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Today confessional factors have not yet developed into stimulators of securitization at the national level in their own right. Their specific features (kinship/foreignness) will determine the degree to which the more important securitization stimulators turn out to be stronger and more sustainable. It goes without saying that religious specifics may also become an object of manipulation on the part of the political elites of states for, say, social consolidation needed to create a strategy of attaining political interests.
Hypothetically, an objective confessional structure of the CC might add vigor to the confessional factor, which means that this specific feature should, together with others, be used to explain why the dynamics of security relations in the post-Soviet period was rooted in a conflict context to a much greater extent than in the other two RSCs. No matter how stable, these dynamics may change under the pressure of the current domestic sociopolitical, socioideological, and external geopolitical processes and the greater role of the confessional factors in securitization in the CA states. We have already seen how regional political regimes were partially transformed into those based on non-tradi-tional Islamic trends. The Taliban’s advent to power in Afghanistan suggests that this alternative is more than a mere hypothesis.
Zaza PIRALISHVILI
D.Sc. (Philos.),
professor at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University
(Tbilisi, Georgia).
GLOBALIZATION AND THE GEORGIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
Abstract
The author discusses the place of the Georgian Orthodox Church and its role in the public and political developments in independent Georgia; he traces the changes in the Georgians’ religious feelings during the transition period and assesses the responses of the religious com-
munities to the challenges of globalization. Prof. Piralishvili concludes that today, for most of the Georgian Orthodox population, traditional religious values remain the best tool for preserving the nation’s identity while political instability adds weight and influence to the religious institutions.
I n t r o d u c t i o n
Viewed over the last two or three decades religious life in Georgia can be described as a process during which its religious organizations have been adjusting to the changing historical and social
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contexts. They gradually shed the old Soviet ideas and moved toward so-called market principles. The Georgian Orthodox Church, as the largest and most influential organization, tried to stem the omnipresent market trends and insist on its own ideas. Each of the religious organizations has come face to face with globalization and the far from simple geopolitical context in which the country has to live and develop.
The prevailing descriptions of this process suggested two key strategies that determine (fully or partially) the country’s religious life. On the one hand, the religious minorities are obviously working toward a liberal religious market in order to acquire freedom of action. On the other, the Georgian Orthodox Church is out to prevent this in order to preserve its traditional role and dominance. Obvious manifestations and concealed meanings typical of both strategies led to an open confrontation.
The Soviet Context
We have no reliable information about the geography of religious organizations in the Soviet Union and their size—the special services that gathered relevant information preferred to keep their findings secret. Officially, religion was announced to be a withering remnant of the past that deserved no closer scrutiny.
On the strength of Stark and Bainbridge’s classification,1 the religious organizations functioning under the strong pressure of the state were client cults. They had organizational structures of their own while relations with their followers were limited to the consultant-client pattern and rarely, if ever, went beyond them. Under Soviet power, believers were deprived of the right to set up socially articulate religious movements; any activities attracted the attention of the KGB which immediately informed the organizations or educational establishments of the far from correct religious interests of their employees or students. The Soviet regime spared no effort to stem new religious movements and to keep the traditional ones within the pinching limits of loyalty.
Contacts among confessions were a lifebelt for those that had to live under pressure. Today, the latent solidarity that bound all sorts of Christian, Muslim, and other organizations together may seem baffling. It was the Georgian Orthodox Church that initiated contacts among the Christian Churches. Here are the facts: in 1962 the Georgian Orthodox Church joined the World Council of Churches and the Conference of European Churches; in 1979-1981 the Patriarchate of Georgia supervised theological discussions between the Georgian Baptists and the Orthodox Christians. In 1983 the Patriarch gave community to two Roman Catholic priest-monks from Austria in the Sioni Cathedral; in 1989 he repeated the procedure for a group of young Georgian Roman Catholics. When on a trip to one of the Georgian regions with a predominantly Catholic population he said that it was Rome and Constantinople that had parted ways while the Georgian Church had never severed its ties with Rome.
Here is another, no less interesting fact: in the 1950s the Soviet government destroyed the Shi‘a Blue Mosque in Tbilisi. The local Sunnis invited the Shi‘a to their mosque where the two groups had prayed at one and the same time divided by a curtain until the curtain was removed ten years ago. Since that time the two groups share the same mosque, an inspiring example against the background of the Sunni- Shi‘a confrontation elsewhere which has developed into a civil war in Iraq.
