popular debate. Places as diverse as post-invasion Afghanistan and David Cameron’s Britain can agree on one thing: If a population doesn’t share a robust sense of national identity you will have a hard time getting it to share much else. But there has been a great deal of concern about focusing political energies on national identity in all but the most extreme cases of political reconstruction. The fear is that building up national identity means an increase in essentialism, exclusionism and isolationism (Okin 1999; Barry 2000; Abizadeh 2002). In an increasingly mixed and mobile world, these patterns are to be avoided at all costs. In essence, national identity, while it may serve the ends of state stability and even social solidarity within the state project, is generally seen as anathema to the kind of global inclusion within which the state project should ideally operate.

NATIONAL IDENTITY & INCLUSION PROJECT Working Paper #6: National Identity as a Resource for Global Inclusion: ‘Dislocating’ national identity from the nation-state1 Catherine Frost, McMaster University This paper argues for conceptually dislocating national identity from the nation-state, so that we can recognise the risks and opportunities for global inclusion that national identity presents. The paper offers two arguments for this dislocation approach. First the origins of national identity lie in international mobility and exchange. Second, the contemporary experience with national identity frequently exceeds and may in fact be re-shaping the nation-state. The paper then considers two risks of this dislocation. One is that the strategic choices of individuals with multiple national identities will create unfairness or inequity, the other is that the interpenetration of national identity into the affairs of other states creates problems for democracy. Yet these practices can also provide avenues for representing complex patterns of mobility and attachment, as well as integrating the fates of disparate states, which means they present resources – as well as risks – for global inclusion. So if national identity does not neatly map on to the state structure, and is unlikely to ever do so without considerable conflict and alienation, then we should seek ways to bring out the inclusive potential of such dislocation, while minimizing its tendency to generate patterns of privilege or influence.

The difficulty is, as the tide of popular opinion turns against multiculturalist solutions in many advanced states (Joppke 2004), national identity is becoming the new (old) solution. This in turn suggests that global inclusion may be about to suffer a serious setback. Without minimizing any of the risks involved, however, this paper challenges the view that national identity and global inclusion is a zero-sum game. The key to this approach lies in quite literally dis-locating the national identity. Conventional wisdom says national identity is a phenomenon with a clearly demarked geographical footprint. National identity is thought of as the exclusive property of nation-states. Or, as Ernest Gellner put it, every nation “wants a state, and preferably its own” (1983, 51). But there are good reasons to question this equation and even Gellner did not believe the nation-state formula worked out as neatly as eager nationalists would suppose (1983, 47). Rather, from the very start the problem with nationalism has been that nations do not map neatly onto states. The effort to force this

After years of focusing on the development of multiculturalism, interculturalism and cosmopolitanism, the challenges of national identity and nation-building are returning to the forefront of                                                         

Comments welcome, please do not cite without permission of the author at [email protected].

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union at all costs has been at the root of the most violent conflicts nationalism has bred. Is it possible that in the new era what was once a problem could become a solution? Can the state/nation mismatch provide a conduit along which global inclusion may develop?

influence. ORIGINS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY In order to begin this discussion it’s helpful to consider the origins of national identity and nationalism as social and political phenomena. Those who trace the roots of these phenomena ultimately find themselves looking at supra-national dynamics rather than national ones to identify its origins. This section explores the accounts of three leading theorists of nationalism. Leah Greenfeld finds the roots of national identity in the scholarly communities of medieval Europe, and argues its historical development relied on a kind of demonstration effect between a sequence of polities ripe for change (1992, 17). Benedict Anderson argues that the aspirations of Empire breeds self-conscious national identity when the realities of colonial birth hits home for ambitious young elites (1991, 55-7). And Ernest Gellner argues that “social-entropy-resistant” traits force disadvantaged groups to turn inward for support when faced with the impressive, but inaccessible, achievements of more fortunate neighbours (1983, 65).

