Sovereignty, Confessionalism and the Moral Foundations of Political Rule

In her important book “Before the West”, Ayse Zarakol discusses the phenomenon of confessionalism and its relationship with political centralized sovereignty. The relationship may at first appear paradoxical since historically the establishment of this kind of sovereignty (NB: there are conceivably other decentralized forms of sovereignty, but IR is mostly concerned with transitions into the centralized type) was marked precisely by the submission of religious authorities to secular power. This makes sense since for most of human history the main check on absolute political power came from independent religious authority, from which law making (or at least interpreting) flowed. Zarakol’s success is to show that this process actually took place in the Eurasian ‘East’ throughout the 13th-15th centuries following the Mongol conquest, well before the actual ‘revolution of sovereignty’ in 16th century Europe.

Yet Zarakol also highlights that the relationship between political and religious authority does not stop there. In fact, the trend in the cases she studied was for centralized political sovereignty to eventually seek an added layer of legitimation in religion – usually the dominant religion of their lands or that of the ethnic core in their empires. This was the case in all of the post-Mongol sovereign polities she studied from the 16th century onwards, including the Ottomans and the Safavids who mobilized the two main different strands of Iran respectively. Yet arguably a similar process had already played out in Yuan/Ming China which eventually abrogated the more internationalist outlook of its Mongol legacy and turned inwards towards Confucianism (the equivalent ‘religion’ of China). Fascinatingly, Zarakol shows that this confessionalization of post-Mongol Eastern empires took place in parallel as well as in interaction with equivalent processes in Europe, especially the ‘Catholicization’ of the Habsburg empire and the French state, engaged simultaneously in a geopolitical contest against Muslim powers and each other.

As Zarakol puts it, this turn to confessionalization – understood as the adoption of religious legitimation by political authority often leading to policies of ‘cleansing’ against religious or doctrinal others inside the sovereign territory – emerges when the universalist claims of a political sovereign become exhausted. In the Eurasian East, all post-Mongol sovereigns started by adopting the world-ruling ambitions of Chinggis Khan, but when these were inevitably quashed and they found themselves in geopolitical competition with each other (or with external powers like the Habsburgs) a new universalizing basis of legitimacy had to be found. This entailed a delicate double move on behalf of political sovereigns. They had to adopt religion as their legitimating ideology without allowing it to displace their own secular primacy, while safeguarding its universalist function and not allowing it to be parochialized. Zarakol shows how for a while the Ottomans were especially successful in doing this. Arguably the Habsburgs were less successful once confessionalization became a factor of intense fragmentation between European sovereigns after the Reformation.

There are some interesting implications of Zarakol’s narrative. The main one is the realization that political sovereignty actually requires universalism. This may appear paradoxical given that territorial sovereignty appears as inherently parochial and particularistic. But no political authority could survive with its claim to legal absolutism alone, given that such claims always cause reactions from various dislocated or peripheralized constituencies. Political sovereignty needs to appeal to broader and grander values, also because these allow different sovereign entities to link up with each other in a bigger society (of states, dynastic houses or any other form international actors take) where economic and social exchanges take place. A fully secular political absolutist sovereign is therefore only a theoretical abstraction – or a very short-lived reality until it encounters massive reactions. A confessionalized sovereign at least creates the fiction of being subject to a supreme morality and/or being bound by the broad-based mass attachments of its subjects. In this sense, confessionalization is the first step towards democratization of sovereignty.

A second implication is that confessionalization is a process of both universalization and particularism, often in a cycle between these two. Political sovereigns borrow the universalizing pretences of mass religions that allow them to enhance, supplant or wholly invent a universalizing political mission for their authority as well. On the other hand, intense confessionalization of political authority is usually a sign that an international order is in a process of fragmentation, usually because of the retreat of a former hegemon whose own ecumenical dominance both sustained that order and served as that hegemon’s universalizing mission. In this sense, processes of confessionalization can be seen as transitions to a new balance of international and domestic cultural authority, with political sovereigns searching for a new moral basis that will at once legitimate them in the eyes of their subjects and allow them to recreate a new international culture within which they can engage with each other. The danger of course is that this process is ultimately unsuccessful and rival confessionalist claims result in total international fragmentation. This is what Europe experienced in the 16th-17th centuries and it remains to be seen if today’s ‘civilizational’ turn around the world – in the West/Europe, Russia, China, India and the Muslim world – portends a new international order of civilizational sovereigns or its complete breakdown.

The phenomenon of confessionalization of course challenges the perception that the main model of political sovereignty has been overwhelmingly secular since at least the 19th century in the West and this is how it was originally exported to the rest of the world. We can relativize the ideal of fully secular sovereign authority in various ways. First, this appears to be a uniquely European idiosyncrasy which owes to the peculiar circumstance of deep confessional antagonism during the Reformation among dozens of aspiring sovereign rulers within a very constrained geographical area. The memory of the religious wars in Europe tainted confessionalism with a negative light in subsequent centuries. But uniquely in Europe also confessionalization of sovereignty was presented by political authorities as anti-confessionalism against the supranational authority of the pope. Thus, political fragmentation and a pro/anti-confessional ambiguity of sovereignty in Europe (whereby rulers appeared confessional towards their own populations but militantly anti-confessional in their external performance of sovereignty) meant that there confessionalization was but a step towards full secularization of political sovereignty.

