Long-Distance Nationalism

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Definition

Long-distance nationalism is a set of ide ntity claims and practices that connect people living in various geographical locations to a specific territory that they see as their ancestral home. Actions taken by long-distance nationalists on behalf of this reputed ancestral home may include voting, demonstrating, lobbying, contributing money, creating works of art, fighting, killing, and dying. Long-distance nationalism is closely connected to the classic notion of nationalism and the nation-state. As in other forms of nationalism, long-distant nationalists believe there is a nation that consists of a people who share a common history, identity, and territory. Long-distance nationalism differs from other forms of nationalism in terms of the nature of the relationship between the members of the nation and the national territory. National borders are not thought to delimit membership in the nation. The members of the nation may live anywhere around the globe and even hold citizenship in other states. This does not, in the view of long-distant nationalists, abrogate the relationship between members of the nation and their national homeland. Long-distance nationalists are expected to maintain some kind of loyalty to the homeland and on the basis of this attachment take whatever actions the homeland requires. The nature of these actions varies, depending on the political and economic situation of the homeland. By knowledgeable estimates tens of millions of people are long-distance nationalists, claiming loyalty to two countries (Aleinikoff & Klusmeyer, 2000).

Long-distance nationalism is best distinguished from the broader kind of identification that has come to mark the term diaspora. The term diaspora is used for a range of experiences of identification with a dispersed population. Increasingly scholars see identifications with a dispersed people, whether self-ascribed or ascribed by others, as forms of disaporic belonging. People who see themselves as members of a diaspora envision a common history with a past shared by all those with a common identification. This kind of belonging often exists in the realm of the imagination. When people act on these identities, they do not necessarily organize in relationship to a homeland state or efforts to establish a state. They may instead organize common cultural or social projects that promote the interest of the members of the diasporic population wherever they have settled.

Such generalized identification with a dispersed population differs from the particular combination of identification and political project that constitutes long-distance nationalism. The nostalgia for the past that marks members of ethnic groups that have migration histories also differs from the active politics of long-distance nationalists who establish sets of practices designed to influence the political situation within a territory that they still call home. Therefore the term long-distance nationalism encompasses two separate meanings of the more classic form of nationalism: nationalism as discourse whereby people frame their aspiration by identifying with a nation, and nationalism as project that consists of social movements and state policies through which people seek to act in terms of the nation with which they identify (Calhoun, 1997). Long-distance nationalists are engaged in some form of political project oriented specifically toward the territory they designate as the homeland. Some members of a diaspora may be or become long-distance nationalists and take action to obtain, defend, or support political action in a specific territory that they designate as home.

In one variant of long-distance nationalism, the homeland is said to exist wherever emigrants from a specific state have settled. It was this variant of long-distance nationalism that was highlighted by Benedict Anderson when he popularized the term in 1993 to describe the moment of recognition experienced by a British woman kidnapped by Native Americans within the territory of the British 13 colonies. When this woman encountered the cultivated fields of the colonists while being moved by her captors from one location to another, she saw those fields as part of England, differentiating herself and the cultivated spaces from the native people through her Englishness. England was a cross-border, transatlantic location for this eighteenth-century person. Since then, increasing numbers of scholars and political activists including Anderson have expanded the use of the term and debated its political implications. In many of the more recent references to long-distance nationalism, including further work by Anderson (1998), writers note that while the population of a nation is understood to extend beyond the territorial boundaries of an ancestral land, the political focus and center of identity of this dispersed population continue to be the territory of the homeland.

History of the Concept

Long-distance nationalism is not new as phenomena, although the term only became prominent in the social science literature beginning in the 1990s. Germans, Czechs, Serbs, Poles, Italians, Hungarians, Greeks, Irish, Cubans, Mexicans, and Turks were among those immigrants who practiced this form of transnational activity and identity. Histories of the nation-state-building projects of disparate countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America contain accounts of the role political exiles played in the struggling to build a nationalist movement while settled abroad.

