potentially violent effects is through its mutually reinforcing relation to the nation. The nation is a political form through which the cultural, religious, and racial Other is constantly invoked and where belonging for those at the margins of the hegemonial constellation is always volatile. For instance, as so-called ‘critics of Islam’, secular Muslims can temporarily inhabit the subjectivity of the torchbearers of national values, particularly by condemning the alleged backwardness and fundamentalism of other Muslims (Amir-Moazami 2011; Fernando 2014, 185–220). Yet, much like the spaces opened up for people that are homosexual in the US American project of ‘Homonationalism’ (Puar 2007), this inclusion into the national body politic remains fundamentally fragile and can be suspended at any time. The decolonial critique is most effective at uncovering the relative stability of the iron cage of colonial tropes and traumas that shape affects and interpretative frameworks of people from (formerly) colonising societies. However, as Fanon (1986, 61–81) so forcefully demonstrates, they also shape the parameters of agency of people from (formerly) colonised societies. In a nutshell, the colonial critique investigates the way in which secularism perpetuates intersecting forms of subjectivation, discrimination, and violence. While closely related to these interventions, the historical ambition and the methodology of the genealogical critique is distinctive enough to merit separate consideration.

The genealogical critique

Scholars advancing a decolonial critique often directly or indirectly draw on the genealogical analysis of the emergence of the basic conceptual and cognitive forms by which we comprehend our social world, including the state, sovereignty, law, citizenship, subjectivity, modernity, nation-ness, time, and space. Inspired by Foucault’s genealogical analysis of institutions such as madness, punishment, and sexuality in Western Europe, Talal Asad has demonstrated that not only the political systems in existing states, but also the abstract concepts we use to make sense of them are steeped in particular interpretations of Christianity (Asad 1993, 2003). Dispelling the myth of the universality of these categories, the genealogical critique seeks to uncover the ways in which our frameworks of thinking about politics and religion have a parochial and provincial history that has come to be perceived and promoted as globally aspired universals (Tsing 2005). Asad’s argument builds on Carl Schmitt’s claim in Political Theology (2005) that all western political concepts are secularised Christian concepts. Elaborating on and criticising Edward Said, Gil Anidjar argues that ‘Orientalism is a critique of Christianity’, since it is ‘no mere political doctrine (although it is that, too); it is also a religious one (and, to be sure, an economic and scientific one as well)’ (Anidjar 2006, 76–77).

The genealogy of basic political concepts, for Asad, Anidjar, and others, becomes a critique not only of secularism, but of the way in which ‘theological-political’ configurations structure political thinking. The secularisation of religion is also deeply enmeshed in the formation and continued significance of nationalism, as the introductory quote by Gil Anidjar demonstrates. Iterations of the genealogical critique include Mahmood’s (2005) rethinking of the liberal autonomous subject in feminist theory, Agrama’s (2012) interpretation of secularism as problem-space in which the boundary between religion and politics is constantly contested, Wael Hallaq’s fundamental critique of western rationality and modernity as colonialism (2018), and Bhambra’s (2007) dispelling of the myths of European Cultural Integrity and the modern nation-state. In a similar way, Göle (2015, 103) critiques the ‘gendered nature of the public sphere’, which particularly affects Muslim women, and Amir-Moazami’s (2018, 91) interrogates how ‘epistemologies of the Muslim question’ are inextricably linked to the question of ‘nation-ness’ (cf. Anderson 1983).

The genealogical critique is most effective in analysing epistemic and ontological violence. However, as Stoler (2016) points out, materiality is central to the colonial proliferation and ‘duress’ of colonial and other cognitive structures. Secularism can facilitate epistemic violence because it forcefully breaks down the legitimacy of concepts and languages of perceiving ourselves and the planet that do not fit within a very narrow and parochial framework of knowledge. These genealogical inquiries also expose what can be called ‘ontological violence’ that manifests when parochial, national understandings of who we are and which world we inhabit are claimed to be universal whereby other ways of being in the world are side-lined and subjugated (Santos 2014, 46).

Table 1 provides a very rough outline of the different ways in which the three critiques conceptualise the link between secularism and the nation, and the types of violence they are able to uncover most poignantly.

Table 1. Three critiques of secularism in relation to nation and violence.

