Spring in the South, winter in the West? Revolution as politics of becoming

Friedrich Nietzsche's Zarathustra coined the metaphor of winter doctrine to criticise a thinking which believes that everything is and should be fundamentally stable. A thawing wind will melt – to paraphrase Marx – the solid ice at least into water.Footnote ¹ As antithetic as Nietzsche and Marx are in relation to their means and aims, they are united in their critical attitude towards those seeking to preserve the status quo. Given that these thinkers were generally critical of religion, it is not without irony that William Connolly picked up Nietzsche's winter doctrine in his argument against secularism.Footnote ² Against the frozen ideology of secularism Connolly argues for a deep pluralism to enable liberal societies to include as many followers of any creed and religion as possible to foster a politics of becoming.

Politics of becoming implies a constellation change which sheds light on injustices formerly ignored and calls old structures into question. However, suffering and painful discourses are in most cases not only a needless cruelty but have their political reasons. Change is thus harmful for those benefitting from the established discourse and challenges their good reasons. To say it in Connolly's words:

When the unexpected early Arab Spring of 2011 blossomed in Tunisia and fought hard for a politics of becoming in Egypt, one of the Westerners’ reflexes was to stay on the side of the winter doctrine. It was a revolution against an establishment closely allied with Western partners. The old order secured also cheap oil, the policy of Israel, control of migration, cooperation against terrorism, the Suez Canal, and a good liberal conscience of keeping fundamentalism at bay thereby legitimising collateral damage when pursuing the other ends. These constellations, as comfortable as they may have been for the West for a long time, are subject to change in a politics of becoming.

For Connolly, the crucial moment in the uprising of a social movement is the reaction of those in power and benefitting from structural power when suffering and injustice can no longer be hushed up. If they are prepared to integrate these demands politics of becoming can happen smoothly.Footnote ⁴ ‘Are you willing to support us in our politics of becoming?’ This is the crucial question that the Arab Spring asks the reluctant and fearful West. This question does not imply that all aims of the old order have to be given up but rather that the West has to face up to the question of Goethe's Gretchen: How do you feel about religion?

Historically, democracies felt often uneasy about religious rule and thus allied themselves with secularism. However, secularism does not necessarily need to be the creed of a liberal democracy and the precondition for human flourishing and global peace. The answer does not have to praise religious autocracy either. However, it has to reflect that the question about religion can also strongly imply the demand for dignity and justice. The poor vote for the Muslim Brotherhood because they were able to combine dignity and social justice under the flag of God. The Arab Spring relies as much on the economic gains of globalisation as on the lasting hardships of the economic crisis and the poor performance of the ruling elites to integrate mass population in the wealth society or at least protect them against the crisis. Currently, it seems that the West has less problems to give up secularism in foreign affairs, given its close alliance with Saudi-Arabia, a fundamentalist autocracy which shares its interest in the status quo, than to face up to the demand for social change that is implied in this question. The foremost aim should be to integrate not only Arab petro-dollars but the Arab people on equal terms in common projects, the Mediterranean Union for starters.Footnote ⁵

Maybe the return of religion in international relations does not need to be a revenge of God, as Gilles Kepel put it in his path breaking book on the return of religion,Footnote ⁶ but rather a source of public reasoning to cure these pathologies of modernisation as Jürgen Habermas has it.Footnote ⁷ Following Habermas's line of thought, the argument put forward here is that the Arab world can make a positive contribution with what it is most feared for: religion.

‘Strong religion’ has been introduced in the debate on religion in politics as a more neutral term for the ambivalent and partisan term fundamentalism but without changing too much of its meaning.Footnote ⁸ Strong religion can however also be used as a term to define faithful who do not downplay their religious convictions in public but are nevertheless prepared to engage in politics without the aim of establishing a religious autocracy and to share the power in a political framework that includes also more secular positions. From a more secular position, strong religion can be welcomed in politics for democratically representing an important segment of the people which should not be excluded as fundamentalist. In a broader Habermasian perspective, the integration of strong religion into liberal democracy and international relations can foster politics of becoming from development and democratisation to migration and civil right discourses. Religious discourses in exchange with secular discourses are not only rich enough to prepare cognitive notions and imaginations of a better world but also possess the motivational impact to work for them. Religious discourses which are themselves open to other religious and secular discourses can help to form islands of moral arguing in the transformation process of globalisation. Habermas calls societies which go beyond rigid secularism and accept religion as a moral source postsecular. I call revolutions that make the realisation of such a society possible postsecular revolutions. The uprising of the Arab world can be understood in terms of a postsecular revolution.Footnote ⁹ In Egypt and Tunisia the revolution was not an uprising against an atheist or thoroughly secular regime, but against an autocracy which legitimised its authoritarian rule by the securitisation of the religious-secular cleavage and an extremist religious enemy.Footnote ¹⁰ The claim had been that Islamic tendencies and terrorism had to be kept at bay by an authoritarian police state. Yet the revolting Muslims of the Arab Spring showed no tendency to behave like the usual suspects. They were not burning American flags or demanding the Sharia. The violence was foremost on the side of the secular regime against peaceful protesters. Set-backs to secular or religious autocracies are always possible but the means and aims of these revolutions point in a different direction. The Arab electorate in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya has confirmed the postsecular trend.

