Diasporas in the Post-Cold War Context With the collapse of the Soviet Union, we witness the...

Diasporas in the Post-Cold War Context

• With the collapse of the Soviet Union, we witness the nationalization of the political space in the post-Soviet geography.

• New states emerged that defined themselves as ethnic homelands even though their core nations are largely multi-ethnic.

• The proliferation of new national states has called into question the relationship between the political boundaries of states and the amorphous and ascriptive cultural boundaries of nations.

• This provided a good opportunity for the study of the trans-state dimensions of ethnicity.


• The legacy of the Soviet nationalities policy plays a major role in the new realities of this geography.

• Soviets institutionalized the territorial nationhood and ethnic citizenship at the same time but as seperate realms.

• Therefore, after the collapse of the Soviet Union many found themselves as national minorities-diasporas with homelands elsewhere.


• These new developments led some scholars to expect some inter-ethnic conflicts in the region.

• This raised several questions such as:

-When and why does ethnicity matter in international relations?

-When do states act to 'protect the interests of co-ethnic populations?

-How do trans-border communities influence foreign policymaking


-Are diasporas divided by state frontiers necessarily a source of insecurity? -Or can nation-states use "their" diasporas as tools of nation and state-building without threatening the interests of their neighbors? -All these recent developments led the scholars and analysts to devote more time on the complicated relationship between dispersed ethnic groups, the states in which they live (host states), and the actions of governments-,that might make some historical or cultural claim to represent them (kin states/homelands).


• Nationalizing host states• A set of new or newly reconfigured nationalizing

states, ethnically heterogeneous yet conceived as nation-states, whose dominant elite pushes for the language, culture, demographic position, economic flourishing, and political hegemony of the nominal state-bearing nation to become the dominant one in the state.


• These states are perceived by their elite as "unrealized" nation-states, as a state destined to be a nation-state, the state of-and for a particular nation, but not yet in fact a nation-state (at least not to a sufficient degree); and the nationalizing policies are seen as remedial, affirmative action policies to fix this problem.


• National minorities/diasporas• The substantial, self-conscious (to varying

degrees) organized, and politically alienated national minorities in these nationalizing states, whose leaders demand cultural or political autonomy and resist actual or perceived policies of discrimination or assimilation.

• Diasporas in this sense is not simply a "group" that is given by the fact of ethnic demography. It is a dynamic political stance or related yet mutually competing stances, but not a mere demographic condition.


• Homelands/Kin states• The states who has its diaspora in other

states and carefully monitors the destinies of these people and act accordingly to defend the interests of their diaspora groups.

• External national homelands are constructed through political action not given by the facts of demography.


• A state becomes an external national homeland for its ethnic diaspora when political or cultural elites define ethno-national kin in other states as members of one state and assert that their condition is to be monitored and their interests protected and promoted by the state.

• Homeland politics takes a variety of forms ranging from immigration and citizenship privileges for returning members of the ethnic diaspora through various attempts to influence other states policies towards its co-ethnics to irredentist claims on the territory of other states.


• Homelands interpret their role as that of a spokesman for the interests of a co-ethnic group abroad, and attempt to craft foreign policy accordingly.

• Research situated along what James Rosenau has termed the "domestic-foreign frontier" has proliferated in the1990s.

• One of the newest subfields on this frontier is the relationship between ethnicity and international affairs, in particular the ongoing spread, and termination of communally based conflicts and its impact on international security.


• In many regions of the world, the traditional homelands of particular ethnic groups have attempted to cultivate a sense of community with co-ethnic populations living in host states.

• Kin states can reach out to their ethnic diasporas in low-key ways, such as by sponsoring cultural exchanges or lobbying for increased opportunities for bilingual education among co-ethnic immigrants in the host state.


• The role of states in defining a particular group as a diaspora is crucial.

• The homeland's attempt to define a community as a diaspora and create a privileged relationship with co-ethnics is a tricky enterprise; it depends on the state's ability to distinguish the privileges of membership in a trans-state cultural community from the rights and duties of membership in a a legal/community defined by citizenhip.


• A variety of institutional innovations can signal a state's involving in diaspora politics.

• Within a kin state, citizenship laws may be changed to allow for dual citizenship or

• Legal guarantees for the right of return to the homeland may be put in place, even if the "returnees" were born into a long-established communities abroad.

• Kin states may establish cultural centers, consulates, or quasi-governmental support institutions in foreign territories with sizable co-ethnic populations.