In the first half of the twentieth century scholars sometimes used the term “home country nationalism” to describe the continuing political participation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrants to the United States in nation-state-building projects in their homeland (Schermerhorn, 1949). Many researchers also understood that immigrants often left home with only very local or regional identities and dialects and actually learned to identify with their ancestral land only after they had settled in the United States:

A great numbers of German immigrants came only with the intention of fostering the development of the German nation-state in Europe. The Irish, the second most important element in the earlier immigration, were also a nation before they were a state and, like the Germans, many came here with the intention of assisting the creation of an Irish state in Europe. On one occasion they did not hesitate to organize armies in America to attack Canada. (Glazer, 1954, p. 161)

In these instances there was a close connection between political movements in the homeland and migrants settled abroad. During World War I, many migrants living in the United States returned to Europe to right for their native land. For example, in 1912 to 1913, the Pan-Hellenic Union sent 42,000 Greek-Americans to right for Greece. Serbian-Americans left to right Austria-Hungry and struggle for Serb independence in 1914 (Harrington, 1982, p. 113). In the early twentieth century, the governments of Italy, Germany, and Hungry used their consulates abroad to sustain the long-distance nationalism of their compatriots. This kind of transnational politics did not just occur in the United States. Japanese and Italian migrants to Brazil were among the South Americans who maintained political identifications and connections with their homeland. The Irish in England contributed to political movements for the independence of Ireland. Intellectuals from colonized countries including India, Kenya, Vietnam, and the Philippines who studied and lived abroad built movements for national independence and formed new nationalist ideologies from outside the borders of their homeland from locations in England, France, and Spain.

Referring to the history of what he calls the “Armenian transnation,” which stretches for hundreds of years, Tölöyan (2000) proposes two different stages of the nation-state-building process that can be encompassed in the term long-distance nationalism. Tölölayan employs the term “exilic nationalism” for projects of nation-state building spearheaded by dispersed elites who organize to establish or reestablish a political state. He calls the ideology and practices of belonging that establish dispersed populations as part of a distant homeland, after the establishment of a nation-state, “which begins for Armenians in 1991, diasporic transnationalism.”

It is important to note that, as part of their ideology of belonging, long-distance nationalists in the past, as they do today, tended to evoke a now discredited concept of “race,” portraying each nation as “racially” distinct. Until this kind of racialization was rejected after World War II, when its implementation led to Nazi genocide, there was a widespread assumption among scholars, politicians, and the general public that an emigrant remained attached to his or her homeland nation through ties of blood. At various times in the end of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, many governments experiencing large-scale emigration defined their nation and appealed to their emigrants in these terms. For example, persons considered “ethnic Chinese” were claimed as citizens of China by a 1909 Chinese law, and the term “overseas Chinese” began to be used officially to recognize the continuing connection between Chinese populations settled elsewhere and the government and territory of China (Suryadinata, 2002, p. 185). U.S. immigration laws contributed to this inappropriate equation of “race” and nation, beginning in the 1882 with the exclusion of Chinese immigrants. This kind of racialization grew in the 1920s. A series of U.S. immigration laws imposed quotas that almost completely blocked the entrance of southern and eastern European immigrants on the grounds that they came from “racially” inferior nations. These restrictive quotas continued until 1965.

The transnational family ties and the long-distance nationalism of immigrants settled in the Americas, Hawaii, and Australia were disrupted by depression, restrictive immigration laws, the two world wars of the twentieth century, and the Cold War. However, some connections and identifications held. Some nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrants and their descendants, as well as post-World War II refugees, continued to maintain some kind of political identification with a homeland and often acted on behalf of that land. However, from the post-World War II period until the 1980s, most historians and migration scholars failed to acknowledge long-distance nationalism. First theories of assimilationism and then a multicultural pluralism focused the attention of researchers on the processes of incorporation in the new land and obscured the significance of any continuing relationship to the old. When scholars did note the transnational political projects of migrants, they saw them as ephemeral, first-generation phenomena. Some researchers continue to this day to make this argument, despite the documentation of continuing home ties and long-distance nationalism that has emerged in a new scholarship of migration.

