Prof. Dr Wolfgang Höpken (University of Leipzig) will present a seminar on the topic “Belated Westernization” or “Religious Revival”: Secularity and Religion in the orthodox Balkans” on Wednesday, 19 March 2025, at 17:30.

Prof. Dr Wolfgang Höpken has studied History, Slavic Languages and Political Sciences at the University of Hamburg. Following his Ph.D. at the University of Hamburg, he was Assistant Professor, then Senior Researcher at the Institute for Southeast-European Studies (Südost-Institut) in Munich. Between 1996 and 2000, he was Professor for East-and Southeast European History at the University of Leipzig; between 2000 and 2006 – Director of the Georg-Eckert-Institute for International Textbook-Research; in 2006, he returned to his job as Professor at Leipzig University until his retirement. Between 2020 and 2024, he was Senior Research Fellow in an Advanced Research Group working on the topic of “Multiple secularities-beyond Modernity, beyond the West.”

Abstract: The post-socialist development in the Balkans has been characterized by a fundamental readjustment of the religious and the secular fields, having produced highly contradictory and ambiguous trends. Also, academic literature has been divided on how to evaluate this: while some, close to the “secularization-theory”, see this development as a somewhat ‘belated’ trend towards a “Western-like” secular society, for others, critical to the “secularization-theory”, this development is more an example of a global revival of religion, proofing that religion even under the conditions of ‘modernity’ does not lose its role and place. Others, coming more from a post-colonial point of view, have warned to evaluate the Balkan development by ‘Western’ standards of secularity, preferring to see the Balkan development more in terms of ‘indigenous’ solutions of an adjustment of the religion and the secular. The paper wants to summarize the post-socialist development by looking into four analytical fields: the functional differentiation between the religious and the secular, the cognitive distinctions having been made in the societies to draw the borderlines between what is seen as religious and what is seen as secular, the way how the people have integrated the religious and the secular into their everyday-life and finally how the visibility and materiality of the religious and the secular have been re-adjusted in the public space and by symbolic means.