• Kin states may advocate the rights of co-ethnics in international forums, or may intercede directly with the host state to ensure that the cultural and political rights of the co-ethnic minority are respected.


• King-Melvin: scholars have often exaggerated the connection between the rhetoric of identity politics and the actual foreign policies of particular states.

• A state's attempt to reach co-ethnic populations across international frontiers or to interfere in the domestic affairs of another state are usually constrained by a variety of factors.


• Brubaker sees a triadic relational nexus between the homelands, host states and the kin groups/diasporas engendered, or given new urgency by the new or at least newly salient mismatch between the cultural and political boundaries.

• Belonging by residence and formal citizenship to one state and by putative ethno-national affinity to another, diaspora groups often caught up between the two antagonistic nationalisms, that of the homeland and the nationalizing host states.


• Nationalizing states, external homelands and diasporic groups are bound together in a single, interdependent relation

• The nationalization attempts at the newly independent states, for example, "exist" and exercise their effects not in isolation but in a relational field that includes both the diasporic groups and their external national homeland.


• In this relational field, minority and homeland monitor the new nation-state and are especially, sensitive to any signs or projects of "nationalization" or "national integration.

• When they perceive such signs, they seek sustain the minority to mobilize against the perceived projects of nationalization and might seek autonomy or even threaten secession.


• The homeland, claiming the right to monitor the the interests of its ethnic co-nationals abroad, might provide material or moral support for tem and lodge protests with the nationalizing state or with international organizations against the perceived projects of nationalization.

• All these actors are not fixed entities but variably configured and continuously construct their political stances.


• The Soviet nationalities policy although supposedly based on the withering away of ethnic allegiances, it indeed privileged ethnicity as a source of individual identity and territorialized nationhood.

• This in turn reinforced the image of the fifteen union republics as the homelands of distinct historical-nations.


• With the collapse of the Soviet Union and drawing up the international borders between the union republics, almost 73 million people found themselves living outside their national homelands overnight.


• Since 1991 diaspora politics of the Soviet successor states have varied immensely.

• Some states have eagerly promoted themselves as the homelands of discrete ethnic populations, while others have attempted to construct entities that entail a more multi-ethnic visions of the state.

• King-Melvin looks at three cases: Russian, Ukrainian and Kazakh diaspora and their respective homelands.


• Some states have actively encouraged the "return“ to the homeland, while others feared the consequences of such actions.

• Some states have created high-level government institutions to maintain links with co-ethnic communities, others look at diaspora as secondary or even tertiary policy priority.

• Some states have eagerly promoted themselves as the homelands of discrete ethnic populations while others have attempted to construct entities that opts for a multiethnic visions of the state.


• The gradual emergence of a "Russian diaspora" after 1991, both as an object of the Russian foreign policy and as a tool of domestic political struggles inside the Russian state.

• Diaspora politics provided a means for the political elite within the Russian Federation to regroup following the disorientation of the perestroika years.


• In an environment with few markers to indicate future policy directions, the discovery or, the invention of a solidly and self-consciously "Russian;' ethnic community beyond the new Russia's borders became the basis for developing a consensus on Russia's new identity.


• Russia came to be defined as an ethnic homeland, a state with responsibilities toward a cultural community that extended beyond its frontiers.

• Russian policymakers asserted that the Russian state was organically linked to the settler communities and bore responsibility for their well-being, a consensus that was first crystallized during the Yeltsin period.


• “On the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Russian Citizens outside the Russian Federation”

• The government also established a federal migration service to assist those repatriated Russians.

• The nationalist opposition's strong stance in support of the diaspora prompted the Russian government to adopt an even more active policy toward Russians and Russified settlers.


• Diaspora politics legitimated an active Russian engagement with the internal and external affairs of the new-states of Eurasia.

• Some interpreted this as RF following its interests in the" near abroad" by using diaspora as a tool and a discourse in broadly humanitarian terms.


• Indeed the diaspora issue surfaced only when it reinforced other economic or political interests.

• The Russian state in no case acted on behalf of its diaspora unless its broader interests were served.


• Ukranian diaspora• During the Soviet years, Ukrainian communities

in the West, especially in Canada and the United States, constituted a powerful lobby calling for and promoting the idea for an independent Ukrainian state.

• The collapse of the Soviet system allowed the western diaspora to influence the homeland politics during the initial years of independence however this later changed.