Thus, these revolutions should not be understood in the legacy of the Iranian Revolutions of 1979 but of the revolutions of 1989. The latter have been mainly understood as liberal revolutions. Because liberalism is usually connected with secularism it has been doubted that the Arab Spring has the potential for a lasting open society. However, already the revolution of 1989 had a religious component. Indeed, the revolutions of 1989 as well as the revolutions of 2011 can be understood as postsecular insofar as religious forces participated in an overthrow of autocratic regimes without establishing a religious autocracy.Footnote ¹¹ Taking both revolutions together as postsecular revolutions enables an understanding of the specific newness of theses revolutions and their contribution to progress and our understanding of working liberal societies. Indeed, postsecular revolutions can also happen in religious regimes that established themselves against a previous secular regime. The oppressed protest after the alleged vote-rigging in Iran 2009 which had been called by the protesters with the same name as the revolution of 1979 – Green revolution – can be termed postsecular. A movement with a religious outlook – the two presidential candidates Mousavi and Karroubi who were outmaneuvered by the election fraud were part of the religious establishment – overcomes the secular-religious dichotomy and integrates secular protesters against an autocratic regime in religious clothes.Footnote ¹²

Postsecular revolutions are defined by their aim to end a secular, religious, or mixed regime which legitimises its rule by the cleavage of secular vs. sacred or the exclusion of some religious communities and to build a society in which citizens with different world views are prepared to accept religious traditions as a guideline without seeking to establish a dominant religious creed or civil religion. Postsecular revolutions end regimes which use the secular-religious cleavage as an instrument to secure their power, claiming the need to control a high risk situation when excluding or oppressing dissidents. A postsecular society can integrate strong religion without reducing it to fundamentalism because each side of the cleavage is prepared to respect the participation of the other in a common public and democratic election that can see representatives of both sides accepted as winners and leave in both cases the common framework of a polity with strong religious and secular components intact. Postsecularism includes the legitimate use of force under due process of law against secular and religious extremists which fight these postsecular societies by violent means. This argument will be developed in three steps. The first section will debate Habermas's take on the revolution of 1989 and how his idea of a postsecular society can be connected with revolutions. In 1990 Jürgen Habermas tried to defend the critical potential of socialism which he believed was still important to balance the vices of capitalism. The revolutions of 1989, he argued, had brought nothing new to substitute this position and were just catching up with the West.Footnote ¹³ Ten years later, shortly after 9/11, Habermas pled for a postsecular society in which religion is not reduced to the question of violence but is appreciated for its potential. He now envisages religious semantics as a common source for moral and political agency with the potential to balance the pathologies of modernisation.Footnote ¹⁴ My argument is that this allows a fresh look at the Arab Spring beyond fears that tend to dominate the discourse. The revolutions show that religion does not have to be equated with violence and fundamentalism. They also enable a recast of the revolution of 1989 which were, as we can see by now, more than just catching up. Already in 1989 religion played are role in the revolution but this aspect was exactly what Habermas missed. Religion was already in communist times the harbor of moral arguing and thus a driving force for change and politics of becoming just as it is now. This connection justifies for both the term ‘postsecular revolutions’.

On the bottom of this argument about the nature of these two revolutions lies the question of the course of history and the implications of the modern idea of progress. I will defend a cautious notion of progress in the sense of a possibility to improve liberalism brought forward by postsecular revolutions in a second section. This second section criticises Francis Fukuyama's thesis of the end of history and the idea of progress which exchanges one system through another system.Footnote ¹⁵ Starting with Connolly and drawing on DahrendorfFootnote ¹⁶ and Weigel,Footnote ¹⁷ the argument is delivered that progress lies in the potential to criticise and improve the shortcomings of liberalism without the idea that this can be done once and for all. Religious communities and their potential of moral arguing foster this kind of progress. To defend this argument against fears of religious autocracies the secular myth of religious violence has to be deconstructed in a third section. In International Relations, this myth is linked to Huntington's clash of civilisations.Footnote ¹⁸ Relying on the argument of Cavanaugh,Footnote ¹⁹ this section addresses this myth with reference to the peaceful Arab Spring. If Muslim citizens who are feared for their fundamentalist potential can make a peaceful and postsecular revolution the power of this myth should be gone.

