Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas:  jgo.e-reviews 7 (2017), 3 Rezensionen online / Im Auftrag des Leibniz-Instituts für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung in Regensburg herausgegeben von Martin Schulze Wessel und Dietmar Neutatz

Verfasst von: Boris Knorre

 

Religiöse Pluralität als Faktor des Politischen in der Ukraine. Hrsg. von Katrin Boeckh / Oleh Turij. München, Berlin, Leipzig [usw.]: Biblion Media, 2015. 475 S., Tab., Graph. = DigiOst, 3. ISBN: 978-3-86688-504-2.

The collective monograph Religiöse Pluralität als Faktor des Politischen in der Ukraine prepared and released by the Institute of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, presents articles on several thematic clusters, written by a team of authors. The first section of the book is devoted to church-state relations, in addition, the book presents the following sections: Religion and religious diversity in modern society, The Churches and authoritarian regimes, The religious dimension in the historical memory, Religious minorities and religious culture.

The subject of church-state relations received special attention. The overall book concept was outlined in the preface by Professor Katrin Boeckh and Professor Oleg Turij, the editors of the book who note that the issue of the religious factor characterizing the current political situation in Ukraine is urgent, as the churches and faiths often affect the formation of political views in the short term, but also affect medium-term parameters, in addition, they often determine long-term values and social rules. The study of churches and religious communities can account for the degree of democratization of a state. The fact that religious communities may also be political actors follows from the effect they produce on the attitudes of social groups towards the authorities and from an assessment of the activities of public institutions at the level of everyday politics. At the same time, they are part of the policy-making mechanism and may affect the country’s Constitution or the implementation of the Constitution in the legal framework and practice, towards which the reality of the country’s Constitution moves.

Boeckh and Turij note that “faiths and religious communities constitute an integral part of political life, because religious identity affects the sense of unity of the nation and the state, it helps develop a civil action, and thus motivates its members to civil activity beyond the church environment as well” (p. 3). It is no accident that this book is primarily focused on the issues of church-state relations in the post-Soviet Ukraine. In particular, the article by Yuri Reshetnikov Which model of relations between the state and churches does Ukraine need? analyzes the attempts and the prospects for the formation of new principles of church-state relations in the prism of selection of the three most renowned models of such relations, according to the classification of religious scholars Silvio Ferrari and Jelena Mirošnikova (p. 97–98): separation model (das Trennungsmodell), cooperation model (das Kooperationsmodell) and identification model (das Identifikationsmodell – means a model of the established church). Reshetnikov says that instead of the principle of “separation of church and state” practiced in the Soviet time, most Western countries follows the principle of “separation from the Church and the state”, which differs from the first, which means “equal relations between State and Church, the autonomy of the State and the Church in the areas of their own competence” (p. 101). According to the researcher, this model will also suit Ukraine, which also means that “the state does not identify itself with any religion, any religious community, and acts neutrally towards various religious institutions”. In practice, however, the implementation of this principle can shift both to the side of the state and that of the Church, and this principle can also assume the form of lack of interaction and cooperation of church and state – “in many countries, the state does not interfere in the internal life of churches but at the same time directly or indirectly finances religious organizations, providing donations to their socially useful associations or educational institutions” (p. 101).

In the article The Churches in the Ukraine and the European Question Martin Paul Buch­holz shows that after the churches were released from state control and management of the Council for Religious Affairs, a new model of relations started to give its fruits. The churches began to act as independent socio-political players in the international arena and even to influence the development of values that are acceptable both for Ukraine and Europe. Churches contribute to discussions around these key European issues, expressing their own opinions, requests, and appeals.

Contributors of the book point to an interesting institutional innovation, made in 1996 by the decree of President Kuchma in Ukraine in the circumstances of religious pluralism, referred to as the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations. As Martin Buchholz puts it, this body “represents an independent panel and interacts with the state, society, and European institutions when religious interests are at stake”, giving as an illustration the situation where, during the discussion of the EU law on homosexuality in 2007, Ukrainian Churches strongly opposed and rejected the rules equalizing homosexual marriage with traditional marriage (p. 83–84).

