Globalization and migration in the contemporary world order: an insight into the postnational condition and the diasporas 9789264234024

Table of contents :
Abstract
The early modern nation-state and diaspora
Globalization, transnationality and diaspora
The postnational phase and diaspora
Conclusion
Disclosure statement
ORCID
References

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Social Identities Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture

ISSN: 1350-4630 (Print) 1363-0296 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csid20

Globalization and migration in the contemporary world order: an insight into the postnational condition and the diasporas Suraj Kumar Saw To cite this article: Suraj Kumar Saw (2018) Globalization and migration in the contemporary world order: an insight into the postnational condition and the diasporas, Social Identities, 24:3, 339-363, DOI: 10.1080/13504630.2017.1376283 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2017.1376283

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SOCIAL IDENTITIES, 2018 VOL. 24, NO. 3, 339–363 https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2017.1376283

Globalization and migration in the contemporary world order: an insight into the postnational condition and the diasporas Suraj Kumar Saw Centre for English Studies, Central University of Jharkhand, Ranchi, India ABSTRACT

ARTICLE HISTORY

In the new millennium, nations and nationalism persevere despite scholarship that has both anticipated and declared their demise. Globalization, which brings flow of capital, goods, ideas, people and technology, has a tremendous undeniable impact on every sphere of the contemporary world. The growing connectivity amongst the nation-states at physical, imaginative and virtual levels facilitates transnational networks that produce new types of migrants who do not respect national borders. The diaspora communities today are no longer confined in the homeland/ hostland binary. The globalized economy, technology and the world society provide enough space for those with hyphenated identities to survive as a connecting link not only with the homeland but also with other diasporic nodes with common origin and cultural/ethnic background. Thus, a new diaspora is taking shape which is highly mobile and interconnected. Viewed in this perspective, this paper aims to explore the changing configurations of diasporic identities in the context of a much eulogized postnational condition engendered by increasing transnational activities that defy the stringent idea of nation and its state’s territorial boundaries questioning the very viability of nation-states in the present era of globalization.

Received 4 July 2016 Accepted 21 August 2017 KEYWORDS

Nation-state; globalization; transnationalism; postnational; diaspora

The contemporary global socio-economic and geopolitical patterns facilitate transnational activities across the borders of nation-states. Population of one nation is no more leading its life in isolation. The policy of one nation is not restricted to its own territorially bound citizens but rather to the population overseas living in the diaspora. The term diaspora has acquired a wider meaning deterring from previously accorded religious sense of Jewish dispersion during the Babylonian captivity in 586 BCE. Diasporas are communities dispersed from their homeland due to forced or voluntary migrations and whose settlement in the land of host nation is marked with substantial durability transmitting co-ethnic identification. The question is why such proliferation of meaning of the word diaspora that once described Jewish, Greek and Armenian dispersion? If we look at the history of movements of mankind, it has been marked with dislocation of population due to myriad reasons that include invasions and genocide, slavery, indenture labour, trade and business, and economic and catastrophic famine. This created diasporic population throughout the world. But it is due to the advent of globalization that the movement CONTACT Suraj Kumar Saw

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across borders of one nation-state to one or more nation-states has turned out to be rampant. Therefore, in the era of globalization, the connectedness of various diasporic populations has made movement overseas a very common phenomenon coupled with highly advanced technology. Hence, the term diaspora has acquired an all-purpose meaning for any migrating population (Brubaker, 2005; Cohen, 1997; Tölölyan, 1991). The geopolitical borders exist, but their sustainability in the contemporary globalized world is less feasible due to the flows of global capital, movement of peoples, technology, goods, ideas and information. The (inter)connectedness of migrating peoples living in various diasporic nodes of settlement in the land of host nations has rendered the national boundaries redundant. Thus, without stringent national borders, the distance between homeland and hostland diminishes. The concept of ‘international’ involves nation-states and interaction among national governments. But today it is no longer the scenario. There are other non-state actors such as transnational corporations, inter-governmental organizations, the United Nations and the NGOs working for women, queers, peace and environment. Moreover, the world politics is highly influenced by the process of globalization, which undervalues the traditional nation-state (b)order, leading to global disorder (Suter, 2003). Under such circumstances, when the boundaries are turning out to be porous, the transformation of the diaspora population that is spread all over the world into a transnational or postnational subject is inevitable. This may lead to the emergence of what I propose to call ‘neo-diaspora’, which works more at the transnational and transstate level rather than at the international level. The classic notion of nation-state has been challenged due to the increasing cultural and economic flows in the contemporary global world order that shifts in the nature of communication and information technologies that have collectively been called the ‘informational revolution’. This study seeks to trace the changing facets of diasporic being and consciousness heralded by contemporary ‘postnational’, transborder and transnational perspectives and the idea of constantly shifting home in a mobile and networked world. The aforesaid fact that the concept of diaspora has acquired a broad semantic field now consists of various groups such as political refugees, immigrants, guest workers, asylumseekers and ethnic groups (Brubaker, 2005; Cohen, 1997; Povrzanović Frykman, 2001; Sheffer, 1996; Shuval, 2000). Diaspora does stand for dispersion and has always been related to dispersed people. Since the early 1980s, the notion of diaspora has broadened due to three new expressions, viz. postmodernism, globalization and transnationalism. The postmodern thought places paradoxical identity, the non-centre, and hybridity in defining diasporas. The diaspora experience is to be seen not by purity of identity but by the recognition of heterogeneous and diversified conception of identity sustained by difference and hybridity (Hall, 1990). The ‘diasporic idea’ allows one to go beyond the simplistic view of certain oppositions (continuity/rupture, centre/periphery) to grasp the complex co-presence of the Same and the Other, the local and the global (Gilroy, 1994). Globalization highlighted the importance of flows, especially of information and culture, facilitating interaction between global and the local transforming the diaspora experience like never before because of the network structure of diasporas (Robertson, 1992). The ‘culture of flows’ produces spaces of ‘in-betweeness’ characterized by global mobility that entails diaspora as ‘a travelling term, in changing global conditions’ which intertwines the concepts of ‘root’ and ‘route’ (Clifford, 1994, p. 302). Diasporas are ‘deployed in transnational networks built from multiple attachments, and they encode practices of accommodation

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with, as well as resistance to, host countries and their norms’ (Clifford, 1994, p. 307). Today, diaspora functions as an interface between nation-states and globalization engrossing ethnic groups whose diasporic existence reflects a sense of belonging to evolving transnational networks that connect not only the land of origin with society of residence but cross the border of other nation-states (Glick Schiller, Basch, & Szanton-Blanc, 1995; Vertovec & Cohen, 1999). Moreover, diaspora can pose a challenge to the meaning of citizenship in nations of settlement and may cause it to transform (Joppke, 1999). Accordingly, the paper explores the reoriented diasporic existence and experience in the wake of transformation of nation-state and the dissociation of citizenship from nationhood. Also, the trajectory of the role of the diasporic communities in the host and home societies is traced concurrently with the evolving conditions and renditions of nation-states through centuries.

