State-Church Relations and The Politics of Corporatism: Islam in France.

At first glance, the creation of national Muslim religious councils across Europe at the turn of the 21st century looks like the straightforward extension of the public recognition and institutional access that Catholics, Protestants and Jews have enjoyed since the 19th century. In this view, third-generation Muslims in contemporary Europe are finally acquiring what civic disorganization or simple prejudice denied their parents and grandparents: the inclusion of Islam as a centralized, visible presence in the pantheon of state-church relations. The historian Maurice Agulhon captured the pragmatic spirit of the interior ministers of the late 1990s who would finally level the religious playing field for Muslims when he wrote, ‘if there is room for three [religions] at the table of the Republic, there is certainly room for four.’ It is therefore tempting to see the improved status of Islam in Europe as a routine tale of pluralist minority incorporation - comparable to the institutionalization of the Spanish language alongside English in some US states, or the inclusion of holidays in alternate-side parking rules or a religious group’s tax exempt status. In reality, the unsteady march to state recognition and accommodation of religious practice reveals more about evolving ideas of what kind of community body should sit at the table of state-church relations than about the table’s size. The extra-parliamentary process of institutionalizing Islam reflects changing modes of group representation and philosophies of state-society relations in contemporary Europe. Government-led consultations started off in an advisory or consultative capacity: they were set up to allow competing Muslim interest groups to inform, and give their approbation to, government decision-making that affected their faith. But the resultant councils combine a regulatory function with a representative role: they are intermediary bodies with the characteristics of full-fledged corporatist institutions. As semi-public agencies, Muslim councils make and implement policy in the domain where religious observance meets the public realm - from headscarves to halal. They illustrate governments’ renewed determination to separate religious communities’ functional role of croyants from their identity as citoyens, reducing religious observance to a technical matter in the same way that class-consciousness was subdued through neo-corporatist arrangements in the 1970s (Berger 1981). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]