Notes on Post‐Secular Society

The resurgence of political Islam and the endurance of broad religious belief in the most modern of societies—America—has created a crisis of faith among secularists. If modernity no longer implies a secular outlook, and secularism, by definition, cannot generate any values beyond an indifferent tolerance of all belief, what role will religion play in the 21st century? In an interesting confluence of reflection, Jürgen Habermas, one of Europe's leading secular liberal thinkers, argues that secular citizens must be open to religious influence, especially since the very identity of Western culture is rooted in Judeo‐Christian values. In his political afterlife, Tony Blair has converted to Catholicism and established a Faith Foundation to press for religious literacy because “you can't understand the modern world unless you understand the importance of religious faith.” Similarly, when Pope Benedict XVI visited secular France in September, President Nicholas Sarkozy scandalized the lay establishment by saying, like Habermas, that “rejecting a dialogue with religion would be a cultural and intellectual error.” He called for “a positive secularism that debates, respects and includes, not a secularism that rejects.” Despite the flurry of controversy over a recent spate of books extolling the virtues of atheism in the wake of Islamist terrorism, the more interesting issue by far is the emergence of post‐secular modernity.     

Not ‘by those old books of international law,but only by war’: Ottoman Intellectuals on the Eve of the Great War

Prevailing understanding of the Ottoman entry into Word War I has focused on the role of Enver Pasha and the so-called pro-German faction in the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). This article examines Ottoman views on international relations and the future of the Ottoman Empire in contemporary Ottoman publications. The article concludes that substantial parts of Ottoman society viewed war in 1914 not only as an acceptable course of action, but as a morally justified, potentially liberating, and unifying experience for many Ottomans. Ottoman views, therefore, form part of a much wider non-Western response to Western expansion, and Ottoman entry into World War I is best understood as a reaction against the international system which the Ottoman leaders thought had betrayed them.     

Islam in Europe: Quest for a Paradigm

Mr. Malik, a journalism fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS), has returned from fieldwork in six West European countries to write a book on the outlook for Islam in the West. The GMFUS is an independent U.S. foundation created to deepen understanding, promote collaboration and stimulate exchanges of practical experience between Americans and Europeans.     

运用艺术教育推动高职人文教育的发展

重视人文素质教育是高职学院一贯的教育理念。人文素质教育的核心是涵养人文精神。而艺术教育是以人为中心的教育,其目的在于培养人和提高人的素质,其实质符合人文精神教育。人文性已经成为艺术教育的坚实基础。本文运用人文与艺术教育关系的理论,旨在阐述艺术教育的作用及其对高职学院艺术教育活动的指导意义。     

Policy Inertia and the Persistence of Systemic Fragility

Many observers have diagnosed a fundamental shift in financial regulation since the 2008 crisis. In contrast, this article argues that changes have mostly been superficial. The ideas underpinning regulation have been adapted rather than overturned. Our financial system remains highly fragile, even if exceptionally loose monetary policy obscures such fragility temporarily. Governments show little appetite to correct the lopsided relationship between the financial sector and the real economy and turn the sector into a reliable engine of prosperity and stability rather than a continued source of systemic risk.     

Post‐Secular Turkey

For 500 years the West was on the rise, culminating in Globalizaiton 1.0—the open system of trade, information flows and the spread of technology on the terms and in the image of the West. The benefits of that system over the last 30 years have led to the rise of the emerging economies. As a result we are entering the new era of Globalization 2.0 characterized by new forms of non‐Western modernity and the interdependence of plural identities. The advent of this new era has been hastened by the fiscal and financial crisis in Europe and the United States. Turkey, with its Islamic‐oriented democracy that has become a template for the liberated peoples of the Arab Spring, and China, with its effective neo‐Confucian form of governance, are the most sharply defined new players in this multi‐polar and multi‐dimensional world. In this section, one of Turkey's most insightful sociologists examines the post‐secular transformation of that nation. One of China's more provocative philosophers proposes a hybrid model that combines what has been learned from the experience of Western and Chinese governance in a way that “enhances democracy” in both systems.     

Economic grievances and political protest

How do economic grievances affect citizens’ inclination to protest? Given rising levels of inequality and widespread economic hardship in the aftermath of the Great Recession, this question is crucial for political science: if adverse economic conditions depress citizens’ engagement, as many contributions have argued, then the economic crisis may well feed into a crisis of democracy. However, the existing research on the link between economic grievances and political participation remains empirically inconclusive. It is argued in this article that this is due to two distinct shortcomings, which are effectively addressed by combining the strengths of political economy and social movement theories. Based on ESS and EU-SILC data from 2006–2012, as well as newly collected data on political protest in 28 European countries, a novel, more fine-grained conceptualisation of objective economic grievances considerably improves our understanding of the direct link between economic grievances and protest behaviour. While structural economic disadvantage (i.e., the level of grievances) unambiguously de-mobilises individuals, the deterioration of economic prospects (i.e., a change in grievances) instead increases political activity. Revealing these two countervailing effects provides an important clarification that helps reconcile many seemingly conflicting findings in the existing literature. Second, the article shows that the level of political mobilisation substantially moderates this direct link between individual hardship and political activity. In a strongly mobilised environment, even structural economic disadvantage is no longer an impediment to political participation. There is a strong political message in this interacting factor: if the presence of organised and visible political action is a decisive signal for citizens that conditions the micro-level link between economic grievances and protest, then democracy itself – that is, organised collective action – can help sustain political equality and prevent the vicious circle of democratic erosion.