The early modern nation-state and diaspora The emergence of nation-states lies in the historical idea in the West from tradition of political thought. Since the fall of the Roman Empire or, rather, since the disintegration of Charlemagne’s empire, Western Europe has seemed to us to be divided into nations (Renan, 1990, p. 8). A particular nation/nation-state/country has been either a receiver or a sender of migrant populations since the origin of nation-state, which was territorially demarcated for certain community of people who share identical ethnic/cultural background. Mostly it is argued that nationalism originated as an ideal, and a political idea, with the American and French Revolutions in 1770s and the formation of the modern state together with older forms of social organizations such as feudalism. The era before globalization, the old-world order, was a nation-state based formulation in which the geographically marked territory was absolute and sacrosanct. The dispersion of people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries occurred due to slave trade, ethnic cleansing and indenture labour as was the case with Africans, Armenians and Indians. Those days the migration was unidirectional – from home to the land of settlement – and relentlessly led to assimilation in a new environment (Brubaker, 2005). Due to the lack of advanced transportation and communication system, the frequency of movement towards the land of residence/homeland was rare. Once the migrants reached the forcefully destined land, or the British colonies so to say, they had no other alternative ways to disentangle themselves from the onslaught of oppression and the spatiotemporal restraints. This led to form a huge diasporic population of Africans, Armenians, Indians, Irish in not only such parts of the world as America, Europe, Africa, Caribbean islands but also everywhere else in the world. Later, the abolition of serfdom and the dissolution of earlier forms of social organizations such as feudalism and bonded labour et cetera pulsated immense mobility, especially those belonging to the lower class and tied to the land (Soysal, 1994). Such populations lived in the colonial lands or the lands of refuge and settled there for a durable period for generations and developed a complex relationship with the native communities. These diasporic populations formed what could be termed as the ‘old’ diaspora (Mishra, 2007, p. 2), that is, the early modern, classic capitalist diasporas in the pre-globalized world. Before the process of modern globalization actually started in the postwar period, there were social formations that comprised immigrants who lived in often involuntary

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dispersion from their homelands and that resisted full assimilation or were negated the option of assimilating or both at the same time. Tölölyan (2012, p. 5) asserts in this regard that ‘Many of them existed in lamentable and precarious conditions, glorified by no one in an era when the nation-state was the supreme form of polity, and diasporicity could mean second-class citizenship’ (‘Diaspora Studies: Past, Present and Promise’, p. 5). The dispersed populations during the nineteenth and opening decades of the twentieth century were not citizens or the ‘natural communities’ of the hostland. Those days the congruence of nationality and citizenship was the order of the day. The early modern categories of belonging subscribed to the narrative of linking state and nation and corroborated that both were contemporaneous – the cultural and the political units adjoined by the hyphen in ‘nation-state’. The old diasporas in the early phases of the nation-state were denied membership due to the idealized conceptual model of the same that preferred polity and culture should be congruent: a distinctive national culture should be diffused throughout the territory of the state, but it should stop at the frontiers of the state; there should be cultural homogeneity within states but sharp cultural boundaries between them. (Brubaker, 2015, p. 132)

Rogers Brubaker (2015) in his book Grounds for difference discusses the politics of belonging of the deterritorialized peoples in relation to the congruence of state territory and citizenry. One has to agree to his argument related to the idealized model of nation-state which synchronizes cultural nationality and legal citizenship because that era was not technologically advanced as of today, which could defy politico-cultural constraints. That was an era not of today’s globalization but of ‘globalism’ (Robertson, 1992). The geographic mobility was bounded externally and the nation-state used to be fluid only internally (Gellner, 1983). Hence, migration brought with it an alienation effect that made the diasporas in the land of settlement a static, solid and immobile entity both at geographical and cultural levels. As communities of foreign origin, the diasporas were unable to cross their own cultural boundaries and mingle with the host society and its culture. And the movement back to homeland was not as convenient and frequent due to the lack of technological advancement and the political will as it is today. Therefore, the conventional outlook towards the nation-states has been that of a space with exclusive monolithic community sharing same territory and cultural or ethnic background with a democratic structure that secures civil rights to its citizens. However, when mass migration became a phenomenon ineludible, the same nation-state turned out to be a haven for different nationalities, that is, a ‘hostland’ for migrating populations. Now, thinking of a nation in respect of the diasporas always brings up intricate question apropos to cultural identity. Wherein lies the identity of a migrating population that carries with itself a whole different set of beliefs, culture, ethnicity and religion in a different country/nation-state. The hyphenated identities of the old-world nationalist diaspora bear a sort of cultural pang while assimilating, integrating and incorporating in the host nation. The reasons of such cultural commotion could be sited in the ‘imagined communities’ of two different nations – one that sends the immigrants and the other that receives them. The axiomatic concept of the nation-state, which began to take form during the French Revolution and was studied theoretically and practised politically in the subsequent centuries, posited a model that matched the frontiers of the territorial

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organization, the state, with the frontiers of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991/2006). Nation, as has been defined by Anderson, is ‘an imagined political community’ which is inherently ‘limited and sovereign’. As Anderson puts it, the nation is ‘imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even heard of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (p. 6). Therefore, in view of this very definition, it is viable to say that the diaspora communities imagine themselves with their own ‘nation’ that is left behind, their homeland which lives in their minds. This is why the idea of homeland in the old diasporic thoughts was framed by religious icons of gods and goddesses, an old copy of religious texts such as Ramayana or the Qur’an, an old ethnic dress such as saree or kurta, and a photograph of pilgrimage etc. (Mishra, 2007). Further, Anderson says that ‘the nation is imagined as limited (emphasis original) because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations’ (1991/2006, p. 7). This formulation of nation – as cultural entity – adhering to bounded territory of the state – as political formation – is very significant for discussion here. Of course, a community which exclusively recognizes itself with a particular clan will not include others of the mankind into the set piece of land to be governed by them – that is, the idea of ‘one people – one state’. The diaspora communities cross one border and enter into another. The host society receives them with anxiety and uncertainty. However, the diasporas themselves cannot refrain from their own scepticism in assimilating with the new environment where they dwindle between the thoughts of what they really are and what they have become. But this border crossing was a phenomenon mostly for once and all in the early modern times because the return was not possible after leaving their own territory. Stéphane Dufoix (2008), in his book Diasporas, refers to the article ‘Diaspora’ in the 1931 edition of the American Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences written by historian Simon Dubnov, who held that ‘Diaspora is a Greek term for a nation or part of a nation separated from its own state or territory and dispersed among other nations but preserving its national culture’ (1931, p. 126). This very preservation of national culture was the outcry of the diasporas who had been a ‘nation or part of a nation’ before. The world that the first-generation migrants occupied was in no way a pure ‘melting pot’ which Israel Zangwill proposed in 1908. The melting pot theory assumed that in the process of blending, both the majority and minority groups lose their distinctiveness. And this was never the case with many diasporas till the world faced globalization. However, many disliked the idea of Zangwill in reference to the United States as they argued that assimilation would debase and weaken American character (Ross, 1914). Anderson also holds that the nation is ‘imagined as sovereign (emphasis original) because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm’ (1991/ 2006, p. 7). Here the ultimate submission from the diasporas to the sovereignty of the hostland is discernible. They become citizens or denizens of a particular state but they seize to be the nationals of the state where they settle. Becoming a national requires total dissolution of both host and home community. Assimilation has two possible outcomes – first, the minority loses its peculiarity and becomes like majority; however, the majority does not change; second, the ethnic and majority groups blend homogeneously, losing speciality (Jiobu, 1988). But bringing the immigrants of first generation through a one-way and

