No one looks for religious overtones in the war unleashed by Putin against Ukraine. The tomos elevating the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to autocephaly, issued in 2019, irritated Putin. It undermined his thesis that Ukrainians belonged to one common Russian “people”. It thus was personally humiliating for Putin. But it could not be a casus belli. And this war is not about faith.
Today, the religious identity of the state rarely determines the azimuths of foreign policy. Although it still sometimes does.
Pursuing a foreign policy course on the basis of belonging to a religious community was a natural instinct in building a coalition of states in the European Middle Ages. In nuce , the fellow believer was a natural ally, the infidel was a natural enemy. For centuries, religious solidarity has been an effective instrument for resurrecting a militant spirit in society and for the attribution of moral righteousness.
The ideals of a common Christian family were appealed to when forcing Arabs out of Europe. The Reconquista united the interests of the kingdoms of Navarre, Galicia, León, Asturias and Castile in the fight against Muslims. And during the reign of the Catholic Kings, it became a catalyst for the unification of the lands that became the bulk of Spain.
Attempts at creating a common Christian bloc to put a damper on Turkish expansion were less successful. The Byzantine Empire was initially able to cope with the onslaught of the Islamic world, but without the considerable help of Western Christian states, and sometimes even fighting them on the other front, as in the case of clashes with the Normans, who used the Byzantine preoccupation with the wars in the East to seize Byzantine possessions (in 1071 AD Bari was lost to them as the last Byzantine fortress in Italy). The Crusades initially brought relief and helped rebuild the power of the Byzantine emperors, but the fourth expedition (started in 1202) demolished and dismembered the Eastern Empire. Byzantyum struggled hard to resist the Seljuks and the Ottomans. The West, apart from mercenaries (for example, the famous Catalan Company in the 14th century), could not (did not want to) offer anything to help. The Byzantine Empire fell and the Turks continued their march north. They did so even without waiting for the capture of Constantinople in 1453.
The southern Slavs did not receive any serious help from the Christian brothers from the West. In Kosovo Polje, in 1389, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Bulgarians stood against the Turks, but they were not supported by Germans or Italians. The Hungarians, in order not to remain lonely, even chose Władysław of Varna as their king. And he led the Christian crusade of Hungarians, Poles and Wallachians, but the Venetian and Burgundian fleet, which the Pope had promised, did not move to help, and Władysław’s expedition ended in defeat. In 1526, it was Hungarians, Czechs, Croats and even Poles who joined the ranks against the Turks at Mohacs without the support of the West. With time, the Turks grew up to be a direct threat to the Republic of Poland. They contributed significantly to its exhaustion.
But after the successful relief of Vienna in 1683, it was possible to create a formal Christian alliance in the form of the Holy League with the participation of Poland, Austria, Venice and even Russia. It was effective in ensuring victory sealed at the peace agreed at the Serbian Karlovci in 1699, freeing Hungarians, Croats, Serbs, Peloponnesian and island Greeks from Turkish rule. In the coming decades and centuries Turkey was pushed out of Europe further, but without such clear-cut religious coalitions.
The idea of a Christian community prompted the creation of integration plans in Europe. For example, the great project of Jiri of Podebrady. However, it did not prevent religious wars. And the Thirty Years’ War confirmed the primacy of state interests (reasons of state) over religious solidarity. The attempt to revive Christian unity in the formula of the Holy Alliance in the 19th century was crushed when Christian Austria supported Muslim Turkey in the war against Christian Russia in 1855. The vision of mobilizing Europe under the sign of the cross finally ceased to appeal to the political imagination. Today, the Christian world does not generate any common political projects.
Sometimes the strength of common Christian roots makes itself felt in diplomatic debates. In November 2009, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg issued a first-instance judgement finding the Italian Government guilty of violating the Human Rights Convention on account of the presence of crosses in classrooms. The complaint was lodged by Ms Soile Lautsi. After the judgement of the Tribunal, a question on this matter was addressed to the Committee of Ministers by one of the members of the Parliamentary Assembly (MP Lipiński from Poland). At the end of January 2010, the Committee of Ministers Deputies held a debate on this question. At that time, I was the Permanent Representative of the Republic of Poland to the Council of Europe. I asked for the floor. However, I did not know that I would be the first to speak after the Italian ambassador who simply announced an appeal to the Grand Chamber of the Court in this matter. The interference by the Tribunal in regulating the presence of religious symbols in public space was by most States regarded as a dangerous precedent in a pluralist Europe. The status of religion varies in individual countries (there are still countries where religion has an official or quasi-official status); there are different traditions, and a different combination of national identity and religion. The sign of the cross is reflected on the national flags of a dozen or so European countries (e.g. there are five of these crosses on the Georgian flag). And the justification of the Tribunal’s ruling was very weak in substance. A discussion, unprecedented for years in the Council, developed, in which over twenty countries supported our position. Including countries such as Russia or Armenia, where the crosses in government offices and schools are not hung. The report from this meeting, in which I involuntarily became the main figure, was leaked to the Polish media. And one of the portals even titled it: “A Pole Fights for Crosses in Europe”. In 2011, the Grand Chamber changed the judgement of the first instance and decided that states have the right to regulate the presence of religious symbols in public space.
