Governing Diasporas in International Relations

The Transnational Politics of Croatia and Former Yugoslavia

Francesco Ragazzi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367206550
• eBook ISBN: 9781351709439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyzes how states extend their sovereignty beyond their territories through the language of diasporas.

An increasing number of states are interested in supporting, managing or controlling their populations abroad, something they define as their 'diaspora'. Yet what does it mean for governments to formulate claims of sovereignty over populations who reside outside the very borders that legitimate them? This book argues that 'diaspora' should be understood as a performative discourse that enables transnational political practices that could otherwise not be justified in a normative structure of world politics, dominated by the imperatives of territorial sovereignty. The empirical analysis focuses on the former Yugoslavia and contemporary Croatia. The first part of the book examines the history of the relations between Croats abroad and their homeland, from the emergence of the question of emigration as a problem of government in the late nineteenth century until the years preceding the formation of the contemporary Croatian state. The second part explores how, in the 1990s, the merging of bureaucratic categories and state practices into the category of 'diaspora' was instrumental in mobilizing Croats abroad during the 1991-1995 war; in reshuffling the balance between Serbs and Croats in the citizenry; and in the de facto annexation of parts of neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina in the immediate aftermath of the war.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, international political sociology, diaspora studies, border studies, and International Relations in general.

1 An international political sociology of diaspora politics

This statement by Croatian president Franjo Tuđman prefaced a handbook for returning Croatian migrants published by the Croatian Ministry for Return and Immigration in 1997.

Dear Croats,

When we started to create the independent state of Croatia in 1990, the main thought and moving force was the union between Homeland and Emigrant Croatia…. In the past seven years, Croatia has made progress which has taken other countries decades, from the hardest days of Yugo-communism and the Great-Serbian aggression, when the world even questioned our survival, to today, when Croatia is a key factor in the peace and stability of this region and is respected by the most important international actors. All of this would have been impossible if the historical moment had not been grasped from the very beginning by Croats both within the homeland and within the million-strong Croatian emigration spread around the world.

(1997)¹

Although formulated in straightforward nationalist rhetoric, the Croatian president’s acknowledgment of a “Croatia abroad” echoed Yugoslavian discourses of the 1930s and 1970s, glorifying an extraterritorial “tenth banovina” (Antić 1990: 233) and a “seventh republic” (Zimmerman 1987: 83).² This short passage, both as a manifestation of the political project of Tuđman’s Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica (HDZ) and as an indication of the political atmosphere in post-Yugoslavia, challenges common assumptions of the discipline of international relations. How can a nation be conceived as encompassing people living both inside and outside their homeland, yet form a single political constituency? What does it mean when a head of state such as Franjo Tuđman, a leading figure of the horrifying war in former Yugoslavia, insists that the “main thought and moving force” of his newly independent nation was the union between the homeland and emigrant Croatia? How can theories of international relations, based on the principle of territorially bound sovereign states, account for this assertion and its underlying assumptions?

Questioning the Westphalian definition of the state

In 2000, when I was working as an intern with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in former Yugoslavia, I spent several months in Sisak, a former industrial center located an hour’s drive from the Croatian capital, Zagreb. The office had been established there because it was the closest important town to the former front line between the Croatian forces and the Serbian-ruled breakaway territory Republika Srpska Krajna. In addition to contemplating ruined houses that had been heavily shelled during the war and conversing with Croatian Serb³ grandmothers returning to empty villages surrounded by minefields, I made tiring trips to local NGO offices where I spoke for hours with the local staff of the UNHCR. As was often the case during and after the war in former Yugoslavia, the highly paid United Nations (UN) international staff worked with local staff who had a better education and a better understanding of the causes of the war. Local staff members told me a side of the story of the war in former Yugoslavia that outsiders largely ignored.

