Religion, Identity and Politics in Russia and Poland/Rusya ve Polonya'da Din, Kimlik, Siyaset.

• Author: Oner, Suna Gulfer Ihlamur
• Position: Book review

Rusya ve Polonya'da Din, Kimlik, Siyaset (Religion, Identity and Politics in Russia and Poland)

By Sevinc Alkan Ozcan

Istanbul: Kure Yayinlari, 2012, 334 pages, ISBN 9786055383176.

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STARTING FROM 1980s different religions "went public" all around the world and reclaimed their agency in the public sphere. However, while in this process of 'deprivatization' certain religious traditions such as Catholicism became the focus of many research initiatives, the Eastern Orthodox tradition attracted little scholarly attention. The book Religion, Identity and Politics in Poland and Russia, which is based on Sevinc Alkan Ozcan's Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Marmara University in Istanbul in 2010, does justice to these two traditions with its focus on the role and stance of the Polish Catholic Church and Russian Orthodox Church within the context of church-state relations, public space, civil society and democratization in two post-communist countries: Poland and Russia. In these two countries, Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, despite interruptions during the communist rule, play a determining role in church-state relations, political patterns, national identity and social sphere. The book offers a well-structured comparative analysis and valuable insights into the experiences of these two major representatives of Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity in Eurasia during the pre-communist, communist, and post-communist era.

The book consists of five chapters. The first chapters, which is also the introductory chapter of the book, consists of a detailed discussion of church history, the schism of 1054, evolution of church-state relations in modern European history with a particular focus on the relations between Polish Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy with their respective states. The second chapter, which is the main theoretical chapter of the book, elaborates on the secularization theories and analyzes the link between the secularization process and evolution of public space and civil society in Europe. The role of religion in modernization and nation-building in Russia and Poland are also discussed in the last section. The third chapter focuses on the relations of the Polish Catholic Church with the Polish state after the 1990s and the Church's direct intervention into the democratization process as a de facto state church. The fourth chapter seeks to address how the relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the...