Rectifying revolutions and the postsecular society: Habermasian perspectives

Revolutions have the tendency to surprise observers. This was as true for the revolutions of 1989 as it is for the revolution of 2011. In 1989 it was particularly the democratic left of the West that had its difficulties to make head and tails out of it, just as today secularism has with the Arab Spring. In 1990, Jürgen Habermas did not see any potential in the revolutions to address the problems of Western societies, which is why he was still prepared to defend the need for democratic socialism as a resource to criticise liberalism.Footnote ²⁰ To him the revolutions had one thing in common which, despite their differences, justified speaking of them as one revolutionary act: ‘It presents itself as a revolution that is to some degree flowing backwards, one that clears the ground in order to catch up with developments previously missed out on.’Footnote ²¹ Habermas calls it ‘nachholende Revolution’Footnote ²² – catching-up revolution. The English translation states ‘rectifying revolution’ which shifts the meaning slightly.Footnote ²³ This orientation backwards to a constitutional democracy and developed capitalism explains for Habermas ‘a peculiar characteristic of this revolution, namely its total lack of ideas that are either innovative or orientated towards the future’.Footnote ²⁴ Thus, Habermas defended a non-communist left beyond the social democrats which ‘keeps alive the idea that socialism once meant more than state-welfare policies’.Footnote ²⁵

Habermas is certainly right that the problems of capitalism have not been solved, to the contrary. In the age of globalisation and with the turmoils caused by this economically driven transformation process the need for an alternative to express values beyond market prices is increasing. However, he might be wrong that socialism is needed or suitable for this task. In addition, his adherence to socialism might have beclouded his ability to grasp the significance and novelty of 1989. In 1989 the spearhead of secular atheism as a political ideology broke off. Communism which developed the secular legacy of the atheistic branch of Enlightenment to the outermost extreme ended in disaster. The course of history left the path that secularisation theory had predicted.

Ten years later Habermas is still looking for a critical alternative to deal with the shortcomings of liberalism and this time he has religion on his list. Habermas suggests the concept of a postsecular society which values the religious sources of public morality. Whereas the earlier Habermas was prepared to defend socialism for this purpose, a later Habermas promotes the postsecular society because despite the pressures of economisation and other modern pathologies this kind of moral argument is still at home in religious communities.Footnote ²⁶ Habermas seeks to start a translation process of secular and religious citizens for mutual learning and to heal shortcomings of modernisation. This postsecular society does not necessarily believe in God. In fact, Habermas does not want to talk about the Kantian relicts of God and immortality,Footnote ²⁷ but about the moral potential of religious communities and their semantics for a solidary society. It is open to debate how strict this focus on morality has to be and if a ‘strong reading’ which includes all aspects of religion, including Kantian versions of God and immortality for starters, is possible or only a ‘weak reading’ which reduces religion to a source of morality. The suggested reading here is the ‘strong’ version,Footnote ²⁸ even though Habermas work is ambivalent.Footnote ²⁹ A ‘strong reading’ can nevertheless illustrate the point in Habermas’ own words:

