Ethnic Minority Religious Education and Partisan Politics in Europe

Looking at public education curricula in Europe one may certainly say, paraphrasing Will Kymlicka (1999), that “multiculturalists have won the day”. Today, in almost all European countries Islam and other minority religions have been incorporated in public education, albeit with significant variations and different degrees of contention from immigrant groups. Moreover, the number of state-funded Islamic schools is increasing all over Europe. This outcome sits oddly with the almost unanimous consensus among European political leaders that multiculturalism as a political program has “utterly failed” and with the growing body of research that demonstrates an anti-immigrant turn of (mainstream) political parties across Western Europe. In this respect there is a puzzle to resolve: Why is there still a growing and largely unaffected trend of incorporating immigrant religious demands in public education? I argue that the incorporation of Islam in public education is shaped by the interaction of partisan politics on multiculturalism and the role of religion with the public sphere with more stable patterns of church state relation. The paper looks at changes in minority religious education policies in the past three decade in all EU15 countries by employing quantitative analyses. The policies are coded in what regards the denominational/non-denominational character of the religious teaching and the balance between Islamic/ethnic minority and Christian religious teaching they propose. The data on partisan politics on multiculturalism and religion is taken from the Comparative Manifesto Project Dataset.