If that was the case however, where did European sovereign rulers ‘buy’ their universalist moral claims from? The answer is liberalism as the ideology of human rights and the autonomy of the individual, an ideology that squared the circle between finding a secular source of supreme morality and ensuring a homogenization and obeisance of the population to its sovereign rulers. Given Europe’s patchwork of political sovereign claims and inevitable heterogeneity of populations within very tight quarters, liberalism resolved the impracticality of the Augsburg ideal of unified compartmentalized confessionally pure sovereignties. All modern European political theory since Bodin and Grotius can after all be seen as an effort to come up with a legitimating basis for political authority that at the same time rejected supranational universalist claims of the Habsburgs and the pope, and accommodated internal heterogeneity. The ideology of rights and the sanctity of the individual – at once individualizing and homogenizing – allowed for this to happen. In this sense, liberalism can be understood as Europe’s distinct second wave of ‘confessionalization’, after the first strictly religious one of the early modern period, with liberalism acting essentially as a civic religion (Europe’s ‘Confucianism’). Of course, much like the confessionalism of Eurasian empires, liberalism also provided European states with a universalizing mission internationally, a claim to a mission of global dominance that Europe/West ultimately realized in the 19th century. And this in turn explains the crisis of Western liberalism today inside Western societies: as all universalist projects, its domestic legitimacy is threatened precisely when its external universalization becomes effectively resisted. Civilizational nativism thus becomes today an internal resistance mechanism by Western societies and states to identify a new universalist and moral legitimating basis of political rule.

Viewed this way, liberalism need not be understood as a secular alternative to religion – at least functionally, the two are very much equivalent. Yet in defence of secularists one also must admit that the phenomenon of confessionalization of sovereign rule is in itself an expression of the primacy of the political/secular over the religious. It is a process where religion loses its autonomy and becomes subservient to the goals of a political centre. This is quite distinct from pre-modern political rule which was very much limited, controlled and even subjugated to the priorities of religion and its independent establishment. The two models are indeed mirror images of each other. In pre-modern divided sovereignty, societal pluralism is accommodated because political authority is fully unable (and indifferent) to standardize society. In modern unified political sovereignty, processes of homogenization –religious/confessional initially and secular/liberal eventually – are ultimately inevitable, with all the pain and reaction this entails, albeit it also opens the way to genuine broad-based mass sovereignty of the homogenized community (people, nation etc.).

In all these ways, it seems that political authority without religious/spiritual/moral content is unfeasible. Not only this, but there is an inverse relationship between pluralism/homogenization on the one hand and political democracy and mass participation on the other. Societal pluralism can certainly be accommodated by broad-based universalizing ideologies, even confessional ones, as long as their primacy is accepted or tolerated by those not belonging to them. But for this confessional/ideational hierarchy to be maintained, the system must remain inherently elitist and alternative partial identities depoliticized. Genuine mass participation and collective law-making on the other hand seems possible only where there is a minimum commonly accepted cultural basis that everyone (or almost everyone) within a sovereign territory ascribes to. In political communities numbering millions, this common belonging inevitably will be based on some culturalist and identitarian traits – even liberalism, which as non-Westerners are keen to point out has always entailed specific understandings of non-secular criteria of belonging to the political community, however tacitly. 

Political democracy fully devoid of culturalist underpinnings has been possible only in specific historical moments, and again in theory more than practice. The ‘republican moment’ in 16th and 17th century European thought laid out a vision of political participation based solely on civic values, but the roots of that vision were always in the very limited historical experience of small homogeneous city-states. What is more, this republican vision was self-avowedly non-universalist in the confessionalist, imperial and royalist sense of sovereignty. At most it was internally universal towards the political community and its right to participation, even though even that community was often defined on the basis of a very restrictive ideal (e.g. the arms-bearing, land-owning male head of household). Externally, the republican ideal necessarily had to be anti-universalistic, since the polis was seen as a self-contained entity given to the vagaries of virtu and fortuna and the inevitable cycle of rise and decline, virtue and corruption.

We are encountering then an ever-narrowing window between mass homogenization, political participation, genuine religiosity free from political manipulation, the self-limitation of political rule by a higher universal moral purpose and the safeguarding of societal pluralism, all mutually exclusionary goals in some combination or other. There remains however one theoretical possibility. Conceptually, a political system of a divided sovereignty between political and religious authority that is also religiously uniform at the societal level can maintain the goals of limited sovereignty, a universalist legitimating basis that tolerates a certain degree of diversity internally and facilitates international engagement externally, homogeneity that ensures political participation, and independence of religious sentiment and personal autonomy all at the same time. As long as the ideal of participation is realized within the daily life of a religious community with a relatively flat hierarchy, and as long as confessional homogeneity is not upset, the square can be circled. The question is if such a political entity has ever existed.