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When Geopolitics and Religion Fuse: A Historical Perspective

Gertjan Dijkink a
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Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

To cite this Article Dijkink, Gertjan(2006) 'When Geopolitics and Religion Fuse: A Historical Perspective', Geopolitics, 11:
2, 192 — 208
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 Geopolitics, 11:192–208, 2006
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 online
DOI: 10.1080/14650040600598403

When Geopolitics and Religion Fuse:

Geopolitics, Vol. 11, No. 02, March 2006: pp. 0–0
1557-3028
1465-0045
FGEO
Geopolitics

A Historical Perspective

GERTJAN DIJKINK
When Geopolitics
Gertjan Dijkink and Religion Fuse

Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies,

University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

This article provides a historic overview of the role of religion in

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international relations and discusses what the new pervasiveness

of religion means from the perspective of critical geopolitics. Religion
and geopolitics seem to have been caught in a zero-sum relation-
ship. Religion helped to legitimate the world of states but receded
when that world order developed its own logic (the Westphalian
system). Where the (geopolitical) logic of the state system or secu-
rity appears to fail, religion emerges as a source for the self-image
of groups or the discourse on global relations. Religious visions in
Christianity and Islam as holy land, holy war or millennialism
(extensively discussed in this article) have a clear geopolitical
character. They fit easily in the study of codes, script and narra-
tives as practised in critical geopolitics. However in drawing gen-
eral conclusions one should account for the completely different
experiential world in which religiosity takes priority and for the
independent causes of territorial conflict.

RELIGION AND (CRITICAL) GEOPOLITICS

Geopolitics is a way to wield or explain power by making territorial (geo-

graphical) distinctions. Religion is the ultimate denial of the significance of
earthly distinctions. When charged with having proclaimed himself King of
the Jews, Jesus, brought before the Roman procurator Pilate, did not deny
the title ‘King’ but said ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’.1 The famous
South Asian poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) declared

Address correspondence to Gertjan Dijkink, Department of Geography, Planning and

International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
E-mail: [email protected]

192
 When Geopolitics and Religion Fuse 193

‘Islam is non-territorial in its character’.2 Conversely, voices from the world

of Geopolitics hardly ever devoted a speech or chapter to religion. What
then justifies our expectation that religion and geopolitics might fuse? The
obvious answer is the occurrence of political practices in the name of reli-
gion like the Crusades or Islamic jihad. Both Christians and Muslims have in
due course accepted war as a religious assignment. That this was motivated
perhaps just as much by the prospect of political or economic advantage is
another matter. One may even doubt if the motives of the Church itself in
encouraging the Crusades were merely religious. It was a way to deflect the
emerging competition and aggression between lords and kings to a domain
were they could do no harm to the reign (and properties) of the Church.
The popes were not the least able geopoliticians (or Realpolitiker) in European
history.3 Here, in revealing religious imaginations as consonant with earthly
desires, one encounters something that goes to the heart of the fusion idea.
At the end of the Middle Ages the fusion between geopolitics and religion
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was pursued from both sides: Popes established armies and kings pre-
tended to be the chosen treasurers of God on Earth. It did not bring Church
and State nearer to each other, on the contrary.
One might be apt to think that unearthing the theme of Religion and
Geopolitics from the grave of history is particularly inspired by recent world
developments (perceived clash of civilisations, Islamic terrorism, etc.). This
may be true but the resurrection of Geopolitics in the shape of Critical Geo-
politics also brought an intrinsic interest in the world of the mind.4 In defin-
ing Geopolitics as an ideological way of constructing or scripting the world
that is often joined with popular sentiments, critical geopolitics should be
responsive to religious visions of world order. A main issue in critical geo-
politics is the construction of ‘self’ versus ‘the other’. The Quran and Bible
are filled with stories about good against evil armies or forces, both in an
earthly and cosmic context. There are also messages of peace and tolerance
but the problem is not what such texts say but how believers use them. The
dominant focus of critical geopolitics on modern states, like the US, and the
Cold War initially kept religion out of the limelight. According to a timely
study ‘Religion: The missing dimension of statecraft’ (1994), American post-
war foreign politics (Iran, Vietnam) suffered from the silent assumption that
other nations have the same materialistic view as ‘we’ do.5 Critical geopoli-
tics also addresses ethnocentrism but (witness the publication of this issue
of Geopolitics) perhaps not coincidentally discusses the subject of religion
after Christian fundamentalism has been revealed as a possible influence on
American foreign policy.
The fusion of geographical and religious notions about the world was
already explored a long time ago in the seminal writings of a geographer who
introduced the term ‘geopiety’. John Kirtland Wright (1891–1969) whose work
has been summarized under the title ‘geosophy’, understood geopiety as the
belief and worship of powers behind nature or the human environment. His
 194 Gertjan Dijkink

