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Home >> Articles Online, by Author >> Articles Online, by date published online >> J Flint, Scottish Affairs, No. 63, Spring 2008 |
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Scottish Affairs, No. 63, Spring 2008Governing Sectarianism in Scotlandby John Flint |
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IntroductionIn January 2006 the Scottish Executive [1] published an Action Plan on Tackling Sectarianism in Scotland (Scottish Executive 2006a). In the same month, the Respect Task Force, based in the Home Office, published the Respect Action Plan ‘broadening, deepening and furthering’ attempts to tackle anti-social behaviour in England and Wales (Respect Task Force 2006, p.7). Both documents identified their respective social problems as priorities for government intervention, set out wide- ranging proposals and were ultimately aimed at achieving a cultural change in (sections of) the population. Both of these action plans may be placed within the wider quest for social cohesion and the reaffirmation of civic and national identity in multicultural societies that has emerged as a governmental priority in several Western European states, including France, Denmark and the Netherlands. The Scottish Executive’s action plan was the latest manifestation of increasing government and Ministerial activity and rhetoric in relation to sectarianism which has been evident since James Macmillan re-ignited a high-profile public debate in 1999, culminating in the National Summit on Sectarianism in February 2005. The growing literature on sectarianism in Scotland has primarily been concerned with defining the concept and debating the extent to which dimensions of sectarianism and discrimination were and are manifested in historic and contemporary Scottish society (Bruce 1985, Gallagher 1987, Bruce et al. 2004, 2005, Devine 2000, Bradley 2004, Walls and Williams 2003, 2005, Finn 2000, Kelly 2003, Paterson 2002). These studies include analysis of how legislation, education policy, religious organisations, local authorities, employers and football clubs have impacted on the nature and extent of sectarianism in Scotland. Less direct attention has been given to how sectarianism was and is actually governed as a social problem in its own right. Drawing on governance theory and Foucault’s work on governmentality in particular, this article utilises policy documents and statements to examine how sectarianism has come to be identified as a contemporary social problem that requires government prioritisation and state intervention. It identifies the key rationales that underpin government constructions of sectarianism, discusses the mechanisms utilised by government to ‘know’ and measure the problem and explores key dimensions of the policy instruments and institutional frameworks through which the sectarianism action plan will be implemented. The article argues that the Scottish Executive’s campaign to reduce sectarianism illuminates several key dimensions of contemporary governance in the UK and elsewhere. Sectarianism: A subject for governmentThe period since 1999 has seen an increasing level of government activity aimed at addressing sectarianism in contemporary Scottish society. State intervention to address sectarianism has a very long history, including Catholic emancipation, the governance of divisions between Protestant denominations in the 19th Century and the amelioration of religious tensions being one of the rationales underpinning the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act (Paterson 2007). However, events since 1999 represent the most prominent governmental prioritisation of sectarianism in the post- Second World War period. The Scottish Executive has conducted two reviews of evidence, established a Cross-Party Working Group on Religious Hatred and commissioned a review of religious marches and parades (Nicolson 2002, McAspurren 2005, Scottish Executive 2003, Orr 2005). The Scottish Parliament has passed legislation introducing new categories of religiously-aggravated offences. In addition, the previous and current First Ministers have made a series of high-profile statements on the issue, and the previous First Minister convened the national Summit on Sectarianism in February 2005 (Scottish Executive 2005a). Addressing sectarianism is now embedded within a framework of institutions and initiatives across Scotland’s government which were brought together in the Action Plan on Tackling Sectarianism in Scotland, launched in January 2006 (Scottish Executive 2006a). As with the emergence of the community cohesion agenda in England and Wales, this governmental activity represents immediate policy responses to specific events (the speech by James McMillan; campaigns by groups like Nil by Mouth; the ethnic disturbances in northern English towns in 2001). However, these actions are also significantly influenced by, and emblematic of, wider rationales and mechanisms of contemporary governance in the UK and elsewhere, including a focus on managing cultural diversity and reshaping the relationship between civic dispositions, religious and ethnic identities, national allegiance and political citizenship (Community Cohesion Independent Review Team 2001). Analysis of the role of the Scottish state within studies of sectarianism (Bruce et al. 