	Perspective on nation	Type of violence
liberal egalitarian critique	difference	inequality
decolonial critique	(neo-)colonialism	subjectivation
genealogical critique	prefiguration of concepts	epistemology and ontology

While these critiques of secularism are inextricably linked to each other, identifying the kinds of actions and power/knowledge formations they most assiduously dissect helps us to refine our analysis of different secular-national constellations, and the ways in which they are embodied and performed locally.

The following case study of recent political and legal innovations in Bavaria, the territorially largest German Bundesland, show how both religion and secularism are mobilised in a strongly culturalist and racialised understanding of the nation. These case studies will demonstrate how the three critiques help us to understand different power-asymmetries, mechanisms of exclusions, and forms of violence that emerge in this process.

Difference, loyalty, and Leitkultur: Christian nationalist identity politics in Bavaria

In the following, I will analyse the way in which politics in contemporary Bavaria are infused by nationalism and a cultural privileging of deliberately ambiguous notions of Christianity, Germanness, and (implicit) whiteness (see Gorski and Perry 2022). These manifest in what I call a ‘religion-culture-citizenship nexus’ that permeates the Bavarian state apparatus and the politics of the party that has ruled Bavaria for more than six decades, the conservative Christian Social Union (Christlich-Soziale Union, CSU). The findings presented in this section are part of a larger study on the ways in which the German and the British states mobilise different knowledge orders, practices, and subjectivities in their engagement with Muslims (see Müller 2020).¹ The conflicting set of practices built into liberal nation-states cannot be easily reconciled, if at all, and are trapped in what Saba Mahmood and Hussein Agrama identify as the paradoxes of secularism.

Methodologically, the analysis presented in the following is based on empirical material gathered through eight months of fieldwork (2016–2017), which included 73 qualitative open-ended interviews with municipal administrators, local and national politicians, members of the secret service, leaders of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities, social workers, and Muslims and non-Muslims living in Hasenbergl-Milbertshofen, one of the most diverse parts of Munich. I also collected and analysed documents including legal texts, newspaper articles, and policy papers, and conducted participant observation in the everyday lives of mosque communities. The majority of the interviews were transcribed verbatim by the author until a certain theoretical saturation was reached (Strauss and Corbin 1998, 143). During the fieldwork, using the different research instruments, I was engaging in a continuous process of what Strauss describes as ‘open coding’ (Strauss 1987, 59–68). This means that relevant information was clustered around key issues, recurring discursive patterns, relevant actors, and specific places. Through this inductive process, I revisited and adapted my research concepts to the questions that occurred as most relevant in the respective field site, given the theoretical interests outlined above. In the final stage of data analysis, I used the process of ‘selective coding’ (Strauss 1987, 69–78) to develop the various subcategories that were used as descriptive and interpretive frameworks for the empirical contexts as discussed below.

Conservative and nationalist identity politics have been a hallmark of Bavarian political culture for a long time. Munich’s fame in world history is, among other events, based on being the stage of Hitler’s so-called ‘Beer Hall Putsch’ in 1923. In the federal system of Germany, relations with religious communities, cultural politics, and education are largely the domains of the different federated states (Bundesländer). Consecutive CSU governments have used this to restrict sexual, cultural, and religious liberalisation for decades. In the wake of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015, in which 1.1 million refugees arrived in Germany within one year, and the increasing politicisation of the country’s primarily Turkish Muslim minority, Bavaria witnessed a surge in culturalist and nationalist rhetoric and policies (see Müller 2018). The following investigation focuses on three empirical anchor points: 1) the ‘Kreuzerlass’, the decree to install crosses in all Bavarian public buildings, 2) the Bavarian Integration Law of 2016, and 3) statements made by a CSU member of parliament instrumental in shaping Bavarian policies on Islam, and the insights provided by an employee of the city of Munich responsible for engagement with religious communities.

‘Disown the cross in the name of the state’: the crucifix controversy

In early 2018, the cabinet of the Bavarian state government decided that from 1 June 2018, a cross needed to be placed in the entrance area of every public office building of the Free State of Bavaria in a way that is ‘clearly visible’ (Bayerische Staatsregierung 2018). The cross was claimed to serve as a ‘visible confession [Bekenntnis] to the basic values of the legal and societal order in Bavaria and Germany’ (Bayerische Staatsregierung 2018). The official announcement declared that ‘the cross is the fundamental symbol of the cultural identity with Christian-occidental character [christlich-abendländischer Prägung]’ (Bayerische Staatsregierung 2018). The Bavarian Minister-President Markus Söder justified the decision by stating that ‘The cross is not the symbol of any religion’ but instead a ‘confession to the identity’ and ‘cultural character’ of Bavaria (Zeit 2018). Not only large sections of the media and politicians of the opposition, but also leading religious figures such as Cardinal Reinhard Marx, the chairman of the Catholic German Bishops’ Conference and archbishop of Munich and Freising, denounced this new rule: ‘If one understands the cross only as a cultural symbol, then one has not understood it’ (Drobinski and Wetzel 2018). Instead, the reduction of the cross to a merely cultural symbol would ‘disown the cross in the name of the state’ (Drobinski and Wetzel 2018).