Before coming to the region I had done extensive research on the subject, yet my everyday conversations in Croatia revealed one element that had been missing from all those sources: the Croatian diaspora. The position of Croats living abroad was one of the most important topics in the public debates conducted in Croatia during the 1990s. The diaspora had helped to elect Tuđman’s HDZ in the first democratic elections; the diaspora had sent humanitarian aid during the war; the diaspora had sent weapons for the defense of the country; the diaspora was bringing new investments home; the diaspora was dominating the government. Yet in the majority of journalistic bestsellers published in English, as well as in academic books and articles describing the dynamics of the war, the diaspora was at most a footnote.

Croatian and Yugoslav diasporic institutions, individual political émigrés, gastarbeiter (guest workers) and other Croats living abroad played central roles in the drive to establish an independent Croatia. The contribution of external funds to the HDZ’s nationalist campaign in 1990 was crucial to its success. Three émigré figures—Gojko Šušak, Ante Beljo, and Marin Sopta—were key to establishing an annexationist lobby within and outside the Croatian government throughout the 1990s. More than half of the Croatian arsenal during the initial period of the war is estimated to have been directly obtained from or financed by supporters in the diaspora. These three crucial elements of the war in former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995—the increase in Croatian nationalism, the rise of Croatian expansionism and the militarization of the country—cannot be understood without first understanding the diaspora and its relationship with the government. Scholars largely ignore these facts, despite what local newspapers reported and still discuss, what appeared on public television and what everyone in Croatia knows.

Why this academic blind spot? At the time when I started my research in 2004, only two journalists, one Croatian (Hudelist 1999, 2004) and one foreign (Hockenos 2003), had carried out in-depth investigations of the importance of the diaspora during the war.⁴ It seems that this omission is the result of what Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller have called methodological nationalism. They remark that, with the exception of some Marxian approaches, “the epistemic structures and programs of mainstream social sciences have been closely attached to, and shaped by, the experience of modern nation-state formation” (Wimmer and Schiller 2002: 303). International relations (IR), for example, established itself as a discipline distinct from political science precisely on the assumption that the type of politics that takes place inside sovereign states is different from that which takes place at the international level. The treaties of Westphalia (1648) have served as the founding myth of the discipline, marking the moment at which the modern nation-state established a distinction between a domestic and an international sphere of politics. The “Westphalian state” came therefore to be understood as the basic political unit of IR, a sovereign unit which has absolute power within its territorial marked borders, but is in an anarchic conflict with other states outside (Osiander 2001).

Diaspora policies and diaspora politics question these established distinctions and therefore lie outside our theoretical habits as social scientists. If we focus on the practices and not the principles, however, we realize “how transnational the modern world has always been, even in the high days when the nation-state bounded and bundled most social processes” (Wimmer and Schiller 2002: 302). Political scientist Aristide Zolberg called attention to this problem in 1981:

International migration constitutes a deviance from the prevailing norm of social organization at the world level. That norm is reflected not only in the popular conception of a world consisting of reified countries considered as nearly natural entities, but also in the conceptual apparatus common to all the social sciences, predicated on a model of society as a territorially-based, self-reproducing cultural and social system, whose human population is assumed, tacitly or explicitly, to renew itself endogenously over an indefinite period.

(1981: 6)

The neglect of international migration may also stem from academic Eurocentrism. With the exception of demographers, European and American social scientists who study migration have been concerned primarily with immigration rather than emigration. Sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad pointed out that migration must be studied transnationally.

As an object that has been divided between political powers rather than disciplines, and between divergent social and political interests on continents that have been separated by a frontier that divides emigration and immigration, the migratory phenomenon cannot be fully understood unless science mends the broken threads and puts together the shattered fragments.

(2004: 1)

Our deeply embedded theoretical habit of seeing the world as a juxtaposition of populations living in bounded territories and approaching international processes through the prism of a territorial Western state—a bias elevated to a paradigm in realist and neorealist approaches to international relations—prevents us from fully understanding the complex processes involved in the wars in former Yugoslavia.

