T
HE CHAPTERS IN THIS VOLUME REFER TOgeographical units. But while
Western Europe may appear as a homogeneous unit from an American or
Asian perspective, it is in fact rather inhomogeneous. It is divided by linguistic
barriers, powerful nation-states, and national cum regional identities.
Linguistically, Western Europe is dominated by Germanic and Romance
languages. This division also identifies different intellectual environments. Even
in Switzerland and Belgium, where both Romance and Germanic languages
enjoy official status, the linguistic areas have different academic traditions.
These linguistic–territorial divisions, however, are hardly static. For example,
nowadays, few young Scandinavian scholars publish in or read German or
French, and many scholars mainly follow international debates only to the
extent that they are conducted in English (cf. Antes 2004: 44). American
scholars are generally better known and enjoy greater respect than colleagues
from neighboring countries.
European countries have extremely different religious cultures and state–
church relationships. Compare the separation of church and state effected in
France in 1905 and the French ideology of laïcité(Baubérot 1998) with the
various state and folk churches of Northern Europe or with the separation of
church and state in countries such as Germany, Greece, Italy, and Spain, which
nevertheless grant the church a special legal and cultural status. All of these
different relationships shape the study of religion.
The European Union is currently attempting to internationalize the academic
landscape. It is introducing a common grading system, funding the intra-
European exchange of students and teaching staff, and making considerable
funds available for research. Nevertheless, most research in the humanities
is still funded by national research agencies. Furthermore, although there is
extensive short-term mobility among students and scholars, recruitment of
faculty is almost exclusively done either nationally or occasionally within
subcontinental regions.
There is as yet no census of departments and programs in the study of
religion similar to that undertaken by the American Academy of Religion or
a review of current research similar to the Canadian Corporation for Studies
of Religion’s State-of-the-Art Review series (Warne 2004: 15–23). Peter Antes
(2004) is, however, a useful country by country survey. At present the non-
confessional study of religion is taught at universities in more than a dozen
countries of Western Europe, and the International Association for the History
of Religions (IAHR), founded mainly by European scholars in Amsterdam in
1950, has member-organizations in fifteen Western European nations. (The
study of religions is still lacking in Ireland and Portugal.) In 2000 the European
Association for the Study of Religions (EASR) was founded. It sponsors several
electronic discussion lists, subdivided by language, and arranges a series of
annual conferences jointly with one of its member-associations.WESTERN EUROPE
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