basic text analysed the writings of early American theologians who among
other things saw geological evidence of the Noachian deluge in the landscape
and suggested that fertile or safe environments are the privilege of those races
that enjoy God’s favour.6 Yi-Fu Tuan, a geographer working in the same vein
as Wright, has attempted to extend the analysis to other cultures with exam-
ples of mystic belief in the powers that shape a place (genius loci) or in the
concrete identification of mountains or rivers with gods.7 Geopiety may imply
actions that go beyond prayer and sacrifice like protecting the environment or
building on specific places. He points to the ‘short step [from attachment to a
place] to pride of empire or national state’. Tuan seems apprehensive of over-
stepping the boundary between (good) geopiety and (bad) nationalism. In
terms of geopiety there is no sharp distinction between what has been called
the ‘sacred dimension of nationalism’ and the attachment to a place that
prides itself on Special Providence.
Anthony Smith has distinguished four aspects of the ‘sacred dimension’
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of the nation.8 The first one, ethnic election or the idea of chosenness, is
embodied in myths like the angel appearing at Kosovo Polje. But Smith also
recognises secular versions like the French Revolution and the idea of mis-
sion it implied for the French. A second aspect is sacred territory. In the
national territory important memories find their place and artefacts. It is the
cradle of the nation or the place where major events have happened and
relics are visited. The idea of a Holy Land can of course be derived from the
Bible. The third aspect mentioned by Smith is ethno-history. He appears to
identify this aspect mainly with the recognition of ‘golden ages’, periods that
embody the inner or true virtues of a community. Finally the idea of
national sacrifice, blood spilled for the nation as commemorated in monu-
ments for the glorious dead, reminds us of the nation’s immateriality and
eternity. Smith tries to outline parallels between religion and nationalism
even if the latter contains no reference to God, holy writs or the hereafter at
all. Here we move into the direction of equating religion with general val-
ues, albeit ‘sacred’ values. But when is something sacred? Curiously Smith
fails to explicitly answer that question. Reading between the lines and in
view of the examples given, we apparently should conceive of sacred as
something existing outside the individual, demanding ritual actions and
taboos and in general supposed to be essential to a person’s life. When the
nation is sacred it has become analogous to God.9
If a political discourse would be based on explicit cosmologies or theol-
ogies there is no ambiguity. Then the sacred would leap to the eye in contrast
with quasi-religious talk on the nation. A complicating factor is that the latter
discourse may appeal to religious people without directly evoking any reli-
gious commandment or holy scripture. Then religion is a hidden dimension.
In writing about British relations with the East, Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)
who was anxious not to be accused of a naïf belief in God, nevertheless used
a ‘discourse [that] was so thoroughly biblical that a knowledge of the English
 When Geopolitics and Religion Fuse 195

Bible was needed for its elucidation’.10 As classical theology was less fashion-
able in the era of high imperialism, writes A. F. Walsh, the pious may have
found an acceptable substitute in Kipling’s talk about ‘the White Man’s Bur-
den’. Secular use of religious discourse opens a vista that would far exceed
the limits of this article. It is important to be aware of this hidden dimension
but the perspective in the next pages will be limited to coded religion (Chris-
tianity and Islam) and explicit religious judgments.
Not any religiously inspired thought about the world is immediately rele-
vant from a political point of view. Geopiety is marked by the political aloof-
ness of its pioneering thinkers, Wright and Tuan. The weak point of the
geopiety discussion was its international aspect but this weakness is not nec-
essarily inherent to the idea, as Newman’s writings on Israel have shown.11
How does a religious bond with place or territory influence behaviour
towards other people and countries? And which prescriptions or cues for
international action do Holy Scriptures contain? These questions strike
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a familiar note in critical geopolitics because they extend the idea of geopolit-
ical codes (national perceptions of the hostility or friendliness of other
nations) to religion. A less obvious issue, but no less important, is how reli-
gion has helped to constitute the international order with its sovereign states.
Two of the properties mentioned by Smith directly touch on geopolitics: eth-
nic election and sacred territory. Ethnic election implies an asymmetric rela-
tion to other international actors and possibly conflict. Sacred territory has a
similar capacity to engender territorial conflicts but this is not to say that ‘the
sacred’ or religion is a factor that is predominantly destructive. One might as
well presume a capacity to contain people happily within their territory.
The above suggests a preliminary structure for discussing the fusion of
geopolitics and religion. The prime subject for discussion should obviously be
the idea of sacred territory or holy land. The second concerns all religious pre-
scriptions for international action, of which holy war is the most pervasive. The
third subject comprises all other religious ideas about world order or God’s
dealings with it. Christian millennialism offers perhaps the topographically most
detailed example. In developing a historical perspective, it is difficult to ignore
theories that connect the role of religion with the changing world order or a
group’s position in it. Such theories refer to changes in the ‘Westphalian’ inter-
national system (Huntington12) to new forms of insecurity (Norris & Inglehart13)
or to well-known patterns of adapting to modernisation (Gellner14). Since this
paper focuses on how religion contributes to geopolitical visions from a histori-
cal perspective these discussions will only be indirectly touched upon.

HOLY LAND

It is generally known that medieval maps of the world (the famous T-O
maps) were strongly influenced by the worldview of the Bible. There was
 196 Gertjan Dijkink

simply no other understandable information about distant worlds available.

Less well known is how religion also provided the (only available) dis-
course for talking about political authority and territorial identity. Even in
the pre-nationalist era territorial identity sometimes cried for intellectual
framing. When William of Malmesbury wrote his history of the kings of
England around 1127 (De Gestis Regum Anglorum) he had to incorporate
the awkward event of a Norman invasion in 1066. How to account for a
historically legitimised rule when English territorial integrity and ruling elite
had been so roughly violated? According to Robert Stein, William’s solution
was to dwell upon the holiness of the English territory on the eve of the
invasion. His narrative constitutes a tour along the numerous places in
England where the bodies of saints have been found ‘entire after death typ-
ifying the final state of incorruption’.15 Apart from marking the territory
with miracles, the ‘body that does not decompose’ was itself a symbol of
the country.
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The linking of saints with a place was a practice in which both the
Church and territorial rulers engaged. In the time of the Italian city states the
Church brought its own strategy and rituals for recognising human remains
as those of the relics of a Saint (inventio) and for connecting them to a
place and cathedral (translatio).16 Could such specific religious conceptions
of power fuse with political power? That was indeed the great attraction for
worldly rulers. In the fourteenth century city-state of Venice we see how the
doges spatially associated themselves with the relics of the patron saint by
erecting their own tombs in the baptistery of San Marco.17 The baptistery
was the site of entrance into the local Christian community, a symbol of
both civic and Christian community. Similar fusions of holy places or saints
and the civic community occurred in later nation-states like the role that the
place of pilgrimage Jasna Gora played for Polish unity.18
In early medieval Europe it was customary to link kings with their
counterparts in the Old Testament (Novus David, Novus Salomon, Novus
Moyses).19 In the kingdom of the Franks under Pepin (751–768) the sacred
dimension was even extended to the Frankish people praised by chroniclers
and the pope as ‘chosen by God, fine soldiers and pious’.20 The main
emphasis seems to have been laid on the king’s task to protect the faith. But
Joseph Strayer has discovered another meaning in late medieval Europe. At
that time religion in France was mobilised in order to establish the idea of
the sovereign state in statu nascendi. When the thirteenth century Capetians
tried to strengthen their hold on France they faced a double problem. As
Strayer expounds, they on the one hand had to switch from the sphere of
feudal and family relationships to a policy geared at fixing the boundaries
of a sovereign state.21 Clearly demarcated boundaries did not yet exist. On
the other hand these kings wanted to claim the prime loyalty of all subjects
living within a territory that enclosed many other autonomous authorities
like the Church. By adopting the role of defender of the faith, supported by
 When Geopolitics and Religion Fuse 197