The paper offers two arguments for dislocating national identity from the standard state structure. First the origins of national identity lie in global and international mobility and exchange. Second, the contemporary experience of national identity frequently exceeds and may in fact be re-shaping the nation-state formula. Taking these patterns into consideration the paper then reflects on the risks a dislocated version of the national identity presents for global inclusion. What does it mean to have national identity operating outside the traditional state container? The paper examines two major risks associated with the dislocation of national identity. One is that the strategic choices of individuals with multiple national identities will create unfairness or inequity; the other is that the interpenetration of national identity into the affairs of other states (either through diaspora representation in the homeland or a national lobby in the new host state) creates problems for representative democracy. But these patterns of strategic identity and diaspora advocacy can also be avenues for representing complex patterns of mobility and attachment, as well as integrating the fates of disparate states, and these qualities make them resources for global inclusion. So if national identity does not neatly map on to the state structure, and is unlikely to do so without considerable conflict and alienation, then the other option is to find ways to bring out the inclusive potential of this dislocation effect, while minimizing its tendency to generate patterns of privilege or

 

Of course some, like A.D. Smith, believe that national identity has its roots in a primordial and pre-existing ethnic core. But even Smith acknowledges that this ‘core’ needs to be mobilized before it takes the shape we recognize as modern national identity (1998). The advantage that accounts like Greenfeld, Anderson, and Gellner’s offer is that they explain where the energy and motivation comes from for such mobilization. The point is that this energy arises in some kind of encounter with those who prove foreign. It’s this encounter that sets off the original process forming the national identity, regardless of how much

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primordial material was already available. The availability of a primordial core (and of course, homogeneity among this ethnic core) makes the nation-building process smoother and more effective. But as Smith points out this raw material has been around for a long time without going through the kind of transformation modern national identity requires. So if we are looking for the developments that triggered this transformation we must look beyond the ethnic core, since the generative energies of national identity do not lie within nations themselves.

Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries the idea of the nation came home, in the sense of applying to people in their place of origin rather than outside of it. But this was a decidedly secondary development, and even then it indicated the political elite of a country and not its general population. The eventual transformation into a form of nationhood that included all “the people” emerged first in early sixteenth century England, Greenfeld claims (1992, 16). As the political history of England unfolded, this example of political sovereignty had a kind viral effect on neighbouring countries. The effect was such that “the emergence of new national identities was no longer a result of original creation, but rather of the importation [emphasis added] of an originally existing idea” (1992, 14). Indeed she suggests the importation and imitation involved tended to breed a kind of reactionary “ressentiment” towards the original source (1992, 15, see also Kedourie 1993). This reaction gives national identity its oppositional and “othering” energy, but it lies over a more fundamental pattern of engagement and interaction. In other words as ideas of popular sovereignty spread from one state to another under the flag of nationalism, national identity served to soften the psychological costs of this imitative practice (Greenfeld 1992,17).

Liah Greenfeld began her study of early nationalism with a conceptual genealogy of the word “nation,” and she finds that the origins of national identity lie in the experience of denizens and outsiders rather than that of the citizen/insider. “Natio” is Latin for “something born” and was originally applied to foreign-born individuals who constituted a social stratus beneath Roman citizens (1992, 4). This outsider meaning continues to attach to the idea of “nation” throughout early Christianity, when it served to group students into roughly identifiable language groups while studying abroad at university. The term gradually shifts in meaning from something “derogatory” to become an indicator of scholarship and common schools of thought. As Greenfeld explains, nation “referred now to the community of opinion and purpose” (1992, 4). But crucially, this community was also embedded within a system of encounters as the nations also represented “sides in scholastic disputations” (1992, 4). Greenfeld also notes that nation takes on a new quality by the time of the Council of Lyon in 1274, when it indicates “representatives of cultural and political authority” especially an elite (1992, 5). But yet again it is embedded in an encounter, one that has what we would call today international qualities.

 

Greenfeld’s focus is primarily on the dynamic between nationalism and democracy (or popular sovereignty) and her interests are in the social and psychological processing of modernity’s political challenges. But her account makes clear that national identity is just as much an international phenomena as a national one. Based on this account, locating the national identity within the parameters of the nation-state would lead us to miss critical aspects of its functioning.