It is now clear that in some instances, particularly in the context of the Cold War, the governments of the United States and Canada encouraged long-distance nationalism. When immediately after World War II fierce armed struggle continued in Greece and critical electoral battles were waged in Italy to decide whether these states would have governments led by Communists, the U.S. government mobilized immigrants to support pro-United States forces. Both the U.S. Democratic and Republican Parties mobilized political support until the 1970s by fanning the long-distance nationalism of long-settled migrants, especially those from countries that had become socialist. Immigrants and their descendants from the states within the Soviet Union and its block such as Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were organized in the United States under the rubric of members of “oppressed nations.” Organizations of these oppressed nationalities were made members of the nationalities division of the U.S. Democratic Party and the National Republican Heritage Groups of the Republican Party (Redding, 1958; Weed, 1973). After the end of the Cold War, some immigrants and their descendants “returned” from the United States, Canada, and Australia to participate in the political processes of these reconstituted or newly constituted states.

The current interest in long-distance nationalism reflects the contemporary upsurge in global interconnections spurred by new flexible patterns of capital accumulation (Harvey, 1989). This form of globalization has been marked by more intense flows of goods, ideas, and people. The global interconnections disrupted since World War I were reconstituted and the global economy was restructured, assisted by new technological and electronic developments. This restructuring began in the 1960s, spurred by disruptions of economies all over the world by what was then described as “modernization” and “development.” As a global capitalist economy penetrated ever more deeply into the rural areas and economic arrangements, increasing numbers of people turned to migration as a way of obtaining money for the survival of their families. In what has been often a multistep migration, people first flee rural areas to seek work in third world cities and then seek entry into capitalist centers in the United States, Western Europe, the Gulf States, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. in the 1960s, persons from independent countries in the Americas found that U.S. migration laws allowed their entrance in sizable numbers. After changes in the U.S. immigration laws in 1965, Asian, African, and Eastern European migration was facilitated. Persons declared refugees, first from Communism, and then from government persecution, also began to enter in increased numbers. Meanwhile, postwar Germany, France, Netherlands, and England, which had accepted migrations of their former colonists from Africa or Asia or “guest workers” from Turkey, found that these newcomers had settled, maintained home ties, and were facilitating the migration of family members. States in the Gulf and Asia accepted migrant laborers as production or domestic workers without granting them any rights of permanent residence.

Many migrants maintained home ties for a variety of reasons. Globally migrants sought work abroad in order to support families, invested in homes or businesses back home, and participated in transnational politics. These continuing home ties became the base of the long-distance nationalism of the new wave of immigrants.

We have entered a second age of long-distance nationalism and transnational nation-state formation. We are seeing the flourishing of a politics in which ancestral identities are made central by diverse sets of actors including emigrants of different classes, political refugees, leaders of homeland governments, and intellectuals. Today’s current mass dispersal of migrants and the availability of rapid communications including mobile telephones, Internet, satellite television, and electronic money transfers facilitate efforts to organize social movements around a homeland politics from afar. In this conjuncture, the term long-distance nationalism is becoming increasingly popular, used by both scholars and political commentators. Skrbiŝ (1999), examining Croatian and Slovenian second-generation youth in Australia, Fuglerud (1999), describing the continuing connections of Tamils settled in Norway to Sri Lanka, and Glick Schiller and Fouron (2001), delineating the political project that connects Haitians abroad and those in Haiti, have adopted the term long-distance nationalism.

Metaphors of Blood and Biological Belonging

To legitimize the connection among the people who can claim membership in the transnational nation-state, long-distance nationalists often highlight ideas about common descent, blood, and “racialized” identities that have long been a part of concepts of national belonging. They claim that people share a common history political destiny because of “blood ties.” Their use of metaphors of blood revives discredited explanations of human behavior and passions on the basis of inherited physical traits. External physical differences of skin color, hair type, or facial features, which we casually refer to as “races,” do not in any way correlate with other genetically based differences between populations (Goodman, 1995). Nonetheless, precisely because governments, medical data, the media, and people around the world continue the practice of categorizing people in terms of external appearances that they call “race,” these categories continue to shape our lives. Therefore, although “race” is a socially constructed rather than biologically meaningful category, “race” matters (Harrison, 1995). Ideas about “race” continue to be used to justify, maintain, or impose inequalities of power and resources. It is this placing of people into “racial” categories, a process that anthropologists and sociologists call “racialization,” that gives continuing life to the intersection of ideas about biology and national identity.

