William Safran - Diasporas in Modern Society
William Safran - Diasporas in Modern Society
William Safran - Diasporas in Modern Society
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DOI: 10.1353/dsp.1991.0004
Access provided by Central European University (16 Jun 2015 10:49 GMT)
Diasporas in Modem Societies: Myths of
Homeland and Return
William Safran
University of Colorado, Boulder
2. Diasporas in Comparison
The Armenian diaspora condition resembles that of the Jews most close-
ly. Armenian ethnicity and the solidarity of the Armenian community are
based on a common religion and language, a collective memory of national
independence in a circumscribed territory, and a remembrance of betrayal,
persecution, and genocide. Like the majority of Jews, most Armenians live
outside the ancestral homeland and have developed several external centers
of religion and culture. Like Jews, Armenians have performed a middleman
function in the host societies among which they lived; they have been high
achievers, have been prominent in trade and commerce, and have made
contributions to the science, culture, and modernization of the host society.
They have had a clear orientation toward their community but have not
chosen to live in ghettos. The fostering of the Armenian language has been
important, but this has not prevented Armenians from being fully im-
mersed in the language and culture of the host society. The church has
played an important role in maintaining Armenian ethnicity, although
there are two competing administrative centers of the Armenian church
(with different degrees of ethnopolitical commitment), church attendance
has been falling off, and the degree of religiousness has varied from active,
even exclusive, preoccupation to indifference. One is born into the Armenian
community, but one may leave it; exogamy is discouraged, but increasingly
practiced; non-Armenians are regarded as "foreigners" (.odarsthe Arme-
nian equivalent ofgoyim), but they are admitted, albeit selectively, into the
community (O'Grady 76-81).
As in the case of Jews, there is among Armenians a continuum of eth-
nicity ranging from assimilationism to intense ethnopolitical mobilization
(see Kirkland). The former has been found most frequently in the United
States, Australia, Canada, and other "pluralistic" settler societies and is
reflected in the Armenian Catholic church; the latter has tended to main-
tain itself in the Middle East, where communalistic and semiautonomous
institutions were customary (e.g., the millet system of the Ottoman Em-
pire), and is reflected in the Armenian Apostolic church. As in the case of
Jews since the reestablishment of Israel, there is a controversy about
whether there is indeed a place to return toand whether, therefore, the
diaspora can be ended. To be sure, there is an Armenian republic, but it is a
severely truncated landmost of historic Armenia is in Turkeyand as a
Soviet province has had neither genuine national independence nor even (at
least until the era ofglasnost') adequate autonomy to develop fully its tradi-
tional culture, which includes the Armenian variants of Christianity.
Myths of Homeland and Return
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Diaspora Spring 1991
blacks have a homeland myth, butin contrast to that of more recent black
immigrants to Franceit can no longer be precisely focused. For this rea-
son, African "Zionist" efforts have not been successful and have not gone
beyond the "repatriation" of several hundred blacks from the United States,
the West Indies, and England to Sierra Leone in the eighteenth century and
the settlement of small groups of American blacks in Liberia in the nine-
teenth century. Furthermore, American blacks no longer have a clearly
defined African cultural heritage to preserve. For these reasons, American
blacks attempting to maintainand rationalizetheir ethnoracial dis-
tinctiveness (and their status as a diaspora) have seen the need to create a
culture that is different from that of the majority; however, some elements of
that culture, such as "Black English," have low prestige and impede social
mobility, whereas others, such as "Black Islam," have been artificial grafts
lacking a convincing connection with black experience. (To some extent,
"Black English" is comparable to Yiddish, which, as the idiom of a closed
and impoverished society, was held in low esteemon the one hand by
those who favored Hebrew because it was the language of the homeland
focus, and on the other hand by those who had adjusted to an "improved"
diaspora and who favored the language of the host society.)
Since a specific homeland cannot be restored to American blacks, their
homeland myth is translated into solidarity with African liberation strug-
gles and the support of a variety of the aspirations of the sub-Saharan black
states, including the fight against apartheid in South Africa and demands
for increased economic aid to African nations. It is further translated into a
general support of the Third World.
