Crisi del diritto, pluralismo religioso e mutamento culturale in Europa

The aim of this article is to analyse the intercultural dynamics developing in the religious field in a Europe affected by processes of migration, in the general framework drawn by the crisis of legal instruments. In the first instance, the demise of the secular state and the aggravation of intercultural tensions is leading to the radicalisation of religious conflicts, to sectarianism and to prevarication. In the second instance, the crisis of the welfare state and the increasingly irrational attitude of legal instruments is depriving many rights of the possibility of being correctly safeguarded and removing legal instruments from their natural function of mediation. As a result, there is both a rise in conflicts about religiously significant contents and a situation in which the official religion is adopting a prevaricating stance vis-à-vis lesser religions. Against this background, the article analyses certain aspects of the cultural transformations taking place, both in the cultural framework of the migrants, where there is an increasing trend towards secularisation, and in that of the natives, where there is a rise in ambivalence, opportunism and more or less developed forms of racism. All this tends to produce a complex fabric of disgregating and conflictual interactions, whose prospective developments are extremely uncertain. The hypothesis of a possible positive development of this state of affairs is focused on the relationship between the consolidation of better living conditions and a more effective safeguarding of rights for all, immigrants included, together with a possible cultural change in the sense of a general process of secularisation. The article argues that the close relationship in this perspective between freedom from economic need, legal freedom and religious freedom underlies the virtuous process that, by influencing both the labour market and the conditions of human existence, cannot fail to lead to easier cohabitation between different cultures, but also to greater freedom and real choice in religious affairs.

Giuseppe Mosconi, Crisi del diritto, pluralismo religioso e mutamento culturale in Europa in "SOCIOLOGIA DEL DIRITTO " 2/2004, pp , DOI: