12 Modern Delusions that must be challenged. #3

No 3. Diasporas have a legitimate role to play in national and international politics.

This is for Ultan (who does not have the head space to join us at present, please do Ultan, you are the Man here). The notion that emigrant or diaspora communities have a special insight into the problems of their homeland, or a special moral or political status in regard to them, is wholly unfounded. Emigrant ethnic communities play almost always a negative, backward, at once hysterical and obstructive, role in resolving the conflicts of their countries of origin; Armenians and Turks, Jews and Arabs, various strands of Irish, are prime examples on the interethnic front, as are exiles in the US in regard to resolving the problems of Cuba, or policy-making in Iran. English emigrants are less noted for any such political role, though their spasms of collective inebriation and conformist ghettoised lifestyles abroad do little to enhance the reputation of their home country.

My Reply:

Well now this is one for which I truly have little to say. Even though some might term me an emigrant, at the moment. I never have credited the idea that a person who is born (or has lived from an early age) elsewhere to his ethnic homeland can claim true nationality of that homeland. You are a product of your genes and your environment, and when an emigrant minority settles abroad and attempts to hold on to the type of culture from which they came, this is categorically not the same environment as that of the culture's origin. For one thing, it usually has more jobs.

Whether that should disenfranchise emigrants from their homeland's political process is another thing. They may not have the same understanding of local issues, they may have old-fashioned or even backward and bigoted views on the neighbours of their homeland. But they have an indisputable link to that land that should be protected in some way so that the baby is not thrown out with the bathwater. What form that protection should take is more difficult.

A fully enfranchised diaspora would seem to me to have an undue influence on a geographically remote region that has its local population to worry about. But then those who stay are unlikely to make very much of the plight of those who leave, whether it be good or bad. After all the grass is always greener...

So in summary, I have no good idea how this issue could be addressed...case by case? Set up a franchise-by-application system, that would enable the interested and invested to vote-by-remote? Or maybe a proportional system, where only a statistically insignificant number of the diaspora could be directly involved in the homeland's political process.

Pie in the sky!