The Return of Religious and Historiographic Discourse:Church and Civil Society in Southeastern Europe (19th - 20th centuries)

Abstract

This paper focuses on the revision of the classical thesis concerning secularism the progressive domination of the discussion around the issue of the civil society. These two poles facilitated the development of a series of historiographic approaches that particularly touched on the areas of Eastern and Southeastern Europe s history. Here we are concerned with three central cases of historiographic discourse s production, as indicators of the dominant paradigm s change: the first concerns the role of the Russian church in the pre-Revolutionary period; the second, the issue of secularization and its relations with Islam in the Ottoman Empire; and finally the third, the problem of internal fragmentation of the Orthodox millet with the establishment of Greek autocephalus Church in 1833 and (self-sufficiency) and later the Bulgarian Exarchate. These new approaches were intended to solve various long-standing problems and for the most part resulted in solutions within existing opposites of historiographic schools of thought.