Religious Accommodation in Western Europe: The Case of Islam.

摘要

Accepting Muslim immigrants and providing for their religious needs and practices is an unprecedented challenge for Western European governments. States have responded in very different ways, but the existing scholarly literature has failed to account for this variation. Based on an analysis of data for fifteen Western European countries, this dissertation presents an Institutional Accommodation Index that compares the countries' policies toward religious minorities for 1980 to 2010. It captures a significant amount of cross-national variation in Institutional Accommodation and reveals distinct longitudinal patterns.;This dissertation argues that the extent of Institutional Accommodation of Islam is driven by confessional distribution patterns following the Reformation. The origins of religious accommodation today stem from largely political, as opposed to ideological, decisions made by ruling elites in the three centuries following the Reformation. For politically pragmatic purposes, such as social stability and economic prosperity, rulers of religiously pluralistic, or "multiconfessional," societies allowed dissenters some leeway to practice their religious beliefs, whether in private or public. These pragmatic responses to religious diversity were later legitimated by religious leaders, intellectuals, and political elites, who claimed religious pluralism as a norm or social value worthy of being defended. Thus, political decisions to tolerate minorities bred norms of toleration. By contrast, rulers of relatively homogenous states lacked the political impetus to tolerate minorities. In these countries, no informal or formalized institutions supporting religious pluralism existed before the 19th century.;On the eve of modern state formation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries---when liberal movements compelled monarchs and parliaments to draft constitutions espousing religious freedoms and liberty---the newly created constitutions and other political and legal institutions of historically pluralistic societies formalized relatively equal benefits and privileges for all religious groups. By contrast, historically homogenous countries espoused religious freedom, but privileged the dominant religion, to the exclusion of others. This divide explains divergent policies toward religious minorities today: Muslims living in the former group tend to experience higher levels of accommodation, while Muslims living in the latter are less likely to have their religious demands accommodated.