an allegedly ‘devout’ people, the French kings achieved the conversion to a

sovereign territorial state: a holy land governed by ‘the most Christian king’.
Later on, in the wake of the Peace of Augsburg (1555) the state appeared
in a different guise saving Europeans from internecine religious war although
at the cost of identifying again with religion. In the same period ‘republican’
polities inspired by the theology of the Reformation (like the Dutch Republic
and England/Scotland) strongly had resort to the Judaic theme of the book of
Exodus and the idea of a Promised Land in order to legitimate their existence
amidst autocratic regimes that rejected ‘self-government’. Faced with a new
kind of international order, a break with both the dynastic authorities that
ruled the rest of Europe and the mother Church, they described themselves as
a new Israel under God’s protection. Religion helped to make sense of the
new kind of ‘democratic’ politics tried out in these states and to represent the
international order as well. The Old Testamentic idea of the covenant22, a free
arrangement between equal people on the basis of moral principles, substi-
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tuted the autocratic model of kingship. The religious connotations of the

nation also involved the (protestant) clergy in disseminating the national idea.
Michael Roberts, in his study of Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus, calls the
clergy ‘great public servants. In education, in the primitive social services of
that age, they were the natural instruments of governmental politics.’23 The
new protestant clergy helped to disseminate the national idea by being the
mouthpiece of the government and by interpreting the nation in religious
terms. In a kind of proto-nationalistic interpretation English writers suggested
ancient origins of the nation in Judaic tribes.24 In Sweden the old story (first
told by a Swedish bishop in 1434) was repeated that the Swedes were a
Gothic tribe that had been separated from other Biblical tribes after the fall of
the tower of Babel and the Flood.25 The Dutch national anthem (written
about 1570) compares the newly acquired territory of the Seven Provinces
with ‘a realm in Israel’. Such views automatically attributed to the outside
world, more in particular the House of Habsburg, the role of Egypt or the
Babylon from the Book of Revelations.
Reading early state history would almost deceive us in believing that reli-
gion and (state-) geopolitics are inseparable if we did not know a period (or
rather THE period) in which Geopolitics, written with the capital G, became
the allegedly scientific and rational advisor of statecraft. When the word Geo-
politik was invented those who used it believed in the hand of nature rather
than in the hand of God. But one may doubt if the break was abrupt. Among
religious people and in churches patriotism was still the commandment rather
than, what would have been logical for the believers in a ‘world religion’, cos-
mopolitanism. Nevertheless, late nineteenth century Geopolitics marked the
breakthrough of a new kind of world awareness, of which the message was
that our lives depend on events in distant places. It was the forerunner of the
contemporary globalisation discourse. The mind-expanding awareness that
rocketed the field of Geopolitics into an intellectual vogue, also enticed some
 198 Gertjan Dijkink

intellectuals to ‘geopoliticise’ their religious feelings. In Germany, the cradle of

Geopolitik, Paul Rohrbach (1869–1956) made a turn from Christian pietism to
acting in the world. Schooled as a historian and theologian, Rohrbach con-
verted to geography after having made a honeymoon trip to Palestine in the
1890s.26 There he suddenly realised that religion also meant a call for action in
the world. Failing to secure a professorship in geography at a German univer-
sity, Rohrbach engaged in journalism in which he often dwelt on the topic of
Germany’s Weltpolitik. Similar ‘conversions’ to the world as a religious revela-
tion are reported from elsewhere for example the Swedish theologian Ejnar
Billing, who wrote The Ethical Ideas in Early Christianity (1907),27 emphasised
the geopolitical event of Israel’s rescue from Egypt as the crucial divine act.28
Thus Geopolitics, often considered as the apotheosis of state-centred
thinking, coincided with a religious renewal in which other places were
connected with human salvation. The idea of the holy land became (again)
invested with millennialist quality that urged for action. It was the time that
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the Zionist movement got the Jewish migration to Palestine going. There
was even a curious reverberation in the secular sphere: ‘Holy Russia’
became the intended focus of the World Revolution. In the twentieth cen-
tury few countries officially entertained a self image in which a special reli-
gious significance was claimed. This does not alter the fact that the idea of
election, being a chosen people, lingered on in popular myths like the Serb
tale about the lost battle against the Ottoman Turks at Kosovo Polje in 1386.
In this myth an angel offers prince Lazar the choice between two options:
one, winning the battle and gaining an earthly Kingdom; two, losing the
battle and gaining the eternal Kingdom of God. For any religious person the
choice is obvious and this at the same time gives a satisfactory explanation
for why the heroic Serbian people lost the war against the Turks. The expe-
rience of sacrifice and victimisation in the past is a reason to assume that
one fulfils the special intention of God in an order higher than the interna-
tional state order.
The most obvious holy places of today are to be found in the Middle
East. They contain the shrines of the Prophet (Mecca, Medina) or his ‘succes-
sors’ Ali and Hussein in the Shiite holy cities in Iraq, Najaf and Karbala. Jerus-
alem has a similar significance for Christians, Muslims and Jews. Such centres
have a truly cosmopolitan significance but only in the case of Saudi Arabia
does their holiness extend to the state insofar that its rulers express a special
responsibility for the Islamic character of the state. However, the geopolitical
conclusions of this status were not drawn by the Saudi rulers but by particular
groups or individuals like Osama bin Laden who perceive the presence of
American troops as a violation of the holy land of Saudi Arabia. Whether
Israel can be considered a secular state is up for discussion. Israel’s official
relations with other states are sometimes curiously coloured by the fate of
local Jews (which after all are no citizens or migrants from Israel) and by the
Holocaust (that was not committed toward Israel). Here the course of world
 When Geopolitics and Religion Fuse 199