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Although he approaches nationalism differently, Benedict Anderson shares Greenfeld’s analyses when it comes to the roots of nationalism in supra-national encounters. Anderson focuses on large-scale shifts in collective consciousness and argues that changes in dominant communication practices (like the use of vernaculars in administration and the spread of newspapers and novels) forge a new “imagined community” where previously the sacred consciousness and imperial order had ruled supreme.

trajectory of bright young men born in the colonial hinterlands. They aspire to recognition and status in the Empire, but after climbing the career ladder in the colonies, find the way forward blocked by their colonial origins: they are too foreign to make it in the metropole itself. In this encounter, this failed ‘functionary journey’ turns into a “cramped pilgrimage,” through which they discover their Creole identity (1991, 55-57). The “shared fatality of trans-Atlantic birth” proves to be the crucial deciding factor in their prospects (1991, 57). The frustrations of this encounter drive the Creole back towards the colonies and gives rise to the first nationalist projects, which Anderson believes originated outside of and in counter to the European project. Nationalism and national identity, as Anderson puts it, became “modular” (1991, 4). It was discovered, adopted and adapted based on prior models pioneered by other peoples. While Anderson’s account places the origins of nationalism in a very different locale than Greenfeld, both involve an encounter oriented towards what lay beyond the national boundaries; in both cases the encounter drives the parties to invest more significance in national identity; and in both cases nationalism spreads through a demonstration effect.

Like Greenfeld, Anderson believes that nationalism arose in response to a psycho-social need. As with all forms of collective consciousness, he argues, nationalism caught on because it helped people make sense of where they found themselves in life. Crucially, it leant meaning to aspects of our lives whose utter randomness might otherwise leave us facing deep meaninglessness. Anderson believes we create imaginative ways to cope with the “overwhelming burden of human suffering” which faces us with questions like “Why was I born blind? Why is my best friend paralysed? Why is my daughter retarded?” While religions attempt to explain such suffering, Anderson explains that the “great weakness of all evolutionary/progressive styles of thought, not excluding Marxism, is that such questions are answered with impatient silence.” The crucial value of nationality, he feels, is that it can assume the role once held by religion in terms of “transforming fatality into continuity” (1983, 10-11). When being born in a particular place or into one language group or another can determine one’s life prospects, the world becomes an unbearably arbitrary place. National identity allows us imagine that such arbitrary experiences have some inherent meaning.

Ernest Gellner had an explanation for the boomerang-like effect in the birth of nations, where an external encounter sets off internal re-imaginings. He explained that we generally have a problem seeing the real roots of nationalism because we often start by looking at the nation or nation-state as the source of the development. But we’ve got it backwards. The nation-state is the effect and not the cause of nationalism. As he put it: “it’s nationalism which engenders nations and not the other way around” (1983, 55). Gellner attributes the rise of nationalism to the imperatives of a new social order organized around industrial

This dynamic is illustrated, Anderson believed, in the career

 

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production and its requirements for an educated and socially mobile workforce. As this “inescapable imperative” gained momentum populations were either swept up or swept aside (1983, 39). For individuals with “social-entropy-resistant” traits that barred them from identifying with an emerging national project, the choice was stark: either forge your own or remain a permanent underclass in someone else’s (1983, 65).

require these conditions. Or to put it another way, the phenomenon of national identity cannot strictly be located within a single nation-state project because the experience of supranational encounters is critical to its origins and development. This may do little to diminish the energies of Cameron or Merkel’s neo-nationalist projects, but it should help keep the real dynamics of national identity in perspective.

At every turn in this account, though, national identity again appears as the expression of a supra-national encounter. The energy of this encounter drives nationalist aspirations to create a national identity that is designed to map on to the socioeconomic apparatus of the state. Whether or not Gellner’s functionalist and economics-driven account captures all the complexities involved in the phenomenon, it shares with Greenfeld and Anderson this central theme: the drive to national identity has roots in, and draws energy from, externalities and encounters outside the national or proto-national grouping. Indeed these works illustrate that in most cases the nation cannot fit neatly within state boundaries, although there is a constant effort to make it so.