In 2007, a number of Ukrainian Christian Churches of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations made a statement about their attitudes toward homosexuality, in which they explained they could not accept homosexuality. The All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations urged the President to secure that, given that a meeting of the European Council on this issue was scheduled in the near time, the law equalizing homosexual marriage with traditional marriage would receive no consent on the part of Ukrainian representatives. Most of the population of Ukraine – 90 %, according to the statement – would oppose the law, a few requirements to the secular authorities in Ukraine were put forward to oppose this law, and even the requirement to establish a special state body which would carry out the cooperation between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Church Council. That is, an article, among other things, refutes a number of myths which have developed around the European path and European choice of states. Buchholz notes that Ukraine does not idealize Europe as the “Promised Land”.

Katrin Boeckh also elaborates on the advantages of churches functioning without state regulation in a very comprehensive article, covering the whole century, entitled Church and state institutions in Ukraine. Transformation functions of the State Committee for Religious Affairs (1917–2013) [Kirchen und staatliche Institutionen in der Ukraine. Die Transformationen des Staatskomitees für Religiöse Angelegenheiten (1917–2013)]. It shows that the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and religious organizations proved to be independent, not only at the institutional level (independent from the government), but also in terms of distancing from any politics as such. Being established as an inter-church body, from which one would expect the desire to abolish the institutions regulating church life which were creted in Soviet times, the Council nevertheless in 2010 opposed the abolition of the Ukrainian Council for Religious Affairs, when “Yanukovych tried to abolish this Council with a view of state governance optimization”.

It is no coincidence that the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and religious organizations is analyzed in many articles of the book, as this body indeed very clearly articulates a model of interaction between the churches and the state and society without the intervention of the state and churches in the internal affairs of each other. As Myroslav Ma­rynovych notes in the article State Favouring and freedom of religion. One Statement [Staatliche Favorisierung und Religionsfreiheit. Ein Statement], the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations appeared to be a bright example of changes in Ukrainian society (p. 109).

In its own, the rise of such an institution marked a change in the consciousness of the churches: the transition from the confrontational attitudes with respect to one another in the direction of cooperation. Marynovych defines this change as a socio-cultural shift, the rejection of the “zero sum game” pattern (“Nullsummenspiel”) in favor of “games with a nonzero sum” when churches begin to think in the logic of “surplus value” (die Logik des “Mehrwerts”), knowing that their good fruits and success in a society depends not on how the public will be able to force their opponents out of the social field, but on the ability to find points of contact and cooperation with them (pp. 107–112).

While focusing on the process of self-determination of the churches through liberation from dependence on the state, few authors (Boeckh, Turij, Marynovich, Söller, Lyubashemko) discuss also the problem of instrumentalization of the churches by the state during the Soviet period. In particular this problem was encountered by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate which after World War II was considered by the Soviet powers as a tool for spreading Soviet ideology and Soviet politics. Katrin Boeckh shows that not all the high ranking clergy agreed to implement this task, and sometimes this caused them the loss of position and rank. The fact that Janukovich failed when trying to instrumentalize a Church again showed that the changes in the post-Soviet period have been irreversible.

The common thread of the book is a discussion of the post-secularization phenomenon as a process that cannot be questioned for Ukraine, but which requires analyzing its causes and components when compared with the situation in Russia, or with the dynamics of changes in other European countries.

According to Katrin Boeckh, post-secularism means not only an increase in the number of believers, but also attests to the fact that today a number of church activities and rituals have a very extensive media effect and go beyond the church fence – referring to events such as processions, pilgrimages, veneration of the saints, etc., the language of religion and about religion. All this goes beyond the scope of the narrow church framework and forms an essential element constituting the categories of “public” and “political”. It is the presence of the religious, which is a social and intellectual reservoir (p. 4) that is worth being studied here.

Several authors point out that the revival of religious life and expansion of ecclesiastical activities beyond the actual church fence are mainly due to “grassroots initiatives” and are to be further extrapolated to social rules (K. Boeckh, O. Turij, M. Gatskov and K. Gatskova, M. Buchholz). This thesis does not provoke any doubt. At the same time, Boeckh and Turij voice an important idea that all the recently discovered variety of religious communities have not been duly recognized yet by the public, while certain political commitments of religious communities, including the focus on democratic values, are largely supported “from the top” (pp. 6–7). That is to say that the process of liberalization and overcoming the inherent self-segregation of religious communities is increasingly attributable to church leaders.