history and the concept of holy land fuse into a potentially dangerous
concoction if it is connected with the fulfilment of a religious prophecy. Such
millennial thinking will be further discussed below.

HOLY WAR

Holy war is the catchword of an international order breaking up. The typi-
cal ‘Westphalian’ state keeps aloof from such projects. The closest approxi-
mation in the established international order was president Reagan’s
designation ‘Evil Empire’ for the Soviet Union. It evoked a distant past when
a French priest and servant of the Capetians invented a pejorative for the
German Empire by a wordplay with Empire: en pire (= worse). Perhaps the
current world order is just as shaky as the European division of power in
the early fourteenth century, at least in the American perception. President
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George W. Bush continued this image in the ‘war on terrorism’ and even
repeatedly added the word ‘crusade’ against the explicit wish of his advis-
ers. As we know both words ‘war’ and ‘crusade’ are often used figuratively.
But the war on terror became a real war and one can understand the appre-
hension of those who have a negative association with the Crusades.
Holy war is an affair of institutions, movements and individuals outside
the state. The medieval fusion of political and religious power did not only
endow kings with a remarkable religious power but also manifested itself at
the other pole: the wielding of political (military) power by the pope. Extra-
territorial or frontier affairs like the Crusades, the Spanish Reconquista or
the subjection of the Baltic tribes elicited the rise of religious military orders
as the Hospitallers (1130), Templars (1120), the orders of St. Georges (1201),
Santiago (1170), Alcantara (1183), the Teutonic order (1198), etc.29 Here we
witness a period, heralded by the reforms of Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085), in
which the Church waxed assertive which inevitably unleashed a struggle for
power between Church and kings. It was perhaps the most extreme mani-
festation of religeopolitics in European history.
The term religeopolitics was proposed by Lari Nyroos in discussing two
‘fundamentalist’ movements in the Middle East: Hamas and Kach.30 Both
movements appeal to a religious predestination of the area that has tradition-
ally been known as Palestine/Israel and that in the eye of the (Kach) believer
can assume a gigantic size even geographically extending to the river Euph-
rates. The pious Muslim (Hamas) or Jew (Kach) sees it as a religious assign-
ment not to abandon this territory. These geopolitical visions and the
violence they entail are in no way reconcilable with the (‘Westphalian’) inter-
national order that recognises border disputes but no exclusive claims on the
same area in order to create a kind of theocracy. By definition such move-
ments are political movements, which raises the question whether we talk
here about political movements using religious power or religious movements
 200 Gertjan Dijkink

using political power? There is no point in juggling words. Whoever talks

about movements has to account for the continuous switching between val-
ues directing personal life and political action. Only the (secular) state has
drawn a sharp line between the private and the public.
There is a certain similarity between the medieval struggle for domina-
tion between the Church and the State which produced the Crusades and
Islamic movements that ignore the established politico-territorial order (à la
Iqbal) in favour of a more polarised vision and resistance to geopolitical
actors like the US as ‘the Great Devil’. Some commentators cling to the dis-
tinction in Islam between dar al-harb (the abode of conflict or war) and dar
al-islam (the abode of the faith or peace) in order to pinpoint the geopolit-
ical core of Islam31 but such distinctions are neither founded in Quranic
terminology nor do they necessarily indicate territorial entities.32 Actually
more extensive studies of the (geo)political background of current Islamic
movements conclude that much Islamic rhetoric is produced in order to
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defend the existing international territorial order. Shi’ites, in view of their

link with the Iranian revolution often treated as one of the more hard-line
anti-systemic forces in the Islamic world, are usually minorities fighting for
their rights in states rather than against the state. Juan Cole writes ‘On
closer examination . . . it seems obvious that Shi’ite activism in the late
twentieth century had the practical effect of integrating Shi’ites more
closely into the post-colonial nations in which they found themselves’.33
An analysis of the only institutionalised pan-Islamic foreign politics, the
Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), concludes that it ‘displayed
neither “Islamic” rationale nor any extra-logical (e.g. theo-logical) determi-
nant of preference pursuit’.34 The OIC was established at the instigation of
Saudi Arabia in response to such disturbing events as the rise of secular-
nationalist Arab movements (the short-lived United Arab Republic of
Egypt, Syria and Jemen), the Six Days’ War in 1967 and the attack by a
Christian fundamentalist on the al-Aqsa Mosque in 1969. First as an instru-
ment used by the Saudis to reshuffle international leadership in the
Islamic (Arab) world by drawing attention to their own central religious
role, the OIC was subsequently ‘hijacked’ by Iran and Pakistan in order to
serve their national aims.
A qualification of the ‘holy war’ interpretation of today’s world conflicts
has also come from the many books that try to delve into ‘the mind of the
terrorist’. According to Robert Pape most terrorist actions can be explained
by the ‘wish to liberate’ occupied homelands.35 Their actions and contempt
for death would be comparable to the behaviour of soldiers on the battle-
field rather than with religious fanaticism. As Christian Caryl remarks in a
review of seven similar books, this explanation is perhaps too narrow since
some terrorist acts seem rather to be the product of ‘cultural dislocation’, a
deep feeling of injury among Muslims that exceeds territorial identity.36 This
is more in line with the idea of a disruption of the territorial order but it
 When Geopolitics and Religion Fuse 201

