Code module : (M0M1CIV2) NOM DE NAISSANCE : MAHELELAINE

Enseignant : Christophe GILLISSEN NOM D'USAGE :

Numéro ou titre du devoir : Nation et Religion Prénom : ANIS ABDERRAOUF
Numéro étudiant : 22000159
Date limite de retour : /
CEMU : OUI / NON

Observations du correcteur :
(M0M1CIV2) Civilisation: constructions des sociétés et
des identités
MAHELELAINE ANIS

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, also known as the
United Kingdom (UK) is located in the Northwest of Europe, surrounded by the
Atlantic Ocean, North Sea and the English Channel. The UK is a not a nation-state
but a Political Union or a “multinational state” that was formed by linking and joining
up several historical nations such as: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
which can be represented by ‘the Union Jack flag’ and also plenty of islands and areas
that are still under the British Monarchy such as the Isle of Man. The capital is
London in England, one of the most influential and powerful capitals worldwide.
Even after coming together, each nation in the United Kingdom conserved its own
national identity and institutions (ethnic, culture, linguistic, religions, family and even
language). Nationalism comes from nationality, a political principle that means the
sense of belonging to one’s own nation, share and support its principles and interests,
which can also be linked to the term “independence”

So putting into consideration that the UK is a multi-national state made up by multiple

countries, how can we discuss the links between nation and religion under the
influence of a defined geographical area at a certain time? can religion affect
nationalism or vice-versa?

State and Nation in the United Kingdom: The Fractured Union - Michael Keating
 Let us start by discussing what is a nation, Guibernau (1996, p. 47) has defined the
nation as: ‘a human group conscious of forming a community, sharing a common
culture, attached to a clearly demarcated territory, having a common past and a
common project for the future and claiming the right to rule itself’. So territory,
history, culture, language and religion all matter.1 However, it is not likely in the real
world to find a nation with a clear-cut and homogenous character in terms of what
was early described as a ‘nation’. Each nation is special in the (alleged) makeup of its
special character and worth. One crucial question is whether – and to what extent – a
group must be aware of its alleged distinctiveness from other groups, in order to be
classed as a nation. One could argue that a nation can objectively be defined as a
group of people which possesses a shared and distinct, historically persistent cultural
identity, and which makes up a majority within a given territorial area. If that is the
case, then one could argue that even if such a ‘nation’ is not pushing for a right to
self-determination (in any form), it nevertheless is a nation. ‘Nation’ as a word and a
label is still evolving, and being applied in new contexts.

Although the differences and tensions between the nations as England had always
been the dominant but they came to form a political union and “A British Identity”
Great Britain reformation started with Scotland and Wales although with Scotland it
was more fluent as it came together with England to a common religion, Certainly, the
former were mostly Anglicans while the latter were mostly Presbyterians, but they
could identify as Protestants. To be British was to be Protestant, as opposed to
majority Catholics on the continent.

There were attempts to merge the two nations but these attempts failed and ended in
1707 when England and Scotland united as “Great Britain” under Queen Anne. There
were several reasons for this union, says Christopher A. Whatley, a professor of
Scottish history at the University of Dundee and author of The Scots and the Union:
Then and Now. 2 One was the fact that Scotland was in debt after trying to establish a
colonial empire in the Americas the same way that England, Portugal and Spain had
done.

“The Scots recognized that the Realpolitik, if you like, of the situation was that if they
were to establish markets overseas, contacts overseas, they needed the support of a
stronger maritime power, which was England,” he says.

Nationalism, Self-determination and Secession by Geoff Andrews and Michael Saward. 1

https://www.history.com/news/united-kingdom-scotland-northern-ireland-wales 2
Many Scots also saw the union as a way of preventing the Catholic Stuarts from
reinstating an absolute monarchy, and securing Scotland’s future under a Protestant
constitutional monarchy. For England, there was concern that if it didn’t unite with
Scotland, the country might side against England with France in the War of the
Spanish Succession. So in 1707, England agreed to give Scotland money to pay off its
debts, and both countries’ parliaments passed the Acts of Union to become one
nation.

After that Wales officially joined Scotland and England and became a part of the
Great Britain in 1707 and then the United Kingdom in 1801. Then the cohesion of
Ireland as King James I of England was actually King James I of Ireland as well as it
says in the 1542 Crown of Ireland Act. But Ireland did not last very long due to
certain elements at that time, if we take the three pillars of the “British identity” as
they were defined by Linda Colley. First of all, a common religion. The vast
majorities of the Irish were Catholics, and could not identify with a British
Protestantism which had a real anti-Catholic dimension. This anti-Catholicism was
official: by law, the British monarch was not and cannot be Catholic or even marry a
Catholic. And until 1829, no Catholic could even sit in parliament. That was one of
the biggest problems at that time, with different religious dimensions and background;
the idea of a Homogenous Society within different nations was far beyond seeing.