Assessing the importance of diasporas in international relations

Diasporas are key to understanding the dynamics of contemporary wars, for emigration is part of the political economy of development of countries that are subordinated within the international capitalist system, which together form what is called the global South.⁵ Diasporas often play an important or even central role in conflicts and post-conflict processes (Shain 1999, 2002). Since the end of the Cold War, most international and intranational conflicts have taken place in countries historically poorer, and these countries have usually experienced major flows of emigration.

Diasporas have been active in many of these conflicts, starting with Northern Ireland (late 1960s–1998) and within former Yugoslavia: Slovenia-Croatia (1991–1995), Bosnia (1992–1995), Kosovo (1996–1999) and Macedonia (2001). Similar patterns occurred in the Caucasus and Central Asia: Ossetia-Ingushetia (1991–1992), Chechnya (1994–1996, 1997–), Tajikistan (1992–1997), and Afghanistan (1992–1996, 2002–); in the Middle East: Israel–Palestine (Al Aqsa intifada 2000–2006) and Kurdistan (in Turkey 1985–2000, in Iraq 2003); in Africa: Sierra Leone (1991–2002) and Congo (1996–1997, 1998–2003); in Asia: Timor-Leste (1976–1999) and Sri Lanka (1983–2009). Diaspora populations played a major part in all these conflicts, in forms ranging from humanitarian aid, weapons, support from exiled governments and associations, and participation in guerrilla movements or liberation armies to lobbying and raising international awareness. In the case of Iraq, for example, exile groups were crucial in misinforming Washington about the situation and actions of Saddam Hussein’s regime, recommending military intervention, shaping policy and providing candidates to exercise power after regime change who were chosen by the George W. Bush administration. Kurdish organizations were also influential, relaying communications between Washington and organizations in northern Iraq. Iraqis living elsewhere were included in the “out-of-country vote” program of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and called upon to aid in reconstruction. Thus, Iraqis abroad have fundamentally affected the war politically and economically.

The relationship between the diaspora and the homeland is crucial in peacetime as well. Increasingly, countries of the global South are proactively including their diasporas in national development plans. The flow of remittances makes a substantial difference in national economies. In 2008, for Tajikistan remittances represented 49.6 percent of GDP, for Moldova 31.4 percent and for Lebanon 25.1 percent (IOM 2010: 118). According to IOM estimates, in the year 2009 alone India received US$49 million worth of remittances, China US$47 million and Mexico US$22 million (IOM 2010). Significantly, Tajikistan, Moldova, Lebanon, Mexico, China, and India have all developed active policies aimed at establishing strong links with their populations abroad.⁶ States that occupy subordinate positions in the international capitalist system are deeply engaged with their diasporas, in most cases economically and in some cases politically.

For many countries, paraphrasing R. B. J. Walker, it can be said that the national population is “not where it is supposed to be” (Walker 2000). The territorial borders of the state do not contain what it regards as its population, a situation that can have economic, social, intellectual, and even military dimensions. According to the IOM, in 2002, one in 35 inhabitants of the planet was an international migrant. These 175 million migrants exceed the populations of Mexico or Germany and equal those of Pakistan, Brazil, or Russia (IOM 2003: 4–5). In addition to their sheer numbers, these groups’ skills, wealth, and political organization make them crucial political actors. Yet the inclusion of a substantial number of people living abroad in the national population matters to the definition of the legitimate geography of the nation. This phenomenon affects some of the most important emerging economies, as can be seen from the following table.

Table 1.1 Comparison of the populations of diasporas and states for selected countries (2000)¹

State	Official...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 An international political sociology of diaspora politics
• 2 Seeing like an emigration state (1880–1991)
• 3 Croatian diaspora nationalism and the transnational political field (1945–1987)
• 4 Croatia, a diaspora forged in war (1987–1993)
• 5 Diaspora as a state category
• 6 Diasporic citizenship, territory, and the politics of belonging
• 7 Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina: diaspora, territory, annexation
• 8 Conclusion: theorizing the government of diasporas
• Index