Cardinal Richelieu And The Death Of The Christian Sodality

Once upon a time, kiddies, long ago in far off Europe, the Western Christians--you know, the Holy Universal Catholic Church, the Western branch of Christianity after the Great Schism of a thousand years earlier--saw themselves as being one great faith community--equivalent to the Arabic word and Muslim concept of the Ummah.  This idea had propelled European political thinking for generations almost beyond count.  The dual rulership of Pope and Emperor, specifically the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, had soldiered on for centuries challenged only briefly on the margins.

Then, in only a couple score of years the intellectual edifice of the Catholic sodality crumbled, fragmented.  It was replaced by the concept of the nation-state pursuing amoral national interest for reasons of state.  This constituted the single most critical and shocking change in European political and social understandings in all the years which followed the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Most surprisingly, the revolution was the work of one man.  More surprisingly the one man was not religious dissident Martin Luther, but a Prince of the Church, Cardinal Richelieu.  Richelieu may have been a Catholic.  He might have been a good Catholic in his beliefs, practices, and life.  But, he was first and foremost a Frenchman.  As a self-conscious man of France, the Cardinal acting in his capacity as First Minister of His Most Catholic Majesty, Louis XIII, rejected the notion of a universal empire of Catholics responsive to Pope and Emperor.  He replaced that hoary bit of received conventional wisdom with the radical idea that a state acted with no moral basis other than what might be in the state's best interests.

In his thinking--and the actions which resulted--Richelieu was the precise opposite of the Holy Roman Emperor, the towering figure of the House of Hapsburg, Ferdinand II.  There is an ancient and not necessarily relevant saying among European historians that the Holy Roman Empire was not holy, was not Roman, and was not truly an empire.  Ferdinand II would have rejected totally the contention that his empire was not just that--an Empire.  He would have pushed back even harder against the characterization of his empire as not being holy.

Ferdinand II was a very good, highly committed son of the Church.  He sincerely believed that foreign policy must be conducted according to the desires and needs of the Christian God.  He also believed with all his heart that he even more than the Pope was capable of both ascertaining the will of God and acting in a consistent moral fashion to achieve the will.  Finally, Ferdinand II accepted completely the idea that there was a single Christian, (Catholic) sodality.  To Ferdinand the rantings of a Luther or a Calvin were the ravings not only of lunatics but the message of the devil.  These heretics and all who supported or agreed with them must be extirpated.

Here it must be recalled that the Protestant Reformation came into existence for religious reasons, but survived because secular rulers in the multitude of petty German states saw protestantism as a tool for national identity and exaltation.  The Reformation grew and spread because Cardinal Richelieu saw the same potential and exploited it with great effect on behalf of French identity and interests.

Which brings us to the most important, most decisive, and (until the mid-Twentieth Century) most bloody war in European history, the Thirty Years War.  The Thirty Years War decided many things.  At the top of the list the war by the time it was ended in 1648 was the permanent destruction of the Catholic Christian sodality--the Christian version of Islam's ummah--replacing it with the self-interested nation-state.  The war lasted thirty years in largest measure because Cardinal Richelieu fearing the encirclement of France by the Hapsburg dominions convinced His Most Catholic Majesty King Louis XIII to underwrite the costs of the war being waged by Protestant rulers including Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden.  Finally, seventeen years after Ferdinand II started his war of counter-reformation, France entered the war directly so as to consolidate its position and assure the defeat of the Holy Roman Empire.

That's right, a Prince of the Church and a king who styled himself His Most Catholic Majesty conspired to defeat the champion of Catholicism, Ferdinand II, and the Pope.  While there were apologists for France and Richelieu who tortured logic and murdered reality to justify the actions of king and minister, Richelieu engaged in no such sophistry.  He said what he believed: A nation-state acted in pursuit of its own interests, its own reasons of state, and this was sanctified by results alone.  In short, the ends justified the means.

States were not in Richelieu's view like individual human beings.  While individuals might best be governed by moral or ethical codes in their interactions, states can only pursue self-interest for self-defined reasons.  States unlike people could act properly only insofar as they defended and advanced their collective identity and the interests which arose organically from that.  A nation-state, he concluded, could only survive by defending its identity and interests.  Further, it could only prosper if it advanced its interests even at the expense of other nation-states.