Independently of Habermas's intentions and how restrictive ‘archaic use of communicative freedoms’ has to be read as Habermasian deliberation, the crucial point for our debate here is to understand that ‘vital and nonfundamentalist religious communities’ or – with the term introduced before – strong religion can initiate, foster, and make revolutions in non-democratic and non-civil societies in order to bring them about, and that they can also overcome exclusivist and dominant aspects of liberal secularism. My argument from the perspective of a strong reading is that revolutions which are started not by religious militants but by believers with a moral imagination and a moral motivation to bring about a politics of becoming deserve indeed to be called postsecular revolutions. The revolutions of 1989 were postsecular in the full sense of the word: they started from religious islands such as the Catholic Church in Poland or the Lutheran Nicolai church in Leipzig, were able to create an alternative space of freedom and truth, ended a secular regime and brought about politics of becoming. The religious aspects of these revolutions were however sidestepped as George Weigel argued.Footnote ³¹ However, Weigel's own approach of putting the emphasis on the influence of Pope John Paul IIFootnote ³² stands not alone.Footnote ³³ Samuel Huntington's research on the third wave of democratisation highlights the developments in Catholicism in general as one of the most important roots of the third wave of democratisation which also affected the events of 1989.Footnote ³⁴ The work of journalists like the eyewitness Timothy Garton AshFootnote ³⁵ in particular, but also of Desmond O'GradyFootnote ³⁶ brought evidence of this line of argument to the wider public. The German journalist Joachim Jauer, a long-standing reporter for West-German media in the GDR, played aptly with the papal blessing Urbi et orbi, in his title Urbi et Gorbi to stress the impact of religion side by side with Gorbachev. It was certainly not a revolution of religious people alone and the religious people were not only Catholics. In Jauer's account also the Protestant impact is made visible, particularly in the GDR but also in Romania with the Hungarian Protestant Lazlo Tokes.Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, some coined the term of a Protestant Revolution.Footnote ³⁸ Even critical voices who deny the revolutionary character of these events, like Peter Maser, do not disavow the influence of Protestants in the changes of 1989.Footnote ³⁹ It was not a religious revolution or a revolutions steered by clerics or other religious personal but a revolution which included religious citizens and was powered by their faith and community. The same can be said for the Arab Spring. Without downplaying the role of secular activists or other influences like the economic situation in 2011 as in 1989, the Arab Spring has its roots in a Muslim majority which took their strength from faith without turning into religious militants. They defended peacefully their dignity against an autocracy and urged the West to engage in a politics of becoming. If postsecular revolutions are successful, they can establish a postsecular society. They can of course fail and end in a secular or a religious autocracy again. However, it would be wrong to categorise them just as a regressive step back or an intermediate step towards a secular liberal society. These revolutions have the potential to influence internationally the secular societies of the West to engage in a global politics of becoming and to alter longstanding and well-established secular rigidities of liberal societies. While it is still undecided if the postsecular revolution of the Arab Spring will fail or create postsecular societies at home, the course of history might be already shaped by the revolutions of 1989 and 2011, particularly in the direction of postsecular international relations.Footnote ⁴⁰ No one would doubt the impact of the French Revolution just because it had its diverse set-backs. To understand this argument in the context of the Habermasian philosophy it seems in order to focus on the central point of Habermas's worldview. For Habermas it is crucial that money and power as regulators of modern societies do not completely eliminate solidarity as a third regulative capacity: ‘Those areas of the lifeworld that specialise in communicating inherited values and cultural knowledge, in integrating groups and socialising rising generations, have always depended on solidarity.’Footnote ⁴¹ If progress is taken to include improvement, solidarity becomes particularly important when the marginalised do not have the power to push through their case for justice by themselves. One could thus argue that solidarity of the majority and thus morality, not class struggle, is history's motor for progress, or with Habermas:

This linkage of morality and politics can be understood as the core of a Habermasian position. From a global perspective, the task of a postsecular international society lies exactly in this potential to create a community out of strangers. Progress can then be understood as the improvement of liberalism beyond global capitalism in the sense of a postsecular cosmopolitism which has the cognitive and motivational strength to engage in politics of becoming.

Habermas addresses this issue of progress and its religious roots also in his essay on the revolutions of 1989. He mentions Karl Löwith's deconstruction of the idea of linear progress in history as a secular version of salvation.Footnote ⁴³ Löwith showed in his study that the Judeo-Christian tradition replaced the eternal return of the ancient by a linear idea of history marked by the milestones creation, fall of man, incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and the last judgment. According to Löwith this religious version was secularised in the modern idea of history and its linear narrative of this-worldly progress aiming at utopian paradise on earth.Footnote ⁴⁴ Although Löwith's critique of a secularised version of progress dates from 1949, the events of 1989 raise the question of progress again. Habermas understands the catching-up aspect of the 1989 revolution as ‘particularly confusing because it seems to remind us of a vocabulary supposedly superseded by the French Revolution: the reformist picture of the return of political regimes following one after another in a continuous cycle like that of the heavens’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This return of the continuous cycle would indeed end the modern idea of progress as something new which ended the old order for good and opened up the space for human flourishing towards a bright and lasting future. Habermas is not prepared to accept a return to cyclic thinking but neither does he accept the postmodern version of the end of history:

Habermas is still prepared to defend the idea of progress in the direction of a liberal democracy against the ‘image of a posthistorical standstill’. If history is still moving then the question of the direction of this development and the philosophy of history is back. At the time, however, Habermas was too caught up in the secular project to see the direction into which progress could be going in the revolution of 1989. It was not just catching-up with the secular West. If the extreme secularism of communism led to a dead end, a liberalism which abandoned secularism might be a step forward in the sense of progress. Religion can empower the self and reason in a postsecular perspective. Yet it is still true that as soon as religion is involved the association is regress.Footnote ⁴⁷ To deal with this problem, the next two sections elaborate on a postsecular notion of progress and revolution and the religious share in bringing about peaceful revolutions and politics of becoming.

