This article is published in a peer‐reviewed section of the Utrecht Law Review Constitutionalizing secularism, alternative secularisms or liberal-democratic constitutionalism? A critical reading of some Turkish, ECtHR and Indian Supreme Court cases on ‘secularism’ Veit Bader* 1. Introduction Recently, the heated debates on secularism in social sciences, politics and, increasingly, in political theory and political philosophy have also infected legal theory, constitutional law and comparative constitutionalism. Generally speaking, it may indeed be ‘too late to ban the word “secular”’ or to remove ‘secularism’ from our cultural vocabulary. The argument, however, that ‘too many controversies have already been stated in these terms’1 seems unconvincing to me. For the purposes of normative theory generally, and particularly for those of constitutional law and jurisprudence, the focus of this article, I have proposed to replace all normative concepts of ‘secularism’ by ‘priority for liberal-democracy’2 because I am convinced that we are better able to economize our moral disagreements or to resolve the substantive constitutional, legal, jurisprudential and institutional issues and controversies by avoiding to restate them in terms of ‘secularism’ or ‘alternative secularisms’. With regard to the ‘constitutional status of secularism’ we can discern three distinct positions all sharing the argument that ‘secularism (...) in most liberal democracies (…) is not explicitly recognized in the constitutional text or jurisprudence’3 and that it has ‘no clear standing * Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Philosophy (Faculty of Humanities) and of Sociology (Faculty of Social Sciences) at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands), email:
[email protected] Thanks for critical comments and suggestions to Christian Moe, Ahmet Akgündüs, Yolande Jansen, Bas Schotel, Gunes Tezcur, Asli Bali, Werner Menski, an anonymous reviewer and the participants of conferences in New Delhi, Utrecht, and Istanbul where I presented earlier versions of this article.