Diasporas Article with Armenian relevant mentions highlighted‏

(would it not be wonderful if the UK Armenian lobby was rated as highly

by a third party as in the USA. Instead it is considered as of no consequence

by the Foreign & Commonwealth papers revealed through the Armenian

Legal Initiative Freedom of Information work)

Diasporas
A new sort of togetherness
May 20th 2010
From The Economist print edition
With new technology and new concerns, émigrés reinvent themselves


AT A Hindu temple in Chicago, hundreds of people of Indian descent,

professing many faiths, turned up from across Illinois and farther afield to hear

a speaker from back home. But the meeting on May 15th was not the usual

style of diaspora politics, in which a nation’s far-flung children are urged to

cheer for the homeland.

The man they came to see was Jayaprakash Narayan, head of a movement

called Lok Satta which opposes corruption and wants electoral reform. And

the aim of his month-long American tour, which includes venues like the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Google headquarters in

California, is to get support from Indian-Americans for a drive to correct some

of India’s failings. That sounds a lot better than passing round the hat for hardline

Hindu nationalist causes, something else that occurs in the diaspora.

Bad, sleazy government, Mr Narayan says, is holding India back, crippling the

country in its race with China. Having voted with their feet by leaving the country,

he adds, Indians abroad should now help make their homeland worth staying in.

Independent India’s early rulers had picked up statist ideas when studying in

Britain; a new cohort of Indians, having thrived in economies like America’s,

are nudging the country towards a freer market. This transmission of ideas,

he notes, is easier in an electronic age.

All this is a long way from ethnic lobbying of the old school, in which people

from country A are persuaded to use their votes to tilt their new homeland’s

policies and make them less favourable to country (or regime) B, their ancient

bugbear. Or else they are urged to fight old causes in an even more direct way

—by sending money to extremist groups. In almost every democracy that has

received migrants from troubled places, the influence (or at least, perceived

influence) of groups committed to particular national causes has been a feature

of political life, and of foreign-policy debates.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former American national security adviser, has

controversially described the Cuban-Americans, the Armenian-Americans
and the supporters of Israel as the three most effective groups in

Washington, DC—while agreeing that the lobby of his native Poland

“was at one time influential”. A landmark in the efforts of ethnic groups to

affect American foreign policy was the arms embargo placed on Turkey in the

1970s, under the sway of Greek-Americans angry over the Turkish takeover of

northern Cyprus.

Until recently at least, it seemed that the influence of ethnic constituencies was

doomed to fade. For one thing, the communities on which they were based are

blurring into wider societies. Gone are the days when Irish-Americans looked

mainly to fellow Hibernians to socialise with; today’s Lebanese-Australian

teenager is as likely to hang out with youngsters from Vietnam as with other

Levantines. In America, meanwhile, support for Israel is no longer an especially

Jewish cause; the largest body of pro-Israel hawks are evangelical Christians,

while many Jews are critical of Israeli policies,

True, groups can hold together as long as there is one big woe to be

redressed. For Armenians, the big cause is recognition that the mass

killings of 1915 were genocide. Yet the power of a single issue cuts both

ways: once the great cause is achieved (as with Baltic independence in

1991) or lost (as with Sri Lanka’s Tamils), the reason for hanging together

can fade away.


Life in the old dog
Despite all this, the latest signs are that diasporas have life in them yet. As

Mr Narayan shows, they are interacting with their homelands in more creative

ways. The American Ireland Fund has raised over $250m, mainly from rich

Irish-Americans, to promote charitable causes, and above all inter-community

relations; a lot better than giving money for guns. A new breed of wealthy

Greek-Americans is doing more interesting things than counting congressional

votes: funding libraries, scholarships and university chairs in Hellenic studies in

the United States, for example. And this week George Papandreou, the Greek

prime minister, met successful businessmen of Hellenic origin from five countries

(such as Andrew Liveris, chief executive of America’s Dow Chemical company),

in the hope that they could lend their struggling homeland some badly needed

pizzazz.

But perhaps the main reason why diasporas are perking up is simply the new

ease of communications. With the internet and social networks, people with a

common origin or concern can stay in touch and pool their efforts—with a

flexibility and spontaneity that would amaze old-time lobbyists, reliant on faxes,

phones and foreign-ministry briefings.

Take a diaspora as obscure as the Indians are visible. The Circassians descend

from a Caucasus nation obliterated by Russia’s tsar in the mid-19th century,

losing around half its 2m population. Nine out of ten Circassians now live in

diaspora: survivors fled to all corners of the Ottoman empire and beyond.

Only 20 years ago, they were dwindling, with moribund diaspora bodies

under Soviet tutelage. The internet is rekindling the cause. Facebook and

Twitter link thousands of Circassians, helping them raise the national profile.

Facebook groups and Twitter feeds enabled Circassians to co-ordinate the

protests held on May 21st in Berlin, Istanbul, New York, The Hague and

Washington, DC, to mark the 146th anniversary of what they term a genocide.

They plan to make their feelings known at Sochi—the site of the killings

—during the 2014 Olympics.

Politics is just one part of the diaspora’s e-revival. Reassembling fragmented

cultures is another. Circassians can find their long-lost music and dance on

YouTube. Information about history and culture that was once obscure or falsified

is now a click away. Online Circassian dictionaries and language courses are

emerging. Internet forums can facilitate the search for a spouse.

For some diasporas, any alternative to politics is welcome. In Ukraine the

diaspora is the biggest donor for the Ukrainian Catholic University, the country’s

main independent provider of higher learning. Rigorous education is less

glamorous than getting Ukraine into NATO or keeping the Russian bear at bay.

But the gains are palpable, in contrast to the chaos and corruption of Kiev politics

which faze many émigrés.

Such stories mark a big turnaround for diasporas, which over the last century have

often had to wage an uphill struggle against time and geography. “One by one, all

remaining links to our old life are vanishing […] Our Baghdad, my Baghdad is

gone for ever.” So concludes “Memories of Eden”, Violette Shamash’s reflections

on Jewish life in that city. A community which a century ago made up almost 40%

of the city’s population now lives chiefly in fading memories. But the people to

whom memories are dear (if only because of things heard from grandparents) can

now cultivate and share them more easily.

E-communications provide some hope of keeping at bay all the forces which

threaten the existence of diasporas, especially small ones: assimilation (seen in

the decline of once-mighty tongues like Yiddish and Latino) and the danger of

irrelevance as the world moves on. But that will only work if the will to keep old

languages and cultures alive really exists. In the easy-come, easy-go ethos of the

electronic age, virtual communities die as well as live.