Those who deploy biological metaphors of belonging hold the discredited assumption that identifies and loyalties are inherent and inherited and therefore able to persist across generations and despite changes in culture and language. They believe that the world is divided into unchanging and inherently different peoples, each with its own culture and ethos derived from a distinct biological nature. As in other forms of reductionism, these claim makers explain complex phenomena by reference to underlying components.

Concepts of blood remained embedded within citizenship laws. A wide variety of states—from Germany to the Dominican Republic—never abandoned the practice of allocating citizenship on the basis of blood ties, a practice called in legal terminology jus sanguinis (the law of blood).

Relationships to the Homeland

The relationship between long-distance nationalists and their homeland government varies greatly. There are four different political stances adopted by long-distance nationalists toward their homeland: (1) anticolonialism, (2) separatism, (3) regime change, and (4) participation. While we can distinguish these four different types of stances to the homeland, over time one form may change into another. They all are distinguishable from what might be considered only a political movement of exiles. All four of these stances build movements of people that include persons settled in various states over generations or even centuries and who may hold citizenships in their country of residency. Nonetheless, persons who adopt the stance of long-distance nationalism continue to consider another territory as their homeland.

The anticolonial struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries century generated a form of long-distance nationalism. Often these struggles were begun or organized by intellectuals and leaders who went abroad for employment or education and organized from afar. However, in their organizing they appealed to larger dispersed populations, urging them to identify with a homeland nation and take action on its behalf. These long-distance nationalists envisioned their ancestral territory as a modern nation and initiated political movements to liberate this territory from colonial rule. In this sense, Mahatma Gandhi, in the course of the 24 years that he lived in South Africa, became a long-distance nationalist and encouraged Indians settled in South Africa to continue to identify with India. Sun Yat-sen, the head of the Kuomintang Party, which spearheaded the republican revolution in China, had an overseas background, sought financial and political support from overseas Chinese, and did much of the organizing from abroad. Intellectuals living in Spain but with roots in the Spanish colony in the Philippines helped forge the vision of an independent Filipino nation. Persons of Irish descent settled in the United States and England struggled to free Ireland from Great Britain; many still work to free northern Ireland from British rule. In some cases long-distance nationalists may claim as a homeland territory a location where none of their immediate ancestors have lived. The links to a homeland territory arise from ideology rather than family history. This was the situation of Jewish Zionists, based in Europe and the United States, who struggled through the first half of the twentieth century to oppose the British occupation of Palestine, and finally created the independent state of Israel in 1948.

Separatist movements that strive to establish autonomy within an existing state or succeed from an established state and institute a new government with its own territory provide as second example of long-distance nationalism. Among the political actors who contributed to the break-up of Yugoslavia were people who defined themselves as Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians living abroad in locations as distant as Australia, Canada, and the United States. Long-distance nationalists living in these locations also contributed to the division of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia and to continuing efforts to establish an independent Kosovo. People identifying themselves as Eritrean but living in Europe and the United States successfully organized a military and political campaign to obtain independence from Ethiopia. They even developed an elaborate self-imposed tax structure to support the armed struggle and establish state structures.

Independence from Indonesia was achieved for East Timor with the crucial support of long-distance nationalists in Portugal, the former colonizing power, and elsewhere during a 24-year struggle. They incorporated the continued use of Portuguese into the concept of the Timorese nation, a language spoken by the long-distance nationalists rather than the majority of the people of East Timor. Those political activists were able to draw global attention to the violent suppression of the struggle against the Indonesian occupation.

Long-distance nationalists are fueling more than a dozen separatist struggles in India. Among the most prominent are the struggle for Kashmir and the Sikh efforts to popularize the idea of an independent state of Khalistan. Persons claiming Palestinian identity who have lived for generations in the Americas, together with those in Europe and the Middle East, continue to struggle for an independent Palestine. The state of Armenia was established in 1991, after several centuries of struggle against Persian, Ottoman, Russian, and Soviet rule. In their struggle to form an independent state, Armenian long-distance nationalists not only built a historical narrative that traced the Armenian people to the time of Noah, but also continually linked Armenian identity to a specific territorial location. Those Puerto Ricans living outside of Puerto Rico who continue to see themselves as part of a distinct Puerto Rican nation that has been colonized by the United States can also be considered long-distant nationalists.