DIASPORAS: NATIONAL IDENTITY BEYOND THE NATION-STATE The tension between the apparent logic of nationalism and its real world dynamic is not limited to its historical roots. Today’s experience with national identity among diaspora populations reinforces a message about its disjuncture with the nation-state. National identity, understood within the confines of a nationstate project, risks missing critical patterns in how this identity operates and more importantly how its operation is changing the nation-state itself. Because, paradoxically the resilience and persistence of national identity in diasporas appears to be one of the transnational forces re-shaping the role of the state in a global context. Peculiar as this finding is, it’s crucial to understand that diaspora activism can create transnational effects without losing its national potency.

This dynamic, while important to recognize, does not bode well for global inclusion, since the nationalist drive they describe tends towards political closure. It is focused on an increasingly futile matching process “striving to make culture and polity congruent” by means of the state (Gellner 1983, 43). This impulse is still evident today in the speeches of European leaders like David Cameron and Angela Merkel who fear for their country’s national identity in a culturally complex age. But national identity is not born in isolation, or out of cultural simplicity, so it’s not automatically clear why its development or renewal should

 

Theorists of early nationalism describe it as a drive to make the political and socio-cultural orders coincide under the influence of international encounters. This imagery – of identifiable and internally coherent national units – also informs the basic structures of the international order, even though today the idea that nations and states will eventually settle down into neat pairings seems unforgivably naive. Scholars are therefore actively

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questioning the value of the nation-state ideal as an analytical model (Walby, 2003, 530; Shain and Sherman 1998, 339; Adamson and Demetriou 2007, 513). Yet any rush to dismiss the power of nationality is equally unwise because national identity remains a force to be reckoned with in state-based and global politics (Antonsich 2009, 292-3; Tonnenson 2004, 186, 193). One explanation for the continuing salience of national identity alongside the increasingly discredited nation-state model is that national identity easily exceeds the parameters of the state project. Indeed its tendency to do so may be at the root of much of its political potency.

and that’s in a setting where there was a revolution in political and economic mobility and a concerted public effort to forge a transnational identity. Instead it appears that the increasingly mobile variant of national identity may have its own special qualities. As one author observes, mobility “reinforces the national uniqueness of the Self. Globalisation does not water down the sentiment of national belonging, but fortifies it” (Antonsich 2009, 292-3). In a diaspora setting the experience of affirming the national identity takes on a new “self-reflexive” quality. Once outside of the nation-state project “national identity becomes the product of agency rather than structure” (Antonsich 2009, 292). This explains not only the strong appeal of national identity among diasporas, but also why diaspora takes on its own political potency becoming a “prescriptive term” that allows “identities and forms of coalition-building and action… across national borders” amounting to a “new form of nationbuilding” (Adamson and Demetriou 2007, 498, 501).

National identity can exceed state boundaries in two ways. First when some existing population outside the state identifies with it in irredentist ways. But this tends to be a feature of newly formed or re-founding states. More commonly the national identity travels with its bearers as they join global population flows seeking economic opportunity or political refuge. While it was never true that nations and states neatly aligned, these migration flows and the subsequent disasporic communities introduce a new factor into the national equation. Because their continued identification with the national project, while developing a life outside the national territory, suggests that national identity can sustain itself outside the state. To see this in operation we must “disaggregate the concept ‘nation-state’ into nations and states, which may overlap but are not co-terminous” (Walby 2003, 541).

With national identity operating on this global scale, it’s important to re-evaluate its association with the nation-state without merely blending the national identity of diasporas into global or transnational processes. Because while Castells “space of flows” (Castells 2010, 408) has made it possible for diasporas to be “both here and there at the same time” (Aikins 2009, 16), it has dispersed rather than submerged the national identity. Global connectivity and mobility has “led not to the erosion but rather the spatial reconfiguration of national identity” (Adamson and Demetriou 2007, 508) And it’s not just self-reflexive diasporas driving this development. The nation-state takes a hand in the “embedding of national identities within new transnational spaces and diasporic practices” (Adamson and Demetriou 2007, 508).

It is important to note that this disaggregation does not imply a weakening in national identity. Studies in Europe show that between 1982 and 2005 national identity among fifteen European nationalities did not decline but increase (Antonsich 2009, 285)

 

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responsibility for managing the state-based affairs of nationals who do not reside in and may never return to the national territory, and who also outnumber state-based nationals more than two-to-one. Thinking about national identity as a nationstate phenomenon leaves us powerless when it comes to grasping these kinds of developments.

