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Introduction
Background
Interest in the political role that migrants can play in their home countries has grown steadily in the last two decades. In conflicts of this period – such as the Balkan wars or those arising out of the Arab Uprisings in 2011 – the role of migrants and refugees as political actors has become increasingly important. However, German, Polish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Lebanese migrants have also historically continued to participate in political processes in their countries of origin, as have classical diasporic communities such as the Palestinian, Kurdish, and Armenian communities. However, with some exceptions, research on diasporas has only started to explicitly put politics at the centre of analyses of transnational processes and practices since the mid-1990s.
Transnational activism describes a form of political mobilisation that crosses borders and emphasises the rooting of actors in two or more national contexts, which is in contrast to orthodox theoretical approaches to immigration: Generations of migration researchers have perceived immigrants as persons who left behind their home and country and faced the painful process of incorporation into different societies and cultures. Immigrants who settled abroad were expected to eventually assimilate into the dominant society’s sociocultural systems, while simultaneously losing their ‘old’ cultural practices and political loyalties (Guarnizo, Portes, and Haller 2003, 1215). This long-held assimilation model has been questioned since the emergence of the concept of transnationalism. Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc have argued that increasing numbers of immigrants should be understood as ‘transmigrants’: immigrants “whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relationship to more than one nation state” (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 1995, 48). One of the results of the transnational paradigm has been the emergence of diaspora politics as a new field of academic research since the early 2000s, as exemplified by a series of scholars (Adamson 2002, 2004; Guarnizo, Portes, and Haller 2003; Østergaard-Nielsen 2003a; Sheffer 2003; Smith 2003a, 2003b; Tarrow 2005; Lyons and Mandaville 2012).
These works have studied those political activities of migrants that aim to increase political power or influence in the migrants’ homeland, while the migrants themselves are living abroad. They address a number of questions: What political role can emigrants play in their country of origin – are they ‘war mongers’ or rather a democratising influence (Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Van Hear and Cohen 2017)? When can emigrants shape development activities in their countries of origin (Cohen 2008b; Merz, Chen, and Geithner 2008; Brinkerhoff 2009)? What macro and micro factors influence the form and shape of migrants’ political trans-national activism (Koinova 2013)?
Diasporas are constantly evolving, as are the tools they use to stay in touch with their country of origin and influence politics. In the current age of globalisation, easier and cheaper transport, the spread of the Internet, and, in particular, the emergence of social media have all been major features of this evolution. In particular, the emergence of social media since the beginning of the new millennium – Facebook since 2004 and Twitter since 2006 – has further facilitated the political mobilisation of migrants across borders: New media make it possible to follow political events that are physically far away with an unprecedented immediacy and can increase the feeling of being both ‘here and there’ at the same time.
The Internet is now considered a key factor in understanding contemporary diasporas, as it is has become an increasingly important tool for creating a sense of community (Honey and Okafor 1998; Sassen 2002; Cohen 2008b). Since the beginning of the new millennium, new social media have made it easier than ever before to strengthen social, political, and economic networks among diasporic communities, including how they mobilise politically (Mitra 2006; Asal 2012; Oiarzabal 2012; Plaza and Below 2014). In authoritarian contexts, social media can constitute an alternative political space that can partially elude state control and allow diasporic groups to follow political mobilisations in their country of origin more easily. During the Arab Uprisings, the role of social media in mobilising the public was widely discussed. For example, while in the early 2000s, cyber dissidence in Tunisia was limited to some opposition figures in Tunisia and a relatively small number of expatriates abroad, after the Arab Spring revolution in 2010, large numbers of people were mobilised through the use of social media as an alternative means of carrying out social protest (Boudokhane-Lima and Vacaflor 2013).
The puzzle
The Uprising in Egypt in 2011 serves as a fascinating case study to use as a basis for an exploration of the transnational political practices of migrants from the Middle East. The first and foremost reason is that Egypt is one of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries, which are particularly characterised by emigration. Second, the 25 January Revolution represented a major political upheaval in Egypt, which politicised Egyptians across borders after many years of political stagnation. The so-called Arab Spring was the largest outbreak of social struggle in the Middle East in recent decades, involving students, women, workers, and Islamic and secular individuals from a variety of social and political backgrounds. As such, the upheavals in spring 2011 opened up unprecedented space for political engagement for Egyptian citizens.
The protests that swept through the MENA region in spring 2011 not only roused a new political consciousness among Egyptian citizens but also influenced the way Egyptians living abroad perceived their countries of origin. The uprisings rekindled Egyptians’ will to participate in matters of public interest, a phenomenon also perpetuated among Egyptians living abroad.