2004) have often focused on the indirect consequences of governmental action, for example the outcomes of the 1918 Education Act or the establishment of the state comprehensive education system in 1965, for levels of disadvantage experienced by Catholics. Studies have also argued that neither historic nor contemporary mechanisms of the Scottish state, including political elites, the civil service and local government, were institutionally sectarian or a ‘Protestant resource’ (Bruce at al. 2004, Paterson 2002). Furthermore, most of the evidence presented about religious discrimination in employment is not located within the public sector (Walls and Williams 2003). This view of the state as disengaged or ‘neutral’ from alleged processes of sectarianism has been challenged by Bradley (2004) who argues that the British state is essentially assimilist, aculturising and secular. Recent debates about state-funded Roman Catholic schools have also brought into focus the direct linkages between government policy and sectarianism. Less detailed coverage has been given to how the institutions and processes of modern Scottish government have responded to and sought to govern sectarianism as a problem in its own right (although see Walls 2003). Governmentality and the Construction of the Sectarianism ProblemGovernmentality, as famously described by Michel Foucault, is concerned both with the rationales or mentalities of governance and the various techniques and mechanisms, or ‘arts of government’ deployed to measure, classify and act upon governed populations (Foucault 1991, 1977). This analytical approach identifies first order acts of governance, associated with the codifying and formalising of key principles and priorities, and second order acts of governance, associated with the actual implementation of policy instruments (Swyngedouw 2005). The starting point for this analysis is that, as Bradley (2004) argues, sectarianism is in itself an ideological construct, in the same way that ‘respect’ or ‘community cohesion’ are. Thus, sectarianism in the Scottish context may be defined as ‘intra-Christian prejudice’ (Scottish Executive 2006b, p.5) but this prejudice ranges from discrimination in employment, housing or other life opportunities on the basis of religious affiliation to harassment or derogatory or inflammatory discourse. The manifestation of sectarianism through urban disorder appears to be the primary focus of the Scottish Executive’s action plan (see also Bruce et al. 2004), linked to wider government strategies aimed at tackling anti-social behaviour. However, this concept of sectarianism has been challenged for failing to address anti-Irish racism (Finn 2000, Kelly 2003). Similarly, the framing of sectarianism as undermining social cohesion requires recognition that governmental definitions of social cohesion, and more specifically ‘community’ cohesion, are themselves contested and have been criticised for their assimilist rather than multi-cultural underpinnings and for focusing on race and religion rather than structural disadvantages between ethnic groups (Burnett 2004). The institutions of the state are of primary importance in shaping and reshaping these ideological constructions, as ‘it is the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not’ (Foucault 1991, p.103). The rationales of governance are revealed through policy narratives that construct social problems, identify their causes and ascribe responsibilities and actions for their resolution (Stone 1989). These policy narratives establish ‘official’ memories of histories and specific interpretations of events that generate particular accounts and understandings of a social problem, whilst simultaneously ignoring or silencing alternative understandings; and thereby enhancing the legitimacy of governance actions (Swyngedouw 2005, Jacobs et al. 2003). This is revealed in policy discourses that identify the existence of sectarianism in Scotland and the lack of ‘respect’ in England and Wales as ‘facts’ that are of significant importance and therefore requiring governmental prioritisation and intervention:
These statements are presented as stating a commonsense, widely-perceived and uncontroversial reality – that sectarianism and disrespect exist on a significant scale and therefore require increasing levels of governmental intervention. The statements ignore, for example, that the Scottish Executive’s own analysis acknowledges uncertainty about the extent to which sectarianism exists (McAspurren 2005) or that evidence about rising levels of anti-social behaviour is inconclusive (Pawson and McKenzie 2006). It should also be noted that no official governmental definitions of sectarianism or respect have been developed. Rather, it is claimed that ‘sectarianism is easy to recognise, but can be difficult to define’ (Scottish Executive 2006b, p.5) or that ‘almost everyone of any age and from any community understands what it [respect] is and thinks this is right’ (Respect Task Force 2006, p.5). A second common feature of governance rationales and discourses around sectarianism and anti-social behaviour is that, whilst these problems are attributed to ‘the bigoted few’ (Scottish Executive 2006a, p.1) or ‘selfish minority’ (Respect Task Force 2006, p.5), they are conversely presented in an alarmist rhetoric as impacting adversely on the entire nation. Thus