Good evidence for the ever-increasing scope of national identity comes from the nation-states themselves. More and more are actively engaging their diaspora communities as the self-defined boundaries of the national project become increasingly blurry. It’s not uncommon for states to develop a ‘diaspora strategy’ aimed at tapping the potential of expatriates while, in return, advocating for their interests at home and abroad. As geographers Robert Kitchen and Mark Boyle explained in an editorial in The Irish Times, a diaspora is a “precious resource to be tended, valued and re-energised” (2009, 14) This sentiment is shared by Ireland’s President, Mary MacAleese, who made diaspora relations a special priority of her presidency. But engaging the diaspora in this way calls for a change in how the national project is conceived. Since many Irish live outside the state, maintaining “Irish-mindedness” should be a goal of state policies towards them, say Kitchen and Boyd (2009, 14). This might look like a self-serving ploy by the state, but these Irish geographers say it involves a genuine shift in thinking about the political community the state serves. They explain: “To think of Ireland as a globally connected nation of seventy million people, rather than a small country on the periphery of Europe, is a more powerful way to think and proceed” (2009, 14).

The Irish and Armenian examples also illustrate that states are consciously cultivating national identity outside their national borders (Adamson and Demetriou 2007, 489) further complicating the supposed fit with the nation-state. Yet this ‘new nation-building’ or what Benedict Anderson called “long-distance nationalism” (2001, 42) still seems to need some anchor in the state structure, which must learn to juggle this new mandate alongside the need for state-based social cohesion. So the persistence of national identity outside the national territory becomes one of the forces re-shaping the nation-state. But the impact is not simply to break down national identity in favour of transnationalism. Instead we see new efforts to tap national attachments driven by forces inside and outside the state. Looking at this from the point of view of global inclusion it means that national identity plays a crucial but complex role in people’s movements through a globalizing world. It may be, as one scholar suggested, that “global inclusion is more easily accomplished when citizens are not forced to globalise continuously” but instead have some increasingly mobile national identity to fall back on (Tonnesson 2004, 192). While for some observers diasporas represent “a constant menace of instability and fragmentation” they are also “endemic to a world order of nation-states, where national identity will always exceed its state container (Shain and Sherman 1998, 340).

This same thinking also seems to be behind a proposal attributed to the Armenian President to create a bicameral legislature whose upper chamber would contain representatives of the diaspora (“Senate for Diaspora?” 2011). While its still unclear how far the initiative is endorsed, that it is being seriously discussed reflects how far this small country of around three million has come to see its fate integrated with that of its seven million strong diaspora. Indeed Armenia already has a ‘Diaspora Ministry’ with

 

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So there are at least two good reasons for dislocating the national identity from the nation-state. First because its origins lie in supra-national encounters and second because it otherwise proves inadequate to the scope needed to understand diaspora phenomena and their influence on the originating state. Subsuming diaspora identity under a transnationalist banner is similarly unhelpful because it isn’t an identity at some higher level of abstraction; it’s the same identity in a different location under different circumstances. In short, it is what it seems to be: a national identity dislocated from the nation-state.

There is a great deal at stake, therefore, in the question of whether national identity is or should be located exclusively within nation-states. On the first score – that of its descriptive accuracy – the nation-state/national identity alignment falls short. There is little evidence that national identity originated in or has unfolded exclusively within state projects. If it had, or was even trending in that direction, there would be less need to confront the second question: Should national identity map on to the nation-state?

RISKS AND RESOURCES

Rather than approach this question in terms of costs and benefits to the state project, this paper aims to switch focus and ask what the dislocation of national identity from the nation-state means in terms of global inclusion issues. The ideal of inclusion is taken very broadly here, to suggest the avoidance of unnecessary barriers to political and social participation.

