With the support of the European Commission, 6th Framework Programme for Research- Citizens and governance in a knowledge-based society A European Network of Excellence on International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion POLICY BRIEF No. 8, March 2008 How should liberal-democratic states accommodate religious diversity? Veit Bader IMES v.m.bader@uva.nl Introducing a new approach to deal with religious diversity… States and politics should be minimally moral: not ‘secular’ ‘Secular’ states commit massive human rights violations Governance regimes are rampantly diverse Introduction Policymakers: be wary of secularist sociologists, political theorists and philosophers bringing gifts. Established institutions and policies that deal with religious diversity in liberal- democratic states are under pressure more than ever before. Politics and political theory are caught in a trap: a fully secularised state with strict separation of state and politics from privatised religions versus selective cooperation between states and organised religions. This policy brief, based on the IMISCOE publication Secularism or Democracy? Associational Governance of Religious Diversity (Amsterdam University Press 2007) by Veit Bader, takes an original theoretical and practical approach to problems concerning the governance of religious diversity. It proposes a moderate and flexible version of democratic institutional pluralism called Associative Democracy (AD). Following are ten steps explaining why and how AD is a plausible way to overcome the deficiencies of today’s predominant models in practical politics and policy. 1. In dealing with religious diversity, all states and politics should be minimally moral. This mean that states must guarantee basic rights to security, subsistence and collective and individual toleration. Liberal-democratic states must also safeguard more demanding non-discrimination rights and equal political rights. This, however, does not mean that liberal-democratic states necessarily are – or should become – ‘secular’. Massive violations of the minimal core of human rights have been committed by secular states of both the past (Nazi Germany and the USSR) and the present (some Arab states such as Iraq). And only very few constitutions (of France, Turkey, Mexico and, albeit in a completely different sense, India) do refer to the state as ‘secular’. 2. In practice, states with liberal-democratic constitutions are characterised by rampantly diverse regimes of religious government. Some countries have established state churches with little actual power. Others are characterised by plural establishment or by cooperation between the state and officially recognised religions. Only a few combine non-