The Political Theology of European Integration

Abstract

This dissertation undertakes the first comprehensive examination of the degree to which national traditions of political theology may inform patterns of West European integration. Scholarly literature has generally reduced postwar integration to economic or technocratic incentives, but the present analysis subjects seventeen West European countries to Boolean techniques of qualitative comparative analysis in order to establish both their prevailing traditions of political theology and degrees of European integration. The findings indicate that the Roman Catholic countries are more, but the Protestant countries less integrated with Europe as a whole; and the argument is entertained that the hierarchy and cosmopolitanism of the Roman Catholic faith is more conducive to European integration than the deeper emphasis on national identity and sovereignty inculcated by the various divisions of Protestant Christianity. These influences are accounted for through a causal narrative by which the theological confrontations of the sixteenth century were settled through the constitutional revolutions of the seventeenth, which in turn influenced comparative political decisions of the twentieth concerning European integration.