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one-sided process of adaptation was not possible for the receiving society. The first-generation migrants’ whole identity remained adhered to its ethnicity; therefore, giving up their prior cultural, linguistic and societal characteristics could never happen in a surrounding which barely provided state-sponsored conditions favourable to facilitate this process. Finally, in Anderson’s view, nation is ‘imagined as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship’ (1991/2006, p. 7, emphasis original). But for the diasporas in a particular nation, inequality and exploitation always prevailed. The community in those days was significantly different from the community of late or postmodern societies. In pre-modern and early modern societies, the communities were based on certain criteria that included blood lines or descent (kinship), locality and residence (neighbourhood) and the nation and its association with state consolidated citizens’ solidarity (Kennedy & Roudometof, 2003, p. 6). The communal relations were mainly based on face-to-face encounters constrained in a locality. Hence, territory and social proximity both were coterminous in maintaining communal ties. Whereas the diaspora communities had to maintain their solidarity with the state of residence while being in a territory far off from the homeland, the native nationals maintain a vertical comradeship with such alien communities. Thus, the community of their origin that the diasporas belonged to was always beyond their reach and existed only in their emotionally charged imaginary. Thus, the traditional form of diasporic existence was territorially confined. There was no cross-border connection with the land called home and the desire to return to the homeland, whether real or imagined, remained largely a myth. As Mishra gives examples that during apartheid in South Africa, few Indians returned to India and nor have the Fiji Indians despite the turbulence there of late. There were no instant communicative tools that could defy spatial restraints to establish a connection between the two communities, one that leaves and the other that stays behind. However, with the gradual advancement in science and technology, the transportation and communication means became speedy and available. The era of globalization brought with itself a flow of capital, goods, information, ideas, people that spread to almost every part of the world in the latter half of the twentieth century. This very flow affected the whole configurations of diasporas’ connection not only with the homeland but also with other diasporas located at various parts of the globe. The unprecedented connection amongst the displaced communities gave rise to a different and webbed world order. In such changed circumstances, diaspora’s role as a link between deterritorialized groups gains accent. The international borders recede due to cross-border activities carried out by individuals, communities and nonstate actors. Hence, globalization paved the way for a transnational world.

Globalization, transnationality and diaspora From the fixity of migrants in the early modern nation-states, the world found more mobile populations in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the twentieth century onwards has been termed as ‘The Age of Migration’ (Castles & Miller, 1993). International migration has grown in volume and significance since 1945 and particularly since the mid1980s. There are several historical factors considered to lend acceptance to these claims such as the massive diasporas caused by the Second World War, the disintegration of British empire and the subsequent migration from the former colonies to the West.

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These events were followed by the process of globalization of the world economy, which produced a highly mobile work force and an unprecedented phenomenon of illegal immigration as a result of the growing imbalance between the developed and the underdeveloped parts of the globe. Recent scholarly works put emphasis on the changing contours of the experiences of global population in the wake of socio-cultural and politico-economic activities of nation-states. The advent of globalization has proffered immense turbulence in the global order that was once solid in nature with less flexibility in relation to other countries/nation-states. Nowadays, international relations and foreign diplomacy is much more interdependent and inter-governmental. The proliferation of new types of immigrants is a result of these changing configurations in the relationship between various nation-states. These new immigrants are mostly technocrats, engineers, contract workers, agents of MNCs, members of international NGOs, etc. The diaspora which was previously not in direct contact with its other communities scattered elsewhere now is in constant connection through computer-mediated communication and internet on cyberspace. Therefore, the diaspora is spreading its activities beyond the territory of the hostland and reaching its other diasporic nodes. Thus, the conventional unidirectional diasporic movement is shifted to multidirected transnational one. In fact, transnationalism, in general, refers to the multiple associations and interactions connecting people across the borders of nation-states. It has been given an exemplar expression by Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton (1992) that ‘a new kind of migrating population is emerging, composed of those whose networks, activities and patterns of life encompass both their host and home societies’. Transnationalism denotes a condition in which in spite of great distances and international borders, which represent all the laws, norms and the narratives, a sort of relationship is established amongst the migrant peoples which is operating vigorously and in real time while being stretched out throughout the world. The ‘relations between citizens of different nation-states are different from relations between governments and their representatives’ resulted in the term ‘international’ being replaced by transnational. So the prefix ‘trans’ was much more useful and relevant than ‘inter’ in relation to national boundaries that are crossed by the transnational relations (Vertovec & Cohen, 1999, p. 11). The global approach adds plurality of expression to transnational relationships emphasizing on diaspora-diaspora relations rather than harping only on diaspora-homeland relations (Laguerre, 2006, p. 6). There is no denying the fact that the world economy is the driving force for the policy-makers at local, national and international level. The exemplary growth in entrepreneurial, industrial and marketing activities as a result of globalization between various countries has compelled the national societies, national economy and national governments to respect other nations’ economic and market ambitions. The treaties that are signed between highly capitalist and developed nations like the United States and other developing countries like India with huge market are testimony of the effect of a globalizing phenomenon. This influences the population of the nationstates as well. The Wallmart of America and Patanjali of India are the good example in case. The satellite technology has brought the whole world in the living room of any household located in any territorial space on the globe through the television. The internet is facilitating new avenues of instant communication on a virtual space. These factors produce drastic pressure on the geopolitical boundaries of nation-states. And the diasporas residing in them also get supremely motivated under such ambience to reach

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out to the homeland and vice-versa. On the one hand, the homeland government attempts to outreach the diasporas for various remittance benefits, and on the other, the diasporas get an opportunity to enjoy the privileges of their country of origin in forms of dual citizenship or other political and financial benefits. For example, the innovative Person of Indian Origin Card scheme run by the government of India with effect from 31 March 1999 (later its merger with Overseas Citizens of India card since 9 January 2015) to outreach its overseas population for cultural, economic, religious and educational interests. These cards have been issued to a ‘Person of Indian Origin’, which means a foreign citizen who at any time held an Indian passport; or he/she or either his/her parents or grandparents or great grandparents was born in and was permanently resident in India; or he/she is a spouse of a citizen of India or a person of Indian origin as per the previous two definitions. This scheme has encouraged more Indians residing abroad, as well as those who have never lived in India, to ‘return’ and invest in India’s economy – transforming ‘brain drain’ to a ‘brain circulation’ (Saxenian, 2006). The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has reported that Indians living abroad transferred $24.6 billion to India in the fiscal year 2005– 2006. India, thus, continues to retain its position as the leading recipient of remittances in the world. The World Bank estimates for 2005 put India in the lead at $23.5 billion, with China and Mexico close behind at $22.4 billion and $21.7 billion, respectively. Thus, globalization has catered to a symbiotic connection in the contemporary times between the diaspora and the homeland and to other diasporic network. Turning again to the diasporas, as Laguerre observes, the scholarly studies should focus on diasporic globalization approach that reconfigures the study of diaspora by highlighting the significance of the multinational context bred by the multilateral relations of diasporic sites in various other countries and with the homeland (Laguerre, 2006). The homeland, the hostland and the diasporas influence each other and in the process turn this multitude of sites into a connected area of social practice. Thus, one’s action depends not only on one’s residence in the hostland but also on the social context of the multinational universe in which one is ingrained. A transnational relationship comes to fruition through bonds of language, culture, religion and a sense of common history that give an affective and intimate colour that formal citizenship or even long settlement frequently lack. However, Cohen’s (1996, p. 518) view in respect of diaspora’s engagement with the nation-state could be contested when he asserts that many diasporas use the nation-state instrumentally rather than revere affectively. Diasporas want not only the security and opportunities in the hostland but also a continuing relationship with their country of origin and co-ethnic members in other countries. But on the basis of this very fact one cannot deny the affection of the diasporas towards their homeland. It is the aspiration of the contemporary migrants to be attached to their roots that makes them demand dual citizenship or dual nationality as in the case of the Indian diaspora discussed above. There had been a constant demand from the Indians living in various parts of the world for a more flexible and accommodating law related to their homeland orientation. And the High Level Committee on the Indian diaspora formed by the Government of India which submitted its report on 19 December 2001 categorically mentions in the Executive Summary (2001, p. xi) that ‘since India achieved its Independence, overseas Indians have been returning to seek their roots and explore new avenues and sectors for mutually beneficial interaction, from investment, to transfer of skills and technology, to outright philanthropy and charitable works’. Such findings emphasize that how the