Adapting Kymlicka’s proposal of a ‘benign neglect’ between state and ethnicity, one can argue that the separation of state and religion would preclude the use of religious criteria in the distribution of rights, resources, and duties (Kymlicka 1995, 4). Following the liberal egalitarian line of criticism, the language of rights in criticising discriminatory treatment of Muslim organisations, for example when it comes to their legal status and financial support by the state, has been invoked in many interviews I conducted, mainly by state agents and Muslims working in Islamic organisations. Yet, while there seems to be a relatively broadly shared consensus that everybody should be able to freely choose and practise their religion, what that entails concretely remains deeply contested.

The decolonial critique is particularly helpful in understanding how overt or subtle cultural and religious specificities are translated into the core ‘values’ or the ‘identity’ of the state, thereby rendering people who are not socialised in Christian cultures, who are often non-white, as the Other against which the cohesion of the nation needs to be reasserted (Gorski 2020). In this way, nationalist identity politics seek to foster select sources of cohesion and loyalty that support and entrench a certain ensemble of cultural, historical, social, political, and religious references – which are frequently organised along racial lines – that are discursively constructed as the identity of a given political group.

One might argue that a decolonial critique is not as relevant to a case study located in Germany, given that it does not share such a long and extensive colonial past compared to Britain, France, or Spain. However, insinuating that Germany would not have a colonial past that would make a decolonial perspective relevant constitutes a serious error in historical and political judgement (see Müller 2017). From the ‘Berlin’ or ‘Congo’ Conference in 1884 to the end of the First World War, Germany espoused one of the most aggressive colonial ambitions in Africa, trying to ‘catch up’ with other European powers. It was in its colonies that the German state conducted its first genocide, that of the Herero and Nama people, and established its first concentration camps such those on the infamous Shark Island or ‘Death Island’, where thousands were starved to death or killed (Olusoga and Erichsen 2010). Personal entanglements (Germany’s first post-war Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was vice-president of the German Colonial Society from 1931 to 1933 and a staunch advocate of colonialism) and support for dictatorial post-independence regimes in former colonies (former Bavarian Minister-President Franz-Joseph Strauss was well known for his support for and friendship with Gnassingbé Eyadema, dictator of Togo for 38 years) demonstrate the ongoing colonial entanglements of Germany with African states. In addition, through tropes such as the ‘loyal Askari’ or the ‘Black rapist’ the German colonial legacy continues to shape German national identity and the experiences of People of Colour living in Germany (Perraudin and Zimmerer 2011).

Culture, loyalty, and race in the Bavarian integration law

Less iconic yet reinforcing a similarly paradoxical mix of secularist and religious identity politics, the Bavarian Integration Law (Bayerisches Integrationsgesetz, BayIntG) was a core element of the Bavarian government’s response in 2016 to the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. The Preamble of the Bavarian Integration Law states that Bavaria is ‘deeply rooted in the values and traditions of the common Christian occident’ while claiming at the same time that ‘the distinction of state and religion are, as fruits of the enlightenment, a crucial foundation of our legal and societal order’ (BayIntG, Preamble §2 and §4).² This allegedly seamless amalgamation of Christian roots and enlightenment contributes to the creation of a narrative that recovers a certain version of Christianity for a reconstruction of the ‘Occident’ for present political purposes. As Matti Bunzl points out, while antisemitism has cast Jewish people as the enemy of the project of a ‘pure nation’, in the ‘new Europe’, Islamophobia constructs Muslims as the principal Other of the European project (Bunzl 2005). Allegedly responding to the ‘threat’ of an eroding European social order, Christian nationalist identity politics aim to contribute to what can be considered a cultural and political ‘(Re-) Christianisation’ of Europe.