The Hispanic (or Latino) community in the United States has not gener-
ally been considered a diaspora. The Mexican Americans, the largest com-
ponent of that community, are either descendants of those who had settled
in what is now the United States before the arrival of the Anglos or (first- or
second-generation) immigrants from Mexico who came in search of a better
future. Although subject to periodic discrimination, they are assimilating at
a steady pace. While they occasionally deplore the treaty of Guadelupe
Hidalgo under which, in 1848, Mexico was forced to cede territory to the
United States, celebrate Mexican folk festivals, and maintain contact with
relatives left behind, Mexican Americans do not cultivate a homeland myth
(see Garza)perhaps because the homeland cannot be easily idealized. The
poverty and political corruption of Mexico (which is easy enough to observe,
given the proximity of that country) stand in too sharp a contrast with
conditions in the United States.
There is, however, a Cuban diaspora. Half of the 800,000 (mostly middle-
class) Cubans who left their island, voluntarily or forcibly, after the installa-
tion of the Castro government found refuge in the nearby Miami area. They
kept alive the hope of returning to their homeland as soon as the Castro
regime was overthrown and initially resisted the idea of giving up their
Cuban citizenship. However, their experience with the Batista regime is too
recent to serve as a prototype of a democratic Cuba that might be con-
stituted after the replacement of Castro. Moreover, as time passes, the
Castro regime endures, and as Cubans become more involved in United
States politics, the myth of return becomes attenuated with the second
generation (see Pedraza-Bailey; Portes and Mozo).
A cartoon appeared in Le Monde several years ago, showing an old man who
says: "I have never lost hope of returning to my homeland some day. How-
ever, I no longer remember where I came from."
political and social purposes by the diaspora, the homeland, and the host
society. This "triangular relationship"alluded to by Sheffer but not sub-
jected to a comparative analysis (1-15)has interesting implications for
majority-minority relations and has political consequences that may be both
advantageous and disadvantageous for the diaspora.
Members of diaspora communities are by turns mistreated by the host
country as "strangers within the gates" or welcomed or exploited for the
sake of the domestic and diplomatic interests of the host country. Internal
social unity has on some occasions required that minorities be kept as di-
asporas. Thus the persistence of the Jewish diaspora was for generations a
convenient and even necessary element of Christian theology: the "wander-
ing Jew" provided daily proof of the superiority of the Christian faith, on
which Western societies were based. This was the obverse of the Jews' own
post hoc theological rationalization for their diaspora condition: the belief
(reaffirmed by the devout in their daily prayers) that they had been exiled
from their land as a collective punishment for their sins (which, in the eyes
of the Jews, did not include deicide). The members of the Armenian diaspora
have been spared a general demonization; the slave, and later free, mem-
bers of the black diaspora may have been stigmatized according to certain
biblical interpretations and, in more modern times, according to pseudo-
scientific genetic criteria; and the Palestinians are often stigmatized collec-
tively as terrorists par excellence. However, the members of these diasporas
have not castigated themselves in the same manner as have the Jews. On
the contrary, their diaspora conditions have been attributed to the sins of
others: the cruelties of the Ottoman Turks, the greed of American colonists,
and the duplicity of the British, the Americans, and the Zionists. Converse-
ly, there are Christian fundamentalists who have theological motivations
for putting an end to the Jewish diaspora: the conviction that the Jews'
return to the Holy Land would expedite the Second Coming of Christ.
Sometimes the interest of internal unity requires that minority group
relations with a (potential or actual) homeland be disruptedin effect, that
the diaspora character of a minority be ended. This approach was reflected
in France during the era of the Revolution and Napoleon, when the "Jewish
nation" was transformed into a mere religious cult. It was also reflected in
the Soviet Union in the 1920s when the authorities began to use the Cyrillic
alphabet for the Turkish languages spoken within their country, in order to
differentiate them (and their speakers) from the language spoken in Tur-
key, for which Kemal had just introduced the Latin script (see Lewis 217ff);
again after World War II when the Cyrillic alphabet was used for the lan-
guage spoken in the Moldavian Soviet Republic, in order to distinguish its
speakers from the Romanians west of the Prut river; and when the use of
Hebrew was banned and words of Hebrew origin in Yiddish were spelled
phonetically so that the connection of the language with Zionism would be
obscured.