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diasporas have become transnational or the migrant communities have become ‘transnational diasporas’ (Lie, 1995). In other words, the notion of transnational diaspora no longer describes the sheer fact of dispersion, but ‘points out to a structured whole where components interact despite their dispersion’ (Ben-Rafael & Sternberg, 2009, p. 4). Further, as the report suggests, the Indian diaspora’s ‘genuine efforts to make a “payback” to their mother country, as they described it to the Committee, are still being stalled because of an unresponsive policy and implementation environment’ (Executive Summary, 2001, p. xii, emphasis original). Thus, it is evident from this example that the diasporas maintain deep ties with the homeland and co-ethnic peoples in order to sustain the cross-border connectedness. Hence, to respond to their reverence towards the land of origin, there have been instances in which governments have made policies to accommodate the diasporas into a symbiotic relationship. This was found in the Council of Europe’s nationality convention of 1997, which permits the signatory states to tolerate dual nationality in the interest of better immigrant integration (in Joppke & Morawska, 2003, p. 18). The concept of transnationalism came into vogue around 1990s, expanding itself across several scholarly fields just like diaspora. Since then it has influenced the studies of movements of people in physical, imaginative and virtual spaces. The defining element in the profile of transnationality is that the migrants’ lives and those remain behind are simultaneously connected between two or more nations. As Thomas Faist suggests: Although both terms refer to cross-border processes, diaspora has been often used to denote religious or national groups living outside an (imagined) homeland, whereas transnationalism is often used both more narrowly – to refer to migrants’ durable ties across countries – and, more widely, to capture not only communities, but all sorts of social formations, such as transnationally active networks, groups and organisations. (2010, p. 9, emphasis original)

Therefore, the transnational practices have made scholars to call diasporas ‘transmigrants’ (Basch, Schiller, & Szanton-Blanc, 1994; Schiller et al., 1992) who frame an ethnic conclave termed as ‘diasporic ethnopolis’ (Laguerre, 2000, p. 12) and ‘global diasporas’ (Cohen, 1997). Transmigrants are not sojourners or temporary settlers. They are settled and incorporated in the economy and political institutions, localities and patterns of the daily life of their societies of residence concurrently maintaining connections, establish institutions, making transactions and influencing local and national events in the countries from which they are emigrated. And the global diasporas link the national to the world economy. Whatever may be the manner to address the diasporas in the contemporary context, the basic reality that the scholars try to delineate are somewhat alike. However, the defining feature of diasporas as a social form rests on a relationship between globally dispersed yet self-identified ethnic groups; the territorial states where such groups reside; and the homeland states from which they or their progenitors came (Cohen, 1997; Safran, 1991; Sheffer, 1986). In the present, trans-state and transborder networks of relationship and communications that connect migrants to multiple states, nations have transformed to ‘transnation’ (Appadurai, 1993; Tölölyan, 2000; Yeoh & Willis, 2004), ‘global nation’ (Østergaard-Nielsen, 2003; Smith, 1997), ‘transnational state’ (Robinson, 2001), ‘transglobal network nation’ (Laguerre, 2009) and, of late, ‘cosmonation’ (Laguerre, 2016) that challenge the notion of national space as territory within which a singular people reside. Peoples can form nations in the transnational moment without occupying the same territory, thus,

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decoupling the ‘nation’ from the ‘state’. In this context, the notion of ‘transnation’ is helpful that emphasizes a common identity which is not associated directly to residence in a specific territory and conceived as a ‘delocalized practice’ wherein retained ‘a special ideological link to a putative place of origin but is otherwise a thoroughly diasporic collectivity’ (Appadurai, 1993, p. 424). In some cases, the connection to the land of origin forces the sending countries to seek to encourage migrants to stay abroad but sustain links. Such countries engage in ‘global nation policies’, which extends extra-territorial membership to citizens and former citizens abroad. Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Turkey have been seen to make the transition from ‘export and return’ oriented nations to ‘global nation’ (Østergaard-Nielsen, 2003). Robinson provides a significant insight into the social theory of globalization maintaining a historical materialistic conception of the state and argues that ‘the state and the nation-state are not coterminous’ (2001, p. 157). He moves beyond the global-national dualism and develops the concept of a ‘transnational state’, which has come into existence due to economic globalization to ‘function as the collective authority for a global ruling class’ (p. 158). The emergent transnational state institutionalizes a new class relation between global capital and global labour in the capitalist globalization trend. Globalization is unifying the world into a single mode of production integrating the national circuits into global circuits of emerging global economy that erodes national boundaries and checks independent economies, polities and societal structures. The geopolitical side (i.e. the state) of the entity ‘nation-state’ remains under scrutiny due to the transnational production practices. This leads to a global internal linkage between peoples, which supersedes the whole set of nationstate institutions by transnational (or global) institutions like International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Trade Organization (WTO). The emerging transnational institutionalism gives birth to the new class relations of global capitalism. For instance, when the IMF or the World Bank condition financing on enactment of new labour codes to make workers more ‘flexible’, or on the rollback of a state-sponsored ‘social wage’, they are producing this new class relation. Transnational states are cognizant of their role in subordinating global labour to global capital in order to reproduce this new class relation. Moving on from the Marxian conception of globalization, there is another scholar Michel Laguerre, who views diasporic dispersion in a different light. He emphasizes on the ‘transglobal network nation’, which functions on the fundament of ‘network governance without a government’ (2009, p. 197). The transglobal network nation does not depend on territorial sovereignty, spatial adjacency, any form of fixity and nationalist orientations. It is a ‘new form of nationhood’ (Laguerre, 2009, p. 197) that transcends the confinements of the nation-states and its sovereign exclusivism. As diasporic sites are mobile places; so the transglobal network nation is characterized by its mobility that affects both the diasporic and the homeland sites. The diasporic nodes with its distinct peculiarities produce a network that facilitates the transglobal network nation to function on the aegis of the transnational infrastructures that sustain its border-crossing activities. Another nomenclature has cropped up in the context of transformation of nation-state, which is again propounded by Laguerre (2016) in his book The Multisite Nation. The categories discussed above indicate the position of the diaspora-homeland relationship and introduce the nation’s geographical expansion beyond the state’s territorial domain, deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the nation, transnational relations that uphold incessantly the existence of both the homeland and the diaspora and the role of communication

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technologies in this respect. However, the neologism ‘cosmonation’ refers to the new ‘augmented nation recast across multiple sovereign territorial landscapes’ (Laguerre, 2016, p. 9). Cosmonation is multisite because it may or may not possess the territory or territories in which it is grounded, for the governance is shared by both the homeland and its diaspora tentacles. Cosmonations imply finite, transient and symbolic borders that can be imagined with the identification of diasporic sites of settlement. That is why, due to the logic of the ‘homeland-multisite diaspora ensemble’, as Laguerre (2016, p. 9) suggests, ‘the boundaries of a cosmonation are always being made and remade from the expansion, contraction, or disappearance of nodes’. Such a nation is an outcome of a formal linking of homeland and diaspora through dual citizenship/nationality, the right to vote in legislative elections and, in few instances of European Union (EU) populations, through representation in the homeland parliament. Thus, in all the above transformations of the imagined community called nation, and its further imagined politico-territorial form, the nationstate, the diaspora populations occupy a central space and act as ‘exemplary communities of the transnational moment’ (Tölölyan, 1991, p. 5). In the context of globalization, the diaspora has turned out to be a political reference which goes beyond frontiers and releases strong claims of legitimacy in international domain. Diasporas exclaim transnational solidarity in a world where national identities seem to be in depression. Hence, diaspora firmly show an alternative to traditional social and political relations among nation-states. It provides a platform to people aspiring to independence and recognition as in the case of Kurds, Sikhs, Turks, etc. It has also gained immense significance in the wake of the relative strain of the concept of the nation, the protests against State coercion, the resistance to national integration models, the inclination towards multiculturalism, the predilection for mobility and all forms of cultural confluence. The diasporas typify the myth of a world free from national frontiers and old fences. Members of diasporas do not exclusively belong to one country but several. Diasporas’ cosmopolitanism, which was once seen cynically in the hostland, is now respected as an epitome of a world without borders. Indeed, they seem to hint at the future postnational condition and citizenship.