However, the political solidarity of the Christian family is a thing of the past. On the other hand, the idea of solidarity between the Islamic states is still politically operational. Its highest distillate for centuries has been pan-Islamism.
Islam was born in the intertwining of religion with the state. This link was embodied in the institution of the caliphate. The caliphate functioned in practice until the fall of the Ottoman Empire. And the Koran is widely recognized in the Islamic world as the basic document regulating all aspects of social existence, including the foreign policy of the state.
The emergence of Christianity was undoubtedly a turning point in the history of human civilization, but also Islam revolutionized the world, above all with its radical egalitarianism and the imperative of expansion. The conquered tribes were offered three options by Muslim rulers: conversion to Islam, protectorate in exchange for tribute and, lastly, the third option: total enslavement.
The world of Islam (“dar al-Islam”) was a unitary world. The Islamic brotherhood smoothed out ethnic differences. To this day, in Muslim countries, even secular ones like Turkey, the concept of national minorities refers only to non-Muslims. The unitary Islamic empire was to be ruled by a caliph. The caliphate combined the functions of spiritual leadership with political leadership. Islam did not know the maxim that the emperor was imperial and God was divine. Until the 1920s, the idea of the caliphate was put into practice. Under the rule of the Ottoman Turks, the caliphate reached truly imperial proportions. It died with the collapse of the Turkish Empire and the Kemal Ataturk Revolution. But to this day, the resurrection of the caliphate remains a political idea (the self-proclaimed caliphate was announced in 2014 by Daesh terrorists).
Islam’s mission was to constantly expand to incorporate the “dar al-harb” regions into its world, that is, regions beyond its control. For militant Islam, the pacts with the infidels were a temporary solution, a commitment with a limited duration.
The area of the Islamic world is naturally heterogeneous. In terms of ethnicity, large groups of Muslims are Arabs (up to 25 percent of Muslims in total), Hindus, Persians, Turks, and Indonesians. Islam broke up early into Sunni and Shi’ite camps following disputes over religious doctrine (and tradition).
The Sunni-Shiite schism has produced in recent years deep political quarrels in some countries. Likewise, ethnic differences came to the fore (Arabs, Persians, Turks, Pakistanis, Indonesians, etc.). And Pan-Arabism has historically been a stronger magnet than pan-Islamism. In countries with a predominantly Muslim majority, Islam is usually the official religion, but there are also countries with a secular model (Turkey). In the 1970s, Gaddafi wanted to make political and ideological Islam the third path between socialism and capitalism, but he did not succeed.
In 1969, at the summit of 25 Muslim states in Rabat, the Conference of Islamic States began its life, formalized in 1971. In 2011, it adopted the name of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. It is the only international political organization whose membership is based on a religious criterion. Russia, with around 20 million Muslims, is merely an observer, and India with over 200 million Muslims is still only a candidate (because Pakistan is blocking it).
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has built its political identity on the criticism of Israel and, more recently, on the fight against the persecution of Muslims in the West (a special summit of the organization was convened in 2005 to condemn the Danish caricatures of Muhammad!) as well as in the East (it stood firmly in defense of the Rohingya). In the 1990s, it wanted to promote the idea of a Muslim model of human rights based on sharia (the so-called Cairo declaration). But it’s been quiet now on this issue for a decade (and maybe it’s a good thing it’s quiet).
The future of pan-Islamism must be viewed with skepticism. Interests with a religious overtone will inevitably lose their importance as societies are secularized (it will also affect Muslim societies) and states become more and more secular. It should be presumed that pan-Islamism will not generate spark for a cardinal political joint action.
Of course, contacts with the diplomatic services of Islamic states require appropriate cultural preparation. As director of the foreign policy planning department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I had consultations in Muslim countries during Ramadan. The hosts suggested either to postpone the consultations or to follow with them the daily fast. I chose the fasting. However, I saw how a whole day of fasting weakened and slowed down my own and interlocutors’ performance after just a few days. Ramadan is not the time for diplomatic activity there.
I felt sorry for Western diplomats, especially women, for the restrictions placed on attire (scarves and coats in Iran) and other aspects of life in Muslim countries. The practical challenge for our diplomats in several Islamic countries with total prohibition was how to ensure the necessary supply of alcohol. The standing anecdote reflecting the challenge is a story about a phone call to our embassy in one of these countries from the customs office at the airport, asking if the embassy was expecting a shipment of a piano packed in a box. “Yes, what’s going on?” – confirmed our diplomat. “Come pick it up quickly, your piano is leaking”.
I myself was involved in a rather embarrassing situation on departure from one very prohibitive country, when, while scanning the checked baggage, it turned out that one of our quite numerous delegation members was carrying a bottle of whiskey. But he had bought it in Okęcie Airport and nobody noticed it on arrival. The “contraband” was only detected on departure and the diplomatic passport did not help. For several minutes we were conducting difficult negotiations, which, however, ended in failure. The officials did not allow the bottle to be taken away. I am ashamed to admit, but the whiskey was so valuable to the owner that he invited his fellow delegation for a quick farewell cocktail for its consumption (in front of the shocked guardians of local morals).