Sometimes the host country finds it useful to emphasize and strengthen
diaspora sentiments. This was done in France during the 1920s and 1930s
when the Ministry of Public Instruction ordained that the children of Polish
workers be instructed in the Polish language; in Germany in the 1930s,
when (for purposes of scapegoating) the Nazis denaturalized Jewish cit-
izens, thereby transforming most of them into Zionists; in the United States
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Myths of Homeland and Return
during the 1950s, when politicians stressed the diaspora aspect of Latvian
and other immigrants from the "captive nations," in order to delegitimate
the postwar incorporation of Baltic lands into the Soviet Union, and during
the 1960s, when the Cuban immigrants' homeland sentiments were fanned
for the purpose of recruiting them for the fight against Castro; by Arab
governments since the 1960s, when they helped foster a diaspora con-
sciousness among Palestinian Arabs in order to mobilize them against Isra-
el;7 and by German authorities at present, when they emphasize the provi-
sional character of the Turkish workers' residence in order to increase the
letter's incentive to return to their homeland.
Occasionally, a minority's interest in its homeland is stimulated for the
sake of the promotion of a foreign-policy goal and ignored later when the
direction of foreign policy has altered. This occurred when the United States
at the end of World War I made grandiose promises to Armenians in the
United States of an independent Armenia in eastern Anatoliain order to
weaken the Ottoman Empire, only to lose interest after the war as a result
of a growing rapprochement with Turkey (Lang and Walker 2). It occurred
also during World War II, when the British encouraged the formation of a
Polish brigade to fight for a free Poland, only to sacrifice that aim in the
interest of a postwar accommodation with the Soviet Union.
Diaspora sentiments may be manipulated by the government of the host
country in order to influence the behavior of the homeland. United States
government officials attempted on several occasions (especially during the
presidency of Jimmy Carter) to have American Jews exert pressure on
Israel; and during the post-World War II period, the Soviet Union cultivated
the fear among Turks that it would someday use Armenian claims to east-
ern Anatolia as a lever for further Russian expansion at the expense of
Turkey (Matossian 194-95).
Conversely, a "homeland" government may exploit diaspora sentiments
for its purposes. Early in the twentieth century, Sun Yat-sen solicited sup-
port among overseas Chinese in his efforts at overthrowing the Ch'ing dy-
nasty; later, the Nazis manipulated the Sudeten Germans and the Volks-
deutsche in other parts of Eastern Europe to promote German territorial
expansion and tried (without success) to have German Americans exert
pressure on the United States government to stay out of World War II. The
Greek government has attempted to use the Greek diaspora in the United
States to lobby against Turkey; the Israeli government has used American
Jewish leaders as interlocutors for the promotion of pro-Israeli policies; and
France under de Gaulle attempted to use the francophone "diaspora" in
Quebec to promote French cultural influence (and, incidentally, to annoy
the "Anglo-Saxons"). Some factions of the PLO, representing (inter alia) one
diaspora, the Palestinian, have tried to enlist the support of a second di-
aspora, the Armenian, against the homeland of a third diaspora, the Jew-
ish. Finally, diasporas have expressed their sentiments spontaneously, in
the form of general political support and remittances that are sent to Al-
geria, Greece, Israel, Mexico, and other homelands.
While the homelands are grateful for that support, they view the di-
aspora with a certain disdain for having been enticed by the fleshpots of
capitalism and for retaining a vulgarized ethnic culture. This is among the
reasons why homelands do not necessarily want to welcome their diasporas
93
Diaspora Spring 1991
back from abroad. Returnees, particularly from host countries that are
more advanced than the homeland, might unsettle its political, social, and
economic equilibrium; returning Maghrebis, Mexicans, and Turks might be
too ambitious and too demanding politically; blacks too Americanized; and
Armenians too capitalist. Palestinian Arabs returning to Jordan from
abroad might pose a threat to the throne (and life) of King Hussein. Even
Israel (despite the Law of Return) is somewhat ambivalent about a massive
influx of Soviet or American Jewsthe former, because of the problem of
integrating them professionally, and the latter, because they are too "Anglo-
Saxon."