The postnational phase and diaspora The decline of the nation-state thesis that was circulated with Hobsbawm (1990) still garners support. In recent scholarly works, the focus has shifted from nation and nationalism to its viability – whether the nation-state remains the primary unit of political concern or is rendered increasingly marginal by contemporary world order. That is to say ‘we need to think ourselves beyond the nation’ because the modern nation-state is in ‘a serious crisis’ brought on by transnational conditions. Globalization has ‘de-territorialized’ the nation and created post-national citoyens du monde (Appadurai, 1993, p. 411). Along these lines, since 1990s there has been an increasing scholarly contention that we are now in a ‘postnational’ or ‘postnationalist’ age (Archibugi & Held, 1995; Habermas, 2001; Sassen, 2002). On the basis of empirical, theoretical and normative reflections, these authors hold that the high point of nation-state is over and that the time has come to celebrate the rise of new socio-political configurations. The term postnational may be understood to suggest that the nation-state and national identity no longer have political significance – the former is relegated as an effective political institution by process of

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globalization, and the latter is being transcended by the rise of cosmopolitan identities. Globalization impacts the importance of nation-state in three ways. The first is that global capitalism has meagre respect for national borders or the national governments through mechanisms of financial/commodity markets and multinational corporations. Few scholars have coined new phrases, Disneyfication, McDonaldization and even CocaColonization, to illustrate the submergence of national distinctiveness. Second, the appearances of threats to mankind such as environmental degradation, climate change, population growth, epidemics and global terror networks exceed the capacity of the nation-states in curbing them. The third is the rise of transnational institutions, including the World Bank and the IMF, and regional blocs, such as the EU, NAFTA and SAARC, which increasingly confines the nation-states’ space for negotiation. The German theorist and public intellectual Jürgen Habermas has reflected upon ‘postnational constellation’. The ambiguity of globalization is for Habermas logically clear in respect of its role in ushering the end of the global dominance of the nation-state as a model for political organization. ‘Postnational’ means that the globalization of markets and of economic processes and commerce, of modes of communication, and of culture, all increasingly deprive the classical nation-state of its formerly privileged position of sovereign power. As a result, its equally classic functions: to secure peace internally and defend its borders, to create fair conditions for a domestic market economy and to exert influence on domestic markets via macroeconomic policies, to raise taxes and allocate budgets for maintenance of minimum social standard and social equity, and to enforce civil rights of its citizens. To elaborate further, Habermas emphatically holds that the Western model welfare-state of mass democracies now faces hard times. The idea of democratic society having authority over society as a whole derives from contextualizing nation-states. To quote Habermas, ‘The phenomena of the territorial state, the nation, and a popular economy constituted within national borders formed a historical constellation in which the democratic process assumed a more or less convincing institutional form’ (2001, p. 60). This historical constellation is completely questioned in the era of globalization. The postnational constellation is a list of political challenges pitted against the weakened ‘democratic self-confidence’ (Habermas, 2001, p. 61) viewed from the set perspective of the nation-state. Hence, nation-states are ‘opening’ themselves to an economically driven world society. Habermas elaborates on how the basis of legitimacy for democratic processes can be validated in a postnational world beyond the frontiers that nation-states have so far been able to generate and sustain. The democracies on the Western model have always originated in the form of nation-states. The societies existing within territorial borders have certain preconditions to wield a democratic form of self-control which are fulfilled by nation-states. Habermas discusses four aspects of modern day nation-state – (a) the emergence of the state as an administrative state sustained through taxation, (b) maintaining sovereignty over a determinate geographical territory, (c) the specific form of nationstate for self-regulation (d) and democratically developed into legal and social state. Habermas takes up globalization as a continuing process which is characterized by the increasing scope for commercial, communicative and exchange relations beyond national borders. Today, satellite technology, air travel and digital communication spread the ‘network’. Network has turned out to be a significant term referring to various flows of goods, persons, capital, electronic information transfer and information processing.

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Flows are stream of information between nodes in a network society whose social structure is made of networks propelled by microelectronics-based information and communication technologies (Castells, 2004). Such social structures result from the interaction between social organization, social transformation and a technological model framed through digital information and communication technologies. There is also a ‘network enterprise’ (Castells, 2004, p. 28) made from firms or segments of firms decentralizing large corporations internally as networks. This leads to a networked economy of alliances based on sharing not only capital and labour but also information and knowledge in order to gain market share. However, economic globalization directly affects national economies as evident in rising impact of transnational corporations with worldwide production facilities and the increase in foreign direct investments. Thus, now there is a larger networked global economy replacing international economy running on informational networks which link suppliers and customers through the networked firm. The unit of the production process is not the firm but the business venture, ordained by a network, the network enterprise. These factors do not invite trouble to a ‘functional and legitimate’ democratic process. But they certainly prove fatal to the nation-state. Globalization has superseded territorial form of the nation-state shifting the core of control from space to time. The foreign trade policies are like national borders with floodgates, which regulate the currents so that only the desired outflows are permitted. Further, Habermas examines the features of globalization that enfeeble the capacity of the nation-state to maintain its borders and to regulate exchange processes with its external environment. He goes on to analyse the effects of globalization on the security of the rule of law and the effectiveness of the administrative state; the sovereignty of the territorial state; collective identity; and the democratic legitimacy of the nation-state. Ecological imbalance and unreliable high-tech facilities have given birth to new kinds of risk that do not respect national borders. Environmental threats, like ozone hole, are unmanageable within the national framework. Moreover, tax-based states are rendered incapable of making profit out of national resources due to the increased capital mobility accelerated by globalization that raises difficulty in collection of taxes. In respect of sovereignty, it is perceptible that nation-states are bound to make political decisions on territorial basis. But an interdependent world society must evade the ‘territorial trap’. There emerge other borders beyond the borders of the nation-states in the form of economic networks and military coalition such as Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and NATO, respectively. New regimes in economic sphere like IMF, World Bank and WTO and in areas such as the World Health Organization, the International Nuclear Regulatory Agency or other agencies of United Nations have made governance beyond the nation-state possible. The basic political structures or interconnected regimes such as EU, SAARC, NAFTA, ASEAN or G-7 summits show that the distinction between foreign and domestic policy is fading and diplomacy in the classical sense increasingly overlaps with cultural or foreign trade policies. The nation-state has facilitated political integration of citizens into a large-scale society. But the ‘facade’ of nation has also given way to secessionism, colonial domination and forceful assimilation of the aboriginals. It also gives rise to ethno-centric reactions to anything foreign to a particular national identity – hatred and violence against foreigners, other faiths and races, and marginalized sections. This is why Habermas distinguishes