Postsecular progress: the open end of history

With the perspective of a postsecular society Habermas moves very much in the direction Connolly wanted him to move.Footnote ⁴⁸ Criticising secularism and arguing for politics of becoming, Connolly aims at a political change which stands in the liberal tradition and in the legacy of Enlightenment. The postmodern take on religion is a pursuit of human flourishing reflecting the shortcomings of a secular modernity. Progress of mankind is still hoped and argued for. And indeed, Connolly acknowledges that he is very close to the classical idea of progress. His answer to the rhetorical question if we can become neo-Hegelians is a clear and loud: ‘We can, indeed.’Footnote ⁴⁹ However, he draws a thin but clear line between the politics of becoming and dialectical processes whose tendency of hoping for the end of history after a last more or less automatic chain reaction he disapproves.Footnote ⁵⁰ Connolly argues for deep pluralism and against pure politics to integrate as many as possible in flourishing societies but he does so without the presumption that following his path would solve all problems once and for all.Footnote ⁵¹ The key to progress can hence be identified as lying in the potential to criticise and improve the shortcomings of liberalism.

This type of neo-Hegelianism informed by a postmodern reading of Nietzsche is more complex than the easy-going end of history argument in favour of liberalism Fukuyama became famous for after the end of the Cold War.Footnote ⁵² Drawing theoretically on Kojève's interpretation of Hegel, Fukuyama declared the end of history as a victory of liberalism:

However, even Fukuyama has read Nietzsche and speculated if the spread of liberalism might foster the appearance of Nietzsche's last man.Footnote ⁵⁴ ‘“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” – so asks the last man, and blinketh.’Footnote ⁵⁵ These questions have an obvious religious undertone. But for Nietzsche God is dead. A pagan Superman is his alternative to the last man. The dominant sociological mainstream of secularism is still based on these Western attitudes of the nineteenth century which reached their heydays in the 1960s and 1970s.

In contrast to this dominant discourse it is striking how many still believe in this God that has been declared dead already over a century ago. Or to say it with David Aikman's ironical quote of an anonymous New York lawyer: ‘Millions of people out there believe what nobody believes anymore.’Footnote ⁵⁶ Peter Berger argued that the secularisation theory of the nineteenth century, which he participated to elaborate in the 1960s, was false. The world is ‘as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more than ever’.Footnote ⁵⁷ This argument about the return or persistence of religion has been widely debated over the last decade.Footnote ⁵⁸ But despite the overwhelming empirical record, political, and social science still have their secular sun glasses on and try to explain the data by defending and adjusting the secularisation theory, sometimes with ad hoc argumentsFootnote ⁵⁹ of which it is open to debate if Lakatos would appreciate them. The survival and flourishing of religion in modernity is still an astonishing phenomenon for IR scholars, anyway.

Even more striking is that same religious people who are scheduled for fading away in the course of progress, modernisation, and secularisation are not only alive but also kicking. It is them who we are engaged in changing world politics in revolutionary politics of becoming. The Nobel Peace Prize Committee, rather part of a secular establishment than one that would be suspected of religious tendencies, acknowledged this by giving the prize in 2011 to Tawakul Karman, honoring a women activist and a revolutionary of the Arab Spring who is also a faithful Muslim and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood party of Yemen. Indeed, in the last decades many of the laureates were religious people explicitly guided by their religious belief when they acted politically for peace: Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa, Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, Kim Dae-jung, just to mention a few. Contrary to the established discourse it can thus be argued that revolution, peace, and progress, in most recent times were brought forward by religious people.

One of the most significant changes of the last century was the end of communism and the Cold War. However, in 1989 the Norwegian Committee overlooked the impact of religion on these changes: the Nobel Prize winner was ‘only’ Gorbachev.Footnote ⁶⁰ The argument is not to claim the revolution of 1989 as a religious one but recover two long neglected aspects: the immense impact of religious revolutionaries and the oppressive secularism of the communist regimes. The revolutions of 1989 were directed not only against an economic and political but also against an atheistic system which tried at least in its heydays to destroy religion fully and oppressed it until the end.Footnote ⁶¹ Marxism as a child of the Enlightenment was indeed very successful to disregard religion as a political force, a success which is still visible in the liberal left, but the communist grip was unable to destroy religion and faith. In the end religious forces managed to topple the secular regime. It is no exaggeration to say that without the Polish Pope, the Catholic Workers of Poland, the Protestant Pastors in Leipzig and Temeswar, and the many believers who stuck to their convictions and brought them finally to public action, the revolutions would not have been possible.Footnote ⁶² The religious communities in the communist world were of course not immune against the pressure of the states and often failed. However, Christians managed to keep islands of morality and truth. These islands were kept open for their agnostic fellow citizens who searched for a public space beyond the domination of the state to keep their moral integrity as well. Thus, they have done first conspiratively and later through revolution what Habermas wants to happen publicly in a postsecular society: Christians and other believers making a contribution to change the shortcomings of the public discourse.Footnote ⁶³

