Taking Religious and Cultural Pluralism Seriously

Abstract

The Western culture of modernity and the institutions of international society embedded in it are being challenged by the global resurgence of religion and cultural pluralism in international relations. This resurgence is part of the larger crisis of modernity. It reflects a deeper and more widespread disillusionment with a “modernity” that reduces the world to what can be perceived and controlled through reason, science, technology, and bureaucratic rationality, and leaves out considerations of the religious, the spiritual, or the sacred. In the second instance, the global resurgence of religion is the result of the failure of the modernizing, secular state to produce both democracy and development in the Third World. This failure became evident by subsequent “political decay”—the decline of politics into authoritarianism, patrimonialism, and corruption since the late 196os—and by “political collapse”—the disintegration of some states, particularly in Africa, since the late 198os.² Dissatisfaction with the project of the postcolonial secular state and the conflict between religious nationalism and secular nationalism was one of the most important developments in Third World politics in the 1990s.³

People Are people Through other people

—Xhosa proverb from South Africa

A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large…. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions¹

—G. K. Chesterton