the ex-Deputy First Minister spoke of ‘the ugly spectre of sectarianism … religious hatred frequently casts a dark shadow’ (Scottish Executive 2002) and the progress report submitted to the National Summit on Sectarianism was entitled A Nation of Opportunity, Not A State of Fear (Scottish Executive 2005b). Some academic studies (Bruce et al. 2004, 2005) suggest that sectarianism and faith-based discrimination processes are largely a myth in contemporary Scotland. However, policy discourse, government-sponsored events like the National Summit and the production of an action plan establish a dominant narrative of sectarianism as an existent phenomenon and thereby legitimate government intervention to tackle it. ‘Knowing’ and Measuring SectarianismFoucault (1991) describes how various measurement and monitoring techniques enable governments to ‘know’ their populations in new ways and produce ‘calculable spaces’ through the surveillance, classification and quantification of governed subjects (Swyngedouw 2005). Such techniques of government are encompassed within the contemporary quest for ‘evidence-based’ policy-making and are evident in the activation of a plethora of policy mechanisms relating to sectarianism in Scotland. These include the commissioning of reviews of evidence or further research studies about sectarianism by the Scottish Executive and Glasgow City Council (Nicolson 2002, McAspurren 2005, NFO Research 2003). The focusing of the ‘gaze’ (Foucault 1977) of these governing institutions upon sectarianism was significant symbolically and politically in both acknowledging that the issue was present in the Scottish population and that it lay within the sphere of state competence. The establishment of the Cross-Party Group on Religious Hatred and the Orr Review of Marches and Parades in Scotland further ascribed a visibility and validity to government interventions to address sectarianism. Following ‘official’ governmental recognition of sectarianism a raft of measurement and audit techniques have been deployed to define and measure the phenomenon. These include introducing religion questions in the 2001 Census (as Foucault notes, the longest-standing mechanism for governments to know their populations), official counts of religiously-aggravated crime, audits of the numbers of religious parades and their policing costs, and surveys of the population’s attitudes towards, and experience of, sectarianism. Three observations about these techniques may be made here. Firstly, they represent the attempts of government to ‘know’ and quantify sectarianism. The 2001 Census enabled the Scottish Executive to produce calculations of the numbers, proportions and location patterns of Church of Scotland and Roman Catholic Church members (Scottish Executive 2004), whilst research commissioned by Glasgow City Council sought to assess the extent and nature of sectarianism in the city (NFO Research 2003). The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service are now required to quantify the incidence of religious motivation in offences prosecuted under Section 74 of the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2003. Thus the Scottish Executive can establish that there had been 726 charges that included Section 74 aggravations between January 2004 and June 2005 and the government now ‘knows’ that the majority of cases occur in the West of Scotland, usually involving males, with twice as many ‘anti-Catholic’ as ‘anti-Protestant’ incidents (Doyle 2006; see Crown Office 2004 for similar results from a previous audit exercise). The subsequent interpretation of these figures has been subject to controversy, arising from the definition of offences not including the religious affiliation of victims and whether these cases are analysed in the context of the entire Scottish Catholic population or the population of west central Scotland. Sir John Orr’s Review of Marches and Parades in Scotland included detailed monthly numbers of ‘Orange’, ‘Catholic’ and ‘Other’ parades by each local authority and police force area from 2001 to 2004, and local authorities and police forces are required to continue to monitor, record and publish these statistics and associated policing costs. Orr’s definition of ‘Catholic’ parades conflates religious groups with republican-political organisations such as the James Connolly Society, and the ‘Loyal’ institutions that he defines as ‘Orange’ have political as well as religious identities. The government now knows that there were 853 notified ‘Orange’ and 20 ‘Catholic’ parades in Scotland in 2003 (Orr 2005, p.66). The Orr review also sought to quantify policing costs related to religious parades, producing breakdowns of policing hours and estimated costs based on policing hours by rank, classified by police force area. This measurement of costs identifies that 700 ‘Orange’ and ‘Catholic’ parades cost £345,732 to police, including 27,240 police hours (Orr 2005, p.182). This has clear parallels with the Home Office’s attempts to ‘measure’ anti-social behaviour in England and Wales through the ‘snapshot’ national count that aimed to collate reports of anti-social behaviour on 10 September 2003 and use this to estimate the annual number of reports nationally and to calculate the associated financial costs to agencies (Home Office 2003a). Sectarianism and anti-social behaviour are made