The vision of society described by the Bavarian Integration Law, however, does not simply refer to a legal and institutional framework. Instead, the law stipulates that the political order is based on a ‘consensus that builds identity’ (BayIntG, Preamble §13). This legal formulation is another instance where the foundations of the political order are explicitly tied to the formation of identity. In addition to several abstract concepts such as ‘unity’, ‘law’, ‘peace’, and ‘freedom’, the Preamble already makes four explicit references to ‘culture’; the word ‘traditions’ appears twice. In contrast, there is only one reference to economic and social issues, namely the requirement of migrants to economically ‘contribute’ to society (BayIntG, Preamble §8).

The centrality of cultural identity is made explicit also in the principal objective stipulated in the law. The law’s first aim is to protect the ‘cultural basic order of society [Leitkultur]’, lead culture, followed by ‘securing societal cohesion’ [gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhalt] and enabling ‘migrants to live in our society’ (BayIntG, Preamble §13 and §14). The formulation of the latter goal presupposes that the migrant subject was potentially unable to live in ‘our society’ in the first place. The migrant, despite being physically present within the boundaries of the state territory, is conceptualised as a subject outside of the spatio-social boundary of the citizenry. Applying a decolonial perspective which is attuned to uncovering processes of subjectification allows us to see how the migrant, like formerly the colonial subject, is constructed as deficient and potentially unable to be a part of the cultural-political community without the enabling intervention of the state.

The Preamble of the Bavarian Integration Law also emphasises the ‘obligation [of every single person] to be loyal towards the people [Volk] and the constitution, state, and laws’ (BayIntG, Preamble §5). The term ‘loyal’ does not appear anywhere else in the text of the law and hence remains open to interpretation. Declaring ‘loyalty’ to be a legal duty in the context of the deeply culturalist language employed throughout the Preamble and the other articles of the law suggests that there exists a link between loyalty and cultural similarity. The reference to ‘Volk’ explicitly invokes a biopolitical dimension that, while not explicitly mentioning race, questions whether ‘newcomers’, often imagined as the Turkish/Arab Muslim Other, will be loyal to an extant body politic of ‘ethnic’ Germans. Their belonging to this ethnically constructed citizenry is cast as volatile and fragile, as decolonial scholars such as Özyürek (2015) have demonstrated.

The term Leitkultur, lead culture, which serves as the cornerstone of the Bavarian Integration Law, encapsulates many of the conundrums discussed above. The so-called Leitkulturdebatte of 1999–2001, the debate around Germany’s predominant culture, emerged as a strategic move by the Christian Democrats to politicise the question of Ausländer, foreigners, through evoking tropes such as the ‘clash of civilisations’ and the alleged incompatibility of different cultures (see Manz 2004; Pautz 2005). In the concept’s Bavarian renaissance, Leitkultur is at the same time underdetermined and overdetermined. It is overdetermined in that not only a very broad range of abstract values are attached to it, but also ‘customs, conventions, and traditions’ that are lived in Bavaria ‘every day’ (BayIntG, Preamble §9, §13). At the same time, it remains very unclear what these abstract concepts really mean for those within the state apparatus whose duty it is to administratively and politically act on the basis of this law. The confusion emerging from this was expressed by Gisela, a civil servant working for the city administration in Munich. She claimed that

Gisela:

in the Bavarian Integration Law people are obliged to adhere to the Bavarian Leitkultur and until today nobody could tell me what that is. I myself would also need to succumb to it because I am not a Bavarian and I don’t know what to do, by any stretch of the imagination.

Author:

Neither do I.

Gisela:

Then you are not integrated [desintegriert].

The undetermined character of the concept of Leitkultur as the pivotal element of the Bavarian Integration Law also reflects the ‘paradox of identity’ (Connolly 2002, xv). Nationalist identity politics aim at the erasure and extinction of the same cultural differences they are predicated upon by creating both an imagined homogeneity (of the nation) and heterogeneity (of the migrants). Thus, in contrast to the stability suggested by metaphors such as ‘deep roots’, ‘long historical struggle’, and the historical references to Christianity, Judaism, Europe and the Enlightenment (BayIntG, Preamble §2, §3, §12), there exists a significant dynamic built into the very concept of identity that urges its constant reformulation and redefinition. As postcolonial scholars working on ‘German Orientalism’ have demonstrated, the definition of Europe as different to the ‘Orient’ is deeply steeped into colonial and postcolonial violence that dates back even further than the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans (Marchand 2009). The subjectivity of the ‘Other’ – be it as Gastarbeiter (guest worker), migrant, Arab, or Muslim – is recreated in the continual process of the re-definition of a racialised understanding of an ‘us’, Bavarian, German, or European.

