RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM INTRODUCTION Globalization is a modernizing and destabilizing influence, which locks even more solidly a nation‐state into the global order. Some people feel threatened by change and the influx of foreign influences. They often look to religious leaders or politicians for answers. There is nostalgia for the past, when life seemed less hurried, more ordered and less threatening. That golden era appears all the more golden; the further people move away from it, as time and change whisk them along. There is obviously something going on in several countries but at this early stage it is not possible to state fully what that is. For it is impossible to untangle fully the threads which combine into a rope consisting of globalization, religious fundamentalism, political extremism, resentment by poor people at their poverty, and sheer opportunism and greed by some religious and political leaders who are looking for causes to champion for their own private purposes. In short, although there is apparently both a religious and a religiously‐motivated political backlash against globalization, the precise chain of causation is not always clear. The world is undergoing a massive change and religions are both affected by it and have an effect on it. First, Religion is apparently looming as a new source of conflict. I say "apparently” because I am not sure just how significant are the religious labels which the mass media now give to the participants in so‐called religious conflicts. In Northern Ireland, for example, the conflict is billed as a religious one but that there are also underlying economic problems which have caused much of the present conflict. Unemployed working class Catholics oppose unemployed working class Protestants. The comfortable middle classes of both communities seem to get along a great deal better. The Turkish Gastarbeiter (guest workers) began arriving in the then West Germany to do the menial work in the mid‐1950s. They were denied German citizenship (a 1913 law defines German citizenship in terms of blood rather than location) but they were important for the German economic recovery and recognized as such. It has only been in the last few years, as the German economy has gone in to recession and the absorption of East Germany has turned out to be more difficult than expected, that there has been a sudden upsurge in racist violence against the Gastarbeiter.
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