• Kiev was also in a position, for the first time, to address the question of its "eastern diaspora” -the 6.8 million persons in the former Soviet republics, mainly in Russia.

• Some Ukrainian political actors, especially those associated with nationalist parties, sought to reach out to Ukrainian communities in the states of the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe.


• Ukrainian government signed bilateral treaties with the host states with the claim to protect the interests of the co-ethnics.

• Ukraine's own weakly developed sense of nationhood has prompted some Ukrainian politicians to seek to forge ties with the eastern diaspora to reinforce their nationalist credentials in the homeland.


• However, the multiethnic and multilingual character of Ukraine, with at least 22 percent of the population composed of Russian and Russified settler minorities who continue to form important segments of the political and economic elite, has provided a check on the kin state's ability to links with diaspora only on ethnic terms.


• Kazakh diaspora

• Kazakhstan was the only post-Soviet republic that approached independence with a titular nation that was not an absolute majority in its own republic; ethnic Kazakhs were only 39.7 percent of the total population in 1989.


• This demographic deficit, along with a shaky historical justification for an independent state, provided an incentive for Kazakhstani elites to look beyond the new state's borders and forge ties with a dispersed Kazakh nation.

• Encouraging diaspora return was a way of bolstering the legitimacy of Kazakhstani independence by appealing to a national community abroad and cultivating a sense of attachment to the newly independent homeland..


• In all these cases, the kin state has actively sought to portray itself as an ethno-national homeland, a political entity with certain rights 'and duties vis-a-vis a cultural community.

• But the policies pursued in all three in relation to diaspora populations have been diverse.


• Nation-states may label a variety of different groups as "diasporas” but the ability of kin states to make the label meaningful and to craft foreign policy accordingly is determined by a set of concrete political factors.

• Domestic politics within the kin state profoundly affects the development of diaspora politics.


• The institutional strength and resources within diaspora communities themselves.

• The relative weakness of Russian, Ukranian and Kazakh diasporic communities hindered homeland attempts to establish ties with them.

• The priorities of and constraints on foreign policymaking in the kin state also affects homeland’s involvement in diaspora politics.


• The degree to which kin states focus on diaspora issues is thus determined in part by the broader foreign policy agendas to which political elites are committed to.

• An additional factor is the constraints of the international environment in which political elites of the homeland must operate.


• Finally, the availability of economic resources has affected all actors in the diaspora politics of the post-Soviet world.

• King-Melvin argues therefore that the earlier predictions of western analysts that diaspora politics would become a source of international conflict proved wrong.


• Brubaker: critical of the current wider use of the term “diaspora”

• The application of the term diaspora to an ever-broadening set of cases: essentially to any and every nameable population category that is to some extent dispersed in space.


• The category becomes stretched to the point of uselessness.

• If everyone is diasporic, then no one is distinctively so.

• The term loses its discriminating power, its ability to pick out phenomena, to make distinctions.

• The universalization of diaspora, paradoxically, means the disappearance of diaspora.


• Are we seeing a proliferation of diasporas in the world, or perhaps even the dawning of an age of diaspora?

• Or are we seeing simply a proliferation of diaspora talk, a change in idiom rather than in the world?


• The two claims are, of course, closely related and are usually advanced together: the radical shift in perspective is presented as a way of coming to terms, analytically and politically, with fundamental changes in the world.

• On the one hand, the literature on diaspora claims to mark a sharp shift in perspective.


• The old perspective was immigrationist, assimilationist, (methodologically) nationalist.

• It took nation-states as units of analysis and assumed that immigrants made a sharp and definitive break with their homelands.


• The new perspective does not make these assumptions. It is said to ‘transcend’ the old assimilationist, immigrationist paradigm.

• So much emphasis was placed on ethnic persistence in the historical and sociological literature.

• Obviously, the world has changed, and so have our ways of talking about it. But one should be sceptical of grand claims about radical breaks and shifts.


• To overcome these problems of groupism, I want to argue that we should think of diaspora not in substantialist terms as a bounded entity, but rather as an idiom, a stance, a claim.

• We should think of diaspora in the first instance as a category of practice, and only then ask whether, and how, it can be used as a category of analysis.


• As a category of practice, ‘diaspora’ is used to make claims, to articulate projects, to formulate expectations, to mobilize energies, to appeal to loyalties.

• As idiom, stance, and claim, diaspora is a way of formulating the identities and loyalties of a population

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