German Muslims are renegotiating and reshaping these processes of subjectivisation in a variety of ways. For example, Özyürek (2015) shows in her work how white German converts often appropriate their own form of nationalism to distance themselves from a racialised Muslim Other. In Bavaria, several groups are reclaiming the language of liberal constitutionalism to assert their status as legitimate and vital part of Germany’s political and social fabric. One of the groups most active in trying to establish an Islamic presence in Bavaria’s capital, primarily through the attempt to construct a ‘Centre for Islam in Munich – Europe’ (Zentrum für Islam in Europa – München), later renamed ‘Munich Forum for Islam’ (Münchener Forum für Islam), explicitly refers to key elements of the nationalist demands on Muslims in Europe while asserting their rightful place as Muslim citizens (see Müller 2019, 2021). They advocate for an Islam that is ‘far removed from political, ideological, and spatial influences of an understanding of religion exported [sic] from other regions’ and that ‘advances a moderate [gemäßigte] and up to date [zeitgemäße] Islamic attitude’ (MFI 2022). They claim that the German language is ‘the common basis and that German is to be used as the connecting communication in this country’. They state that Germany ‘should be the country towards which the new identity is oriented’, while Muslims should ‘embrace the Basic Law and societal values’ (MFI 2022).

Another example is the strategy of Islamic associations to use the legal framework of the constitution, in Germany called the Basic Law (Grundgesetz), to assert their rights of religious establishment. In an interview, Emre Osman, a leading member of the Turkish-Islamic Union of Religious Affairs (Türkisch-Islamische Union der Anstalt für Religion e.V., DITIB), argued that the Bavarian state was in breach of its constitutional duties by not supporting Islamic associations in providing Islamic religious instruction in schools. ‘If according to Article 7 paragraph 3 [of the Basic Law] religious instruction is to be given in cooperation with the religious associations, then they should get and request our consent’. As the Bavarian government rejects the demand to cooperate with Islamic organisations on this question, Mr Osman claims, ‘The government and especially the Ministry of Education prevents us, us Muslims, from abiding by the constitution’. Because his organisation requests the government to fulfil its constitutional obligation to cooperate with religions, he claims ‘we are the guarantors for the constitutional order in Bavaria, we Muslims, we abide by the constitution, and we demand the Bavarian State Government to also abide by the constitution, please!’ This line of argument needs to be understood in light of the weaponisation of the Basic Law and the ‘values’ that Muslims are constantly requested to pledge allegiance to. Emre Osman subverts the frequently Islamophobic weaponisation of the Basic Law by using it as the basis for charging the state with violation of the very constitutional settlement between state and religion that determines the governance of religion in Germany since the Weimar Constitution of 1919.

In this way, the violent subjectivation of ‘the Muslim’ as a potential danger to law, order, and national values, which forms the background narrative to the Bavarian Integration Law, is countered by assuming the subjectivity of the defenders of that same constitution, holding the government to account based on the very civil rights the state is bound to. Using the categories developed above, one could argue that Mr Osman mobilises the liberal egalitarian critique, while the decolonial critique enables a deeper understanding of the contested processes of subjectivation. As the next section demonstrates, the culturalist and racist instrumentalisation of the Basic Law permeates the core of secularism in Germany.

‘Beyond the Basic Law’: culture, race, and citizenship

The discussion of the Bavarian Integration Law in the previous section exemplifies the outcome of a process where a key conflict within the state apparatus is expressed in legal language: the tension between categorising the interaction with Muslims either in terms of citizenship or in terms of culture. Gisela, who worked for the Munich municipal administration, claims that in her experience the German Islam Conference struggled with the same conundrum. The government’s attempt to make Islamic associations commit to the Basic Law was accepted without hesitation. However, she claims ‘that was not enough for us, one wanted to make them commit to values, but then failed to define what this is beyond the Basic Law [über das Grundgesetz hinaus]’. Unequal application to the basic rights enshrined in constitutions such as the German Basic Law is often used as a basis for a liberal egalitarian critique of discrimination. However, this line of critique often fails to capture the way in which secularism and the nation are entangled with culturally specific and racially coded expectations which go beyond this legalistic framework. What is loosely defined as the ‘beyond’ opens space for the prejudices of the alleged threat of the Oriental/Muslim Other to the nation, which, according to Smith (2016) forms one of the three pillars of white supremacy.