Between 1919 and 1921, the Irish felt as if they were the victims of an imperial
project and England as a colonizer. After 120 years of political turmoil almost
constant, several insurrections and a war of independence led by the Irish Republican
Army independence was taken from the U.K. The Irish War of Independence ended
with the division of Ireland; in 1922 the south of the island obtained its political
autonomy in 1921. And the north-east of the island remained within the United
Kingdom which changed its title to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland, and it only was because many English and Scottish settlers settled
there in the 17th century, and that their descendants considered themselves primarily
British. The southern region became the Irish Free State, which, despite its name, was
still a part of the British Commonwealth. In 1937, the southern region became the
sovereign nation of Ireland (or the Republic of Ireland).

After the Second World War Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland took and increase
direction toward nationalism and noticed more and more activists and political
movements and parties that emphasized on independence from the UK. The United
Kingdom was in a weak state especially from within and the British Identity was
already delicate and fragile due to the already existing issues between the coexistent
nations within the UK (separatists in Scotland, Protestants and Catholics, poverty...)

According to Catterall Pippa; “the gradual unravelling of the post-Reformation nexus

between Church and State in the UK and the period of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries is seen as a key hinge moment, both in terms of Church-State
relations and of changing sensibilities about the role of religion in framing social and
constitutional responsibilities. Trajectories from c.1830 are explored through three
prisms:the 'guided retreat' from a close relationship between churchmanship and
citizenship; the shift instead to religious organisations seeking spiritual autonomy; and
a growing emphasis on what religion has to say about social and economic order. The
analysis of the state of constitutional relations between religion and the British state at
the start of the twenty-first century in the context of developments such as the
Equality Act 2010 and the Global War on Terror.

What was important to focus on and study about The UK at that time was especially
the relation between Religion and Nations. Religion can motivate and intensify
nationalism, or moderate and even suppress it which can be considered as a very
significant phenomenon that, in a sense, determine human social and historical
essence, existence and purpose. In the UK Catholic and Protestant’s traditions differ
significantly due to the supranational and hierarchical institutionalization of the
Catholic Church compared to the national and sub-national institutionalization of
Protestant denominations, which put the traditions of these two at opposite sides in
terms of the national-religious configurations they generate, a proper understanding of
the development of nationalism should incorporate the direct and indirect influences
of religion. However, Nikola Sedlar argues that ‘the relationship between religion and
nation is only marginally debated in social-philosophical, anthropologic, and
sociological theories of nation, as well as in the philosophy and sociology of religion.
Anthropologists and sociologists on the one hand, claim that mutual territory,
economic interests, language, culture, origin, state, consciousness, character etc. are
constitutive factors of the forming of a nation, but they rarely mention religion.
Religiologisits and theologians, on the other hand, when discussing nation and
religion, always mention a certain difference between religion as a universal,
transcendent and eschatological entity, and nation as a secular and historical
particularity.’

National identity links directly with religion that in this particular situation considered
as “the truth” each religion and belief will deliver different meaning of truth both
moral and cognitive and transmits different beliefs and social ideas and this social-
religion basis group becomes one of a nation, and according to James Dingley, a
professor at the University of Kurdistan; “this nation becomes morally and
cognitively exclusive of non-religious members since they will hold different truths
and so cannot be trusted, they cannot be ‘loyal and true’. Ireland and Northern Ireland
provide a classic example of this, where Catholic and Protestant were the mediums for
transmitting Romantic or Enlightenment versions of the truth and so provided a basis
for opposed ideas of nation”
Catterall, Pippa 2021. Religion, Parliament, State and Nation since the Glorious Revolution. in: The Cambridge Constitutional
History of the United Kingdom Cambrfidge Cambridge University Press
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nationalities-papers/article/nationalism-and-religion-in-comparative-perspective-a-
new-typology-of-nationalreligious-configurations/7965D0CEC6C6A680007386D50D12B95E
On the relationship between religion and nation - Papers on Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology and Pedagogy
Religion, truth, national identity and social meaning: The example of Northern Ireland-James Dingley
Northern Ireland was created in 1920 during the partition of the island. Six counties in
the northeast of the island were detached from the others and remained within the
United Kingdom. In this new territory, two groups, or two communities, coexisted: a
Protestant majority and a minority Catholic. In the 1960s, about a quarter of voters did
not have the right to vote in municipal elections because they did not meet one of the
conditions; it was the case for most of the Catholics. On the other hand, some
Protestants voted more than once, if they had several accommodations and several
shops. These provisions partly explain why social housing and jobs were reserved for
Protestants. Granting social housing or employment to a Catholic was tantamount to
giving him the right to vote, an example of how much religion can influence in a
nation, as nationalism includes two things “a theory and a practice”. The question that
could be asked at that time; could Irish Catholics in the 19th century forgotten the Irish
Nationalism in favor of being British and part of the UK where Protestantism
mattered less and where they could gain the right to vote as their neighbors Scots and
Welsh had already happily accepted ? That “if” required the obligation of forgetting
the whole Irish history and prior to 1829 and the role of religion in all of that.