certainly does not re-establish a link between geopolitics and religion in the
sense of holy war. Religion is simply the only discourse available when ter-
ritorial identity fails.
The Iranian revolution (1979) is by far the most anti-systemic event in
the Muslim world because it did not stop at securing a national domain for
operating a theocracy but also aimed at exporting its revolution. Khomeini
defiantly declared ‘In Islam there are no frontiers’ but in this case the result
was a sharp international polarisation. In diabolising the US and the West,
the Iranian spiritual leadership also targeted the Saudis, faithful servants of
the Western cause. However the OIC would not move along in that direc-
tion. At most it followed the Iranian line in safe foreign policies like the
condemnation of Rushdie’s book ‘The Satanic Verses’ or in collecting lavish
financial support for the hard-pressed Bosnian Muslims. In the end, how-
ever, Iran recognised the UN when it needed mediation in a crisis over
killed Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan. The OIC rather remained an arena
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that allowed Iran to counter its (partly self-induced) feelings of encircle-

ment. A similar utility was assigned to the OIC by Pakistan but then in con-
nection with the hot security issue of Kashmir and its relations with India.
How important geopolitical considerations are in the functioning of the OIC
is revealed by the fact that India with its large (160 million) Muslim popula-
tion has not been offered OIC membership whereas it includes countries
like Gabon with a 99 percent non-Muslim majority. With the exception of
the Palestine membership, the OIC apparently accepts the criteria of the
Westphalian world order but it does not accept certain countries as mem-
bers even if they contain large Muslim minorities. The result is that more
than a quarter of the umma remains outside the OIC.
Concluding that the political resurgence of Islam has not induced the
rise of a strong Islamic force on the World political scene, as an anti-
systemic force unifying all Muslims or as a consensus or alliance between
Islamic states, does not necessarily deny that religion is a new and signifi-
cant political force. As Naveed Sheikh argues, the impossibility of finding
unequivocal directives for foreign politics in religious ideas or holy writs
should not diminish our interest in Islam as a retrospective legitimator of
political preference.37 That means we should not search for geopolitical
visions in the canonical texts themselves but focus on the continuously
changing interpretations of the world against the background of sacred writ-
ings and jurisprudence (hadith in Islamic practice).38 The OIC is a cognitive
community that primarily allows its members to enact their Islamic identity
whatever that may mean for the geopolitical views taken. This new body
does not simply help states to redefine their national interests – that is how
common IR theories look at inter-state ventures – it also is the reverse, a
way to adapt pan-Islamic universalism to the regulatory mechanisms of the
Westphalian international order. The aspiration remains, in contrast to a
form of intergovernmental cooperation as the EU, non-territorial.
 202 Gertjan Dijkink

MILLENNIALISM

Religious rejection of the international territorial order can also proceed

without strong political action or ‘voice’, but simply by ‘exit’, to use Hirschmann’s
concepts. The Puritan migrants to America left an evil world (Europe) in
which political power was equated with tyranny.39 Since they initially did
not make a geographical distinction between evil and holy lands one may
doubt if their move should be called a form of religeopolitics at all. In any
case they created the special American attitude that John K. Wright defined
as geopiety. As a discourse analysis of sermons preached in New England
between 1740 and 1800 showed, religious attention focused on the world in
a very general way.40 At most the world was seen as the theatre for the Sec-
ond Coming of Christ. “I trust the whole earth shall soon be filled with the
knowledge of the Saviour”, declared one of the ministers in a sermon.41
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Only one geographical detail qualified this inclusive vision: In view of the
religious health of the American communities one expected that the new
millennium would start in America. This ecstatic embrace of the world was
not sustainable but millennialism was stirred up anew by the military
engagement of the New Englanders with the French at Louisburg in 1745
and even more intensely by the American Revolution three decades later.
Now the content of the religious messages had changed. The focus was on
the civil and religious liberty that in the ‘New American Israel’ would be
ensured. The war with the French unleashed an endless series of images of
enslavement, prisons, torture, and popish power that would befall America
if the French were to win. The enemy appeared in apocalyptic discourse as
‘offspring of that Scarlet Whore’, ‘Mother of Harlots’, ‘Babylon the great’.
The victory was accordingly hailed as unequivocal evidence that the king-
dom of darkness could no longer restrain the latter-day glory.42 All this did
not arouse any feeling of moral superiority to England. The military victory
was attributed to ‘God’s British Israel’, stronghold of liberalism and Protes-
tantism, as well. How dramatically these feelings would reverse within only
a few years. During the Revolutionary years ‘civil millennialism’43 as
unleashed by the war with the French, was brought to bear on England
itself. Enraged by such measures as the Stamp Act (tax on all legal docu-
ments) and other duties, the increasing number of placemen and the pres-
ence of a standing army, England was imagined as an even more insidious
enemy of liberty then the French. It was one of the apocalyptic forces of
darkness, the horrible wild beast of the book of Revelations. Sermons dealt
with the themes of Exodus and Israel’s struggle for liberty against the
Pharao in an unmistakable reference to the players England and America.
This example from the foundation history of the United States reveals
a remarkable event: the sudden geopoliticisation of religion or ‘civil millen-
nialism’. The preceding period of colonisation had shown that even a dom-
inant role of religion in the daily life of a group does not inevitably evoke
 When Geopolitics and Religion Fuse 203