This view, which was universally adopted in the wake of France's clear success, assured there would be conflicts armed and otherwise almost non-stop.  As a consequence Europe experienced more wars per century than any other region of the world.  As another result, Europe emerged as the preeminent region.  The linkage between evolving political complexity, social organization, and technolological advancement with the recurrent limited warfare is clear.

While no historical analogy is exact, an analogy is suggestive.  History does not repeat itself but it can have present day echoes of long past dynamics and events.  So it is with today's political Islam, particularly the variant espousing a global caliphate encompassing the totality of the Muslim ummah.

The current political changes underway in North Africa and the Mideast in predominantly Muslim polities will assure the US and the West generally will have to deal with regimes predicated upon some form of political Islam.  The chief anxiety abroad in the US and elsewhere is that the form of political Islam with which we will be dealing will consist exclusively of the most ambitious sort--the proponents of the global caliphate, the universal ummah.  The European experience, the success of Richelieu against opponents as given to the idea of a faith based universal morality demanding a One True Faith dominated world, suggests that the anxiety might be overdrawn notwithstanding the seeming success of what has been termed "stealth jihad" in parts of Europe and the US.

It merits noting that despite the declarations and hopes within the Western elites that nationalism and the nation-state are bankrupt, dying institutions, they are alive and well throughout the world--including Muslim majority states.  Turkey, Egypt, even Iran are strongly nationalistic in their views.  Arguably, the mullahs in Tehran have been successful in keeping their regime in power by exploiting the nationalism of the Iranian population.

In Egypt, specifically the Egypt of Nasser, the concept of "Pan-Arabism" floundered on the reef of national identity and national interest.  To other Arab states the Nasserist concept smacked of a stealth imperialism.  To Egyptians, the problem was seen differently: Why Pan-Arabism rather than an Arab bloc marching to the music composed and played in Cairo?  All of Nasser's attempts to create a "United Arab Republic" failed due to nationalism.  Even when Islam was invoked, as it was albeit belatedly, the appeal to common faith like the appeal to a common tongue did not overcome national identity.

Turkey has a long history of using Islam to reinforce the Turkish national identity.  Starting in the last days of the Ottoman Empire and extending down to the AKP of today, religion has been invoked as a buttress for the national identity.  Along with language, religion has been employed consistently as a means of identifying and expressing Turkey in comparison to other nations and states.  As Erdogan expressed recently in a speech to expat Turks in Germany, the rejection of assimilation is critical lest Turkish identity and national interests be weakened.  Admittedly, the Turks have taken national identity to extremes as with the forced removal of Armenians early in the Twentieth Century, but the most important takeaway is not the mass deaths of those being removed but rather the reason--nationalism, national identity, and national interest.

As a result it is fair to conclude that the AKP will not surrender Turkish identity or national interest to the radical notion of a universal ummah or the pursuit of a global caliphate.  Nor will the Turkish government put national interest at risk to promote "stealth jihad" or any other form of expansionist political Islam.

The various peoples of the world are today too aware of the reality of national identity.  In this way they are far advanced over the Europeans of the early Seventeenth Century.  They are also far ahead of the Europeans of the time of the Thirty Years War in having a long experience with the formality of the nation-state.  This in and of itself lowers the appeal of the universal ummah and the hallucinatory global caliphate.

None of this implies that a regime based on political Islam will not use Islam law including the barbaric punishments, the degradation of women, and the suppression of free expression.  All may well exist soon in Egypt or elsewhere.  However the adoption of Islamic law in all its backward and barbaric features does not represent a threat to the West and other civilized states in and of itself.  Beyond that, the nature of communications today insures that a highly restrictive and reactionary sort of Islamic code will be met with widespread resistance.  The adoption of Shariah is a self-limiting proposition in any organized state--even as has been seen in Iran.

Universality based on religion is not new.  Nor is it unique to Islam.  History demonstrates that when the universal is met by the specific, the universal loses.  People do not identify on a universal basis.  They construct corporate identities on shared values, language, geographic propinquity, and, most importantly, a shared historically based mythology.  This is what the canny Cardinal intuited in the early Seventeenth Century and supported his concept of the nation-state pursuing national interest at the expense of others.  His ethic not only was alive and well back then, it lives and breathes today--throughout the Muslim world.