calculable and measurable, providing mechanisms for the deployment and calibration of government resources and the subsequent measurement of government ‘performance’. The requirement for the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service and local authorities to continuously record and publish the numbers of religiously-aggravated offences and ‘Orange’ and ‘Catholic’ marches also provides the means for the auditing of government performance over time that is a feature of reflexive governance (Dean 1999). The parades data provides channels for the comparative assessment and benchmarking of local government performance. However, a second observation is that these attempts to ‘know’ populations and quantify social problems produce ‘new’ knowledge that challenges predominant discourses and enables political debates to be reframed. For example, data generated by the religion and revised ethnicity questions in the 2001 Census was used to demonstrate that ‘Glasgow is not Belfast’ in terms of residential segregation or marriage (Bruce et al. 2004) and that Irish-Catholic health disadvantage remains a significant issue (Walls 2003). Therefore, as government agencies attempt to make sectarianism more calculable, their techniques of measurement and audit produce unintended consequences that undermine the assumptions in governance rationales and may lead to a reflexive re-orientation of policy interventions (Dean 1999). This is illustrated by the most recent audit of religiously-aggravated crimes that found that a third related to football or football teams and only 12-percent related to religious marches, a revealingly low proportion given the links made in policy discourse between sectarianism, football, parades and violence in urban Scotland (Doyle 2006; see also Crown Office 2004). Similarly, the quantification of parades in Scotland (Orr 2005, p.66) reveals the overwhelming predominance of ‘Orange’ marches compared to ‘Catholic’ marches. Between 2001 and 2004, ‘Orange’ parades accounted for between 50 and 53 percent of all parades notified to local authorities in Scotland (and 73 percent in the Strathclyde Police area). In the same period ‘Catholic’ parades accounted for one percent of the total. As an illustration, in Strathclyde in 2003, there were 44 notified ‘Orange’ parades (713 in total) for every one ‘Catholic’ march (16 in total). Such figures clearly challenge existing ‘neutral’ policy conceptualisations of ‘sectarian’ parades being essentially an equally two-sided problem. The third observation is that there are significant political and policy implications of how techniques of government are deployed in order to frame its understanding of sectarianism. Walls (2003) provides an account of how the political context impacted upon the rationales for excluding, and subsequently including, questions about religion in the 2001 Census, including disaggregated Church of Scotland, Roman Catholic and Other Christian categories. The shift from the General Register Office for Scotland in 1999 perceiving ‘no strong business case’ for religious information to be gathered to the inclusion of the religion questions in 2001 epitomises the emergence and subsequent government engagement with sectarianism as a policy issue. However, it also illuminates how the deployment of mechanisms of government narrows or extends the spheres of governance intervention. The exclusion of religion questions prevented governmental knowledge about certain groups being framed and interpreted in terms of religious parameters. However, the 2001 Census data enables new analysis of religious and ethnic groups that may result in new policy imperatives. More fundamentally, the construction of the Census reveals the wider rationales and conceptual understanding of governmental actions which combine with reflexive responses to contemporary political contexts and events to shape policies (Walls 2003, Thomas 2006). Walls (2003) argues that the reluctance to include certain questions reflects the racialisation of ethnicity and subsequent marginalisation of research into white or religious minorities in the UK. Importantly, these may be linked to more fundamental assumptions about citizenship and national identity. France provides the most obvious example here. Government in France is underpinned by the notion of the (secularism) of the French state and citizenship (for a full account, see Thomas 2006). This conceptualisation of a national identity means that gathering Census information about religion is actually prohibited in France. This constraint on knowing populations also serves to limit the parameters of political debate and to marginalise certain dimensions of cultural identity and belonging, such as faith. In contrast, the contemporary acknowledgement of sectarianism as a source of social conflict in Scotland by the Scottish Executive and some local authorities, underpinned by a plethora of governmental initiatives and analysis mechanisms, reframes conceptualisations of identities and conduct within Scottish society. The measurement and analysis of sectarianism will continue to be carefully politically managed in order to preserve the ‘neutrality’ of government agencies. As one small example, the Orr Review (2005) did not disaggregate the policing costs of ‘Orange’ and ‘Catholic’ parades, though they were individually categorised