If the idea of a neat match between national identity and the nation-state proves problematic from the very start, and becomes more so in an era of global mobility, the wonder is why it retains such a strong influence. One explanation could be that it’s the desirability and not the reality of national identity being expressed in this idea. Theorists like David Miller and Margaret Moore, for instance, offer strong arguments for the advantages of a fit between state and national identity. A cohesive sense of nationality within a state, Miller explains, makes possible the kind of redistribution needed for social justice in the modern era (1995, chapter 3). The same sense of solidarity also underpins the spirit of compromise necessary for thorough-going democracy, explains Moore (2001, chapter. 4). But in both cases what is needed is that individuals share a national identity. Does this also imply they can (or should) only have one, and that any extras undermine the social and democratic project? This question, and the concerns it raises, is behind much of the recent criticism of multiculturalism on the grounds that it legitimates the persistence of diaspora attachments in new states.

 

When looked at from this perspective the dislocation process presents at least two major areas of risk. First people may tend to identify strategically and opportunistically in self-serving ways. Second, uncontained national identity may warp the politics of both the originating homeland state, and in different ways, the new host-land state. These risks present a serious concern and if the story ended here would constitute a good argument for either containing national identity within the state project or eliminating it altogether. But that solution would itself come at a high cost in terms of political conflict and personal alienation. Therefore it is worth considering these risks more closely to see whether they represent such an unmanageable departure from ‘normal’ politics. i) The strategic use of identity

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First, the dislocation of national identity means that some people can lay claim to more than one national attachment – their diaspora identity plus a new host-land identity. As these identities proliferate so does the opportunity to mobilize and or switch between identities strategically. Examples of this strategic behavior abound. Many of the individuals recently evacuated at considerable risk and expense from Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have opted to exercise their claim on a European or North American national identity for understandable reasons. Many may do so with every intent of returning as soon as the immediate crisis passes. Yet this kind of strategic identityshopping tends to generate a negative reaction among holders of the alternative national identity (the one footing the bill for any emergency airlifts) especially when that identity is only temporarily activated in a crisis situation and then set aside again. It should be noted that in these extreme cases documented citizenship is generally required to make a national identity claim stick. The increasing liability this extra-territorial identity claim represents in terms of protecting co-nations abroad has led states to seek ways to limit the transmission of citizenships outside of the national territory (Nyers 2010, 56).

circumstances. If this is so, then separating strategic behavior from identity is not a realistic goal. Its not clear, for example, why strategic identity claims linked to evacuations should offend us more than strategic identity claims linked to health care, education, or social assistance. The only difference is where the strategy unfolds. Therefore the strategic use of identity is not the offending act. Yet to invest location with the moral significance to render an act acceptable or repugnant seems specious. We have to wonder: is territory anything more than a method to conceal our moral arbitrariness from ourselves? If so, the strategic use of identity falls short as a moral objection. Moreover there is no reason to conclude that the strategic use of identity cannot be a progressive and inclusive force. Scholars looking at national identity in Australia found that ordinary Australians drew on a combination of national and cosmopolitan identities as resources to help come to terms with rising diversity (Brett and Moran 2011). Studies in Scotland found that among visible minorities the sense of inclusion in a national identity required conscious “agency” (Bond 2006). While my own work among minorities in the Republic of Ireland found that minority advocates adopted an active strategy of appealing to elements in Irish national identity that supported inclusion (Frost 2010).

The evacuation phenomenon illustrates how national identity is used strategically to mobilize a claim on the resources of the originating or new host state. But is this a problem rooted in the dislocation of national identity? And could relocating it within state boundaries solve it? There are reasons to think not. For one thing the strategic use of identity is not a perversion on the identity experience. All identities are used strategically at some level, to help us navigate our social and political worlds (Hedetoft 1999). Indeed one could say that identity is a kind of social strategy - one that emphasizes certain bonds in certain

 

So being able to navigate identity options strategically is not inherently problematic. Yet there is a looming problem nonetheless. The problem is not that some people use national identity strategically and others do not. The problem is that some people have more and better national identity options than others. In other words the problem is inequality of access to this process, not the process itself. As Ayelet Shachar has argued, national citizenship is one of the most valuable things we can

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inherit in life (2009). If national identity is the key to citizenship because it represents the primordial belonging A.D. Smith says lies at the heart of the modern nation-state then it’s understandable that rivalry and resentment follows its uneven distribution.

