A NEW SORT OF TOGETHERNESS

Economist
orld/international/displayStory.cfm?story_id=16167 636
May 20 2010

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.