In a third form of long-distance nationalism, activists advocate regime change. Their quarrel is not with the territorial boundaries of the state in which they live, but with the individual or political party that controls it. Filipinos abroad helped overthrow the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. The anti-Castro Cubans and their long-term efforts to reverse the Cuban revolution, and the Iraqi exiles who opposed Sadam Hussein, can all be considered long-distance nationalists. Between 1957 and 1986 Haitians emigrated to the United States and Canada in large numbers and built a movement to overthrow the regime of the Haitian dictatorship controlled by the Duvalier family. In many cases, activists form oppositional political parties and organize informational campaigns and political lobbies. In other cases, political opposition can include sending arms or participating in violent struggle. Members of this opposition include not only emigrants, but their descendants, who still see the land of their ancestors as a homeland, regardless of their citizenship. In some cases, this means that some partisans may “return home” to a right and die in a territory in which never lived.

Not all long-distance nationalism is oppositional; increasing numbers of emigrants engage in the fourth type, that of participation. They and their descendants settle in a new land but continue to participate on a regular basis in the political life of the homeland by joining political parties considered legitimate in the homeland, contributing money to them, attending meetings, monitoring homeland politics through media and the Internet, attending political meetings, lobbying or demonstrating in the new land on behalf of the old, or voting. Pakistani academics and scientists settled in the United States travel to Pakistan frequently to advise the government (Levitt, 2002). Associations of Indian Hindus living in England, Canada, and the United States pressure the Indian government to define itself as a Hindu state. Dominican political parties are active in soliciting votes in New York City for both Dominican and U.S. elections and have offices in the United States as well as the Dominican Republic. Migrants in the United States contributed approximately 50% of the campaign funds for the 1994 Dominican presidential campaign (Graham, 2002). Increasingly candidates for political office in many Caribbean and some Latin American states routinely campaign in the United States.

Citizenship Laws and Long-Distance Nationalism

Long-distance nationalism does not rest on legal definitions of citizenship. Both migrants and their descendants and homeland states and political movements may define dispersed populations as continuing members of their ancestral land, whatever citizenship they may hold. All types of long-distance nationalist movements include the active participation of people who have never lived in the territory they claim as their homeland and never have been citizens.

Long-distance nationalists also vary in the degree to which they acknowledge the possibility that individuals may have more than one homeland and can be simultaneously incorporated in more than one state. In the Haitian experience, for example, from 1957 to 1986 long-distance nationalist leaders organizing against the Duvalier dictatorship insisted that all Haitians settled abroad were political refugees and exiles who were obligated to return to Haiti once regime change was achieved. However, this politics of return was abandoned once regime change was achieved. At that point, Haitians living or born abroad were defined by some political leaders in Haiti as continuing to be Haitian, no matter what citizenship they held. They were encouraged to stay abroad and continue to build Haiti from afar, returning “home” only as “Creole tourists.” Tourists industries of returning migrants who still identify with home are growing around the world. In this context, long-distance nationalists are increasingly demanding dual citizenship so that they can easily travel to the homeland to visit, invest, and build homes and businesses.

Increasing numbers of countries with historical or contemporary large-scale migrations are changing their laws to formally include populations who have become citizens of other states by allowing either dual citizenship or dual nationality. Legal citizenship allows for full participation in a country’s political system including voting and running for office. Nationality usually allows persons to enter a country without a special visa and have rights to own property, and invest but not to vote or hold office.

