Defining a Secular Identity in an Increasingly Religious World? Religion in EU Foreign Policy

The paper will deal with the tension between the EU’s secular character and the continuing or even growing salience of religion in states which the EU internationally interacts with. Adopting a discursive approach, it primarily explores the ideas on the appropriate place of religion in politics which form the background against which the EU historically has defined its external relations. Drawing on the concepts of organizational identity and of the varieties of secularism as well as on previous research on EU foreign policy, the paper, more specifically, asks how consistent the EU’s foreign policies have been when it comes to religion, and to what extent and how religion has become part of the EU’s international identity. Four possible forms of identity are hypothesized: (Judeo-) Christian, secularist, and as a secular community of values, each entertaining different mechanisms, such as privileging, marginalizing and securitizing, or subsuming certain forms of religion; or, due to the EU’s limited actor capacity in its foreign policy and its multi-layered polity, a pattern of ‘multiple identities’ if the EU does not construct its international identity in a consistent way. The paper reviews these questions and assumptions from a historical perspective through a content analysis of official documents before and after the formation of the EU’s religious freedom and religious engagement agenda.