a religeopolitical vision of the world. Only when a threat to the freedom of

a group arises that involves an infringement of the life-space by other
human groups does religion appear capable of offering inspiration or narra-
tives for describing the world in terms of a territorial struggle. Among Chris-
tian nations the Exodus theme of the chosen people led by God out of their
exile in Egypt is the favourite narrative. It became an important theme in the
self image of South African Boers as well, but again not from the first
moment when they arrived in Africa in the seventeenth century. Only after
British colonial expansion in the nineteenth century put pressure on indige-
nous tribes, which subsequently started to move, did the cornered Boers
emphatically embrace this Biblical image.44 In both the New England and
South African cases geopoliticisation of religion preceded the creation of a
state. The reverse situation, geopoliticisation of religion following the cre-
ation of a state, is also explicable particularly if the state is in peril. It is
somewhat less surprising than the previous cases because once created, a
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state always evokes a geopolitical discourse. But there are similarities with
the politically unorganised religious bands of the Puritans and Boers. The
creation of the Dutch Republic of the United Provinces (ca. 1580) was actu-
ally the outcome of a (protestant) liberation movement that was initially
more unified in what it rejected than in what it politically aspired toward.
Compared to the dynastic and authoritarian politics of the remaining part of
(continental) Europe, the new republic indeed was a movement or band
rather than a state. There was a tenacious resistance against rule by one per-
son in the administrative affairs of the Dutch republic that reverberates in its
twentieth century democratic corporatism. No wonder that its self-represen-
tation soon arrived at stories about the Jews in Egypt (tribes), Moses (as a
leader pointing to rules instead of devotion to persons or idols) and the
theme of the chosen people.45
The Exodus theme also inspired American thinkers on the threshold of
Independence. This was revealed by such iconographic exercises as design-
ing a Great Seal for the new Union. One of the designs made was Benjamin
Franklin’s ‘Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God’ showing:

Moses standing on the shore and extending his hand over the Sea,
thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh, who is sitting in an
open Chariot, a Crown on his head and Sword in his Hand, Rays from
the Pillar of Fire in the Clouds, reaching to Moses, to express he acts by
Command to the Deity.46

Yet when a final design had to be chosen among several competing submis-
sions the overtly Biblical themes were disregarded. The winning design
showed the American eagle and on the reverse side of the coin, among oth-
ers, an eye overseeing the world as a single reference to ‘the Deity’. It might
even be interpreted as deification of the American union itself. Religiousness
 204 Gertjan Dijkink

seems to have subsided in the private sphere after the US emerged as an

autonomous political body.
A new political impetus to embrace religion occurred only when America
for the first time was really threatened by a single strong global antagonist
(or at least perceived such a threat) during the Cold War. As is well-known
the Cold War produced an unprecedented witch hunt in domestic politics in
the US and a distinct vision on the spatial diffusion of communist evil. It
went along with a strong revival of religious practice in the US and a refor-
mulation of the Pledge of Allegiance.47 Originally formulated in 1892 by
Francis Bellamy the pledge ran: ‘I pledge all allegiance to my Flag and to
the Republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible, with liberty and jus-
tice for all’. After some minor changes during the subsequent decades, spec-
ifying whose flag and what nation, it was proposed in 1951 to add ‘under
God’ to the pledge. In Congress this was explicitly motivated with reference
to the communist danger: ‘America must be defended by the spiritual values
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which exist in the hearts and souls of the American people. . . . Our country
cannot be defended by ships, planes and guns alone’ (senator Homer Fer-
guson).48 The final agreement about the new text came in 1954 and today it
seems unthinkable that someone should propose to drop it again.
After a period in which the political role of religion was primarily that of
supporting the self image of a holy land, the attacks of 11 September and the
war in the Middle East have again spotlighted the role of American millennial-
ism. There is no evidence for millennialist thinking in the White House but
the relationship between George W. Bush’s worldview and Christian funda-
mentalist leaders is beyond dispute. Evangelists, who are seeking the lime-
light with books that sell into millions of copies, tell us that there is a close
correspondence between the description of the Day of Judgment in the Bible
and current events in the Middle East. For them the invasion in Iraq is the first
part of a series of events that are clearly predicted where the Bible states that
four angels ‘which are bound in the great river Euphrates’ (Rev. 9:14) will be
released ‘to slay the third part of men’. When Israel will have reoccupied all
its former land the final winding up of man’s history will start with the
‘Rapture’, the transportation of the true believers to heaven. Such beliefs can-
not but only have potential negative consequences for international peace
efforts but also for attempts to prevent an environmental catastrophe.49

WHEN RELIGION AND GEOPOLITICS FUSE:

FOOD FOR CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS?

As medieval practices discussed earlier in this article showed, religious

discourse can transmit ‘proto-geopolitical’ views in a situation where a geo-
political discourse is not available or permitted. This reveals a profound
need for territorial order even in a situation where religious cosmopolitanism
 When Geopolitics and Religion Fuse 205