It was not only the Nobel Prize Committee that overlooked the impact of religion. Francis Fukuyama was aware of religious fundamentalism as a potential challenger of liberal dominance but he judged its influence to be negligible.Footnote ⁶⁴ Fukuyama had no eye for the power of religion from the Polish Pope to the Mujahedin in Afghanistan that helped to bring down communism. Today Fukuyama seems cautiously optimistic that the Arab Spring has brought the end of history closer to the Muslim world.Footnote ⁶⁵

It is not the place here to recast the well-known debate about Fukuyama's end of history for discussing the current issue. Ralf Dahrendorf's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe,Footnote ⁶⁶ however, have an important point to make in the context of politics of becoming, Connolly's neo-Hegelianism, and the religious contribution to revolution and progress: Dahrendorf questions the idea of ‘system’ which Fukuyama takes for granted. Fukuyama argued that ‘[t]he triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.’Footnote ⁶⁷ For Dahrendorf the very idea of a systematic notion of politics is a red rag. Relying on Karl Popper's notion of an open society, Dahrendorf argues that the ‘road to freedom is not a road from one system to another, but one that leads into the open spaces of infinite possible futures, some of which compete with each other. Their competition makes history.’Footnote ⁶⁸

Dahrendorf goes in his critique so far as to declare that capitalism had ‘to be fought as hard as communism’Footnote ⁶⁹ if it would really be a system as well. A system is the opposite of freedom. Every system tries to determine the action of people according to rules which are seen as unchangeable and which rather sooner than later became subject to the interpretation of the ruling elite. Or in Dahrendorf's words: ‘All systems mean serfdom, including the “natural” system of a total “market order” in which no one tries to do anything other than guard certain rules of the game discovered by a mysterious sect of economic advisers.’Footnote ⁷⁰ This critique of the notion of system can help to understand the problem of secularism. A secular separation of political and religious authority and the disentanglement of their decision processes can be a very reasonable setup that aids the flourishing of religion as well as politics. However, secularism has the tendency to develop the character of a system in the sense criticised by Dahrendorf. Secularism imposes then rigid rules on a society which are interpreted by a small elite that dictates the rules of the game and has the power to enforce them. The secular despots of the Southern Mediterranean shelf tried to establish the claim that a democracy which brings religious forces to power has to be kept in check or even to be abandoned for the sake of secularism, and this argument was accepted and supported by the West. Since the Algerian elections in the earlier 1990s and the military coup against the election victory of the FIS this was a standing argument.

Of course, just as secular thought, religion can be brought into a system, too. The Iranian Revolution established such a system. Islamic terrorism was not only a boogeyman of the West, and the new variations of Salafism, the idea to establish a pure community like that of the forefathers of the first Muslim generation, is pure politics and certainly the opposite of deep pluralism or the politics of becoming The crucial task for any successful postsecular revolution, that is for both religious and secular citizen, is to overcome one system in the Dahrendorfian sense without establishing another. It is the task of creating an open society ready for politics of becoming. If progress is understood in terms of correcting the shortcomings of liberalism, religion could be seen as the ideal partner for democracy. George Weigel's claim about a final revolution in 1989 and the religious contribution to it can be understood in this sense. ‘The final revolution is not the end of history. It is the restoration of history to human dimensions.’Footnote ⁷¹ For Weigel this means the end of a human enforced utopia promised by communism and the return of ‘normal’ politics which has the ability to discern good and evil, to strive for the first and fight against the latter but all on a human scale of slow and painful little steps of progress towards preliminary ends.Footnote ⁷² This process might fail more often than it succeeds but it keeps on trying without enforcing a final victory once and for all by violent means. This ‘normal’ society is not too far away from what Dahrendorf calls with Popper an open society. To this liberal thinking the religious perspective can add an important contribution. Weigel argues that

