Conventional views assume a systematic intertwining between the Orthodox Church and the state, which makes Orthodox countries culturally hostile to modernity. These views have been shaped by a long history of antagonistic relationships between Western and Eastern European states and fail to grasp important long-term trends within the Orthodox religious landscape. The political culture in Orthodox countries has undergone several changes across the centuries. Under the East Roman (Byzantine) Empire, complementarity provided the blueprint for church-state relations. In later centuries, this model was modified to suit the Ottoman and Russian empires. Modernization also prompted Orthodox states to create state churches. Church-state separation was further pursued by communist and colonial regimes and was sometimes accompanied by the active persecution of clergy and the faithful. The political culture of modern Orthodox countries was decisively shaped by the nationalization of the faith, spurred by various national revivals. In the 19th century, Orthodox Christianity became a nationalized religion, whereby strong associations were established between newly constructed churches in Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania and these countries’ respective nations. This version of Orthodoxy was exported into the New World through communities of East European immigrants. The communist takeover of Eastern Europe further strengthened administrative fragmentation. After 1989–1990, the fragmentation of the USSR allowed for a more open expression of the model of national religion. Orthodoxy was revitalized but also served as a cornerstone for Russian, Ukrainian, and Estonian national identities, leading to regional ecclesiastical disputes. Current institutional dilemmas have resulted from these long-term processes.
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Church, State, and Political Culture in Orthodox Christianity
Victor Roudometof
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Nationalism and Party System Formation in Southeast Asia
Andreas Ufen
Because the party literature is dominated by approaches with references to Western, especially European, party systems, it tends to neglect the specific circumstances of party system formation in colonial and postcolonial settings. This includes the role of agency, especially by foreign and Indigenous elites interested in crafting political, partisan cleavages. This can be studied by comparing Indonesia and Malaysia, two neighboring countries with many similarities but very different cleavage structures and trajectories. In British Malaya, Malay groups led by aristocrats reached independence rather smoothly through negotiations with the slowly retreating colonial power. The hegemonic national model was henceforth essentially Malay, royalist, and Islamic. Ethnic minorities and their respective cultures and languages were tolerated, with certain minority rights explicitly legitimated, but the national culture was leaning toward an exclusionary stance. The preindependence, elite-centered construction of an illiberal consociational arrangement and the parallel state violence against the leftist opposition resulted in postindependence political stability against a backdrop of restricted spaces for civil society coupled with conservative Islam and Malay chauvinism. The political left had already fundamentally been weakened beginning in 1957, and a conservative coalition of ethnically based, elitist parties dominated politics through semicompetitive elections. The major structures of the party system formed during the critical juncture in the late 1940s until the early 1950s existed until the mid-2010s before a slow disintegration of old coalitions and parties began. By contrast to British Malaya, in the Netherlands Indies a radically anticolonialist, well-rooted nationalist movement led by middle-class activists emerged, creating a fundamentally new notion of being “Indonesian” and supporting a religiously tolerant, multiethnic, democratic nation-state. After 1945, the movement was further instilled with nationalist passion by fighting an independence war against the returning Dutch. The period from 1945 until 1949 was marked by a number of social revolutions, and local aristocracies were substantially weakened. A mass-based and militant nationalist movement fighting against the colonial power resulted in social conflicts that were not settled at the time of independence. The path after the formation of the party system until the 1950s was interrupted by a long period of authoritarianism, but mass organizations such as Nahdatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, certain dynamics of interparty competition, and the attempt at solving political conflicts consensually still characterize party politics in Indonesia. In short, deep political cleavages produced a strongly polarized party system, resulting in a long period of authoritarianism and eventually a resurgence of old cleavages in a newly democratized polity after 1998.
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Zapatistas and New Ways of Doing Politics
Richard Stahler-Sholk
Scholars of Latin American social movements since the 1980s have sought to explain the apparent upswing in cycles of contentious politics, the innovative characteristics of these new movements, and variations in how they interact with or sidestep conventional institutional politics. The regional context for these developments is very different from the postmaterialist conditions said to have spawned European “new social movements” since the 1970s revolving around identity and values, such as ecology, peace, gay rights, and women’s movements. Relevant causal factors for Latin America’s contemporary movements include popular reaction against neoliberal policies imposed by international financial institutions and brokered by national governments. Another factor was the transition from military authoritarianism in much of the region, inaugurating a struggle between political elites with a liberal-representative vision of democratization and social movements favoring radical/participatory democracy. The era of globalization also brought reexamination of the citizenship pact and of the hegemonic (mestizo) construction of the nation-state, fueling a reinvigoration of indigenous movements, some with their own cosmovisions of buen vivir (living well) that destabilized mainstream notions of the political. The interplay between party-electoral politics and grassroots movement activism took place against the backdrop of the “pink tide” of elected leftist governments, which swept much of the region in the first decade of the 21st century and subsequently appeared to recede. Throughout this period, scholars and activists alike debated whether fundamental change could best be achieved by movements pushing parties and governments to use state power to enact reforms or by movements themselves adopting radically horizontal and inclusive patterns of organizing—“new ways of doing politics”—that would transform society from below.
The January 1, 1994, Zapatista uprising among mostly Maya peasants in the poor southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, launched the day the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, became emblematic of new ways of doing politics from below. What began as a rebellion of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [EZLN]) quickly morphed into a social movement that both criticized national and global power structures and sought to empower local communities through everyday practices of de facto autonomy. Negotiations with the state over indigenous rights and culture quickly broke down, but the Zapatistas proceeded anyway to develop their own structures of self-government, autonomous education, healthcare, justice, and agrarian and economic relations, among other innovative practices. The Zapatista movement continues to raise important issues such as the role of culture and identity in popular mobilization, the social spaces for organizing in an era of globalization, the new characteristics of movements that practice alternative forms of prefigurative politics, and the possibility of redefining power from below. Scholars of the Zapatista movement have also posed probing self-reflective questions about the adequacy of conventional definitions of politics and Western positivist epistemologies and about the need for decolonizing research in indigenous and other oppressed communities.