The homeland myth plays a role in the political behavior of diasporas
and is reflected both in voting and in interdiaspora relations. In France,
Mahgrebi-Jewish relations are complicated by the Arab-Israeli conflict; in
the United States, black support of the Arab cause has translated itself into
hostility toward Jews (though, to be sure, that hostility has multiple deter-
minants); and in both countries diaspora Armenians, despite their cap-
italist outlook, have been positively inclined to the Soviet Union (for harbor-
ing the only Armenian political entity) (see Szaz). In France, many Jews
have voted for the Socialist party because of its more favorable attitude
toward Israel, and one may assume that if in the future there is Maghrebi
bloc voting it would benefit the Gaullist party for the opposite reason. In
Britain, many Pakistanis voted for the Conservative party because of Mrs.
Thatcher's anti-Soviet attitudes; and in the United States, Cubans, ethnics
of East European origin, and (increasingly) Jews have voted for the Re-
publican party because of its reputation for a tougher stand against Com-
munism. Sometimes, the interest of the diaspora in the domestic affairs of
the homeland takes the form of direct political interference, as, for example,
the interference of the leaders of the Lubavitch Hasidic sect in Brooklyn in
the politics of Israeli coalition formation.
In sum, both diaspora consciousness and the exploitation of the home-
land myth by the homeland itself are reflected not so much in instrumental
as in expressive behavior. It is a defense mechanism against slights commit-
ted by the host country against the minority, but it does notand is not
intended tolead its members to prepare for the actual departure for the
homeland. The "return" of most diasporas (much like the Second Coming or
the next world) can thus been seen as a largely eschatological concept: it is
used to make life more tolerable by holding out a utopiaor eutopiathat
stands in contrast to the perceived dystopia in which actual life is lived.
The problem of diaspora/host country/homeland relationshipsand, in-
deed, the very definition of diasporagoes beyond the purely ethnic, genet-
ic, and emotional. Devout Roman Catholics who live in largely Protestant
countries may see themselves as living in a religious diaspora and look to
Rome as their spiritual homeland. Catalans of Perpignan, who may be pa-
triotic French citizens, may regard Barcelona as their cultural and lin-
guistic homeland; and the German-speaking Swiss may locate the Ger-
manic cultural center somewhere in Germany and view themselves as
living in a "dispersed" or peripheral Kulturgebiet. For French and Italian
Stalinists, the "hieratic" homeland was, for many years, Moscow, and they
may have seen themselves as living in an ideological diaspora. For multina-
tional corporationsand their executivesthe economic diaspora may be
Myths of Homeland and Return
and therefore their ethnic unity? Does the decline of religious practice
among Armenians weaken their ethnic consciousness, or, on the contrary,
does it cause them to look for a territorial focus as a replacement for a lost
faith? Does the weakening of religious practice among the Maghrebis in
France compromise their myth of an ultimate return to their country of
origin or, on the contrary, does it cause them to emphasize their "Arabness"
(arabit) and therefore to maintain a homeland myth?
8.In the relationship between perceptions of discrimination, actual op-
pression, and diaspora sentiments, which are the independent and which
the dependent variables? Is there a reciprocal causality? Is diaspora con-
sciousness a concomitant of a feeling of otherness, of alienation, or of a lack
of hospitality on the part of the host society; or, on the contrary, is the lack
of hospitality a response by the host society to the exceptionalism that
diaspora consciousness signifies? Is the exceptionalism of the diaspora a
response to the very nature of the host societyof its culture, its behavior,
and its dominant ideology, including a monistic approach to the definition of
membership in the political community?
9.More specifically, is the diaspora consciousness of an immigrant com-
munity more likely to develop in countries whose citizenship criteria are
based on jus sanguinis (e.g., Germany and Switzerland) and less likely to
maintain itself in "settler" countries informed by jus soli (e.g., the United
States, Canada, Australia, and [to a lesser extent] France)? Or, on the
contrary, does the institutional and ideological pluralism that exists in the
latter countries alleviate the pressures against the expression of diaspora
sentiments?
