State Neutrality and Religious Diversity in Europe

In Europe, states are under a duty of ‘ensuring, neutrally and impartially, the exercise of various religions, faiths and beliefs’, or so the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly held.1 But what does it mean, exactly, for a state to be neutral towards all religions and beliefs? The answer to this question is not obvious, given that the principle of state neutrality vis-à-vis religion and belief is contested and illusive. The concept of neutrality even has all the markings of an essentially contested concept, as attested to by persistent and fundamental disagreement over its interpretation.2 In constitutional and political debates, there is normative ‘contestation at the core’ about the content and implications of neutrality.3 These debates are, moreover, not confined to conceptual discussions. They extend to normative disagreement, in the sense that disputes about the meaning of neutrality are inherently linked to normative disagreements about its implications. In Europe’s constitutional democracies, the principle of state neutrality vis-à-vis religion and belief is often intimately related to the construction and understanding of the relationship between state and religion. This latter relationship is construed and understood differently in different European states. Whereas some states (for instance, France and Turkey) enforce a relatively strict separation between religion and state, others maintain a closer relationship between both (for instance, Norway and the UK). The remaining states are located somewhere in between both ends of the continuum. Importantly, different constitutional understandings of the relationship between state and religion translate into—or, rather, correlate with—distinct interpretations of the neutrality principle throughout Europe. Whereas some states enforce a more restrictive understanding of neutrality (for instance, France), others favour a more open or inclusive variant (for instance, Germany). In other states, still, it remains unclear what neutrality means, exactly (for instance, Belgium).

Duty · Epistemology · Neutrality · Normative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious Freedom and Discrimination

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