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between cognitive dissonances leading to solidarity of national identities and the hybrid differentiations that weaken native cultures and homogeneity in the advent of assimilation into a single material world culture. Due to desired, tolerated or unsuccessfully resisted migrations, the OECD societies find a substantial change in the ethnic, religious and cultural compositions of their populations. This pluralization of life forms could be handled by a democratic constitutional state, but the problems arising from immigration and multicultural society pose a real challenge for the classical nation-state. For nation-states the difficulty arises in accommodating all citizens on equal terms with the political culture of the country when the majority culture ceases itself to be identical with the national culture. Thus, the solidarity of citizens relies on the success of this decoupling of political culture from majority culture. The diasporas oscillate between these two national cultures while imagining themselves as belonging to one of these with hyphenated identity (like African-American, Indian-American, etc.). The conventional identification of the state with a specific national cultural identity can no longer be supported practically. National citizenship has paved way for local, regional and transnational forms of citizenship based on non-national institutions. For instance, the EU is seen as a potential example for the embodiment of ‘postnational citizenship’ (Soysal, 1994). Because once the guestworkers arrived in the host societies of postwar Europe, they became formidable as foreign communities. And the new model called ‘postnational’, as Soysal (1994, p. 3) puts it, ‘derives from transnational discourse and structures celebrating human rights as a world-level organizing principle’. Therefore, postnational citizenship integrates the foreigners as ‘persons’ who has ‘the right and duty of participation in the authority structures and public life of a polity, regardless of their historical or cultural ties to that community’ (Soysal, 1994, p. 3). However, Joppke and Morawska (2003) question the empirical relevance of the postnational membership model. They hold that the first-generation immigrants had their return option open with them. Once the integration of the second generation and third generation of settled guestworkers took place, ‘the deficits of postnational membership became obvious’ (Joppke and Morawska, 2003, p. 16). That is why the revaluation of citizenship in European states cannot be smoothly accommodated within the postnational membership because exemption from state determined expulsion has remained the privilege of citizens alone. For example, the violent approach towards foreigners in postunity Germany did not differentiate between asylum-seekers and ‘Turks’ born and raised in Germany (in Joppke & Morawska, 2003, p. 16). This conception of ‘universal personhood’ (Soysal, 1994, p. 136) might play a valuable role in promoting a vision of tolerance, diversity and integration that people, in good faith, may aspire and that may be realized by political stakeholders in democratic states (Schuck, 1998). More often than not the national politics is pinned around the ideals of democracy and distributive justice. Hence, the democratic rule has to institutionalize decision-making processes across national boundaries in order to sustain itself in future. As regard to distributive justice, it is held by many liberal egalitarians that the significant challenges for the welfare of the individual of a nation-state, such as poverty, environmental degradation and exploitation, are transnational in origin and nature. Therefore, a universal, global theory of redistributive justice is needed that makes no distinction between co-nationals and foreigners. In the early 1970s after the postwar era, an entirely different system of transnational liberalism emerged. Earlier, the flow of cross-border funds was mainly from government to government or from multilateral lending agency to government.

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But now most of the money moving across borders is private, and governments do not have any involvement in the transaction at either end (Ohmae, 1996). The global markets have unprecedentedly liberalized, capital mobility has accelerated and industrial mass production has taken a leap. The globalized markets have clearly worked in harming the state’s autonomy and its capacity for economic interventions. As markets drive out politics, the nation-state increasingly loses its capacities to raise taxes and stir growth, and the ability to secure the essential foundations of its own legitimacy. This happens due to growing rate of unemployment, overburdened social security systems and a contracting tax base that exhausts the financial capacities of the state. International stock exchanges have taken over the ‘valuation’ of national economic policies. Further, national governments, terrified of the discreet threat of capital flight, have let the cost-cutting deregulatory policies flexible enough that produce vital profits and fatal income disparities, unemployment and the social marginalization of a growing population of the poor. Thus, as nation-states increasingly lose both their capacities for action and the stability of their collective identities, they will find it more and more difficult to meet the need for self-legitimation. This perhaps leads to the image of territorial masters losing control of their own borders. And since diaspora has limited explanatory powers in the lack of nation-states and homeland, the idea of a world without borders certainly transforms the diasporic existence and consciousness. This leads to the formation of the late modern complex diasporas that is interconnected to a supreme degree like never before. The complex or segmented diasporas are so called because they may unite together in some contexts and not in others; their members’ identities are situationally determined (Werbner, 2004). Werbner elaborates in the context of the public sphere created by the South Asian diasporic communities in Britain. In the South Asian diaspora ‘the vast cultural regions of consumption do not simply coincide with either religion or national homelands’ (Werbner, 2004, p. 900). The complex or segmented diasporas of a particular region share both high and popular material culture of consumption and religion across a large number of nation-states, create social and economic space for coordination and communal solidarity which debunks national origins and religious beliefs. In their cultural productions, the British South Asian artists and producers celebrate the shared cross-ethnic sensibility beyond religion and national origins. In Britain, Pakistani or Bangladeshi national identities are virtually submerged under a ‘Muslim’ identity. And British Pakistanis create two diasporic public spheres of British Islamic and the British South Asian, just as an Indian or Hindu and Sikh identity is linked to ‘South Asian’ or ‘British South Asian’ identity. Such alternative identities lead to a complexity that defies exclusivity of diasporic communities and parochialism of any sort arising out of conservatism and family pressure. The subsequent British-born South Asian generations tend to give message of tolerance, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, which is reflected in the novels and films of British South Asians. The religious and South Asian tradionalism, sexual conservatism and ethnic chauvinism are satirized and confronted in artistic outputs like Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham (2002, a South Asian British Film) and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). Therefore, the nationality of the diasporic South Asians, like Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi, in few crucial cases does not come to the fore when matters related to Islamophobic or xenophobic concerns in the host societies take graver shapes. Ergo, there is a need to look at the diasporas deterring

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from the traditional viewpoint which resisted inclusivity and adhered to the conventional atavism. Hence, such propositions lead to accept the fact that common culture, language, music, sport, literature, attire and popular entertainment channels/cinema are widely enjoyed, transcending geopolitical regions encompassing several post-colonial nation-states in a globalizing world. That is to say, a thoroughly new diaspora is taking shape in today’s world for the second- or third-generation migrants, which could plausibly be termed as neo-diasporas. These diaspora communities populate ‘liquid homes’ (Cohen, 2009) as they are more mobile and more connected to their homelands and other similar diasporas than those in the past era of rigid formulations of nation-states when boundaries were the absolute signifiers of power, domination and control. Research on the second generation has demonstrated that transnational migration is not a transient phenomenon (Glick Schiller & Fouron, 2003), which further points out that the nation-state container view of society does not sufficiently put forth the complex interconnectedness of contemporary reality (Ben-Rafael & Sternberg, 2009). This is not an attempt to add to the already existing plethora of terminologies under whose penumbrae my theoretical formulation of ‘neo-diaspora’ may fall but to assert a transformed contemporaneity. The neo-diasporas are not only transnational but also trans-state that challenges ‘nation-state container view’ of host societies. The nation-state’s geopolitical unit – that is, state (not the nation) – is being politically transcended as state-sustained machinery functions at internal and external domains to regulate membership in the national collectivity and movement across territorial borders. Of course, commonly nation and states are regarded as synonyms, but this view signals a statist bias that prefers claims to nationhood by entities established as sovereign states over those of stateless nations such as Tibet, Khalistan, Tamil Elam and Kurdistan etc. It also ignores the plurinational/multinational democracies such as Belgium, Canada, India, Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom (Gagnon & Tully, 2001; Keating, 2001). Movement of people across state boundaries is outrightly a political matter because it threatens the entente of territory, political institutions and society that states seek to uphold. However, networks of people, information and goods regularly span the boundaries of the state, leading transnational migration to relentlessly recur. Moreover, migrants do not forge their communities alone; states and the politics within their borders provide scope for migrant trans-state social activities (Waldinger & Fitzgerald, 2004). I have deliberately avoided the stopgap linguistic dependant of ‘posts’. The prefix ‘neo-’ serves the purpose here to reflect the paradigmatic transnational and trans-state shift that, indeed, translates diaspora communities into late modern hypermobile groups or neo-diasporas. The transnational ties lead to regular trans-state contacts through several nodes of a diasporic network. Such a network operates both inside and outside the nation-state via institutions, social and economic actions, discourses or flows. Encouraged by this network for settlement in the hostland, the migrants now see the opportunity of enjoying citizenship rights based on personhood rather than membership in a particular political unit (Bauböck & Faist, 2010; Jacobson, 1996; Soysal, 1994). Today, the migrants not only arrogate diasporic communities and varied social formations but also experience the trans-state shift of locations for socio-cultural distinctiveness vis-àvis the conditions in acquisition of state membership in the receiving societies. Besides, they also have access to the homeland’s state facilitated privileges. Thus, modern citizenship plays vital role in emergence of modern democracy where pluralistic conception of