prevails. Saints or the Biblical narrative of the Promised Land offered strong
symbolic tools and story lines. When the ‘Westphalian’ international order
materialised, religion receded into the background without becoming
entirely inactive. Nationalist or imperialist ideas could easily resonate with
old religious reflexes or discourse types but officially underpinning foreign
policy decisions with religious views had already become outrageous on
the diplomatic scene of the seventeenth century.
Contemporary statesmen, even Iran’s leadership, are usually reticent
about turning religious aims into an explicit geopolitical doctrine. Yet it
does not mean that commonplace decisions in foreign politics like giving
(financial) support to other countries, promoting mutual exchange of the
cultural elite and even the choice to declare war are not tacitly influenced
by religious norms and affinities. American support for Israel cannot be
explained without the special religious tie. But when Palestinian negotiators
told BBC interviewers (2005) that George W. Bush, in personal communica-
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tions, had described his involvement with the Middle East as an assignment
of God, the White House was keen on rejecting the claim.
There is no real evidence for the assumption that religion is (increasingly)
causing international conflict50 but some territorial conflicts like the Palestinian
issue have acquired a particularly vicious character by the involvement of reli-
gious fanaticism. Moreover, war, once started, always arouses religious senti-
ments about the adversary even during the intra-European ‘World Wars’ of the
twentieth century.51 Similarly, we cannot say that identification with the state in
Muslim countries inevitably veils itself in Islamic fundamentalism (there is defi-
nitely a non-Islamic Indonesian or Malaysian nationalism) but it is striking that
governments in these countries are often upset about the plight of (non-
national) Muslims elsewhere in the world. We may consider this an attitude
that simply mirrors Western interference with ‘human rights’ conditions in other
places of the world. Muslims did not pioneer the violation of national sover-
eignty in the name of ‘values’. However, solidarity with Muslims in distant
countries also reflects the deeper feeling of victimization in the Muslim world.
This is not a religious vision but existential dislocation. The latter may promote
religiosity but it is not yet clear what it means for religeopolitical visions.
Most of the contemporary examples of a fusion between geopolitics and
religion are recorded from non-state institutions or actors: religious or political
movements or religious leaders. But those who actively practise what some-
times is called a holy war, international terrorism, have very inarticulate geo-
political visions or codes except for the wish to expel non-Muslims from
Muslim lands. Whereas the state gave some coherence to the linking of geo-
political visions (either popular or more formal in books) with foreign poli-
tics, this coherence is absent in the case of such disparate phenomena as
terrorism, religious movements and Muslim states. This poses a problem for a
critical geopolitics which, notwithstanding its criticism on state-centred thinking,
owes its existence precisely to the politics of states. It is, as in the case of
 206 Gertjan Dijkink

Marxism, powerful in deconstructing the (capitalist) state without having

much to say about the world that follows its demise (socialism).
Studying geopolitical codes and visions in religious texts or messages is
an opportunity but no real new challenge to critical geopolitics. The chal-
lenge is rather to understand how religiosity as such influences basic atti-
tudes toward the world. Religion is the substitute worldview for those who
have no tie to a nation-state. Whereas leaders may use religeopolitical codes
as incentives for mobilisation, for the masses religion means an escape from
the harsh reality of daily life, the promise of peace rather than war. As bad
luck will have it, religious images are also useful when territorial conflict
has erupted. We should not reverse the causation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Section ‘Geopolitics’ of

the Standing Group of International Relations (SGIR) conference ‘Construct-
ing World Orders’, The Hague, 9–11 September 2004. The author thanks
two anonymous reviewers of the journal Geopolitics for their critical com-
ments on the original paper.

NOTES

1. John 18: 33–38.

2. Naveed S. Sheikh, The New Politics of Islam. Pan-Islamic Foreign Policy in a World of States
(London: RoutledgeCurzon 2003) p. 31.
3. See for a review of the ambiguous literature on the early medieval papacy: Marios Costambeys,
‘Review Article: Property, Ideology and the Territorial Power of the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages’,
Early Medieval Europe 9/3 (2000) pp. 367–396.
4. See such publications as Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics
(London: Routledge 1998); John Agnew, Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics (London: Routledge
1998); David Slater, ‘Spatialities of Power and Postmodern Ethics: Rethinking Geopolitical Encounters’,
Environment and Planning D; Society and Space (1997) pp. 55–72
5. Douglas M. Johnston and Cynthia Sampson (eds.), Religion: the Missing Dimension in Statecraft
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.)
6. John Kirtland Wright, ‘Notes on Early American Geopiety’, in John Kirtland Wright (ed.),
Human nature in Geography. Fourteen papers 1925–1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
1966) pp. 251–285.
7. Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘Geopiety: A Theme in Man’s Attachment to Nature and to Place’, in David
Lowenthal and Martyn Bowden (eds.), Geographies of the Mind. Essays in Historical Geosophy (New
York: Oxford University Press 1976) pp. 11–39.
8. Anthony D. Smith, ‘The Sacred Dimension of Nationalism’, Millennium 29/3 (2000). See also
Anthony D. Smith, ‘Ethnic Election and National Destiny: Some Religious Origins of National Ideals’,
Nations and Nationalism 5/3 (1999).
9. Connor Cruise O’Brien distinguishes three steps from ‘chosen nation’ to ‘holy nation’ to
‘deified nation’, each implying a lesser degree of dependency on God. The chosen nation concept
implies God’s special grace but it may forfeit His favour, the holy nation will always be special but
it may not always live up to its status and the deified nation is God itself. Connor Cruise O’Brien,
God Land. Reflections on Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1988).
 When Geopolitics and Religion Fuse 207

10. A. F. Walls, ‘Carrying the White Man’s Burden: Some British Views of the National Vocation in
the Imperial Era’, in William R. Hutchison & Hartmut Lehmann (eds.), Many are Chosen. Divine Election &
Western Nationalism (Harvard Theological Studies 38) (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press 1994).
11. See for example David Newman, ‘Metaphysical and Concrete Landscapes: The Geopiety of
Homeland Socialization in the “Land of Israel”’, in H. Brodsky (ed.), Land and Community: Geography
in Jewish Studies (Bethesda, MD: University Press of Maryland 1998) pp. 153–184
12. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (New York:
Simon & Schuster 1996).
13. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (New
York: Cambridge University Press 2004).
14. Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London: Routledge 1992).
15. Robert M. Stein, ‘Making History English. Cultural Identity and Historical Explanation in
William of Malmesbury and Lazamon’s Brut, in Sylvia Tomash and Sealy Gilles (eds.), Text and Territory.
Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
1998) pp. 97–115.
16. Diana Webb, Patrons and Defenders. The Saints in the Italian City-States (London: I.B. Tauris 1996).
17. Debra Pincus, ‘Hard Times and Ducal Radiance. Andrea Dandolo and the Construction of the
Ruler in Fourteenth-Century Venice’, in John Martin and Dennis Romano (eds.), Venice reconsidered.
The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univer-
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sity Press 2000) pp. 89–136 (p. 94).