elsewhere. Such disaggregating would have explicitly shown the vast majority of policing resources being spent on ‘Orange’ parades. However, as the case of France reveals, there are fundamental policy assumptions underpinning this political micro-management, which are discussed in the following section. Sectarianism, Respect and Governing CitizensAlthough it is not possible to provide a detailed account of all the proposed measures in the respective action plans, there are central commonalities between the sectarianism and Respect agendas that illuminate key characteristics of governance in the UK and elsewhere (see Dean 1999, Crawford 2006). The first of these provides evidence for the continuing limitations, or retreat, of the sovereign state (Garland 1996) and the subsequent emergence of governance-beyond-the-state involving the ceding and fragmenting of functions of government to quasi-public, private sector or voluntary organisations. This is combined with the promotion of active citizenship through which governmental objectives are to be achieved by reshaping the conduct and cultural values of ‘autonomous’ subjects rather than overt state interventions and by increasing the role of citizens in governing social problems (Foucault 1991, Dean,1999). The foreword to the Respect action plan acknowledges: ‘[respect] cannot be achieved by Government alone’ (Respect Task Force 2006, p.3) and the Scottish Executive similarly admits: ‘Government alone will not be able to end sectarian values’ (Scottish Executive 2005b, p.2). Rather the governance of sectarianism and anti-social behaviour is characterised by a role for private, voluntary and community organisations, for example Nil By Mouth and Sense Over Sectarianism. It also involves the incorporation of an expanding network of ‘surrogate regulators’ as other organisations become embedded within delivering government goals or subject to regulation (Crawford 2006). Thus, the Respect agenda has introduced a licensing scheme for private landlords, whilst the Scottish Executive has established a national licensing scheme for Scottish football clubs. What is important is that these schemes identify and assign a role for these organisations in governing anti-social behaviour and sectarianism and thereby attribute new responsibilities and expectations to them, resulting in a considerable expansion of the arenas where these social problems are subject to governance and increasing the sites for interventions. These increasing spheres of (indirect state) governance of sectarianism and anti-social behaviour reaffirm Foucault’s insight that less direct state government need not equate to less governance (Foucault 1991). In fact, what we are witnessing is also an increase in direct state mechanisms for governing these social problems. These result in extended powers to state agencies and widen the range of behaviours subject to surveillance and intervention. The introduction of legislation relating to religiously-aggravated offences has already been discussed. The sectarianism action plan also proposes that local authorities use their licensing powers to prohibit the sale of sectarian and paramilitary goods, and enforcement action has already taken place in Glasgow. The action plan further proposes utilising new football banning orders to tackle abusive sectarian behaviour at games and looking at legal measures to address similar conduct at parades and marches. In addition to providing new mechanisms for the channelling of governmental power, these measures make certain previously tolerated behaviours the subject of regulation. Similarly the Respect agenda has led to a plethora of new techniques for regulating conduct, including Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, Acceptable Behaviour Contracts, Dispersal Orders and Parenting Orders. These mechanisms have been deployed in specific cases to ban behaviours including swearing, making reference to The Taliban, the wearing of particular clothing or congregating in certain localities, and they also extend government regulation of, for example, parent-child relationships (see Flint and Nixon 2006). What these developments appear to represent is therefore a significant increase in the ambitions of government. The focus upon respect and tackling incivilities and sectarianism are representative of what Frank Field (2003) has identified as a new ‘politics of behaviour’ in which regulating the conduct of citizens and their interactions in the public realm becomes an increasing priority for government. Certainly the establishment of cross-department Respect and Sectarianism Task Forces suggests their centrality in the respective governments’ agendas. Underpinning this new politics are new forms of government that operate by seeking to recode citizens’ values and sentiments as well as behaviour. Both anti-social behaviour and sectarianism are identified as essentially arising from a lack of respect for other people (Scottish Executive 2006a, Respect Task Force 2006, Home Office 2003b). Government ambitions go beyond managing the manifestations of social problems; rather they seek to bring about ‘cultural shifts’ in the population (Home Office 2003, p.6, Scottish Executive 2005b, p.6). The Respect Action is explicit in its aim of broadening the scope of government ‘to address anti-social behaviour in every walk of life’ (Respect