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The European Convention on Human Rights guarantees freedom of education, including the opportunities to create and operate faith-based schools. However, as European societies become more religiously diverse and ‘less religious’ at the same time, the role of faith-based schools is increasingly being contested. Serious tensions have emerged between those who ardently support religious schools in their various forms, and those who oppose them. Given that faith-based schools enjoy basic constitutional guarantees in Europe, the controversy around them often surrounds issues of public financing, degrees of organisational and pedagogical autonomy, and educational practices and management. This volume is about the controversies surrounding religious schools in a number of Western European countries. The introductory chapter briefly analyses the structural pressures that affect the position of religious schools, outlining the relevant institutional arrangements in countries such as Denmark, Germany, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Scotland. The following chapters provide a detailed analysis of the discussions and controversies surrounding faith-based schools in each country. Finally, the two concluding chapters aim to provide a bigger, comparative picture with regard to these debates about religious education in liberal democratic states and culturally pluralist societies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Comparative Education.

The European Convention on Human Rights guarantees freedom of education, including opportunities to create and operate faith-based schools. But as European societies become religiously more diverse and ‘less religious’ at the same time, the role of religious schools increasingly is being contested. Serious tensions have emerged between those who ardently support religious schools in various forms and those who oppose them. Given that faith-based schools enjoy basic constitutional guarantees in Europe, the controversy surrounding them often boils down to issues of public financing, degrees of organisational and pedagogical autonomy, and educational practices and management. This introduction to a special issue on controversies surrounding religious schools in a number of Western European countries briefly introduces structural pressures that affect the position of religious schools and sketches the relevant institutional arrangements in the respective countries. We then go on to introduce some of the main concerns that frame the relevant debates. The paper concludes by introducing the various contributions in the special issue.

Pillarization describes a society as divided into a number of "pillars," being compartments standing for the networks of organizations belonging to religious and ideological subcultures. Typically the associations cover a broad range of societal domains (education, media, political parties). The Netherlands is considered the purest example of a pillarized society from approximately the 1900s until the late 1960s, when there existed a Catholic, a Reformed a socialist, and a neutral or liberal pillar. This societal configuration functioned politically as a "consociational democracy," a term coined by the political scientist Arend Lijphart. In order to gain a fair picture of the contemporary relevance of pillarization for Dutch society and politics, one should distinguish between social, institutional, cultural, and discursive legacies and differentiate between the impact of these legacies in specific societal and policy domains.

Liberal democratic states face new challenges in balancing between principles of religious freedom and non-discrimination and in balancing these constitutional principles with other concerns, including social cohesion, good education, and immigrant-integration. In a context of increased prominence of secular and antiIslamic voices in political debate, there are demands to reduce legal ‘exceptions’ for (conservative) religious groups in the Netherlands. This article focuses in particular on public debate and jurisprudence with regard to education and explores discussions of associational freedoms that are of importance to religious schools, including the right to select and refuse pupils (the debate on the socalled duty to enrol (acceptatieplicht)), the possibilities for schools to refuse hiring staff who do not support the school’s philosophy (for example in relation to sexual orientation), and teaching on sexuality and sexual diversity. The article concludes by arguing that the Netherlands is undergoing a shift in the conceptualisation of religious freedom in relation to liberal equality, which in the longer run may destabilise a tradition of toleration and substantial collective freedoms for conservative religious groups.

This article reconstructs the ways in which Islamic presence and mosque establishment have been represented in French public discourse. During colonial times, the French colonial state aligned itself with selected religious leaders and paid the salaries of imams and the maintenance of mosques in the overseas territories. In Europe, Islamic symbols such as mosques were displayed at colonial expositions and a monumental mosque was built in the centre of Paris between 1922 and 1926. The French state was also supportive of Muslim religious practice when Muslims sojourned in France as colonial workers and later as transient migrant workers. In the 1960s and 1970s, Islamic practice in France was largely hidden from view because it was practised in prayer rooms located in the cellars of apartment blocks where most of the migrant workers lived. During the period of citizenship the visible presence of Islam in French society became a deeply controversial issue. In the late 1980s the idea emerged to establish central ‘Cathedral Mosques’ in major French cities, which would stand as symbols of an ‘Islam of France’. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, public authorities began to see the multiplicity of smaller and medium-sized mosques in French cities as illustrative of the emergence of a so-called ‘neighbourhood Islam’, and as an inevitable result of the diversity and independence of Muslim communities in France.

This paper conceptualizes Dutch traditions of religious governance in terms of a model of "principled pluralism" (Monsma and Soper 2009). It approaches church-state traditions in a disaggregate way, meaning it is sensitive to domain specificities and takes notice of the actual constitutional and legal arrangements, (changes in) public policies, and varieties in application of laws and policies. It explores to what extent the legacy of "pillarization" and the relatively strong emphasis on collective freedoms of religious communities may lead to tensions with other liberal values (notably non-discrimination and equality) in contemporary Dutch society. The second part of the paper focuses on the domain of education, in particular contestation around conservative religious schools. It demonstrates in what ways political discussions on organizational and educational freedoms of religious schools with respect to selecting pupils and staff and curriculum exemplify the will to give priority to the principle of non-discrimination. The paper concludes by arguing that the Dutch regime is undergoing a shift in the conceptualization of religious freedom in relation to liberal equality, which in the longer run may destabilize a tradition of toleration and substantial collective freedoms for orthodox and conservative religious groups.

This paper conceptualizes Dutch traditions of religious governance in terms of a model of "principled pluralism" (Monsma and Soper 2009). It approaches church-state traditions in a disaggregate way, meaning it is sensitive to domain specificities and takes notice of the actual constitutional and legal arrangements, (changes in) public policies, and varieties in application of laws and policies. It explores to what extent the legacy of "pillarization" and the relatively strong emphasis on collective freedoms of religious communities may lead to tensions with other liberal values (notably non-discrimination and equality) in contemporary Dutch society. In this part the focus is on the domain of education, in particular contestation around Orthodox religious schools. The paper concludes by arguing that the Dutch regime is undergoing a shift in the conceptualization of religious freedom in relation to liberal equality, which in the longer run may destabilize a tradition of toleration and substantial collective freedoms for orthodox religious groups.

Policy orientation from ACCEPT Pluralism, an EU funded research project investigating whether European societies have become more or less tolerant during the past 20 years. This policy brief is based on that part of the research comparing faith-based education in six EU Member States: Denmark, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.

Work Package 4: National Case Studies of Challenges to Tolerance in Political Life The ACCEPT PLURALISM project (2010-2013) is funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme, Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities. (Call FP7-SSH-2009-A, Grant Agreement no: 243837). Coordinator: Prof. Anna Triandafyllidou, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute.

L'auteur analyse les 30 dernières années d'adaptation des dispositions institutionnelles néerlandaises à la présence musulmane dans les domaines de de la pratique religieuse, de l'éducation, et de l'affirmation de l'identité religieuse dans le domaine public. Cette analyse s'appuie sur l'évolution des relations entre les politiques d'intégration, le système de "pilarisation" des Pays-Bas et les relations Eglises-Etat.

Islamic presence in western Europe is usually perceived as a post-war immigration phenomenon. However, early in the twentieth century Muslims were also sojourning on a regular basis in Europe, where they founded provisions and accommodations for their religious needs. The French city Marseilles is an interesting site for a historical reconstruction of representations about Islam and mosques in Europe. In colonial times, Muslims –mostly colonial workers or soldiers in the French colonial armies—frequented Marseilles. Since the 1950s, large numbers of Muslims arrived in the city as migrant labourers, and many settled there to become permanent residents.