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Shedding Light on the Conspiracy: A Reply to ‘The Sacred Conspiracy: Religion, Nationalism, and the Crisis of Internationalism’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 February 2012
Extract
Religion plays a central role at the global political level despite being often portrayed as dead, marginal, or irrelevant. The way in which it plays that role, however, is not always immediately apparent or transparent. Professor Berman's essay attempts to illustrate the various ways – direct and indirect – in which religion is still central in today's debates about international law and politics. He does that by bringing us back to the interwar period, which saw an abundant flurry of arguments about international law, nationalism, and religion. He focuses in particular on the avant-garde movement led by Georges Bataille, who called for the shaking of civil society by appealing to the destabilizing forces of the (left) sacred in opposition to the conservative forces of the (right) sacred. Bataille's key insight is that religion has a contagious energy that is far more sweeping and powerful than the mere force of Western rationality. From this viewpoint, (international) law is incapable of taming the crisis of the West and of keeping at bay the perils of religion and nationalism.
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- INTERNATIONAL LEGAL THEORY
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- Copyright © Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2012
References
1 N. Berman, ‘“The Sacred Conspiracy”: Religion, Nationalism, and the Crisis of Internationalism’, this issue.
2 Bataille, as quoted by Berman, ibid.
3 On this point, Berman only cites en passant an article by Baume, S., ‘On Political Theology: A Controversy between Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt’, (2009) 35 History of European Ideas 369, at 369–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Berman, supra note 1.
5 J. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (2008); Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (2002); Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (2011).
6 See note 3, supra.
7 Berman, supra note 1.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 See the Israel trilogy, supra note 5.
11 Berman, supra note 1.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Berman complains about the European Court of Human Rights’ upholding Turkish ‘restrictive governmental acts . . . limiting religion to a “respectable place”’. It is too easy, however, to criticize an international court of human rights without taking into account local democracy and the margin of appreciation that it requires from an international institution.