1 See: R. Stark, W.S. Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation, University of California Press, Berkeley, Calif., 1985, p. 26.
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The Post-Soviet Context
It is hard to determine the size of the religious communities in Georgia. My efforts to compare figures from different sources produced the following results: 80.0 percent are Orthodox Christians; 11.0 percent are Muslims; 5 percent follow the Armenian Apostolic Church; 0.5 percent are Jewish; 2.5 percent belong to other religions; and 1.0 percent have no religious convictions at all. The Orthodox, Catholic, and Armenian churches, together with the Jewish and Muslim communities, are considered to be the traditional religious groups.
I have already written that all later developments were generated by the newly formed religious market that appeared in the early 1990s and which spread to Georgia. Religious organizations with big money coming from abroad, well-adjusted to the free philosophical environment, and armed with adequate missionary techniques came to Georgia. The Georgian Orthodox Church (and, to a certain extent, most of the traditional religions in Georgia) had never regarded “faith” and “salvation” as marketable products. This relies on a logic of its own and is rooted in serious religious motivations that should be taken into account. However, according to Mark Juergensmeyer, this may result in religious nationalism and religious conflicts.2 Indeed, at some point some of the Orthodox priests accepted latent or open religious violence as possible.
The other traditional religious organizations displayed more reserve with respect to the religious market. On the one hand, they were naturally concerned about the aggressive missionaries of the new religious movements; on the other, the liberalized market protected them against the mounting aggressive religious nationalism.
The relations between the Georgian Orthodox Church and the Muslim and Jewish communities still determined by many years of contact deserve special discussion. Today, as in the past, they live side by side, always prepared to close ranks at times of crises.
While in the first half of the 1990s ethnocultural nationalism comprised, to different extents, religious nationalism, in the latter half of the same decade religious nationalism became an independent ideology mainly because society, struggling to adjust to the new realities, was badly wounded.
There are two main circumstances caused by the adaptation crisis that finally created the current religious context.
First, Georgian society, like the larger part of the formerly Soviet population, lived for 70 years in a constrictive historical space with limited ideas about the global processes and unable to contribute to them. In the years of independence it has found itself in an absolutely alien world, the philosophical and cultural paradigms of which turned out to be different from what most of Georgian society expected. The liberal and democratic ideas in great demand in Soviet times among the intelligentsia looked alien in the new historical conditions; in some cases they appeared to be directly opposed to the country’s cultural identity. Many of the products of globalization, especially those that demanded revision of the traditional cultural and religious values were rejected as unacceptable. The church community was moving toward an ideology that rejected globalization and liberalism as unwelcome.
In the latter half of the 1990s this trend became even more obvious: while in 1990, according to a public opinion poll carried out by a group of students, the absolute majority of the respondents (about 58.4 percent; 16.1 percent refused to answer, while 25.5 percent were undecided) was in favor of the country’s liberal and democratic development, two year later, in 1992, 14 percent of the polled looked at liberal democracy and national interests as two independent options, the latter being preferable. According to the public opinion monitoring conducted by the Philosophical Society of Georgia
2 See: M. Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993, p. 178.
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in 1998, 17 percent regarded globalization and liberalism as a more or less acceptable alternative to cultural identity. The figures are not too obvious but the trend is there.
To a certain extent, this is the result of blunders of the ideologists of liberalism who hoisted it as an alternative to traditional national values, which, more often than not, was misused, thus adding a cutting edge to the cultural identity problem. These ideologists failed to predict that confrontation between liberalism and the traditional forms of national identity (Christian Orthodoxy being one of them) would undermine the position of their ideological preference. The conception of the identity of Georgian society was a logical continuation of this process. It acquired its final shape at the very beginning of the new century, after the Rose Revolution to be more exact, and caused ever sharper responses to globalization.
The extremely hard social conditions in which most people found themselves drove the nation away from the liberal option. Indeed, in the absence of adequate social skills and an efficient system of social protection the free market economy looked like the synonym of an economic disaster. Extreme poverty is still the nation’s everyday problem. Those regions central power ignored were hit more than the others.