Dahrendorf and Weigel represent as secular and religious citizen together a postsecular society which avoids the idea of a system of rule turned over by another system. To bring this final revolution about it needs, as always, two to tango. The old system must give way to the new order, thus already anticipating the politics of becoming to come. Stepping aside voluntarily and renouncing one's privileges takes great strength and vision, and Gorbachev, despite the point raised above, was therefore rightly awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize. The revolutionaries reacted with the establishment of the rule of law instead of revenge. Yet not only the direct adversaries have to accept the politics of becoming. The international system has to behave like an international society. The old West was prepared to accept the new East as a partner. The most demanding task was the unification of Germany for its neighbours and the integration of Central and Eastern Europe within the European integration projects. The West had the ability to propose conditionality – the Copenhagen Criteria – but the West had to support their fulfillment financially and accepted the candidate countries as equal partners with the right of entry as soon as they fulfilled the criteria, sometimes earlier.Footnote ⁷⁴

Similar questions return with the revolutions of 2011. The West was not able and not willing to back the secular autocrats against the peaceful protesters for democracy and rule of law and stay with its secular autocratic winter doctrine, despite its fear of a fundamentalist take-over. This fear made the Arab Spring more ambivalent for the West than the revolutions of 1989. It is here that the West has to accept that international relations become postsecular. Until the revolutions, the West's secular preference had turned the promotion of democracy in Muslim countries into a mock exercise because a secular dictator was preferred to an opposition with a Muslim outlook. This meant that the West wanted democracy for the Arab people but not by and through the Arab people, which leaves two of three of Lincoln's core definitions of democracy out. In the Arab Spring, however, it was no longer possible for the West to keep its winter doctrine just as it was not possible for France and Great Britain to veto the German unification process and for the EU to do anything else than to allow the whole of Europe to join. However, the story is still in the making. Israel stays firmly to its winter doctrine and the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring were not very vernal in this respect. The Copts of Egypt worry if the revolution is still the revolution they participated in or if it starts to eat up their children. The secular establishment still in power continues to play its divide et impera games. The Bloody Sunday of the 9 October 2011 (when more than twenty Christian Copts were killed) – so different to the crucial 9 October 1989 in Leipzig and its peaceful mass demonstrationFootnote ⁷⁵ – was a sign on the wall for the Muslim majority to defend the postsecular revolution for an open society together with their Christian minority against the establishment of any kind of autocratic system.Footnote ⁷⁶ As all countries of the Arab Spring still have to face the test of a transition period, the politics of becoming are still an open enterprise. From an international perspective, the same test applies to the West and the international community. Domestically and internationally, citizens and states can form a postsecular open society like sketched out by Habermas, Dahrendorf, and Weigel, but they can also insist on the blueprint of a secular or religious system. Winter doctrines come together as do politics of becoming.

A contradiction in terms? A peaceful, Muslim revolution

Whereas the last section showed with Weigel and against Fukuyama that religious people can make revolutions to a postsecular liberal end and that religion can be a motor for progress, this second section shows that this can be done peacefully. Samuel Huntington soon became the challenger of Fukuyama's end of history argument with his notion of a threatening clash of civilisations.Footnote ⁷⁷ Embedded in a wider argument about the myth of religious violence William T. Cavanaugh criticises Huntington together with Bernard Lewis, who invented the notion of a clash of civilisations,Footnote ⁷⁸ as those who used the myth of religious violence for the West's interest in international relations.Footnote ⁷⁹

