Discussion-Dealing
with Diasporas
(or, Dialing for Diasporas)
Seventh World Convention of
the Association for the Study of Nationalities
Columbia University, New York, NY, April 11-13,
2002
Alexander
H. Joffe
West
Asia Environmental Security Project
New
Rochelle, NY 10801
IÕd like to begin my comments with a few words
on the concept of diaspora and then turn to diaspora politics.
Contemporary scholarship on diasporas regards
the dispersal of communities as a modern condition, intimately associated with
the West, with late capitalism, or post-colonialism. Nothing could be further
than the truth, for nothing could be a more common feature of human geography,
demography and politics. Dispersals Ð including migration, expulsion, and state
sponsored activities such as colonialism and conquest - are common as far back
to the Bronze Age and earlier, and has always been the norm. In the final analysis
we are all products of the African diaspora, of homo sapiens sapiens
100,000 years ago, which replaced the earlier dispersal of homo erectus, and so
on. What distinguishes a diaspora from an ethnic group is simply a sense of
dispossession, real or imagined. The key phrase is Òwe sat down and wept,Ó but
that doesnÕt necessarily mean that youÕd really like to go home again. The
universal cycle of wash, rinse, and repeat makes each diaspora just a little
less special.
But in the words of the late Speaker of the
House, Thomas Tip O'Neill, all politics are local. What truly is different
today is the expansion of the local, thanks to the compressions of time and
space brought about by technology. No longer must members of communities at far
remove from their homelands await letters or newspapers or pamphlets carried by
isolated travelers, or clipper ships, or delivered narrowband through telegraph
or newspaper, or even telephone and television. As Homer Simpson has put it,
they have the Internet on computers now.
The immediacy of global communications and the
availability of global transportation has meant a deeply new level of
involvement of diaspora communities in the politics of home, and the reverse.
One question is therefore how have these technologies changed diaspora
politics? How does the capability to be deeply informed about issues, and to
communicate and interact in highly complex manners affect the conduct of
politics? And what are the consequences of diaspora groups being potentially
better educated and informed about local politics than the locals, better
capable of capable of entrepreneurship and development in a global economy, and
not to mention non-traditional in their attitudes toward sex, gender,
minorities, multiculturalism, political pluralism, and other public:private
affairs? The Latvian presidency of Dr. Vaira Vike-Freiberga, a multi-lingual
professional woman from Canada, is an excellent illustration of this. At the
very least, technology has been a boon for the diaspora, and an occasional
inconvenience to totalitarian and repressive regimes at home.
Despite the best efforts of NGOs, diaspora
communities, and Western political philosophy, including liberal nationalism,
local politics are local politics, a function of local ideology and social
organization. In the post-colonial and post-Cold War eras the local has
reemerged with a vengeance, geographically scrambled and renamed but not
transformed by imperialism and global ideologies, including liberalism. Local
cultures are reasserting themselves in local processes given names but not
substance by the West. But the geography of the local has been changed since
perhaps the time of Napoleon, through migration, warfare, expulsion, and the
political horse-trading. Early modern politics take place in post-modern space.
As some of the writers have noted, this poses
practical and philosophical problems since diasporas defy tidy national
boundaries and international norms about sovereignty, territorialism,
governance, rights, and justice. The problem is compounded in Western and
Central Europe by the unraveling of the Treaty of Westphalia on the one hand,
by trends toward the devolution of existing nation-states by their atomistic
ethnic (and aspiring national) components, and on the other by the halting
development of a kind of federalism (the EU, Hungarian Status Laws or
neo-medievalism) which would, somehow, resolve the Hapsburg dilemma. Perhaps it
will. But I suggest this weird harmonic between centripetal and centrifugal
forces may not characterize the rest of the world. The stubborn persistence of
identity politics even in Europe also supports the perennialist view that
communities, including nations, are an Ôage-oldÕ phenomenon, a perspective not
favored by the Hobsbawmian approach which regards individuals and communities
as a primordial ooze without inclination, and sees residual or resurgent
identity, particularly among central Europeans, and all Jews everywhere, as a
threat to the great leap forward of the new, global, preferably Soviet, man.
The new geography of the local has also given new urgency to the preservation
of the local, not only from the tsunami of Coca-Cola and other easily hated
Americanisms like globalization, but from onesÕ neighbors and their tyrannical
languages or writing systems. French farmers might be burning MacDonalds but
until recently erstwhile Yugoslavians were burning each other.
Since the title of this session is dealing with
diasporas, let me return how diasporas might fit into all this. I have already
mentioned the new spatial qualities of diaspora. Another issue is how diaspora
communities are transformed by their encounters with the world, and the effect
that new forms of ÔhybridityÕ bring to the substance and conduct of local
politics. A related problem is ideology after the Cold War. In some ways this
is relatively simple, since the philosophical problem and language of rights
and minorities and the conflict with practical state politics dates back to the
Enlightenment. The rhetoric of liberal democracy and the problems of bringing
it about are not in themselves new, but the conditions across which all this is
debated are. The only new ideology to come around lately is global jihad,
although this too an old-new ideology, dating back to the caliphate, which has
also been transformed by technology. If the window of this conference room
faced south toward the Battery, the absence of the World Trade Center would
demonstrate the capabilities and intentions of this transformation. Each of the
authors in their own way has consciously stressed liberal democracy, but from
the perspective of the rest of the world this flavor of Western political
philosophy is another form of Anglo-Franco-Germanic intellectual imperialism
which has been exported with great difficulty. Unlike identity politics such as
nationalism, democracy and constitutionalism posit philosophies and practical
politics which may fundamentally conflict with the local rent-seeking state.