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citizenship can accommodate the specificity of host communities and multiplicity of the diasporic communities. Therefore, a liberal nationalist approach is developing in favour of multicultural social system as in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. What I have tried to explicate by bringing together the concept of diaspora with the national, transnational and postnational conditions is that the diasporas have acquired new face, facet and feature under changing patterns of the global state membership. The children of migrants have developed a sense of multiple belongings without shedding their core diasporic identity. As they receive education in the host society’s schools, participate in its popular culture and enter its workforce, native-born children of immigrants become part of the former while maintaining economic, social or cultural ties with, and political interests in, their parents’ country or region of origin (Joppke & Morawska, 2003). Furthermore, the value that immigrant parents attach to education varies by ethnicity, class and gender, and is one area where inherent cultural values are seen to influence patterns of integration in future generations. For instance, in the United Kingdom, British Chinese and Indian children (some belonging to the third generation) have consistently performed better than British Whites at school, and in marked contrast, for example, to the high drop-out rate amongst children from London’s Kurdish- and Turkish-speaking communities (Enneli, Modood, & Bradley, 2005; Saggar, 2004). The Punjabi immigrants’ strategy, according to the anthropologist Margaret Gibson, focuses on academic achievement in the public schools as a means to improve their children’s chances for success in terms of the opportunity structures of the American mainstream (in Alba & Nee, 2003). The second generation, the children of the immigrants of the 1980s and 1990s, are now coming of age. They have reached a point in late adolescence and adulthood when they are braced up to make a contribution to the future of ‘the Indian community’. They have not, however, chosen to permeate seamlessly into the organizations set up by their parents or grandparents. Nor have they opted to dispense with the ties based on their ethnic heritage altogether. Instead, they are constructing an organizational network of their own (Bacon, 1996). For the second generation, organizational life is regulated by resources drawn from the cultural milieu of America and, parents represented, India. The South Asians who settled in an agricultural town in northern California evolved social norms encouraging ‘selective acculturation’ while discouraging social contact with local white youths who paid less or no respect to the Punjabi youths (Gibson, 1989). The relationship between diasporas and territories have their own uniqueness. Belonging to a diaspora implies being able to live simultaneously on three scales – the transnational world scale; the local scale of the community; and the scale of the host or home country – while privileging one or two of these. This combination of scales varies from one individual to another according to their position in the pedigree of generations. The first generation, those who were born and have lived in the society of origin, tend to privilege the local scale of the host country and the national scale of the home country. The second generation takes into account more often the local and national scales of the host country, where they were born and have lived and, at times, the transnational scale; the third generation, in search of its origins, depends on two or three of these scales (Bruneau, 2010). This is why, the old rigid and coercive conception of assimilation has become a passé (Alba & Nee, 2003) and ‘second-generation youths confront

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today a pluralistic, fragmented environment that simultaneously offers a wealth of opportunities and major dangers to successful adaptation’ (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001, p. 55). For instance, the South Asian diasporas in Britain face this duality of such environment as immigrant communities. Second-generation immigrants, who were expected to have access to more opportunities, because of being born in the country of settlement, are also discriminated on basis of ‘race’, colour or cultural background. To cite the above example again, Chadha prominently features a significant episode in Bend It Like Beckham where the protagonist, Jasminder, a Punjabi Sikh girl willing to play football for an English Club, is told by her father, Mr Bhamra, a first-generation immigrant Punjabi, about unequal opportunities offered to people of non-white ethnicity. He recounts the discrimination he was subjected to in his youth as a fast bowler and the fun that the ‘bloody Goras’ made of his turban and set him off packing. However, his scepticism is flawed in the movie itself and Jasminder not only plays for the club but also gets scholarship for her winning performance in a football match. Thus, the film shows the evolving concept of Britishness which allows the non-whites to ‘bend’ their ways to achieve their goals making most out of the opportunities in the host national society dominated territory. Such new perspective does not make assumptions. It is said to ‘transcend’ the old assimilationist, immigrationist paradigm. Rather than the singular immigrant, scholars now detail the diversity of immigration circumstances, class backgrounds, gendered transitions and the sheer multitude of migration experiences (Lie, 1995, p. 304). This revaluation in approach towards the immigrants and their children in the host society has been given apt manifestation in the Editorial of the report on immigrant integration in the OECD and European Union published in 2015 as follows: The issue of immigration and the integration of immigrants and their children are high on the policy agenda of EU and OECD countries, both from an economic and a social standpoint. The active participation of immigrants and their children in the labour market and, more generally, in public life is vital for ensuring social cohesion in the host country and the ability of migrants to function as autonomous, productive and successful, self-realised citizens. This is also critical for facilitating their acceptance by the host-country population. (p. 9)

The basic institutional rule of integration is appropriateness. Steps towards integration have to be appropriate in order to be successful. The policies have to leave intact the established communities and their cultural practices as well as the communities and cultural practices of the immigrants (Münch, 2001). Above, the OECD and EU encourage participation of the immigrant communities and their descendants in the ‘public life’ in order to promote ‘self-realised’ citizenship for ‘social cohesion’ in the host country. Therefore, it demands flexibility in political membership of a state against the normative national citizenship that accentuates coexistence of rights and identity. As Ong (1999, p. 6) argues, ‘in the era of globalization, individuals as well as governments develop a flexible notion of citizenship and sovereignty’. Ong examines the role of states in responding flexibly to the mobility of transnational populaces. She also discusses the postnational tendency which undermines the role of the nation-state in determining the status of the subject as people form identities and fealties which cut across the constraints of established political, economic and social system. Flexible citizenship is partly a riposte to such positions, as it indicates the enduring capacity of the nation-state to adapt to rapidly developing conditions. There are, Ong (1999, pp. 15–16) says, ‘diverse forms of interdependencies

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and entanglements between transnational phenomena and the nation states – relations that link displaced persons with citizens, integrate the unstructured into the structured, and bring some kind of order to the disorderliness of transnationalism’. This suggests that the action of states in this way is often governed by the adience to mediate the threat (of dual loyalty) and the potential (primarily economic) of transnationalism. The vast and crucial portion of world population living in the diaspora functions as a connector at geographical, political and cultural level with other populations of the world, that is, the ‘homeland’ population, bringing down the nation-states’ monopoly in global affairs. The diasporas are now mobile transnationals rather than the previously stagnant nationals. They are still ‘imagined communities’ maintaining ‘long-distance nationalism’ (Anderson, 1992, p. 3) in the era of email, instant messaging and the World Wide Web and, of course, modern modes of travel. Transnational links seek economic benefits; hence, favour migrations, as well as the maintenance of a connection that is termed as ‘long-distance nationalism’. Migrants and their descendants build presence in their adopted countries according to the relationship to the homeland, and they try to influence the host country’s policies in favour of the state, nation or people to which they belong to. Involvement at a distance with a country with which one feels individually or collectively related can take different forms for ‘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’ (Glick Schiller, 2005, p. 571). National borders are not thought to delimit membership in the nation because its members may live anywhere in the world and could hold citizenship in other states. Local and regional associations connect compatriots who are not necessarily fellow citizens. In its trans-state dimension, the organization of stateless peoples involves the politics of exile; in its localized dimension, it involves the demand for recognition of a non-state identity. Kurds are currently the world’s largest ethnic population without a country. They number between 20 and 25 million and are mainly distributed between Turkey (half of them), Iraq, Iran, Syria and the European countries (Dufoix, 2008). However, there are other sides of the argument too. Critics of postnationalism observe that historically the rise of the nation-state and transnational capital complements each other in a symbiotic relationship (Holton, 1998). Nationalism is by no means inoperative in contemporary Europe/world and nor is only tantamount to violence and bias on grounds of race, sex, ethnicity and so on. On the other side, postnationalism has its own typical violence too – the violence of disregarding the differences between established and aspirant nation-states or placing a violent burden of proof on aspirant nationalisms (Epps, 2003). The processes pertaining globalization, which leads to a postnational world, involve transboundary networks and encompass multiple local or national processes and actors (Sassen, 2006). Hence, Brubaker suggests that, Moreover, the recent forms of the external politics of belonging are neither postnational nor transnational; they are forms of transborder nationalism. They do not presage the transcendence of the nation-state; they indicate rather the resilience and continued relevance of the nation-state model. (2015, p. 143)