Cavanaugh shows in his persuasive historical and textual genealogy of the powerful myth of religious violence that its usage for foreign policy is based on a much deeper foundation. It is the shift from the ecclesial to state power in early modern Europe which was fostered and secured by the construction of this myth. Later it was used to defend the nation state's power with the citizens’ obligation to kill and die for. The very idea of religion as a set of rules independent from public praxis but ascribed to private devotion was constructed in this process to satisfy the need of the emerging state.Footnote ⁸¹ ‘The new conception of religion helped to facilitate the shift to state dominance over the church by distinguishing inward religion from the bodily disciplines of the states. The new subject is thus able to do due service to both, without conflict.’Footnote ⁸² However, ‘the gradual transfer of loyalty from international church to national state was not the end of violence in Europe’,Footnote ⁸³ as Cavanaugh shows convincingly for the creation of the myth in wars of religion,Footnote ⁸⁴ which are notorious for the narrative of the Westphalian system.Footnote ⁸⁵ It is not the space here to develop Cavanaugh's far reaching argument any further. However, for a postsecular perspective on international relations it is crucial to keep the construction of the state via the myth of religious violence in mind. Religious discourses and their understandings of God, at least in the three monotheist traditions, have a universal, global perspective. Secularism becomes this way a defender of national sovereignty of the mortal God called Leviathan, whereas religion can foster postsecular cosmopolitanism. In our context, Cavanaugh's insights can be developed further by adding the secular violence of modern revolutions in Europe to the legacy of political violence.Footnote ⁸⁶ From this secular legacy, revolutions have to be bloody by definition. There has to be a violent up-rise, the king has to be executed and not only the king. The French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 are the hallmarks of revolutionary imaginations. Revolution and violence are conceptualised as twins. The peaceful change of 1989 has thus not been understood as revolution. Transformation made its career as the term to exam these events and changes. It is still the Marxian idea of class struggle and violent turnover which directs this course of research. Hannah Arendt, however, has in conceptualising revolution from the American perspective of 1776, freed the notion of revolution already in 1963 from its violent Jacobinic and Marxist-Leninist legacy. For Hannah Arendt, revolution is the beginning of something new. Change has to be radical, from the roots, but it can be peaceful. Actually, peaceful change is a precondition that there is no slash back and that the revolution will not itself turn into despotism. For Arendt, the social question is the source for violence. She believed that if the rich initiate the revolution, like the in case of the American colonies, there is a chance for peaceful change and the establishment of a liberal society. If the economic need of the poor like in Paris gains the upper hand, the argument of necessity will lead into the establishment of a totalitarian regime in charge of feeding the masses and legitimised by the virtue of their leaders in doing so.Footnote ⁸⁷ This rather pessimistic outlook had its empirical underpinning in the communist revolutions creeping across the postcolonial world until Arendt's death in 1975. The Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran could be easily integrated in this violent legacy of secular revolutions. It certainly serves as an illustration of how violent religious discourses can be and was a major contribution to keeping the myth of religious violence alive. The return of religion in politics could thus be constructed as an Islamic threat from Iran over Hamas to Al-Qaeda.

The revolutions of 1989 were different. The crucial thing of these revolutions was their peacefulness despite of their economic concerns. Christians were a crucial part of the revolution but more in the sense of the leaven the gospel tells them to be than as the majority. The peacefulness of the revolutions had something to do with the religious well they started from. As Pastor Führer from Leipzig argued, those who carry candles cannot throw stones.Footnote ⁸⁸ However, as we have seen above, the religious aspects of these revolutions have been sidestepped. As the long-standing myth of religious violence had it, religion in the political sphere of the turmoil after 1989 became only visible as soon it had something to do with violence as in the wars on the Balkans.Footnote ⁸⁹

In the case of the revolution of Tahrir Square, sidestepping the religious aspect was no longer possible. Whereas in 1989 mainly Christians were the religious protagonists, in 2011 they were to an overwhelming majority Muslims. They were praying in the streets and the Friday prayers were a crucial starting point for the Arab revolutions, as had been the Christian Monday prayers in Leipzig. This is not to say that the Muslim Brotherhood started the revolution. In fact, they had been latecomers. However, the so-called secularist protesters of the beginning (‘normal people’, bloggers, ultras) were not an Arab version of libertarian atheists but mainly ordinary Muslims. This is also not to say that out-spoken secularists were not part of the revolution. Secular minded people had an important impact, however the critical mass came from the Friday prayers. From a postsecular perspective the crucial point is that the sacred-secular cleavage was overcome in these revolutions and faithful but not extremists played an important part.Footnote ⁹⁰ Islam was no longer linked to a violent Arab crowd as the orientalist image had it.

The core of these revolutions is regime change through peaceful mass demonstrations which enforced democratic elections. This peacefulness, not the massive violence of Gaddafi and later Assad, or Ceausescu in 1989, which resulted in a split of the army laying the ground for civil war, set the bench. This new standard made the postsecular revolutions of 1989 and 2011 unique in the revolutionary legacy from 1789 to 1979. Violence is no longer a necessary companion of revolutionary progress, but religion might be. This is not to say that religion is the cause of this peacefulness, but the correlation shows that the causal relation of religion and violence is certainly false. The peaceful resistance of praying Muslims for due course of law, against corruption and humiliation, against dictatorship and in favour of democracy has the chance to bring the myth of religious violence to an end.

From an IR perspective, we are witnessing at the moment a significant shift: The new step towards progress is brought about by religious citizens combining strong religion with demands for democracy. It is too soon to tell how the situation will evolve.Footnote ⁹¹ However, what appears for the time being is that democracy is not just reaching the Arab World: the Arab World is adding a new postsecular flavour to democracy. Yesterday the question was if socialism would become obsolete, today secularism is called into question altogether. In both cases, world politics is affected.