We cannot take the strategic element out of identity. But if we authorize some identity strategies while rejecting others based on the brute fact of location then we are using arbitrary factors to create administrative simplicity rather than using moral factors to create justice. There is a genuine risk of inequality involved in the proliferation of national identities, but it is better to consciously confront the risk and develop resources for its management than to conceal it under the banner of territory. Moreover, by shifting focus towards equality in identity resources we are also led to consider that not all national identities are created equal and some have more strategic value than others. The one-state-one-identity formula lends itself to a misled sense of equality and turns our attention away from another pressing issue for global inclusion: it’s not that people need some national identity, it matters for equality which national identities they can mobilise.

We may not be able to take the strategic element of out identity – indeed we may not want to when we see it used in resourceful ways – but we should be conscious of the increasing inequalities this system makes possible. Otherwise we may unwittingly enable a deepening system of privilege for the globally mobile. The dislocation of national identity from the nation-state should not translate into an opportunity for a privileged few to accumulate an extensive range of cultural and political opportunities while other, less mobile, populations make do with fewer options. Herein lies one of the real risks of dislocating national identity from the nation-state.

ii) ‘Outside’ influence in domestic politics The Armenian proposal to integrate diaspora representation into the state’s governing institutions hints at a second risk of the dislocation process. The risk is that the new scope of national identity may eventually warp the domestic politics of nationstates, and this concern applies both to the politics of the homeland state and the new host-state. Hannah Arendt said that the boundaries of the polis were critical because they were a way to contain the boundless unpredictability of human action; they serve to corral the otherwise unruly consequences of our existence within an accountable and intelligible context (1989, 198). But a dislocated national identity does precisely the opposite; it represents human action spilling over the boundaries of what we generally think of as the modern polis. So the risks are considerable that in acknowledging this process we sacrifice a crucial resource in managing politics itself.

How can we limit this effect? Should we be trying to ensure people have access to only one nation-state through their national identity? This would certainly rationalize the drive toward a national identity/nation-state alignment, which has the virtue of limiting us (ideally) to the national identity that aligns with the territory we occupy. The problem is that people do not unproblematically settle in one political space. Artificially forcing an identity choice based on geography, for the sake of equalizing strategic identity opportunities, achieves superficial equality at the cost of real injustices to denizens, resident aliens, and other mobile populations. Global inclusion is therefore undermined by this model since it penalizes most heavily those for whom global mobility is a fact of life.

 

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consistent level of churning of populations as individuals move in and out of the nation-state as necessity, opportunity and/or inclination dictate. Individuals may also create hybrid lives, with homes in different states, extended family links abroad, or international educational or work opportunities, etc., all of which create a genuine, if somewhat marginal, stake in a nation-state’s affairs. Ranier Baubock believes such connections form the basis for a principle of “stakeholdership” that grounds rights to membership and political participation (2009, 21-7). If Baubock is right, and if the goal is an accurate representation of the stake people hold in the affairs of the states they interact with, then it’s not a simple matter to rule out all forms of diaspora representation in nation-state government. For that just creates another risk – this one based on the mis-representation of people’s complex life trajectories, which can exceed the traditional scope of the nation-state without exceeding the bounds of national identity attachments.

In some ways the Armenian Senate proposal is an innovative solution to the complex history and identity of a small internationally-oriented state. The risk is, however, that it violates a key tenet of democratic government. In The Politics Aristotle outlines the core principle of citizenship as “ruling and being ruled in turn” (Book III, sec iv, 1277a25). In other words one must eventually live under the rules you help to make, and this reciprocity ensures equality and civic friendship. But diasporas pose a problem for this relationship because many individuals may not return to the home land to be ‘ruled in turn.’ This opens a window not only to unrepresentative politics be also to government-by-nostalgia where expatriate population have a stake in forestalling adjustment and development that may change the culture or society of the homeland. This nostalgia effect, for instance, was behind the lagging development in Irish national identity, because the focus on expatriate tourism in the mid twentieth century kept the country oriented towards a nostalgic traditionalism (Zuelow 2007). This traditionalist drive lasted until an economic boom created enough independence to renew the national identity, by injecting new elements based on the relationship with Europe and technological innovation.