Task Force 2006, p.7). To do so requires reshaping ‘the habits of everyday life’ (ibid, p.5) and, increasingly impoliteness and incivility, as well as criminal behaviour, have become the focus of government discourse (see Field 2003, Flint and Nixon 2006). The key mechanism for bringing about these ‘fundamental shifts in attitudes and behaviour’ (Scottish Executive 2005b, p.7) involves re-making citizens by encouraging individuals, conceptualised as active agents, to work on themselves in order to change their orientations and values as well as behaviour, with particular regard to reshaping the expression of identity and tolerance of diversity. In other words, citizens must, through a continual adaptive process, learn to negotiate and re-negotiate their traditions, cultural identities and everyday dispositions (Thomas 2006, Mitchell 2006). In addition, they are required not only to actively govern themselves, but to become active in the governance of conduct of others, with communities implored to take responsibility themselves for tackling anti-social behaviour and sectarianism (Home Office 2003b, Respect Task Force 2006, Scottish Executive 2005a and b, 2006a). The importance of education is demonstrated in the prominence of schools as sites of intervention in both the Respect and sectarianism action plans. The encouragement of citizens to become actively involved in governing these social problems is evidenced in the promotion of the Taking a Stand and Anti-Sectarianism in Scottish Education Awards that signal formal government approval of such acts of citizenship. The historian Tristram Hunt has likened these developments to a ‘new reformation of manners’ and points out that legislation has never in itself delivered significant attitudinal or moral changes in populations (Hunt 2006). Regardless of the extent to which these new quests of government actually succeed, the emphasis on achieving cultural shifts and the broadening of behaviour to be governed in the sectarianism and Respect agendas challenges the view that contemporary governance is characterised by a retreat and retrenchment of the institutional reach and ambition of the state. Conversely, the state is actually engaged in new ‘utopian’ projects of ambitious social engineering and the colonising of new policy agendas (Crawford 2006, Moran 2003). We have come a long way from Jack McConnell’s aim of the Scottish Executive ‘doing less better’. Citizenship, Diversity and National IdentityThese attempts to encourage citizens to negotiate cultural differences and realign their own conduct and values occur within wider government rationales about national identity and the requirements of contemporary citizenship. In France, this government discourse is based on a modernising agenda: ‘In a secular society, every person must be able to take some distance with regard to tradition’ (Commission on the Application of the Principles of Laïcité in the Republic, quoted in Thomas 2006, p.241). Likewise in Scotland, sectarianism is regarded as ‘holding back’ ‘Modern Scotland’ and in order for Scotland to ‘play a full part in Europe and the global economy’ there is a need to ‘put sectarianism in the dust-bin of history (Scottish Executive 2006a, p.1). In these discourses, and also replicated in community cohesion policy narratives in England, citizens’ ‘past’ attachments to tradition, culture or faith are contrasted unfavourably with the primarily economic needs of a secular nation in a global economy (McGhee 2005, Bagguley and Hussain 2006, Burnett 2004). This makes an interesting contrast with the Respect agenda which is concerned with ‘bringing back a proper sense of respect in our schools, in our communities’ (Blair 2005) and reversing a process of traditional values becoming ‘less widely held’ (Respect Task Force 2006, p.5). Both the sectarianism and Respect agendas are concerned with recoding the habits of everyday life. Where they differ is whether this entails abandoning or reviving traditional habits. The Scottish Executive’s acknowledgement of sectarianism and its high profile campaign to tackle the issue may be interpreted in different ways. One reading is that it comprises an element of the ‘One Scotland’ campaign that is built around equal opportunities and tackling religious and ethnic discrimination. Another reading would suggest that its focus on the sites of the most visible manifestations of sectarianism and associated disorder such as football matches and parades represents an extension of the anti-social behaviour agenda. It also however has its roots in the community cohesion agenda and the continuing challenges for government in responding to diversity and conflicting identities and values in multicultural societies. This is an issue that extends far beyond Scotland or the UK and has increasingly focused on religion (predominately Islam in the wider European context). In France, one of the responses has been to ban religious symbols in schools and reaffirm secularism and allegiance to France as a republican polity as the basis of French citizenship (Thomas 2006). In Scotland the Scottish Executive protects the diversity of religious affiliation and practice, but has sought, for example through the non-denominational and Roman Catholic school twinning initiative, to limit the extent of segregation and promote interaction. However media