In our modern times, we are witnessing interesting changes in the world as religion is making inroads into our societies and into world politics. The resurgent role of religions is witnessed almost everywhere.
People talk about God all the time and how fundamentalisms of all kinds (including Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam) are growing and have been very vocal in their quest to express faith in the public sphere, believing that religion should rule every aspect of personal behavior.
The expectation that religious movements and faith-based politics would diminish in influence or disappear altogether in the context of modernization and globalization has clearly been disproved by the emergence of religious-political movements with strong popular support in a number of regions and across several different faith traditions.
Even in Europe, where secularization of religious behavior made it a private affair and secularism is responsible for the clear separation of state and religion, religious movements are thriving.
If we try to look at the situation from the ‘worldview paradigm’, one could say that the problem in Europe is that secularism can no longer manage to ensure a constructive dialogue between religious worldviews, namely between Christianity and Islam. Indeed believers may not like to see religions conceptualized as belief systems but the advantage of this approach is twofold:
* The question of truth in the various systems of beliefs becomes nonsense because beliefs are like axioms in a theory: they cannot be proven or argued for, but only argued against. Therefore, there is no need to enter into the controversy of the truth of religions, whether Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism or Islam. We can leave theology to theologians and this is good news.
* Being considered as systems of beliefs, different religions can, if they have sufficient beliefs in common, hold a constructive dialogue between them and allow for cross-cultural exchanges. In this case, a consensus between different worldviews can be achieved.
Now in spite of being a system of beliefs, normally a religion doesn't imprison its believers in it, doesn't preclude them from understanding other worldviews and genuinely communicating with others.
Nonetheless, I tend to think that we need to reflect further on pluralism, in particular on religious pluralism. Are we confronted with a new religious pluralism? Does it undermine the cultural and social foundations of democracy? Is it the reason why identity politics has become more salient?
What's wrong with new religious diversity in secular Europe? Is it pluralism that is failing in our present times? After all, looking back on history, it seems to me that "the relation between pluralism and religion has never been unambiguous"!
Now, because public interest in religious pluralism has grown dramatically in Europe but also on the other side of the Atlantic, religion has moved up the political agenda in Europe, in the United States and around the world.
Looking at Western Europe as a whole, we can say that growth in religious diversity is mostly related to immigration and that in continental Europe at least, immigration and Islam are almost synonymous.
This is a key issue to understand the challenges ahead.
Despite differences of policy responses to ethnic and religious pluralism from country to country, as well as differences in integration policies, the general assessment among publics, politicians and the press is that none of the attempts to integrate Muslim religious minorities into European countries has been successful.
The success of many far-rights, anti-immigration parties in various elections in European countries is a clear sign of a growing malaise.
But it has to be taken as a wake-up call. How we will master the political, social and cultural tensions that have emerged over the past decade will have a decisive impact on the future and health of democracy on the continent. At least this is my profound conviction.
The main point that I want to emphasize is that with the paradigm shift new tools and opportunities are available for conflict transformation.
I want emphasize the need to use soft power tools, namely what we can call "cultural diplomacy" at large.
This is an important tool, in particular when looking at the world in 2011 and we realize that out of a total of 143 conflicts, 108 had a cultural dimension.
However, please note that by stressing this dimension of some conflicts, I am in no way making the case for the culturalisation of political conflicts.
Indeed political problems have to be solved by political means.
But it is also quite clear that protracted conflicts, even when settled by a binding political agreement between political actors or governments focused on the issues of contention, must always be embedded in a much broader process involving people at all levels of society if we want to reach sustainable peace.
This is why even in major politically harsh conflicts, soft power has a powerful - although often neglected - role to play because, after all, reconciliation as part of peace-building depends highly on cultural and identity issues, narratives and stories built and exchanged about conflicts, stories that influence their resolution or contribute to their perpetuation.
Just take the conflict in the Balkans, apartheid in South Africa or the case of East-Timor, three different examples but all of them showing the role of cultural and public diplomacy, as one can call it, as a soft power tool to build sustainable peace among people.
Take also the 60 year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict and see how much we should invest in soft power to influence the behaviour of the two parts in order to get the desired outcome of peace.
After all, peace is never made but it is always in the making and negotiated agreements alone do not make peace, whereas people do. So let us invest in soft power tools that can be use to change perceptions and worldviews and by changing them, improve the quality of interaction between peoples.
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