Italy is one of the many countries of historic out-migrations that recognizes dual citizenship. On a web site entitled Italiaamerica: Italian Dual Citizenship and decorated with an American flag, a Brazilian flag, and a flag with the colors of Spain and the inscription “en Espangol,” a person of “Italian descent” can learn how to obtain Italian citizenship. With certain restrictions, people whose parents and grandparents were born in the United States but who have a paternal great-grandfather who maintained his Italian citizenship may become Italian citizens. States that grant dual citizenship vary as to whether they allow extraterritorial voting. As a result of a law that went into effect in 2002, Italy recognized “the right of registered voters living abroad to vote by absentee ballot through local Italian Consulates.” In the United States, Italy solicits participation in Italian elections through advertisements in English and Italian in U.S. newspapers. Portugal not only recognizes dual citizenship, but organizes Councils of Portuguese Abroad. Israel has dual citizenship since the founding of the state in 1948, but requires citizens to return to vote. In recent years travel agents have offered special travel packages at times of highly contested elections when various political parties urge their supporters abroad to return and vote.

Countries of large contemporary migration are following suit, changing their laws to grant either dual citizenship or dual nationality. After tremendous pressure and a petition campaign, in 2003 the Philippines granted full citizenship to emigrants who had lost their citizenship because the naturalization requirements of other countries had required them to denounce prior citizenships and loyalties. In the Philippine case, advocates claimed that dual citizenship would encourage Filipinos abroad to more readily invest their money and expertise in their homeland. In 2003 it was reported that “overseas Filipinos annually remit $8 billion (Javellana-Santos, 2003).

Similar claims about investment have been made in regard to changes by the government of India, which in 2003 offered amendments to a 1955 Citizenship Act to extend dual nationality to certain people designated by the Indian government as “People of Indian Origin” (PIO). Prior to the legislation, persons designated nonresident Indians (NRIs) who still considered themselves Indians but did not hold Indian citizenship received tax and investment privileges in comparison to other foreigners, but still needed a visa to visit India. The new legislation did not offer dual nationality to all Indians abroad, but only to those settled in the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Italy. Indians abroad have been demanding dual citizenship in the face of considerable opposition in India. In a speech in 2003 describing the new legislation, the deputy prime minister said, “The 21st century will belong to India. I am sure non resident Indians would probably do more than resident Indians towards this goal… Let us join hands so together Indians and non-resident Indians can help develop India”

In certain cases, states that do not allow dual citizenship or dual nationality use rhetorical flourishes and a language of blood to explicitly encourage long-distance nationalism. Since 1986 several successive governments of Haiti have defined persons of Haitian descent as a diaspora that remains part of Haiti, no matter where they live. Aristide, who has twice served as president, defined this diaspora as the tenth department of Haiti (Haiti has nine territorial divisions called “departments”). The statements of the government are reinforced by a widespread belief among Haitians in Haiti and abroad that whatever citizenship persons of Haitian descent hold, “the blood remains Haitian” (Glick Schiller & Fouron, 2001). The post-Mao Chinese governments have taken the same approach to their dispersed populations. While not allowing dual citizenship, they have a special office for overseas communities and sponsor “roots trips” in an effort to reconnect persons whose ancestors were Chinese with the People’s Republic of China (Louie, 2001).

Many significant countries of immigration including the United States, England, France, and Sweden allow their new citizens to retain or acquire citizenship in other countries. The United States requires naturalizing citizens to take an oath to “renounce and abjure absolutely and entirely all allegiance and fidelity to any prince, potentate, state or sovereignty” to which the person previously was linked as subject or by citizenship. Rulings of U.S. courts have nonetheless allowed dual citizenship including the possibility that persons with dual citizens serve in the governments and militaries of other countries. Questions are only raised if such countries are enemies of the United States. U.S. passports recognizes both dual citizenship and warns that in “certain circumstances” acts supportive of foreign governments may lead to revocation of U.S. citizenship. Despite provisions of Australian law, by 2000 up to one-fourth of all Australian citizens claimed some form of rights in other countries (Millbank, 2000). In 2002 Australia repealed Section 17 of the Australian Citizenship Act of 1948, which that prohibited dual citizenship. Germany, despite its large foreign population, does not usually allow dual citizenship and makes obtaining German citizenship very difficult, even for people born in Germany. Germany makes exceptions for the many people who come from states whose laws do not allow citizenship to be abjured.