In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, for example, Egyptians living abroad launched several initiatives that aimed to support the upheavals and the transformations taking place in Egypt. One of these was the Tahrir Square Foundation, a US–based non-governmental organisation, which was initiated by influential members of the Egyptian business community in the United States and Canada. As foreign aid became an increasingly sensitive topic in post-revolutionary Egypt, the Tahrir Square Foundation sought to use the resources of Egyptians abroad to fund humanitarian, educational, and economic development in Egypt. Another initiative involved efforts to encourage Egyptians abroad to use their savings to start economic projects in Egypt. Following the revolution, remittances sent from abroad increased sharply. According to the Central Bank of Egypt, remittances for the fiscal year 2010–2011 reached $12.6 billion, breaking all previous records (Abdelfattah 2011, 9). Finally, there was a growing movement of Egyptians abroad who began to advocate a need to return to the country in order to invest their knowledge and expertise in development there. Prominent examples of such returnees were Alaa Abd El-Fattah and his wife Manal, both well known Egyptian bloggers and activists, who had moved to South Africa in 2008 but returned to Egypt in 2011. Abd El-Fattah’s aunt, Ahdaf Soueif, a contemporary Egyptian author living in Great Britain, also returned to Cairo in 2011 to witness the uprisings. Similarly, Khalid Abdalla, a British-Egyptian actor and activist, returned to become one of the founding members of the Muṣirrīn Collective in Cairo, which documented the events during and after the revolution.
Research questions
This book analyses two specific case studies of this intensified political engagement: namely, Egyptian diaspora politics during the Uprisings and the transformation phase (2011–2013), in two European cities – Vienna and Paris. The choice of this subject as a topic of research primarily stems from an interest in the questions of why and how migrants and their children engage in diaspora politics. As a more specific sub-question, the research of this book aims to understand how social media can be used to organise and mobilise transnational political action. Therefore, this book addresses three sets questions:
- Transnational political activists: Who were the diaspora activists in Vienna and Paris targeting political events in Egypt during the relevant period? Which factors contributed to their political engagement? What motivated them?
- Forms of participation and transnational political networks: What forms of networks were generated to enable participation in the political processes? How were political connections organised across borders? How have these networks tried to influence politics?
- Political organisation on social media: How were social media used to organise and mobilise transnational political action? How were political processes discussed on social media?
Three hypotheses were linked to these sets of questions. The first was the hypothesis that migrants living in democratic countries promote democratic processes in their country of origin and can therefore become drivers of political innovation in those countries. The second was that the institutional context in which migrants and their children settle influence the form that diaspora activism takes. It is for this reason that a comparative approach, using two different cities, was adopted for this study. The third hypothesis was that social media makes diaspora politics easier and more effective.
The time period 2011–2013 was chosen because it was – despite considerable political repression – characterised by a degree of political openness. After the toppling of President Mohammed Morsi and the violent crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and revolutionaries in July and August 2013, we have entered into a new authoritarian situation where political participation has once again become very difficult.
Case selection
European countries have become an increasingly popular destination for Egyptian migrants in recent decades and offer a very different context for political participation than traditional Egyptian destination countries in the authoritarian Gulf States. Vienna and Paris provide a useful backdrop for a comparative analysis because, as European migration cities, they share similar histories but also diverge in their numbers of Egyptian migrants and their approach to integration. Both cities can be classified as ‘top-scale cities’ (Schiller and Çağlar 2009), insofar as they have a long tradition as immigration cities and accumulate the highest share of the foreign-born population in the country. They possess a great deal of cultural capital, they have significant economic, cultural and political ties to the rest of the globe, and they rely a lot on both low-skilled and highly skilled migrants. Both cities contain the greatest number of transnational institutions and associations in their respective countries and stand for multiculturalism, with ethnic associations informing their character and global reputation. As such, they offer a very broad range of opportunities for the incorporation of migrants and transnational activities (Schiller and Çağlar 2009, 190–5). Second, France and Austria offer very different ‘contexts of reception’ (Portes and Rumbaut 2006) with regard to the size of their respective Egyptian migrant communities, their national immigration policies, and how they conceptualise citizenship. A comparative case study of these two cities is therefore especially useful for analysing the links between different institutional contexts, different migration histories, and transnational political participation.
Egyptian migration inflows in both cities are not typical of classical traditional immigration flows but represent a new type of migration that has emerged in Europe since the 1980s. As explained in much greater detail in Chapter 4, Egyptian migration to Europe represents only a small share of Egyptian emigration, which has traditionally mostly been to oil-rich Arab countries in the Gulf (e.g. Saudi Arabia) or Libya. Migration to Western countries, particularly to the United States, Australia, and Europe, only increased in the 1980s, further intensifying after the Second Gulf War in 1991 when Egyptian emigration destinations were restructured. Historically, Egyptian migration flows to Vienna and Paris were quite similar. In both cities, Egyptian migration began in the early 1950s, mostly as elite migration, and increased in the 1980s with migrants building up informal migration networks that later facilitated the migration of other social classes. Migration flows to Vienna and Paris both started increasing in the 1980s when temporary labour migration to the Arab oil-producing countries, such as the GCC countries (Gulf Cooperation Council), declined. These migrants also included Copts, who migrated both for economic reasons and on account of the discrimination they faced in Egypt. However, since the 2000s Paris has witnessed a significant increase in irregular migration flows, making it one of the top European destinations for Egyptian migrants today. Vienna has not experienced this phenomenon to such a great extent.
Framing diaspora politics theoretically
This book brings together three streams of literature to frame diaspora politics: literature on political transnationalism, literature on diasporas, and new social movement theory. This book adopts a definition of ‘diaspora politics’ as a political activity that crosses one or more borders....