Let’s have a closer look at this problem. The 1998 public opinion poll conducted by the Philosophical Society of Georgia revealed a very interesting fact: a large part (about 29 percent) of the active Orthodox believers were jobless because they failed to find employment in keeping with their field of specialization and educational level or assessed their incomes as low or very low. There is no information about the extent to which this factor contributed to the growing number of new religious organizations, especially the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but their numbers did skyrocket at the turn of the 21st century; it can be surmised that the loss of social status also contributed to the process.
It should be admitted that the latter came to the fore after the Rose Revolution when most of the population of 40-45 years and over lost the hope and chance of being employed by state structures.
In any case, the rapid growth of active believers over the last few years can be considered an important fact and sign of stronger religious feelings. This fact cannot be explained by social and cultural reasons alone; the process is unfolding because of personal and religious considerations, although the above factors should not be ignored. The social and cultural factors served as fertile soil for existential factors behind the more vigorous religious activities.
At first the Orthodox Church confronted the challenges of globalization with rising fundamentalism: starting in the mid-1990s religious and secular publications presented, in apocalyptical terms, democratization and liberalization as a conspiracy against Christian Orthodoxy as the true faith. The theories of alternative historical roads for the nation and the church gained currency under the spell of certain Russian Orthodox ideologists.
Since that time the conservative right wing of the Georgian Orthodox Church with its frequently archaic social vocabulary has been standing opposed to the missionary activities of the new religious groups perfectly adapted to the latest historical realities and, in their extreme manifestations, striving for the country’s “new Evangelization.” On the other hand, violence against the newcomers attracted the attention of highly respected human rights organizations.
On 20 May, 1997, under pressure from its fundamentalist wing the Georgian Orthodox Church left the World Council of Churches and the Conference of European Churches. On 8-9 November, 1999, during the visit of Pope Paul John II to Georgia, the Patriarchate issued a statement which prohibited its followers from attending the Papal service.
The mid-1990s can be described as a time when religious nationalism struck root in Georgia. It was a time when liberal-minded religious figures moved to the fore within the Georgian Orthodox Church; their active efforts and frequent criticism of the Church policies failed to dent the religious process and convince the public. Most church figures and believers remained convinced that the liberals were resolved to undermine the nation’s cultural and religious identity rather than to remedy the situation.
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The liberal wing, however, managed to introduce liberal and democratic terms into the statements coming from the top church officials. In May 2005, the Patriarchate set up the Coordinating Center of Inter-Religious Relations in Support of Statehood which brought together nearly all the confessions functioning in Georgia: the fundamentalist ideology was finally abandoned for the sake of adjusting to the new conditions.
The Georgian Orthodox Church Today
The fact that the number of believers in Georgia has considerably increased speaks volumes about the country’s religious (and not only religious) life. Despite the fact that the absolute majority regards itself as Orthodox Christians, due to cultural and historical traditions the number of those who follow Orthodoxy for purely religious reasons is growing rapidly.
According to the public opinion poll conducted in 2006 by the Business Consulting Group (by E. Jgerenaia), 56.1 percent of the polled who described themselves as Orthodox believed that religion was a very important factor in their private lives; 32 percent described it as an important factor, while 8.5 percent said it was not very important; 17.5 percent practice religion regularly, while the majority limits its involvement to large religious holydays. According to the 1998 poll conducted by the Philosophical Society of Georgia, only 5.67 percent described themselves as true believers. This means that religious motivation has become stronger. Well-organized groups of believers living in their autonomous or even closed communication shells form another important social factor.
It should be added that according to all the opinion polls the Orthodox Church enjoys the greatest trust of the nation: in 2003, in the wake of the Rose Revolution, it outstripped the president by several points. This means that the number of followers is not the only indicator of the role of religion in Georgia. Since the 21st century the Orthodox Church has obviously been leaving behind its former image as an ethnographic and cultural curiosity to become a social factor in its own right. Today it strongly affects the country’s movement toward the global context.
