What? Are you counting from the foundation of Rome?
I counted from the first Greek city-states, which also held a republic-style model, circa 700BCE.
I'm pretty sure we are making this all up as we go along. There is no model for the stresses and strains of the world as it is: overpopulated, with resources falling fast and the environment falling apart in all kinds of ways.
Certainly, historical states have suffered such things in the past -- it destroyed some of them. I need to find the references, but there are the archaeological ruins of an early agrarian city that died by environmental degradation -- deforestation resulted in loss of wood for fuel and construction; over-hunting meant loss of protein-sources; skeletal-pitting showed calcium depletion from relying too much on grain for food. After hundreds of years of thriving, the surviving population just left. Wish I could recall its name.
It means that fortunately cultures and societies are not the regimented entities that we think they are, that norms and ideologies don't actually determine very much behavior. That the end of the world can happen without even being noticed until it is too late.
For some, it clearly did. We certainly have examples from which to build models to understand how states fragment under strain, how populations sleepwalk into environmental problems and how they react when they finally realise that problems aren't going away.
The slogan "The economy, stupid" was coined for
Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign for presidency, but it's had resonance well beyond his term. Stability of statehood seems to rest on the economy much of the time and the economy in turn rests on other things like environmental security, justice, domestic and foreign security and also feeds those things to some degree.
I believe that religious freedoms tend to grow in expanding economies simply because they must. More trade and a demand for more labour causes a state to reach beyond its traditional national composition for trading partners to swell its coffers, and immigrants to swell its workforce. In doing so, it has to make concessions to accommodate its changing population and the tastes of the other nations it begins to call its friends. Expanding economies create pluralism; Pluralism creates demand for religious freedoms.
What's interesting to me for the purpose of this discussion is that despite having constitutions that enshrine religious freedoms it seems that many states around the world aren't actually ready to honour them. We can tell because of how much difficulty they're having with pluralism. My reading of it is that the nations comprising the political strength in those states
really don't want pluralism in the first place.
Your point I think Higgins is that in the long run, nation is stronger than state (though still weaker than economic or environmental necessities). I suspect that may be true.
So does that make the ideal of religious freedom outmoded? Arguably, nations don't want it and arguably what most states want is simply a stable society with abundant labour and stable trading partners -- because It's the Economy, Stupid. Is the present formulation of the right to religious freedom simply too strong to be met in more than lip-service in most places?
It seems to me that most of the Islamic nations have already voted explicitly on this -- they'll be tolerant as long as Islam is in charge and not brought into disrepute. Many of the Christian nation-states have voted with their deeds more than their words for centuries: they'll be tolerant as long as Christianianity (or the preferred Christian sect) is dominant. I'm still researching Israel's approach (that state doesn't have a constitution, so it means poking into specific laws and customs), but I think that its history and foreign policy are indicators.
In the developed and developing Asian nations ethnicity often seems to count more than religion, but of course religion ties closely to ethnicity anyway. In my personal experience, Japan is tolerant of foreign religious curios as long as the Japanese (and not the resident Koreans or Chinese or the smattering of remaining Ainu) are in charge -- an issue which has never come into question because of its isolationism.
Reports from Taiwan indicate a high level of religious tolerance there, but I haven't looked into it much yet. Mainland China has both issues of ethnicity and religious tolerance to manage. India seeks religious tolerance (actually desperately needs it for economic and social stability), but seems to be still struggling to find a social model in which religious and ethnic tolerance work. In my experience of South-east Asia (mainly Thailand and Cambodia and Singapore) the questions are more ethnic than religious, and they're not resolved.
In my experience of Australia and Canada, religious tolerance is effected by a sort of apathetic indifference to religion in the first place; our concerns seem mainly to be ones of ethnic tolerance.
States like France and Turkey seem to be trying to find the balance between secular government and religious nationhood, but I don't imagine either would say that they're close to finding it. Russia and most of the former USSR have both ethnic and religious contention that shows little sign of resolving. Most of Scandanavia (or the bits I've looked into) have a dominant religion that sees no sign of changing, and might well ask what the problem is in the first place.
I don't know too much about South America, but I understand that Pope Alexander VI sorted out its religious profile back in the 15th century, and it hasn't greatly changed since.
So my question remains: religious tolerance? Really? Says who? Sure, the states all talk about it -- they
have to, to accommodate their economic needs. But which
nations really want it? And if the major nations of the world don't want it, how can states give it anything more than lip-service?