A conversation with Mr Tutush, a conservative member of the Bundestag, illuminates the way in which this ‘beyond the Basic Law’ is interpreted not only in cultural and religious, but also in racialised and gendered terms. Mr Tutush is Christian and has partly Middle Eastern heritage, through which he has assumed a key role in defining the position of his party, the Christian Social Union, towards Islam. When I asked him how he would draw the distinction between moderate and radical Islam, which is key to CSU rhetoric, he responded by mentioning four elements: the constitution, a value canon that is allegedly ‘European’, gender equality, and a predetermined understanding of religious freedom:

everything which ultimately forms the basic value canon of our Basic Law in Europe, that which is the basis, for this has to be accepted, as a minimum in fact. And there is simply the equality of men and women and there is freedom of religion which not only gives me the right to practise my religion, but which also urges me to respect other religions and there are a lot of measures [Maßnahmen] in this area that need to be accepted.

This demonstrates that one of the main functions of nationalist identity politics is to connect the legal and institutional arrangement of citizenship, expressed mainly in one central source, the German Basic Law, to a vast and rather undetermined interpretive space of culture. This interpretive space includes values – specified as Bavarian, German, British, European, of the Enlightenment, humanist, or Christian – gender roles, language, attitudes towards other religious groups and social norms, and a certain positionality ‘towards society’. This suggests that Muslims, often exclusively conceptualised as migrants or descendants of migrants, are an entity that is distinct from ‘society’ (Spielhaus 2014, see Cremer in this collection). The purported incompatibility in terms of the legal framework of the Basic Law becomes culturalised, and, as the following quote shows, racialised. Mr Tutush justifies the proposal to stop offering Turkish as an optional subject in Bavarian state schools, a policy explicitly targeting Muslims, as follows:

So I think nobody has [anything against it] when Vietnamese learn Vietnamese, but with Turkish classes in school we need to have in the back of our minds that this is a prerequisite [for] Turkish being spoken in the mosques. And then I have, via the Turkish classes in school, via teaching the Qur’an, via the Turkish language, via the Arabic language, then I just don’t have an opening into our society.

This statement is an instance of the ‘racialisation’ of Islam in Germany and other European countries (Hernández Aguilar 2018; Meer 2013; Özyürek 2015). In his statement, Vietnamese is used as the example of a language that is deemed ‘safe’ and not in conflict with the nationalist demands of belonging and loyalty. It is considered to be a cultural formation that does not constitute a threat to the nation. In contrast, Turkish and Arabic language acquisition allegedly pose a threat to the ‘open character’ of society because of their instrumental role in maintaining Turkish and Arabic as languages spoken in mosques. In this process, the argument for removing Turkish language classes in state schools is based on the fusion of a cultural practice that, when being practised in religious spaces, allegedly prevents the required ‘openness’ towards ‘our society’. This amalgamation of certain cultural and ethnic formations – in this instance the Turkish and Arabic languages – with Islam is part of a process of subjectivisation identified by Etienne Balibar, ‘the production of ethnicity is also the racialisation of language and the verbalisation of race’ (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, 104). The Muslim subject, formed by the amalgamation of linguistic, cultural, racial, and religious characteristics is cast as a threat to the ‘openness’ allegedly embodied by the dominant (white) ethnicity of the nation-state.

The racialisation of Islam is particularly problematic considering the role race plays in the employment of security technologies. As decolonial critiques have shown, security discourses in general and categorisations used by security agencies in particular work on the basis of hypotheses of suspicion (Amir-Moazami 2018, 94). The connection between culture, religion, race, and citizenship that is established through the statements discussed above produces new moments of suspicion. These in turn are interlinked with qualitative and quantitative predictions on the prospects of integration and the danger of radicalisation (see Johansen and Spielhaus 2012). The permeation of the semantic field of Islam with race and culture not only produces new iterations of the ‘will to knowledge’ (Foucault 1978) about Muslims, but also expands the legitimacy of coercive and violent interventions against radicalisation to questions of cultural practices linked to certain ethnic groups. Importantly, this does not mean that actual ‘knowledge’ in the sense of correct facts is being produced. Rather, the connections of race, culture, and religion are part of an ‘ongoing pursuit of intelligibilities’ (Stoler 2008, 351) that provides the epistemic repertoire for the political language and practice through which secularism and nation-ness have effects in state activities and the lives of its citizens. In this process, not only does Islam become racialised, but also race becomes Islamicised.

