HENT DE VRIESstore? Finally, what new possibilities might it set free, create, or open up, for us or for
others, known and unknown? Could one address such questions concretely, with existing
and alternative national, inter- and non-governmental policy orientations in mind?
Timely Considerations?
The conference that provided the core papers of this volume examined interrelationships
between the political, economic, and cultural characteristics of the ‘‘age of globalization,’’
on the one hand, and the vision of society and structures of governance developed over
millennia by major faith traditions, as well as by supposedly less systematized indigenous
traditions, on the other. That such an undertaking has about it an element of urgency
cannot be doubted, in view not only of 9/11 and subsequent attacks in Madrid and Lon-
don but also—more broadly and perhaps, in a longer view, more importantly—of reli-
giously informed resistances and responses to pressures to secularize and to assimilate in
cultural and political terms. These resistances and responses are implicit in the continuing
sources of tension and conflict between the self-proclaimed secularism of the West and
its allies, on the one hand, and the self-perception of developing, often postcolonial, socie-
ties with their state-sponsored, popular, or alienated fringe political movements, on the
other.
The West still imagines developing societies and underprivileged communities and
individuals to be inevitable beneficiaries of globalization, of its markets no less than its
cultural goods, its constitutional democracy as well as its interpretation of human rights.
In the end, if somewhat indirectly, they very well may be. But these societies’ present
place in a hegemonic world ruled by imbalances in power, news, money, and markets
is a source of permanent frustration, indeed, of humiliation and contention. This has
repercussions for internal relationships in Western nations, with their significant immi-
grant communities, no less than for the establishment and maintenance of international
law. The recent dramatic difficulties with policies of integration and accommodation in
European countries (for example, in France and the Netherlands, whose respective politi-
cal troubles are extensively discussed in this volume), as well as the recent escalation in
the Middle East of hostilities between Israel and the Palestinian authority (Hamas) and
Hezbollah in Lebanon. So is the immobility, not to say paralysis, of European governance
in dealing with its internal affairs, to say nothing of the inability or unwillingness of the
international community to enforce an immediate end to reiterated acts and crimes of
war or to guarantee minimal assurances for security, justice, and peace for all.
To illustrate that, sadly, the studies of political theologies collected here are all too
timely, let me refer to the example of ‘‘political Islam,’’ especially the much-debated dan-
ger represented by dispersed militant movements. Having emerged in the wake of global-
ization, after the failure of so many of its state-based and ‘‘secular’’ nationalist projects,
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