This risk of misaligned political representation appears in another form within the new host-states. Possibly the most controversial risk associated with dislocation of national identity from the nation-state is the potential for national lobbies to exert sway within new host-states. The singular focus of a national lobby is seen as problematic because it is presumed to put the interests of the diaspora homeland ahead of those of the new host state. In effect, it’s a version of the strategic-identity concern writ large, whereby the host state is used opportunistically to serve goals not inherently in its own interests. As one prominent Canadian columnist put it, diaspora politics turn dangerous if they “twist Canada’s foreign policies to suit ethnic demands” (Simpson A19). Many national diasporas have come under criticism for just such influence including Irish, Israeli, Armenian, Punjabi and Tamil, to

So where individuals will not be being ‘ruled in turn’ they should not be part of the ‘ruling’ elements of the nation-state project, this is a sound principle. The difficulty is we cannot say with certainty to whom this rule applies. In an age of high mobility we can no more suppose that a population within a nation-state is a stable governing entity than we can conclude that those currently outside it won’t one day return. In fact all signs point to some

 

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name a few. If such lobbies genuinely lack a long-term interest in the affairs of the new host-state it’s reasonable to wonder whether their intervention is productive.

If national identity never neatly mapped on to the nation-state then what we are really dealing with in this case is a claim about the desirability of such a fit. A clean alignment between identity and polity can make social justice and democratic engagement easier to administer. And there are definite risks to the dislocation of national identity from the state project. But it is not all risk. There are also opportunities to align institutions with actual practice. If individuals use identity strategically we should be vigilant to the inequalities that may result. If diaspora attachments are encouraged within an originating state, this should not translate into unrepresentative politics. And if national lobbies mobilize new host states to international action this should not provide a license for the strong to become stronger. But allowing people choice in their identity, creating institutions to represent people’s complex life trajectories and engaging states with one another’s fate are not inherently undesirable outcomes. Instead these can help provide the resources needed to enhance global inclusion.

Although realistically we could raise the same question about the intentions of big industry. Likewise anyone with aspirations to eventually global mobility could pose a similar democratic risk since their fates and ambitions lie elsewhere. The point here is not that the influence of national lobbies is unproblematic. The point is that a) assuming we have an adequate metric for sorting ‘sincere’ political participation from the self-serving kind is a fallacy, and b) assuming ‘sincere’ political participation means it must be exclusively host-state-centric in focus, is a mistake. If we are all implicated in an increasingly inter-dependent world it cannot be automatically illegitimate to advocate within a state for initiatives outside it. The risk that extra-territorial national lobbies will influence domestic politics is real. But is it always a bad thing to have a force that makes states take an interest in affairs outside their borders? The dislocation of national identity from the nationstate means national groups can make claims on different nationstates the way individuals can mobilize different citizenships. Which means a similar problem arises: it matters how these powerful resources are distributed. Once again it is the potential for exacerbating inequality and privilege that presents the greatest concern. The focus therefore should be on monitoring and if necessary ameliorating the inequalities in influence, rather than on eliminating the use of influence per se since this proves as fundamental to political participation as strategic behavior is to personal identity.

CONCLUSION Dislocating the national identity from the nation-state is a risky venture but it carries two significant rewards. First, it more accurately captures how national identity actually works in terms of where it develops and operates. Second, it challenges us to recognize people’s real life patterns, which may involve a genuine stake in the affairs of several countries, an attachment which cannot be neatly severed for administrative convenience. Moreover by bringing this dislocation into sharper focus we also reveal ongoing patterns of inequality and privilege. None of this diminishes the significance of the nation-state as a

 

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central element in the equation however. And the increase in popular rhetoric stressing the need for cohesion continues. But this exercise illustrates that it’s not always clear what cohesion is supposed to be organized around. If there are fractures in the supposedly straightforward nation-state project the solution is not to delegitimise diasporas or the strategic use of personal identity, while exalting some traditionalist nationalism. The national identity/nation-state model was never adequate and likely never will be. Nationalism at best represents the aspiration towards this fit not its achievement.

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