Social Science Research Council

2007 DPDF Research Field:
Rethinking Europe: Religion, Ethnicity, Nation

Europe is currently reshaping itself and at the same time anxiously questioning the wisdom of those changes. In some countries (the Netherlands and Belgium, for example) recent abrupt shifts in social policy have been motivated mainly by worry about integrating new immigrants. In others (France and Britain, for example), civil unrest and terrorism concerns have prompted new worries about national social models. Throughout Europe, refiguring of regional identities and powers has coincided with rethinking the role of religion in public life, particularly (but not only) regarding Islam. And almost all of the new nation-states issuing from the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia confront challenging, and in some cases still explosive, problems involving national minorities; and across Europe, the question of race is returning to public debates.

Most studies of these topics have focused on one country and have been shaped by the concerns of one discipline—the politics of Muslim integration in France, the ethnography of language choice in Wales, the social organization of Catholics in Germany. But the burning issues in Europe today cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Understanding debates about the place of Islam, for example, requires going beyond the sociology of religion to also learn about the historic patterns of immigration and the legal frameworks for governing religion across a variegated landscape of nation-states, regions, and the European Union. Understanding the processes and politics of ethnic identifications requires studying everyday encounters in towns and cities, the deep historical shifts of boundaries and loyalties, and the problem of European identities.

Methodologically, the research field "Rethinking Europe" provisionally distinguishes three approaches. One provides a range of actor-oriented approaches, and includes the study of everyday social interactions, the use of formal interviews, long-term informal conversations, and textual analyses. Another concerns the use of comparative frameworks, often juxtaposing a small number of contrasting cases in order to highlight the specific features of each, or comparing across time frames to examine either cross-temporal processes or the range of possibilities within one nation-state. The third offers a broader range of questions than are usually found in any single discipline, from asking about the class dimensions of religious movements, to examining the theological issues behind the political integration of a religious minority.