This book is an in-depth examination of the linking of homeland territory and population to its distributed overseas diaspora in the process of forming and operating as a cosmonation. This is not a new form of the nation because this model has informally been in existence for many years. Throughout the centuries, segments of nations have developed and prospered outside their homelands in foreign territories (Lacoste 1991: 1ā21). What is newāand the object of this investigationāis that this mixing and interaction between the population of these different sites has not simply been carried out at the individual, group, associational, and institutional levels only, but also been incrementally set in laws and translated into public policy, allowing diasporans to obtain dual citizenship; vote in homeland presidential, legislative, and referendum elections; hold public sector positions in the homeland government; and be elected to serve or be represented in the homeland parliament (International IDEA 2007; Ragazzi 2010: 305ā322; Tintori 2011: 168ā188). The formal recognition of these democratic rights, accompanied by the homeland effort to build crossborder bureaucratic infrastructure to ensure implementation, oversight, and state control, is a new development in the history of the nation (CantĆ©grit 1995; Garriaud-Maylam 2004: 162ā175; Laguerre 2013: 22ā24).
This book transitions the study of immigration and integration into a hostland to a new level, from a national setting to a cosmonational arena and field of practice. It redraws and magnifies the domain of interactions between actors and enlarges the scope of investigation and analysis. It premises on the idea that one cannot fully understand the logic of immigrantsā actions unless one relocates their everyday life inside the cosmonational web of relations that links them to the homeland and various diasporic sites of the group, including transitional places of residence of refugees, asylum seekers, visitors with student visas, and unauthorized sojourners with nonimmigrant status. This larger frame of reference provides the context for understanding the rationale of immigrant integration in foreign countries. The endgame is not simply integration into a hostland; there are other factors to take into consideration. Integration into a multisite domain must also occur due to oneās sense of belonging to the hostland and also oneās entanglement in the process influences, shapes, and delimits the parameters of oneās options. Therefore, it is integration within the cosmonation at a level commensurate to oneās needs, depending on oneās immigrant status, residential location, and social position in the network.
What is a Multisite Nation?
One conceives of the multisite nation as a crossborder social formation with a population distributed across many countries. Governance is shared by both the homeland and its diaspora tentacles, which are considered to be part of the homelandās demographic composition despite the peopleās residence abroad. A multisite nation may or may not possess the territory or territories in which it is anchored. When it does, one speaks then of the āterritories of the nationā (Lacoste 1991) or the ānation and its territoriesā (Csurgai 2005) to insinuate the geographical expansion of the boundaries of the nation and highlight multiple locations of the dispersed population.
The multisite nation is the outcome of a long gestational process brought about and fueled by human mobility, diasporization, and crossborder relinking, enabled by the availability of efficient and rapid mass transit and easy access to, and use of, information technology (IT). In its modern post-French Revolution rendition, the nation is thought to be attached to a specific territory in which it has developed culture, traditions, and institutions that distinguishes it from other cultural collectivities (Renan 2009). This is the most prevalent model of the contemporary nation that comes to mind, routinely referred to as a nation-state (Blaut 1993; Smith 1989; Schnapper 1995). If culture is the glue that defines the specificity of the group, territory is by necessity the place of its anchorage in the global landscape.
In essence, a multisite nation can be nonterritorial if it does not possess and control a territory that it can call its own, but rather occupies a subaltern position wherever its people settle, as in the cases of the Roma in Europe, better known as Gypsies, or the Jews prior to the existence of the State of Israel. It is a nation without a permanent homeland or with an occupied homeland whose ancestral population has been dispersed overseas. It can be monoterritorial if it has its own territory with or without a dispersed diaspora active in transnational relations with the homeland, as exemplified by the Republic of Italy. It can be multiterritorial if it comprises a combination of homeland and other territories (added through colonization, merger, occupation, or annexation) and a significant diaspora population that maintains engaged relations with the homeland, as is the case of contemporary France. These categories are not mutually exclusive since any type can evolve or devolve into another. This book is concerned with the multisite nation in both its monoterritorial and multiterritorial deployments.
One speaks of the territory of the nation to imply the sharing of the land by a group of people with the same culture, traditions, aspirations, and practices of solidarity that sustain their interdependence and unite them for the protection of the common patrimony. Since attachment of the nation to a specific territory is a basic component of the equation, one may then ask the rhetorical question, what has become of the nation in situations of emigration, dispersion, and resettlement in foreign countries? Just referring to its transformation into a ātransnationā (Tololyan 2000; Willis and Yeoh 2004), ātransglobal network nationā (Laguerre 2009), or āglobal nationā (Ostergaard-Nielsen 2003: 760ā786) does not explain the nature of the metamorphosis that has led to such an outcome. One must do more to unveil the nature of its territorial inscription, border-crossing circulation, expansive spatialization, multisite-entrenched bureaucratic organization, crossborder infrastructure, and transnational institutional practices (Laguerre 2009: 195ā210).
The multisitedness of the nation occurs through different processes, including emigration, diasporization, decolonization, redesigning of borders, secession, or annexation, which underscore both the role of geography and political inscription in such arrangements (Lacoste 1991: 1ā21). This volume concerns a different set of problems pertaining to the linking or relinking of different sites in deconstructing and understanding the making and operation of the cosmonation as a recalibrated form of the nation, reflective of the inscription of the globalization process in the reality of the organization of cultural collectivities.