Conclusion: conscripts of secularism

In the religion-culture-citizenship nexus analysed above, Muslims are thought of as existing within a field of tension between these three clusters of identification. In different interpellations, some or all of these categories are employed to situate Muslims within a certain sphere of identity. While several senior politicians and the Bavarian Integration Law focus on culture as the central perspective through which to understand the ‘Muslim question’, they establish epistemic links to the role religion plays in relation to culture, and in relation to rights and obligations. These include the requirement of loyalty to a religiously, culturally, and racially determined Staatsvolk, the nation-state’s people. Christian national identity politics actively reproduce the need to reaffirm the allegedly stable ontological essence of the religion-culture-citizenship nexus. Secularism constantly questions the legitimate place of religion and how particular religions relate to citizenship, culture, and geographical dimensions of the state. Subjectivities produced by these modes of questioning, particularly the loyal subject, are inevitably situated in this nexus. This structurally fixes the culturalisation and racialisation of the way Islam is being dealt with.

The rhetoric of integration politics in Bavaria demonstrates how closely the concepts of secularism and the nation are enmeshed. In the language of the law and in the statements of politicians, secularism is used to delimit belonging and Otherness in the national body politic. Each of the three strands of critique outlined above enables us to uncover different ways in which secularism and the nation relate, and what kinds of violence they facilitate. The liberal egalitarian critique reveals the ways in which the nation constructs boundaries and differences that are then used as the basis for unequal and discriminatory treatment. However, this perspective is less well attuned to the indirect, affective and culturally coded mechanisms through which secularism mobilises questions of the right place and form of religion along the lines of race, class and gender. Decolonial critiques help us to uncover how (neo)colonial entanglements and Orientalist imaginations create the subject formation of non-white people and Islam as Europe’s Other. They allow us to unearth the ‘imperial durabilities’ (Stoler 2016) of colonial and racist formations in the ways in which the secular nation-state distributes suspicion, fear, and the ambition to belong.

While these brief empirical examples did not make full use of the analytical potential of the genealogical critique, they attune us to the power/knowledge formations that are imbued into core concepts of liberal politics, such as national identity, secularism, and the Basic Law and its values. Legally requiring every state building in Bavaria to put up a cross while at the same time claiming that Muslim girls’ headscarves infringe on the secular character of the state can be interpreted as significant instances of Christian nationalist identity politics. These kinds of constellations are far from uncommon in Euroamerican societies today. A genealogical perspective enables us to see these political constellations as part of a longer story of the ways in which elements of white Christian supremacy are maintained through the secularised politics of the nation-state (see Gorski and Perry 2022). As outlined above, this should not be misread as an argument that secularism is per se normatively objectionable, or to deny that it has enabled the enjoyment of considerable freedoms and equalities for many people. However, like any formation that is central to the modern state, secularism is inextricably linked to various forms of violence as a defining characteristic, through unbenign neglect, quiet acquiescence, or direct intervention. Tracing these complicities of secularism, nationalism, and the state should be a central concern for students of religion and politics, and all those who want to understand marginalisation and power in the New Europe.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants of the workshop on 'Who may belong? Nationalism, conservative religion, and identity in German, Dutch, and Anglo-American politics', held at the University of Cambridge in December 2019, for their helpful comments, and the conference organisers and editors of this collection, Marietta van der Tol and Philip Gorski, for their very helpful feedback. I am also thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive review, and to Thandeka Cochrane for countless inspiring debates on (post)coloniality that have significantly shaped my thinking.

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Tobias Müller

Tobias Müller is Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) and College Research Associate at King’s College, University of Cambridge, and Fellow at The New Institute, Hamburg, Germany. Previously, he was postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University and Junior Research Fellow at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge. His research interests include political and social theory, decolonial and feminist theory, secularism and religion, masculinities and extremism, and the politics of climate change. His recent work has been published in Political Theory, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Compass, Religion, State and Society, Review of Faith & International Affairs and Nature.

Notes

1. Ethics approval for this research was obtained by the University of Cambridge Ethics Committee in 2016 as part of the ethics approval procedure for conducting research for a PhD degree at the University of Cambridge

2. The original text of the Bavarian Integration Law of 13 December 2016 can be found here: https://www.gesetze-bayern.de/Content/Document/BayIntG (accessed 6 September 2022). All translations in this contribution are by the author.