In the words of a very recent writer Liah Greenfield and from “The Construction of
Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism” ‘The birth of the English nation
was not the birth of a nation, it was the birth of nations, the birth of nationalism.’
Moreover, its importance lies also in its relationship with religion and in the precise
impact of English nationalism on its neighbors and colonies. As Hobsbawm define the
national state as the “national church” and nationalism as a “new secular religion.”
 To conclude, by questioning the relationship between religion and nation is as
interrogating between culture and politics. According to Pascal-Yan Sayegh in his
book “Religion and Nationalism in Contemporary Europe: Towards a Renewed
Syncretism?” argues that ‘Interrogating this relationship is also the predicament in the
study of nationalism. The importance of the political (civic, Western) aspect of
nationalism and the cultural (ethnic, Eastern) can be hotly debated, but this tension is
itself a representation of nationalism. The discourse of nationalism thus remains an
ambivalent and nationalism operates as a rather inclusive ideology. 3 In short,
nationalism already posits the relation between culture and politics as fundamental for
its reproduction and its critique. As the opening quote from Hobsbawm suggests,
there is an established and perhaps too obvious connection between religion and
nationalism.4 The quasi-religious discourse in Renan’s “What is nation?” (the notion
of sacrifice e.g.) shows how nationalist myths are closely related to and perhaps of the
same nature as religious myths.5 The fact this relation is too obvious may be part of
the reason why this issue is seldom addressed.6

2.The term assemblage is the accepted translation of the French word agencement (which relates to agency) in
reference to Gilles Deleuze. The Deleuzian concept of agencement assigns novelty the progress of what composes
these assemblages rather than simply to the relation between the composing parts. See e.g. Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 23.
3 See e.g. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State.
4 Other leading scholars in the field of nationalism have drawn connections between religion and nationalism.
Benedict Anderson for instance places nationalism on the same level as the “great religiously imagined
communities”, in Imagined Communities, Verso, 1983, p. 12. In a different tradition, the works of John Armstrong
focus on the formation of ethnic and national ties within the religious framework of Christianity or Islam. See e.g.
Nations before Nationalism, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1982.
5 Ernest Renan, “'Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?' Conférence faite en Sorbonne, le 11 mars 1882”, e-text, Bibliothèque
Municipale de Lisieux, 1997, <http://www.bmlisieux.com/archives/nation01.htm> [last accessed 25.03.2010]
6 Going beyond the scope of this paper, the fact that such relation is so obvious should make us ask ourselves
about how just our postulates are.
Annotated Bibliography

 Nationalism, Self-determination and Secession by Geoff Andrews and

Michael Saward, on the definition of nationalism and what makes a
nation.
 https://www.history.com/news/united-kingdom-scotland-northern-
ireland-wales. Construction of the British Isles and joining the UK to
forming a multi-national state.
 Catterall, Pippa 2021. Religion, Parliament, State and Nation since the
Glorious Revolution. in: The Cambridge Constitutional History of the
United Kingdom Cambrfidge Cambridge University Press
 On the relationship between religion and nation - Papers on
Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology and Pedagogy
 Religion, truth, national identity and social meaning: The example of
Northern Ireland-James Dingley
 The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism
 The term assemblage is the accepted translation of the French word
agencement (which relates to agency) in reference to Gilles Deleuze.
The Deleuzian concept of agencement assigns novelty the progress of
what composes these assemblages rather than simply to the relation
between the composing parts. See e.g. Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans.
Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p.
23.
 See e.g. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State.
 Other leading scholars in the field of nationalism have drawn
connections between religion and nationalism. Benedict Anderson for
instance places nationalism on the same level as the “great religiously
imagined communities”, in Imagined Communities, Verso, 1983, p.
12. In a different tradition, the works of John Armstrong focus on the
formation of ethnic and national ties within the religious framework of
Christianity or Islam. See e.g. Nations before Nationalism, University
of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1982.
 Ernest Renan, “'Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?' Conférence faite en
Sorbonne, le 11 mars 1882”, e-text, Bibliothèque Municipale de
Lisieux, 1997, <http://www.bmlisieux.com/archives/nation01.htm>
[last accessed 25.03.2010]