The nation has not always been enclosed in one contiguous territory. In fact, throughout recorded history there have been numerous nations spread out in more than one territory. The process by which they have so evolved differs from one case to another. The often-cited examples are those that emerged from empire building, colonization, expansion, annexation, occupation, or federation (Beaume 1985; Schnapper 1995; Smith 1986; Tilly 1975). Although the plurality of forms deserves more reflexive analyses for democracyās sake, it is not the object of study for this book. What concerns us here is the multisite nation that results from a combination of homeland territory and extraterritorial diaspora sites. For some states, territorial residence is no longer a prerequisite for the acquisition and exercise of citizenship rights; in fact, in some cases, one observes dissociation between membership and territory of residence in the acquisition and performance of full citizenship rights (Benhabib 2002: 181). Living outside the territory of the nation is no longer an obstacle to exercising oneās citizenship rights, as was the case in the past (Soysal 1994; Baubock 2005). Now, such rights are being performed by diasporans in a growing number of countries.
A multisite nation navigates through different places because its population comprises a territorial as well as an extraterritorial demographic component, with needs either exclusive to each or common to both portions of the population. In such a scenario, the homeland territory symbolizes the principal anchorage of the nation while its overseas territories and extraterritorial diasporic sites constitute both its mode of geographical expansion and a source of its transformation. The borders of the nation expand when it becomes part of a larger reality, which contributes to its metamorphosis into a cosmonation. This is an integrated structure that may combine the homeland, diasporic enclaves, and, in some cases, annexed overseas territories in the production of the crossborder nation. With this new identity, the multisite nation finds itself entangled in a mixture of homeland territory and diasporic sites within a circumscribed circuit of mobility, interactions, and solidarity.
On the one hand, the territory of the nation serves as its central landscape, fulfilling major functions because of the ancestral homeland it represents and the jurisdiction the state maintains over its internal affairs. It is an epicenter that both introverts in order to care for the residents in its midst and extroverts due to its interactions with, and the influence of, the extraterritorial population in the production of cosmonational outcomes.
On the other hand, the extraterritorial sites are enclaves in hostlands inhabited by members of the cosmonation. Diasporic enclaves, as domestic places of residence located inside foreign countries, are cosmonational sites because of their belonging and attachment to the country of origin, participation in its affairs, and contribution to its well-being. These extraterritorial sites are appended to the homeland territory to expand the space of the nation, thereby transforming it into a cosmonational sphere of interaction for those who hold membership in the group. A combination of homeland territory and extraterritorial sites forms the transfrontier spatial landscape of the cosmonation.
Extraterritorial sites have their own peculiarity as they function in foreign territories. Thus, diasporans who inhabit them are also expected to be in sync with customary practices and submit to a legal regime different from that of the homeland. This population practices a form of ādiasporic citizenshipā (Laguerre 1998a, b) that allows them to maintain loyalty to both the homeland and hostland, while they may also participate in activities of compatriots living in other diasporic enclaves.
Networks of Connections
The connections that make the networks of homeland and diasporic sites an operational crossborder social formation are important factors to identify and analyze in order to unveil the multifaceted dimension of the cosmonation. Without these extraterritorial connections, the cosmonation would have been more symbolic than real, occupying a latent phase until it could become operative, which happened in most cases prior to World War II. The revolution in mass transit and IT has provided the infrastructure to make these networks operative, thereby turning the cosmonation into a reality.
Crossborder networks linking these sites have multiple origins. They are developed and sustained by individuals for the purpose of consolidating the ties that bind members of multisite families (Scott and Cartledge 2009: 60ā89; Singh et al. 2012); by associations for the purpose of recruitment, project implementation, leadership structure, and fundraising (Mercer et al. 2009: 141ā161; Van Amersfoort and Van Heelsum 2007,: 234ā262); by institutions for reasons of expansion, efficiency, headquarterāsubsidiary relations, and profit maximization (Judge 1972: 14ā24); and by the state for providing services to, and sustaining good relations with, the extra muros members of the cosmonation (Dufoix 2010; Garriaud-Maylam 2004).
The materialization of the cosmonation further develops with the crossborder integration of state institutions, services, laws, and governance. In France and Italy, these have become regular, formal, and legal ongoing cosmonational practices. The transformation of the nation leads unequivocally to structural readjustment of the state in order to meet these new conditions and challenges.
The modern nation-state that gradually perfected its classical form between the French Revolution and World War II was preceded by imperial and colonial social formations and is now being succeeded by the cosmonation-state model. The cosmonation-state distinguishes itself from the imperial and colonial social formations in that a large chunk of its population resides as diasporans in foreign countries over which it has no territorial jurisdiction. The reconstitution of the nation with the inclusion of the overseas diaspora population therefore presents an array of structural, organizational, and relational issues that shed light on crucial aspects of the globalization process.
This book elaborates on how the mechanisms of linkages, connections, and networking interact to form distributed sites of homeland and diaspora into a cosmonation and how diasporans in different units of such a crossborder social formation, wherever they relocate, relate to each other. The ensemble thereby functions as a cultural and political collectivity manifested through cultural traditions, inter...