Religion and International Political Economy — A Case of Mutual Neglect

Sabine Dreher

The new wave of religious activism since the 1970s has forced the social sciences in general and the discipline of International Relations (IR) specifically, to reconsider the role of religion in society, politics, and, to some extent, economics. Previously, religious activists were written off as remnants of traditions soon to be wiped out by the modernization process, and were, therefore, supposed to restrict themselves to the private sphere. However, beginning in the 1970s, religious activism emerged into the public sphere, often under dramatic or violent circumstances. Prominent examples of "public religion" (Casanova 1994) are the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s supported by the Catholic Church, Protestant fundamentalism in American politics and its role in the Republican Party, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and the emergence of a new form of global Islamic Jihadism with the 9/11 attacks against the United States. Somewhat overlooked in lists such as these is liberation theology in Latin America, but it shows that the demands of religious activists ranged from more progressive to more reactionary responses to modern life, though, it has to be said, reactionary responses are more prominent in the debate.

The reemergence of religion into the public sphere took many observers by surprise since secularization — the process by which religious institutions are subordinated to and separated from politics, economics, and society — was supposed to have relegated religion to the private sphere. In addition to the separation of religion from other spheres, social scientists also assumed that religion would simply disappear; yet, religious movements are now among the key oppositional movements in the twenty-first century according to Tugal (2002, 85). Moreover, Rinehart (2004, 271) points out that religious doctrines have emerged as real alternatives to communism, socialism, and liberalism.

In IR, this led to a debate on how to interpret the role of religion. On the one hand, there have been those who interpret the emergence of religious activism as a successful and dangerous challenge to the secular and territorial Westphalian system of sovereign states that needs to be contained. On the other hand, others have argued that religious activism is a reflection of the need for greater pluralism and authenticity in the international system, signaling the need for deeper structural and democratic reforms in global institutional arrangements.

According to this second perspective, the Westphalian state-centered system characterized by anarchy, hierarchy, and territoriality has been complemented (but not supplanted) by global governance and a global civil society (McGrew 2013; Kaldor 2003). The disaggregation of the state in the "post-Westphalian" system has created space for other identities that were suppressed: new social movements around women's rights; civil rights; peace and environment; movements around sexual identities; and right-wing, regional, and ethnic movements, to name just a few (Eisenstadt 2000; Badie and Smouts 1992). It is in this context of the emergence of identity politics against the modernizing, nationalist secular state that scholars in IR have discussed the "resurgence" of religion since the early 1990s (Huntington 1993; Thomas 2000; Hurd 2007; Rinehart 2004).

The problem with this scholarship on religion in IR is, however, according to Bellin (2008), that it did not integrate itself into a larger field of inquiry such as culture and IR or international political economy (IPE) but largely studied religion in isolation. One further and more important difficulty is its focus on the political aspect of the new religious activism while largely ignoring economic questions. Even within IPE, which unites students interested in the economic side of world politics, researchers have not studied the religious resurgence to a significant degree (Dreher 2012).

There is little research on whether the new religious activism has had any impact on the neoliberal globalization project that not even the 2008 economic crisis was able to derail. On the contrary, the main theme coming out of the crisis has been that there is a need for more, and not less, of the same (Centeno and Cohen 2012). Neoliberalism is defined here as a project of global market making (McMichael 2000) with the goal to abolish all state regulations that are seen as impediments to economic growth (or the freedom of maneuver for business, whether nationally or globally), while the surveillance and regulatory capacity of the state are strengthened to better implement these reforms. This combination of a free economy and a strong state is the hallmark of the neoliberal revolution according to Gamble (1994). But it is startling to see that the crisis of 2007-2008, the biggest crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, has not completely delegitimized neoliberal ideas, and that we are, instead, pondering the "strange non-death of neoliberalism" (Crouch 2011).

This persistence of neoliberal thinking is unexpected since it has not been a resounding success in economic terms. While neoliberal policies have increased profit rates for firms and lowered inflation, they have also reduced overall growth rates of the economy, increased global economic instability through recurrent financial crises, amplified global and national economic inequality, facilitated corporate corruption in the absence of state...