The nation-state would not disappear. Contrarily, the defence of ‘cultural-civilizational identity’ would become a powerful new rationale behind its continued existence (Jha, 2006). Consequentially, the diasporas, then, would continue to participate in

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various multicultural host societies as harbinger of plural identities coexisting with mainstream nationality in receiving countries. With the passage of time, the diasporans also integrate into the society of settlement that involves adjustment in values, norms and behaviour. The future generations of diasporas do achieve denizenship (Hammar, 1990), enabling them of legal claim to local voting rights, the right to permanent residence in a country and social rights in the wake of international migration. Although ‘globalization may lead us to rethink the notion of the nation in one array of instances, and perhaps look for signs of organizational or symbolic decay, in other cases nations and nationalism appear to be on an upswing’ (Hannerz, 1996, p. 89). In the case of global crisis – like AIDS epidemic or the Ebola outbreak – the societies which have been most successful in encountering them are those with strong and long-established nation-state structures. While the existence of regional blocs does impact upon the sovereignty of their constituent member states, the EU, the most developed regional bloc, nevertheless remains an association between nation-states, an inter-national network of interaction (Breen & O’Neill, 2010). And the recent exit of the United Kingdom from the EU is a relevant case against such regional blocs in the world’s geopolitical matrix. Brexit and the earlier Grexit are further problematizing the issues concerning citizenship and immigration. Brexit is seen as the will of the people of the United Kingdom wanting to see a reduction in immigration. The twin forces of globalization and regionalization have synchronically generated possibilities and increasing discontent across class, race, gender, geographical and ideological lines. Increased EU supranationality is seen within Britain as depletion of British sovereignty, territoriality and autonomy (Grenade, 2016). The ‘immigration problem’ foregrounds security concerns and triggers social antagonism. As far as the pluralization of identity at the stake of national identity is concerned, even those who favour cosmopolitanism and plural group identities do not outrightly reject national identity. They beckon for the internal transformation of nation-states and reformulation of nationalism that are more inclusive and adaptable to cultural differences (Parekh, 2000, pp. 230–236). Even after the post-Cold War era the resurgence of ethnonational conflict in the West and other parts of the world testifies to the appeal of nationalism as a living ideology. Supersession or transcendence of nationality will not solve the issue. Postnationalism consequently is incapable of accepting the liberal forms of both state nationalism and minority nationalism (Kymlicka, 2001). Nonetheless, semi-defined and less convincing alternatives to national citizenship should not be the agenda of concern rather an effort towards its expansion is necessary to include those marginalized and susceptible to violence. The normative foundation of a postnational citizenship may be so ‘thin and shallow that it can easily be swept away by the tides of tribalism or nationalism’ (Schuck, 1998, p. 204). Instead, some form of distinct citizenship in form of group rights that culminates into a broader view of politicocommunal membership inclusive of different interests, positions and identities emerging from gender, ethnicity, race and religion. An ethnically and religiously diverse country like India may be considered as a noticeable example of an early incorporation of group-differentiated citizenship rights in the ambit of a liberal secular state – way before the discussions about multicultural citizenship brought the idea to the fore (Mitra, 2013). National citizenship is still the best source of people’s civil, political and social rights. It is national citizenship that can be of crucial importance for the individual migrant’s life chances in cases of crisis related to law and order and security threat arising out of terrorism. In

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such moment of greatest need, citizenship means everything, and the difference between permanent residence and citizenship turns out to be total. Postnationalists’ indifference to political citizenship is, for sure, peculiar. The right to vote – the most important entitlement secured through national citizenship – is one for which un-emancipated Jews, workers, women, native Americans and African-Americans struggled for decades, and only the sacrifice of blood achieved it. Noticeably, the denial of suffrage to Jews, women and Blacks was among the greatest liberal democratic injustices of the last two centuries (Hansen, 2009). And the postnational democracy cannot provide a proper public sphere for opinion formation. Kymlicka (2001) suggests that democratic participation by common citizens and the public sphere depend upon the shared language that all citizens speak. That is to say linguistic/territorial political communities, that is, nations, remain the primary forum for democratic participation in the modern world. On the transnational level, there is no shared language, hence, no effective public sphere. Another significant dimension of nationalism is distributive justice, which is attacked by postnationalist ideas. Liberal nationalists refute cosmopolitans on the ground that it gives rigid choice – either to cling to the principle of national self-determination with particularist attachments or to ignore these attachments in favour of global duties (Miller, 2007). The need of the hour is to seek a theory of distributive justice that would provide equal importance to the right of self-determination, the freedom of peoples to choose and be responsible for their own future with greater duties to non-nationals or the diasporas.

Conclusion The diasporas are prime pillars to uphold both the nation-states and the postnational condition in an incessant globalizing world. In the contemporary world order, the multi-locale diaspora cultures are not mandatorily defined by a specific geopolitical boundary. On the one hand, the new diasporas of the late modern, late capitalist post-colonial world is making the borders of nation-states porous through their transnational renditions, which paves way for a postnational world order where the ‘nation’ is left in a disorder and the ‘state’ in shifting contours. On the other, amidst all such debates of the demise of nation-states in the age of globalization, governments that reach out to ‘their’ diasporas are obviously amplifying their economic power. They have begun to extend their sovereignty by offering concession on citizenship or voting rights to overseas populations in return for political or financial aid. Therefore, diaspora can serve to strengthen rather than to weaken nation-states. We are witnessing a different breed and creed of deterritorialized population of neo-diaspora that is very complex in new ways, viz. culturally, linguistically, religiously, politically, given the intricacy of their belongingness and the sense of rootlessness. In our contemporary times, and in future, diasporas can play a groundbreaking role in the formation of supernations such as China and India, given their economically and politically powerful diasporas abroad. India and China are perceived as emerging superpowers in the contemporary world (Mahtaney, 2007). Together, they are home to 40% of the world’s population and both are world’s fastest growing economies. The large Indian diaspora facilitates India’s connections to the global economy (Asian development outlook, 2004) and, in case of China, investment inflows into Guangdong and other special economic zones come mainly from the overseas Chinese diaspora (Mahtaney, 2007). Hence, the new discourses on diaspora deal with ‘routes’ than with ‘roots’. The

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focus is on movements and connections rather than on origins. The emphasis is on ‘global people’ who do not live ‘in diaspora’, because global people do not live either ‘at home’ or ‘in exile’. For global people, home is constantly shifting with shifting attachments and purposes. They promulgate world citizenship, which implies the joining of the wisdom of humankind with latest geopolitical and geotechnical reality to recognize the entire world as one’s state. Furthermore, if there is EU in West which proffers postnational paradigms, there is SAARC in East, which still struggles with its border policies/conflicts in South Asia making a strong case for the existence of nation-state even in the scenario discussed above. But the South Asian diaspora has developed an acute transnational network through contract workers, various kinds of professionals, technocrats and software experts who are working or settled overseas that again defies the borders of their common Indian subcontinent origin and assuages the bitterness prevailing in the homeland. Overall, the diasporas today are cosmopolitans, nonaligned transnationals struggling within and against nation-states, striving for coexistence in global technologies, market and politics with the rest of the world population.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID Suraj Kumar Saw

http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7821-0495

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