reports of the conflicts between pupils and parents and the controversy over religious iconography at the shared school campus in Dalkeith, and the difficult negotiations between parents, the Catholic Church and North Lanarkshire Council surrounding the proposed school twinning programme, reflect the challenges European governments face in attempting to mould religious and cultural identities into a secular citizenship, to reshape community traditions and to reduce the visibility of religious differences, if not the differences themselves. ConclusionsThe French Commission on the Application of the Principles of Laïcité in the Republic argued that ‘being willing to adapt the public expression of one’s religious particularities and to set limits to the affirmation of one’s identity allows everyone to meet in the public space’ (quoted in Thomas 2006, p. 242). This article has suggested that we are witnessing an important change in how the Scottish state responds to (Christian) religious diversity and the affirmation of religious identities. In particular, there is a shift towards an explicit focus upon sectarianism as a source of social conflict which reframes traditional approaches to tackling the disadvantage of particular social groups combined with a targeting of the manifestations of sectarianism through urban disorder. This has resulted in an increasing level of governmental interventions. The attempts of government to utilise a range of mechanisms to quantify the extent of sectarianism enables it to know populations in new ways. The precise deployment and scope of these techniques influences constructions of sectarianism, but also leads to unintended consequences that reshape debates and policy imperatives. The article has argued that the Scottish Executive’s governance of sectarianism may be embedded within trends in governance in many Western European and other developed nations, including the realignment of the roles of the state and other actors through which central governments cede as well as create new powers for themselves. Active citizens, subject to constant adaptation and re-education, are identified as central mechanisms for governing social problems like sectarianism and anti-social behaviour. Government attempts through the sectarianism and Respect agendas to achieve cultural shifts in the habits and values of their populations signify the increasing ambition, rather than the retreat, of the state. How this ambitious programme develops in Scotland will be influenced by continuing debates about sectarianism and its links to citizenship and national identity. What this article has sought to highlight is the prominent role of government in constructing, defining and interpreting the concept of sectarianism. As France’s Commission on the Application of the Principles of Laïcité in the Republic identifies, it is ‘the state [that] permits the consolidation of shared values that establish the social bond in our country’ (quoted in Thomas 2006, p.241). AcknowledgementsI am grateful for the insightful comments of Lindsay Paterson, the Scottish Affairs Associate Editor and two anonymous referees on previous versions of this article. ReferencesBagguley, P. and Hussain, Y. (2006). 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Scottish Executive (2004). Analysis of Ethnicity in the 2001 Census- Summary Report. Edinburgh: Scottish Executive. Scottish Executive (2005a). Record of the Summit on Sectarianism 14 February 2005. Edinburgh: Scottish Executive. Scottish Executive (2005b). A Nation of Opportunity, Not a State of Fear: A progress report to the Summit on Sectarianism. Edinburgh: Scottish Executive. Scottish Executive (2006a). Action Plan on Tackling Sectarianism in Scotland. Edinburgh: Scottish Executive. Scottish Executive (2006b). Calling Time on Sectarianism. Edinburgh: Scottish Executive. Stone, D. (1989). Causal stories and the formation of policy agendas. Political Science Quarterly, 104(2), 281-300. Swyngedouw, E. (2005). Governance innovation and the citizen: The Janus face of governance-beyond-the-state. Urban Studies, 42(1) 1991-2006. Thomas, E.R. (2006). Keeping identity at a distance: Explaining France’s new legal restrictions on the Islamic headscarf. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 29(2), 237-259. Walls, P. (2003). Religion, ethnicity and nation in the Census: some thoughts on the inclusion of Irish ethnicity and Catholic religion. Radical Statistics, 78. Walls, P. and Williams, R. (2003). Sectarianism at work: Accounts of employment discrimination against Irish Catholics in Scotland. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 26(4), 632-662. Walls, P. and Williams, R. (2005). Religious discrimination in Scotland: A rebuttal of Bruce et al’s claim that sectarianism is a myth, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28(4), 759-767. March 2007, online March 2009 John Flint is Professor of Housing and Urban Governance in the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University. He has researched and written on governance and anti-social behaviour policy in the UK, the role of Church of Scotland congregations within Scottish communities and the politics of faith schools. j.f.flint@shu.ac.uk [1] This article was written before the recent change of title to ‘Scottish Government’.
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