Diaspora politics are often at a grave disadvantage.
In a longer version of these remarks I have
attempted to show how throughout the Middle East two features are paramount
when thinking about diasporas, the return of the local and the wildcard of
ideology. And example of the return of the local is Afghanistan after liberation
from the Taliban which has again its traditional organization based on kin,
clan and tribe, where authority is again chaotic warlordism that characterized
it for centuries. Even the diaspora politics of Osama Bin Laden is operates
globally but resonates locally, first and foremost among the enormous educated
undermiddleclass in Saudi Arabia.
With regard to ideology and adaptation to
diaspora, Palestinian politics are an example of how the assimilation and
hybridization typical of diaspora identity formation was deliberately
truncated. This developed through a sort of imposed neo-medievalism by
neighboring Arab societies, who kept Palestinians in refugee camps and limited
their rights, and then by ideological monopolization of identity formation by
the PLO, a unique Third World liberation movement which learned its practical
politics from the KGB. Now when the PLO returned to the West Bank in 1994 as
the PA it encountered other elements, diaspora technocrats returned from the
West, traditional patrimonial, clan, kin and village based organization,
growing Islamist movements, and a younger swing generation. But the PA
developed the same way as post-Soviet era nomeklatura, they immediately
privatized state resources and allied themselves with or became oligarchs,
monopolizing lucrative industries such as construction and auto theft. Upward
mobility for some, downward for others. Interestingly, the various intelligence
and security services, which emerged by design as means of coup-proofing, as
fronts for plausible deniability, and through genuine ideological differences,
replicated and then incorporated the preexisting clan, kin and village
structure. The various security services, subgroups and factions are, to a
surprisingly large degree, family affairs, a condition eerily similar to the
19th century and earlier. The reaction of Western diaspora returnees has been
to flee in droves, along with a new wave of Palestinian Christians. The loss of
human resources is significant.
But ironically, the diaspora communities of two
of the most repressive Middle Eastern societies, Iran and Iraq, are the most
lively, democratic, and forward-looking. Why democratic diaspora cultures
should exist for these countries, one ideologically saturated and the other
outright genocidal, rather than for, say Syria, is a problem. Obvious although
incomplete answers are possible. Despite their obviously recent and imagined
character, and legacies of minority rule, these are two of the largest and most
ethnically diverse Middle Eastern states, perhaps the most deeply involved with
the West before and after independence. As counter-examples, however, we must
point to Lebanon, where if the cosmopolitanism of the Francophile confessional
state was real, it was also predictably fragile and brief. The Hariri regime is
an excellent example of carpetbagger diaspora politics at work; the billionaire
construction magnate may have returned to rebuild Lebanon's infrastructure for
his own profit, but Lebanese politics now resemble those of the 1860s. At
another extreme, despite two centuries of profound involvement with the West,
the most vocal Egyptian diaspora communities are Islamists who seek to
overthrow MubarakÕs pharonic state and restore the caliphate. In the end, the
ideological and practical monopolization of diaspora or dissent is as dangerous
the continuation of local patterns of rivalry. Only the scale of the profits or
blood feuds may differ.
We could look around the world, to Angola, South
Africa and Zimbabwe, Kazakhstan, Uzebistan, Belarus and Ukraine and see
parallel developments. Who your neighbors are, where your diaspora communities
live, and what your political history and traditions and predominant political
ideologies really do count. But if the politics of much of Asia and Africa are
coming to resemble those of the pre-Westphalian era, or the Middle Ages, this
does not mean there is a crude essentialism at work. It simply means that the
imposed ideologies and political artifices of the past few centuries have
proved weaker than either die-hard capitalists or unreconstructed Marxists
would have liked. The conceit of the West was and is that the truths of
liberalism are somehow self-evident. They are not, particularly if, as in much
of Central Asia and all of the Middle East, the new boss is the same as the old
boss, and the world looks just the same. The Hapsburg and Ottoman dilemmas have
not been solved by Wilsonianism and most Western political theory. This, and
other zero-sum facts of life, seem not to have been adequately appreciated,
particularly by those living in trans- and post-national fantasy worlds that
are the latest manifestations of traditional Enlightenment thinking.
What then are the sources of hope for the
future? To return to the features emphasized at the outset, global
communication and global movement are informing local communities and the world
about conditions at home, and are permitting diaspora communities to make new
and substantive contributions to the political and cultural life in their
homeland, and also hybridized identities and new values. Indeed, diaspora
politics may be the last, best hope for many societies. In the Middle East at
least this means criticizing not only maximum leaders, but also fundamentals of
traditional society, including blood feuding, female circumcision, the
suppression of women and dissent, intolerance of minorities, occasionally
slavery, and so on. But if diaspora Iraqis can call for a Westphalian style
democratic, federal state which, among other things, protects the rights of
women and minorities, everyone can. Civil society in a sense begins abroad.
For example, demands for governmental
transparency and accountability, financial management, and other structural and
legal changes are routinely made by international organizations such as the IMF
and in country-to-country agreements. While these are frequently given only lip
service, such reciprocal, bilateral procedures do give some hope for
improvements at home. Here the contribution of diaspora communities could be
extraordinary, but only if substance is placed before symbolism (and perhaps
even liberalism before liberty). National narratives rarely organize weekly
trash collection. Exercising influence on bilateral relationships from both
home and away seems more likely to produce results than grandiose and
ineffective multilaterialism.
If this means that we rooting for Western
intellectual imperialism, then so be it. Rather than promoting liberalism
through the kinder and gentler form of imperialism, the NGOs, diaspora
communities can and should be bringing liberal values back home. We may hope
that the successes and failures discussed here today help clarify this
important task.