Reasons for Long-Distance Nationalism

Zlatko Skrbiŝ (1999) argues that long-distance nationalism develops only if an emigrant population contains a critical mass of political exiles. Such a grouping of exiles seeks to promote identification with their homeland in the face of status loss and a loss of political significance in the lands to which they have been dispersed. Whatever social standing they are able to maintain depends on their building a political constituency abroad and keeping palpable the goal of returning home to political power and social position. As new generations are born who are culturally different from their parents and who are not fluent in their “mother tongue” metaphors of a blood-based peoplehood are often used to link these generations to their “homeland”

Looking globally, it is clear that people come to a position of long-distance nationalism from disparate experiences. In some cases migrants and ethnic populations are legally allowed citizenship rights in their new country of residence, but find they face open or subtle forms of discrimination. This has been the case of various immigrant populations in the United States including Irish, Italians, Chinese, and Jews in past waves of migration and many migrants of color in the current period of large-scale migration. Emigrants, past or present, rarely come from the lowest economic strata of a country because it takes a certain degree of personal or family resources to migrate transnationally. In the contemporary global economy, in which the gap between rich and poor countries continues to grow, persons from poor countries who have relatively high levels of education and class standing can earn more by emigrating and performing menial labor in restaurants, factories, and service professions abroad than they can in professional work at home. Often migrants who experience a loss of social standing maintain their personal self-esteem by identifying with the homeland. They support national narratives that underline their membership in an ancestral homeland, one either already constructed or envisioned.

Migrants settled abroad and their children, even those who have obtained citizenship in their new land, may also articulate an ideology of biological belonging as a response to the racism and negative stereotyping that they confront in their daily life. Since 1965, the racialization of Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian migrants in the United States—who are depicted not by their country of origin, but in terms of broad categories as Hispanic, Asian, and Black—has led many individuals to increase their identification with their homeland. There are vocal Haitian second-generation youth, for example, who say “Haiti is me” and “Haiti is my pride,” identifying with Haiti not as their cultural roots, but as a location to which they belong. The stereotype of Croatians in Australia as hotheaded irrational nationalists has contributed to the long-distance nationalism of second-generation Croatians, some of whom “returned” to Croatia in the 1990s to join the military struggle to build the Croatian nation-state (Skrbiŝ, 1999).

In other situations, such as that of Malaysia, persons whose families have resided in a country for several generations are denied full citizen’s rights and find they must look transnationally to find a homeland. Until very recently this was the situation that faced the large number of Turks settled in Germany and Koreans settled in Japan. German lawmakers finally have allowed Turkish immigrants who can demonstrate full incorporation in Germany and who renounce their Turkish citizenship to become German citizens. In response, Turkey has developed “identity cards” that allow these former-citizens special privileges in Turkey. However, relatively few Turks in Germany choose this path. They maintain their Turkish citizenship, fearing that, whatever their actual citizenship, they will still be treated as foreigners in Germany, while the new identity cards will limit their political and economic possibilities in their homeland (Çaglar, 2002). People who reside in other countries without rights to legal residence, such as estimated 2.7 million Mexicans in the United States, also may identify with and support their homeland government (U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 2000). To increase the loyalty of these people and respond to their need, the Mexican government is publicizing the availability of Mexican identification cards called “matricula consular,” issued by Mexican consulates, and recently increasingly accepted by several states in the United States in applications for a driver’s license and a bank account.

The law and public policy makers of the country of settlement may contribute, however inadvertently, to the construction of long-distance nationalism and an ideology of biological belonging. Currently European Union policies make economic immigration almost impossible and allow residence to people who can identify themselves as political refugees. Such identifications compel individuals to identify publicly with dissident political movements in their homelands, encouraging identities that are linked to efforts to build new nation-states. The growth of Kurdish identity and its accompanying long-distance nationalism, as well as the polificization of Tamil and Eritrean diasporas, have been fueled by this form of state policies. Until 1990, emigrants to the United States from socialist countries such as Cuba, Vietnam, and Poland generally arrived in the United States as refugees or as relatives of refugees, whatever their personal motivation in migrating. This labeling sometimes strengthened their long-distance nationalism.