This fact of grassroots support has another contradictory and dangerous property. Being based on a strong grass-roots support during the period of Soviet repression, the UGCC contributed to the revival of spiritual perception and encouraged many people, who had deserted from faith because of atheistic propaganda and repression, to actively participate in ecclesiastical life. In the present circumstances, however, it has undermined its credibility by gradually departing from an ecumenical mindset and excessively focussing on of its clergy and national political issues. This obstructs the spiritual mission of the Church, nurtures xenophobic attitudes towards other Christians, and sometimes leads to harsh criticism pronounced by the church leadership because of “lack of patriotism.”

Such an isolationist grassroots effect can also be detected on the part of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate. Its anti-ecumenism and isolationism have a completely different direction – their culmination were the appeals, coming mainly from the ordinary faithful, to boycott the Popes visit in 2001 in Kyiv, as Buch­holz noted (p. 71).

Of particular interest is the article by Oleg Turij The historical roots of religious conflicts in Ukraine. Identity problems of the Christian churches. Analyzing the path of self-determination and the search of identity by the Ukrainian traditional Christian churches, Turij shows that the Orthodox and Catholic Churches to a greater degree maintain “negative identity” rather than “positive”. The lack of a positive response to the question: “Who are we?” in the Ukrainian society urges public entities of this society to an attempt at identifying and strengthening their own identity by the formula “We are not like those, we are not them!” Or, what is more categorical, “Only us, not them”. As the author notes, this negative identity is more peculiar to the churches, which are designated, according to the official terminology, as “traditional” or “historical”: the Greek Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. Note that the statement of negative identity by communities as well as the similar problem of negative ethics is a vital topic developed by Russian scholars, in particular, Alexey Zygmont (HSE) (A. Zygmont: The Problematics of Violence in Post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Discourse, in: State, Religion and Church 2 [2015] 2, pp. 29–53) and Andrey Arkhan­geljskii (A. Arkhangelskii: Dyrka ot ėtiki. Chto ne tak s rossiiskoi sistemoi tsennostei. [The hole of ethics. Whats wrong with the Russian system of values], in: http://carnegie.ru/commentary/2016/07/05/ru-63999/j2r4).

Particularly noteworthy are the efforts to assess the correlation of religious preferences, values, social norms and economic behavior, presented in the articles by M. Frey, M. Gatskov, K. Gatskova, O. Popova, who use data of the Ukrainian Household Budget Survey (UHBS) (in the first case) and of the World Value Survey – in the second case as well as data of the Life in Transition Survey (LiTS) together with the classification of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) – in the third case. The attempts to determine the correlation of values with religious preferences prompted the necessity to raise the issue of the cultural capital of social groups in Ukraine, in connection with which it seems advisable in the future to connect the relevant methodology of Mariano Grondona, modified by scholars like L. Harrison, I. Chkonia M. Mattini, and to assess the cultural capital of certain public or religious groups by means of a 25-factor table of high and low indicators of cultural capital. Investigation of this problem is so important, given the dynamic of changes in Ukrainian society, that their very relevant and fundamental works appeared also in Russia and in different countries. In particular, in 2011, Maria Snegovaia defended at Moscow HSE a thesis for the degree of Candidate of Economic Sciences themed The Impact of religious affiliation on the socio-economic preferences and behavior of religious respondents (case study of Ukraine). The issue of socio-economic preferences of the Ukrainian society was included as one of the most important cases of global processes in the collective monograph Culture Matters in Russia and Everywhere: Backdrop for the Russia-Ukraine Conflict (Ed. by L. Harrison and E. G. Yasin. Lanham 2015).

Boris Knorre Moskva

Zitierweise: Boris Knorre über: Religiöse Pluralität als Faktor des Politischen in der Ukraine. Hrsg. von Katrin Boeckh und Oleh Turij. München, Berlin, Leipzig [usw.]: Biblion Media, 2015. 475 S., Tab., Graph. = DigiOst, 3. ISBN: 978-3-86688-504-2, http://www.dokumente.ios-regensburg.de/JGO/erev/Knorre_Boeckh_Religioese_Pluralitaet.html (Datum des Seitenbesuchs)

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