With more than 300 million members with more or less intense beliefs, Orthodoxy is structured into three patriarchates and numerous, often national, Churches, making it a heterogeneous and yet essential force for understanding the politics of Eastern Europe and Russia.
The work takes on the difficult challenge of offering readers an overview of the geopolitical issues and discourses carried by the Orthodox Churches from the schism of 1054 to the present day. Its author, Jean-Arnault Dérens, first a medievalist historian then a journalist, has been traveling the Balkans since the end of the 1980s where he has acquired knowledge of a land whose conflicts and tears which have stained it with blood he dominates and which he reports in The Balkan Courieran online news journal he created in 1998.
The current Orthodox world, with nearly 300 million faithful throughout the world, united by dogma and liturgy but very fragmented, at the crossroads of the Byzantine, Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, torn apart during the Cold War and by the conflicts of the end of the XXe and the beginning of XXIe century, often trapped by nationalism, has experienced a major divide since February 24, 2022: the start of the war in Ukraine and the unconditional support that the Russian patriarchy has given it since that date. The overview proposed in the book therefore proves valuable for better understanding what is happening in the heart of Europe.
Beyond an opposition between Moscow and the West
This journey, part of a vast space, going from Central and Balkan Europe to the Middle East, intersects the multiple forms of Orthodoxy as well in the Albanian patchwork, as in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Nagorno-Karabakh disputed between Armenians and Azeris. It offers a vivid and nuanced picture of this complex world to twist the image usually associated with nationalism and political or societal conservatism. Indeed, Jean-Arnault Dérens refuses a dual and stereotypical vision placing back-to-back an orthodoxy compatible with European standards and that, subject to the Russian sphere of influence, unacceptable with regard to Western standards.
He also refuses the idea of a Church made up of a monolithic bloc which would have collectively taken the path of anti-Western neo-conservatism while he wishes to show its multiple faces. By retracing this long historical trajectory in the Balkans, the Middle East and in the former Soviet space, this essay highlights these multiple legacies, shows the links between Church and nation, addresses all the ruptures caused by the Cold War and the exit from communism or even the excesses of political exploitation that have taken place since.
The chronological span envisaged is considerable since the subject plunges into the beginnings of Orthodox Christianity to end in 2022. The conceptual frameworks mobilized articulate a chrono-thematic plan in three parts, the first starting from the historical roots of Orthodoxy until the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, the second covering the conflicts and disasters of XXe century as well as the links between communism and Churches, the third part, finally, taking hold of contemporary reconfigurations and these borderlands that Ukraine represents. The book is intended for a broad audience, an objective evidenced by clear but precise writing, not saturated with notes or references to references. The title, Geopolitics of Orthodoxy therefore announces a table of issues that are both specific dogmatic, given the autocephalous structure of the Orthodox Churches, but also political or international, the Churches and their faithful being redivided and displaced according to political and military upheavals or peace treaties (p. 147-149).
Distinct churches and constant political issues
From this point of view, the author’s bet is largely met, as the observatories involved offer a multiplicity of examples. Official or dissident Churches, diasporas or conflicts, particular situations – that of the schism within the Bulgarian Church since 1992 (p. 175-179) or the Serbian Church marked by “ symphony » between political and religious power and the fight against Milošević (p. 193-206) – are reviewed here and contribute to an exhaustive picture that is as close as possible to complex situations. The institutional organization of the Orthodox world explains the need to think about problems in a geopolitical way, since the competition between the poles of power constituted by the patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch and Moscow organizes the lives of the faithful and leads to the autocephaly of certain Churches.
Significant sections of this fresco of the Orthodox world cover the “ bloodlands » described by Timothy Snyder. Their long-term history has been marked by confessional ruptures, since the appearance of Uniatism in Poland-Lithuania at the time of the Union of Brest in 1596. It has also been marked by territorial conflicts accompanied by forced displacements of populations but also theological controversies, such as during the Council of Lviv in 1946 where Greek-Catholic priests demanded the reintegration of their Church into the patriarchate of Moscow (p. 59).