Problems of the Religious Organizations’ Legal Status
The above is directly related to the legal basis of religion and religious organizations in Georgia. The special role of the Orthodox Church in the history of Georgia is envisaged in Art 9 of the Constitution, which says: “The state shall declare complete freedom of belief and religion, as well as recognize the special role of the Apostle Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Georgia in the history of Georgia and its independence from the state.” The idea about an agreement between the state and the Georgian Orthodox Church was first formulated in the latter half of the 1990s; the final document acquired the form of a constitutional agreement; in March 2001 the parliament amended the Constitution accordingly.
The Constitutional Agreement was signed on 14 October, 2002, and approved by the Synod of the Orthodox Church three days later, on 17 October; the parliament of Georgia passed it on 22 October. Under this document the Church acquired the historically determined status of a subject of public law.
This legal status placed the Georgian Orthodox Church above all other religious organizations, the legal status of which was limited to that of a subject of private law. Georgia’s legislation has no
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special legal status for religious communities, which makes the situation unacceptable: many of them reject the status of subjects of private law.
No legal changes are possible for two reasons: on the one hand, most of the hierarchs of the Orthodox Church refuse to limit themselves to recognizing the Church’s past services. They regard the republic as the Church’s canonical territory in which no other confession may enjoy the right of evangelization.
On many occasions this radical approach is confronted by the equally radical opinion that the Constitutional Agreement created unequal conditions for religious organizations and that all other structures should be invited to sign similar documents. In a country with scores of religious organizations (some of them with no more than ten members) the Constitutional Agreement can hardly be accepted as precedence.
This probably explains why Georgia has not followed in the footsteps of many European countries (Austria, the U.K., the Baltic countries, etc.) which classify religious organizations on the strength of the country’s cultural traditions, the length of their presence in the country, etc. to create adequate legislation. Many of the religious newcomers or small groups would object, but this is the only road leading to a legally organized religious context.
The degree to which any religious organization blends into the specific conditions in any country is very important: on many occasions a religious movement, which is perfectly adequate in one cultural milieu, fails to blend into a different environment. New religious movements have already created unpleasant surprises in Japan, Belgium, the U.S., and other countries, which means that this problem should be managed with caution.
International Contacts of the Georgian Orthodox Church
The most intensive yet far from unambiguous ties connect the Georgian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). On the one hand, the Georgian Church is doing its best to contain the ROC’s expansion to the regions (Abkhazia and Samachablo) outside the control of the central authorities. Some of the members of the Moscow Patriarchate went as far as approving the “cold war” of 2006 between Russia and Georgia in the course of which Georgian and other labor migrants were deported from Russia. This caused numerous violations of human rights and a lot of suffering.3 The patriarchs of All Russia and Georgia declared that the two churches remained true to the many centuries of their fraternal relations, but it became obvious that Russian neo-imperialism had become Russian Orthodox messianism. This breeds mistrust of the Russian Orthodox Church.
We are aware of two approaches to the contemporary Orthodox realities: the first, a relatively liberal one, is practiced by the Constantinople Patriarchate which is actively trying to adjust to the new historical conditions and has accepted human values as its highest value. This was clearly demonstrated during the Papal visit of Benedict XVI to Turkey in November 2006 when he and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I declared their readiness to bring the two churches closer together. This meeting and the reference to Bartholomew I as the Ecumenical Patriach rocked the ROC. The Russian Orthodox ideologues argued that the Pope denied the ROC the role of heir to the Byzantine Church.
The process began even before the Pope reached Turkey: Metropolitan of Smolensk and Kaliningrad Kirill Gundiaev, head of the department of foreign contacts of the ROC, expressed his concern
1 In October 2006 Bishop of Saratov and Volsk Vsevolod Longin approved these practices.
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about the Archbishop of Constantinople and Ecumenical Patriarch claiming a role in the Orthodox world similar to the one the Pope plays in the Catholic world.
Those Orthodox Churches (the Georgian Church being one of them) that did not abandon the Julian calendar for the Gregorian have a special role to play in the globalist project of the ROC. It claims leadership of the group of churches that is still living in “alternative history.” Russian publications are brimming with statements that primacy should belong to the Jerusalem Church as the Moth-er-Church rather than to the Constantinople Patriarch and that it is for the Russian Church and the state to address the global tasks of Orthodoxy.
