State-religion relations in Southern and Southeastern Europe: moderate secularism with majoritarian undertones
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This contribution studies comparatively three Southern European countries (Italy, Spain, and Greece) and three Southeastern European countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Bulgaria). Looking beyond historical path-dependencies, we investigate recent developments in terms of state-religion relations. Starting with a thick description of the historical legacies and post-1989 developments, we focus on issues of the last decade, such as the rise of populism and nationalism, the path to EU accession for Bosnia and Albania, the economic and Eurozone crisis of the 2010s, and the refugee emergency of 2015. Our aim is to assess how these have shaped state-religion relations and to categorise the six countries within the typology proposed in the introductory contribution to this collection. Our findings suggest that moderate secularism and liberal neutralism prevail in all six countries. There are, however, important variations in terms of the relevance of majoritarian nationalism in some of them, as the state defines the prevailing religion and has strong historical and institutional ties with that religion. The contribution elaborates on these specificities and concludes with some questions on the importance of the notion of dominant vs qualifying norms and on the role of current challenges in shaping further state-religion relations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".