Political leaders and public officials of the homeland government may encourage long-distance nationalism from their “diasporas” and even provide ways in which those permanently settled abroad can be represented in the legislature of the homeland. The “Croatian diaspora” was allocated 12 of the 92 seats in Parliament (Skrbiŝ, 1999, p. 184). The Colombian Constitution now provides for the representation of populations abroad. While not granting legislative representation, Portugal has an official Council of Portuguese Communities Abroad to which persons living abroad can be elected. Portuguese communities in the United States and Brazil have been courted by Portuguese officials (Feldman-Bianco, 2002).

In all cases, governments of states that fuel long-distance nationalism of dispersed population see emigrants and their descendants as an important resource. However, exactly what kind of resource a diaspora might represent to the home country varies with the particular history of the ancestral state, the condition of its economy, and its relationship to other states. In many cases, such as that of the Philippines and Mexico, it is vital for the national economy that emigrants remit money to sustain families and local communities. Mexico has aggressively encouraged emigrants to fund development projects in their home communities by providing matching funds for such projects. In other cases, the goal seems to be to encourage long-distance nationalism as a lever of expanding into neighboring territory. Hungary is currently reaching out and claiming citizens in its neighboring states as “kin” in the name of their Hungarian “mother nation” (Steward, n.d., pp. 3, 24).

It is important to note that not every government with a sizable emigrant population welcomes the participation of the diaspora in homeland politics, and even when this participation is legally possible, it may be contested or discouraged. The Republic of Slovenia, another of the new states created through the break-up of Yugoslavia, gave no seats to the diaspora, although citizens living in other countries are allowed to vote (Skrbiŝ, 1999, p. 184).

The policies and pronouncements of emigrant-sending states may resonate with some of the needs and aspirations of kin left at home, and these kin may become another set of actors who may deploy biological ideologies of belonging. Migrants generally leave behind families needing support and persons to whom they are indebted for the money to travel. Rhetorics of blood and nation may be employed by kin in the home country as a way of legitimating and maintaining vital family connections that help them build better housing, send children to school, feed and clothe a wide family network, and improve the social standing of the migrants and their families.

Evaluations of Long-Distance Nationalism

In discussions of long-distance nationalism, Anderson (1992, Anderson 1998) portrays it in a negative light. Using the example of middle-class Indians comfortably settle in North America and sending money and arms to reactionary homeland movements, he questions the legitimacy of nationalism from afar. This has also been the concern of South Asian academics who, fearing the pernicious effect of long-distance nationalism, have petitioned U.S. corporations to stop funding charities that they claim fuel hatred and violence against minority communities in India. There is no doubt that money and arms that contribute to political violence are being provided by persons who are settled abroad and identify with a homeland struggle. Jewish-American right-wing extremists, Irish-American supporters of the Irish Republican Army, the Tamil Tigers settled in England and Norway, and Kurds throughout Europe provide examples of long-distance nationalists who support violent conflicts from afar. Whether such struggles are judged to be terrorism or just struggles, it is clear that some primary participants are found beyond the borders of a particular territory.

After 11 September 2001, the dual loyalties of immigrants began to be reexamined in many immigrant-receiving states. The U.S. declaration of a “war on terrorism” occurred at a point when more than 40 countries had declared dual citizenship and nationality and long-distance nationalism, with or without legal rights, was becoming a way of life (American Immigration Center, 2003). The United States and many European countries increased surveillance on cross-border transfers of funds, communication, and travel. It became more difficult and in many cases impossible for people to obtain visas to visit the United States or Europe. These developments threaten the activities that accompany and reinforce long-distance nationalism. At the same time, certain aspects of U.S. and European governments’ foreign policy legitimated long-distance nationalism. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the first president, Hamid Karzai, was a previously nonresident Afghan, as were members of his cabinet. The majority of the leadership chosen by the United States after its occupation of Iraq in 2003 were previously nonresident Iraqis.

As is the case with any form of nationalism, identification with a homeland is polysemous, carrying simultaneously multiple and conflicting meanings. The motivations for long-distance nationalism are many, as are the actors. Long-distance nationalism cannot be summarily classified as more pernicious than other kinds of nationalism.