Jean-Arnault Dérens also devotes beautiful pages to the current situation in Ukraine (p. 257-271), marked by the coexistence of three ecumenical patriarchates since independence in 1991, – that of Kyiv established in 1992, the local branch of the Russian Orthodox Church reporting to the Patriarchate of Moscow and the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine created in 1919 and clandestine until 1989 –, who, on the ground, share the administration of places of worship. But the start of Russian intervention in 2014 reconfigured the cards, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine seeking to emancipate itself from Russian supervision and leading to the recognition of its autocephaly by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 2018. The war which began in 2022 led to a break with Muscovite supervision without achieving an easy rapprochement with the Patriarchate of Kyiv, as evidenced by the expulsion of priests of the Cave Lavra in 2023, because they are accused of collaboration with the Russians.
The place of Orthodoxy in the war in Ukraine
On these questions, this work echoes the essay recently written by Kathy Rousselet which shows, among other things, that the Russian Church, very present in the public space and with around 70% of the population declaring itself Orthodox, is characterized by an irregular practice on the part of the faithful who, for a third of them, also declare that they do not believe in God. However, current propaganda, activated by representatives of law enforcement agencies and ministries (siloviki) and nationalist religious elites, mobilizes a Russian imperial imagination and framework notions such as “ Russian civilization » and the “ Holy Russia » that the Moscow Patriarchate materialized in 2017, by redesigning the “ canonical territory », including Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and many countries from the Soviet Union and which positions itself against the West. This imperialist attitude was strengthened after the Patriarchate of Constantinople granted autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2018. In effect, this reignited competition between the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow and offered a new argument to justify the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops.
Despite this alliance between political and religious power, the work nevertheless shows that there is no pan-orthodoxy on a global scale, with the exception of circles on the extreme right of the European political spectrum (p. 212-213).
An evolving instrument
The situation in Russia occupies some developments which deserve attention, in particular those which occupy pages 107-127 and which are devoted to the trajectory of the Russian Church since Christianization at the end of the 10th century.e century. Indeed, this presentation proves essential, given the role that this Church has assigned to itself, since the development of the theory of the Third Rome at the beginning of the XVIe century, seeking the status of sole representative of the “ true faith » after the fall of the first two Romes. The famous expression, formulated thus by Philotheus of Pskov, its creator: “ Understand, most pious tsar, that all Christian empires are included in your own empire. Two Romes have fallen, the third stands, but there will be no fourth » has had a long existence with historic eclipses.
Indeed, at the time of the founding of the Moscow Patriarchate in 1589, the notion of the Third Rome became difficult to accept by the Patriarchate of Constantinople with which Moscow would then have been in competition while its role as protector of Christians living under Ottoman occupation was accepted by the other Orthodox patriarchates. At the end of the XVIIe century, it defined itself as the last home of the true faith but without mobilizing the myth of the Third Rome. During the XVIIIe century, after the transfer of the capital to Saint Petersburg and especially to XIXe century, the expression was used politically in the dynamics of Russification of the non-native populations of the empire and in the support of the Slavs subject to the Austrian or Ottoman powers in the context of a revival of the Russian and pan-Slavic messianic ideology. At the end of the XIXe century, the use of the idea of the Third Rome made it possible to give Russia the mission of liberating Eastern Christians. This mission was caught up in the reactivation of Russian nationalism and the idea that the Eastern Slavs shared a common destiny.
Finally, since the end of XIXe century, “ certain thinkers called for a move beyond Russia’s Slavic and Orthodox identity to forge an “Asian” ideology on the scale of its imperial pretensions and capable of allowing it to hold its own against a Europe that “despised” it. » (p. 125), thus inventing a Eurasian destiny for Russia.
The work also addresses the instrumentalization of the religious question by political powers, not only in Putinian Russia, but in other areas. Thus, in the Romania of Nicolae Ceausescu, in the context of an exacerbated nationalism, the theory of “ Daco-Romanian continuity “postulates a long Romanian national identity” of which the Church was one of the attributes » (p. 179).
Conclusion
The book has the flaws of its qualities due to the abundance of areas considered and the long chronology considered. Some pages address essential questions without being able to detail them, for example on Petro Mohyla, metropolitan of kyiv at the end of the XVIe century, on the syncretism of everyday life in Kosovo or even on the massacres of Armenians at the beginning of the XXe century before the genocide of 1915. Furthermore, a perspective of social and cultural history of religious practices would offer a useful counterpoint to the institutional observatory envisaged here and to the analysis of the vision and geopolitical discourses of orthodoxy. Nevertheless, this historical and geopolitical chronicle commands admiration with its attention to detail and its conciseness to better understand the complexities of an Orthodox world crossed by antagonistic currents and often trapped in nationalism.