18. Cathelijne de Busser, Places of Pilgrimage in Contemporary Europe (PhD thesis, University of
Amsterdam, in progress).
19. Egon Ewig, ‘Zum Christlichen Königsgedanken im Frühmittelalter’, in Theodor Mayer (ed.), Das
Königtum; Seine Geistigen und Rechtlichen Grundlagen (Lindau, Germany: Jan Thorbecke Verlag 1956).
20. Ibid., p. 55.
21. Joseph R. Strayer, ‘France: The Holy Land, the Chosen People and the Most Christian King’, in
Medieval Statecraft and the Perspective of History. In Joseph Strayer, ed., Essays by Joseph R. Strayer (Prin-
ceton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1971) pp. 300–314.
22. See for example Exodus 34:27–28: “And the LORD said unto Moses, Write thou these words:
for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel. And he was there
with the LORD for forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water. And he wrote
upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.”
23. Michael Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus: A History of Sweden, 1611–1632, Part I, (London: Long-
mans, Green & Co. 1953–1958) p. 350.
24. Howard D. Weinbrot, Brittania’s Issue. The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993) pp. 408–418. See also Arthur Williamson, ‘Patterns of
British Identity. Britain and its Rivals in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Glenn Burgess
(ed.), The New British History. Founding a Modern State 1603–1715 (London: I.B. Tauris 1999)
pp. 138–173 (p. 141)
25. Erik Ringmar, Identity, Interest and Action: A Cultural Explanation of Sweden’s Intervention in
the Thirty Years War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996) p. 158.
26. Gertjan Dijkink, ‘Geopolitics as a Social Movement’, Geopolitics 9/2 (2004).
27. Ejnar Billing, De Etiska Tankarna i Urkristendomen (Stockholm: Sveriges Kristliga Studen-
trörelses Bokförlag 1936).
28. Stephen A. Mitchell and Alfred Tergel, ‘Chosenness, Nationalism and the Young Church Move-
ment’, in Hutchison & Lehmann (note 9) pp. 231–249.
29. A. Forcy, The Military Orders from the Twelfth to the Early Fourteenth Century (London:
Macmillan 1992).
30. Lari Nyroos, ‘Religeopolitics: Dissident Geopolitics and the “Fundamentalism” of Hamas and
Kach’, Geopolitics 6/3 (2001).
31. Nyroos (note 28) p. 142.
32. Sheikh (note 2) pp. 20–42.
33. Juan Cole, Sacred Space and Holy War. The Politics, Culture and History of Shi’ite Islam
(London: I.B. Tauris 2002) p. 186.
34. Sheikh (note 2) p. 105.
35. Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win. The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random
House 2005).
 208 Gertjan Dijkink

36. Christian Caryl, ‘Why They Do It’, New York Review of Books 52/14 (22 September 2005).
37. Ibid., p. 117.
38. See also Graham Fuller and Ian O. Lesser, A Sense of Siege. The Geopolitics of Islam and the
West (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1995) p. 103: ‘In effect, it is not religion that is evoking radical
behavior but specific conditions that are evoking radical responses couched in religious terms’.
39. Avihu Zakai, ‘Puritan Millennialism and Theocracy in Early Massachusetts’, History of European
Ideas 8/3 (1987).
40. Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty. Republican Thought and the Millennium in Rev-
olutionary New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1977).
41. Ibid., p. 49.
42. Ibid., p. 49.
43. This term is introduced by Hatch in The Sacred Cause of Liberty and can be considered as a
special case of religeopolitics.
44. Bruce Cauthen, ‘The Myth of Divine Election and Afrikaner Ethnogenesis’, in Geoffrey Hosking &
George Schöpflin (eds), Myths & Nationhood (London: Hurst 1997) pp. 107–131.
45. A. Th. Van Deursen, ‘The Dutch Republic, 1588–1780’, in J. C. H. Blom & E. Lamberts, History
of the Low Countries (New York: Berghahn Books 1999) pp. 143–218 (p. 149). Simon Schama, The
Embarrassment of Riches (New York: Knopf 1988).
46. O’Brien (note 8) p. 61. No drawing has been left of this design. See also www.greatseal.com
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47. Lee Canipe, ‘Under God and Anti-Communist: How the Pledge of Allegiance Got Religion in
Cold War America’, Journal of Church and Society 45/3 (2003). Canipe remarks that church attendance
in America rose from 37% to 49% between 1940 and 1955.
48. Ibid., p. 316.
49. Fuad Shaban, ‘11 September and the Millennialist Discourse: An Order of Words?‘ Arab Studies
Quarterly 25/1–2 (2003); Bill Moyers, ‘Welcome to Doomsday’, New York Review of Books 52/5
(24 March 2005); Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (New
York: Oxford University Press 2004), Garry Wills, ‘Fringe Government’, The New York Review of Books
52/15 (6 October 2005).
50. Bruce Russett, John R. Oneal and Michael Cox, ‘Clash of Civilizations, or Realism and Liberal-
ism Déjà vu? Some Evidence’, Journal of Peace Research 37/5 (2000). See for an analysis of the role of
civilization in domestic conflicts: Jonathan Fox, ‘State Failure and the Clash of Civilizations: An Examina-
tion of the Magnitude and Extent of Domestic Conflict from 1950 to 1996’, Australian Journal of Political
Science 38/2 (2003) pp. 195–213.
51. See for example A. J. Hoover, God, Germany and Britain in the Great War. A Study in Clerical
Nationalism (New York: Praeger 1989); A. J. Hoover, God, Britain and Hitler in World War II: The View
of the British Clergy 1939–1945 (New York: Praeger 1999).