There are no influential supporters of the Russian Orthodox globalist project among the Georgian Orthodox clergy; however, the wing that thinks in the terms of alternative history and alternative (not liberal) eschatology is very strong: this makes them unintentional allies of the Russian strategy. Many of them agree with the thesis supplied by the Russian Orthodox circles that so-called mondial-ism is an evil spearheaded against Orthodoxy.
The very ambiguous position of the ROC in relation to the churches of the breakaway regions finally tipped the balance: after the war of 1991-1993 the Tskhum-Abkhaz Eparchy of the Georgian Orthodox Church was detached from the rest of its canonical territory. Today, a temporary eparchial council made up of local clergy is looking after the interests of the Abkhazian Orthodox Church. It rejects the jurisdiction of the Georgian Orthodox Church which, in turn, refuses to accept its canonical rights. Despite the efforts of Council Head Vissarion Aplia, the Abkhazian churches and their congregations could not join the Moscow Patriarchate, however the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCA) considers that the Abkhazian Church belongs to its jurisdiction even though this has not received canonical confirmation. The Act on Canonical Communion signed in May 2007, under which the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad became part of the ROC, created the impression that the Abkhazian Church is patronized by the ROCA. In Georgia this is interpreted as an attempt by the ROC to invade the canonical territory of the Georgian Orthodox Church. Expansion is going on in the case of the Ossetian Orthodox Church as well.
This produced a diplomatic result in the form of a visit by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, an indefatigable object of criticism on the part of the Russian Orthodox ideologists, to Georgia as a guest of honor at the 30th anniversary of the enthronement of Catholicos-Patriarch of Georgia Ilia II. The official information supplied by the Georgian Church did not mention a ROC delegation. It should be said that President George W. Bush congratulated the Catholicos-Patri-arch. The head of the Georgian Church responded with a letter in which he pointed out that the United States had a great role to play in developing Georgian statehood. It is interesting to note that for many years the Georgian Orthodox Church preferred to stay away from foreign policy issues thus breeding strong suspicions among its opponents of its pro-Russian bias. In this context the letter was a telltale point: the Georgian Orthodox Church had left its shell and is viewing itself as part of the globalizing process.
The Latest Developments
The latest developments have transformed the Georgian Orthodox Church into an institution that enjoys the trust of the nation. During the November 2007 political crisis the Orthodox Patriarchate turned out to be the only force with enough authority to interfere in the crisis and bring measure and rationality to the political passions. During the previous crises of 1989, 1991, and 2003 the Church tried to do the same and failed: the political opponents either ignored the calls to peace and a dialog or even declined them. In November 2007 the Church did not merely initiate a dialog between the two opposing groups but also suggested that constitutional monarchy might prove to be the best
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form of Georgian state organization. Several influential political parties sided with the Church. This means that if and when the project is realized the Church will gain even more authority.
Those who insist that this will cripple the country’s democratic development are wrong: today, the man-in-the-street is looking for familiar cultural landmarks—without them democratic development will remain a mere formality.
C o n c l u s i o n
The developments in Georgia’s religious life designed to match the global processes and meet the challenges facing human values have not always been straightforward. So far they cannot be described either as democratic or as consistently religious and nationalist. This is what can be expected of a small nation living in an uncomfortable historical environment and working hard to save its identity by preserving its traditional forms of life. The two trends manifested in the Georgian Church—the attempt to preserve its religious and cultural identity, on the one hand, and the need to take the global processes into account, on the other—faithfully reflect the major trends obvious in Georgian society.
Irina BABICH
D.Sc. (Hist.),
leading fellow at the Department of the Caucasus, Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow, Russia)
RUSSIA
IN THE NORTHERN CAUCASUS (LATE 18TH-EARLY 20TH CENTURIES): STATE AND LEGAL ASPECTS OF ITS RELIGIOUS POLICIES
Abstract
The author investigates the so-called peaceful ways to fortify Russia’s position in the Northern Caucasus, which include, among other things, special relations with the local Muslims, as well as Orthodox missionary activities wherever possible. She
relies on archive materials, written sources, and regulatory acts relating to the later 18th-early 20th centuries to conclude that, on the one hand, the Russian state in the Northern Caucasus created favorable conditions for the nationalities who became part of the
