Rhetoric Race and Religion
Does religion affect the way nations interact with one another? Does it affect foreign policy? And if so, why have scholars of international relations ignored the role of religion until recently? David Smith, a lecturer at the University of Sydney in the Department of Government and International Relations and a researcher in the United States Studies Program, provides us with an overview of how religion has played, and possibly still plays, a role in international relations and foreign policy.
We start out with an overview of the field of international relations (IR), a sub-discipline in political science (and one that stretches across other academic fields), and why scholars working in that area have, until recently, ignored religion. David takes us back to 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia to explain this general academic oversight. It is argue that since Western Europe essentially took the “religious question” off the table in the real of interstate conflict and diplomacy following the Thirty Year’s War, it was never considered to be a point of interest to scholars studying IR. Add to this the general tendency to favor materialist and realpolitik explanations in studying nation-states, and religion never seemed to be something interesting to study.
Things begin to change in the IR field with the 1979 Iranian Revolution. We note that although the Peace of Westphalia may have conditioned thinking about the role of religion (and ideas more generally) in diplomacy, the rest of the world really wasn’t party to this worldview. The general pattern of thinking in U.S. foreign policy prior to 1979 was that Islam would always be an ally to America in the battle against communism, thus the popular revolt that swept Islamists to power in Iran caught policymakers by surprise. Prof. Smith notes that the Iranian revolution has had the effect in the US State Department of creating a concern over popular uprisings with religious overtones. He illustrates this with the recent US reaction to the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt.
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