10.To what extent is diaspora consciousness a function of the degree of
structural "normality" of the minority community? Is such consciousness
likely to be sharpened by a divergence of the minority community from the
"normal" social-occupational pyramid (i.e., one in which there are masses of
landowning peasants at the bottom, a sizable industrial working class in the
middle, and a small bourgeoisie farther up the social scale)? And to the
extent that such a norm no longer applies in "postindustrial" societies, may
one project a weakening of diaspora consciousness in them?
11.Does the diaspora community function as a better scapegoat than an
indigenous minority or an immigrant ethnic community that no longer has
any linksmythic or realwith its country of origin? History seems to
suggest that there is no difference: neither the American blacks (before the
Civil War) nor the European Gypsies (during World War II) had a "home
country"; but that fact did not prevent the former from being reduced to
slavery and the latter from being persecuted and annihilated. Because of
the existence of a large number of assertive and economically important
Muslim states, it is highly improbable that the Maghrebis in France, though
often made a scapegoat for unemployment and crimes of violence, would be
forcibly expelled or that the Turkish diaspora in Germany would be sub-
jected to a "final solution"; because of the existence of a populous and influ-
ential Chinese state, it is highly improbable that the members of the Chi-
nese diaspora in various countries would be subjected to a similar fate; and
it may be argued that the Jews would have been less likely to be victimized
if a Jewish state had existed before 1948.
12.What are the implications of the diaspora phenomenon for public
96
Myths of Homeland and Return
policy? More precisely, how should the government of a host country conduct
itself vis--vis its diaspora communities? What links with their home coun-
tries should it allow? Should it discourage all cultural or organizational
expression of diaspora sentiment for the sake of a rigid definition of mem-
bership in the "nation-state"? Or should it encourage such expression as a
politically innocuousand socially perhaps even usefulmanifestation of
a subpolitical identity? Should there be a new approach to citizenship that
would distinguish it from nationality and that would accept as "normal" a
diversity of cultural orientations, emotional identifications, language prac-
tices, and extraterritorial interest without these being regarded as proof of
political disloyalty? Attempts to answer these questions may reveal that
diaspora communities pose a more serious challenge to host societies than
do other minority communities: they test the efficacy of the process of inte-
gration and the outer limits of freedom of consciousness and, finally, the
limits of pluralism.
Notes
This article is a revised and much enlarged version of a paper presented at the Universit de
Haute Bretagne, Rennes, France, in December 1988. The earlier version was published in Les
Etrangers dans la ville, ed. Ida Simon and Jean-Pierre Simon (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1990). I also
wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions, from which this
version has benefited greatly.
2."Jeszcze Polska nie zginiela kiedy my zyjemy"these are still the words of the Polish national
anthem, which parallel those of "Hatikva," the Zionist and, later, Israeli national anthem: "As
long as there is a Jewish soul within us . . . our eyes turn to Zion."
3.For an "inventory" of the Polish diaspora and its institutions, see Kolodziej, whose study was
published under the auspices of the Cracow-based Institute for the Study of Poles Abroad.
4.See Morsy (15ff), who points out that this label is often used even for third-generation descen-
dants of Algerian immigrants.
5.The term "Palestinian Arab" is preferred by some Israeli Jews, especially those of the older
generation who remember that the term "Palestinian" was applied to the Jewish as well as
the Arab inhabitants of Mandate Palestine. In Britain, the major fundraising agency in behalf
of the Jewish settlers used to be called the United Palestine Appeal, and the Jerusalem Post,
the English-language daily of the Jews in Israel, was, until 1948, known as the Palestine
Post.
6.According to one sympathetic observer of the Palestinian condition, the focus of the Palesti-
nians' homeland aspirations would not be Haifa (or the rest of Israel within the pre-1967 borders),
"as a first step at least" (Colin Smith 5).
7.According to Zuheir Mohsen, head of the Saiqa faction of the PLO, "There are no differences
between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese. ... It is only for political reasons that
we carefully underline our Palestinian identity." Saiqa is backed by the Syrian government.
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