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Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

John A. Armstrong
John A. Armstrong
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Abstract

Using an exchange model, this article examines two ethnic groups, mobilized and proletarian diasporas, in a broad range of modernizing polities. The salient dimensions of myth, communications networks, and role differentiation permit one to distinguish these groups analytically over a long time period, and to subdivide the mobilized diasporas into archetypal diasporas and situational diasporas. The latter are politically detached elements of a great society, whereas the “homeland” of the archetypal diaspora is symbolically significant as a major component of the diaspora's sacral myth. Because internal resentments and the pressures of the international environment tend to undermine the value of a diaspora to the dominant elite of a slowly and unevenly modernizing multiethnic polity, these polities (Russia and the Ottoman Empire are examined closely) exhibit a succession of mobilized diasporas. Rapidly modernizing polities, on the other hand, tolerate mobilized diasporas, but turn increasingly for their unskilled, transient labor to groups which are more distant culturally and in physical appearance from the dominant ethnic group, and which, therefore, are increasingly disadvantaged and restive.

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Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 70 , Issue 2 , June 1976 , pp. 393 - 408
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1976

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References

1 Even historical studies of nationalism pay scant attention to diasporas. See for example Hayes, Carleton J. H., The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York: Smith, 1931)Google Scholar; Meinecke, Friedrich, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1911)Google Scholar; Kohn, Hans, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1944)Google Scholar; and Baron, Salo W., Modern Nationalism and Religion (New York: Harper, 1947)Google Scholar. Recent social science discussions like Schermerhorn, R. A., Comparative Ethnic Relations (New York: Random House, 1970)Google Scholar and Enloe, Cynthia H., Ethnic Conflict and Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973)Google Scholar deal only in passing with mobilized diasporas.

2 I am completing a monographic study on the German diaspora in the Russian Empire and the beginnings of its replacement by the Jewish diaspora. This work will employ in a limited context both quantitative and nonquantitative data to test some of the hypotheses advanced here. The study will appear in a book edited by Jeremy Azrael for the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies Collaborative Research Project on Nation-Building and National Integration in the USSR. Since considerable amounts of data on Russia are cited in this and in previous studies I have published, I have documented here only the most important assertions about the Russian multiethnic polity.

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7 See especially Coughlin, Richard J., Double Identity: The Chinese in Modern Thailand (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), pp. 121, 160Google Scholar. Indians in East Africa and Malaya and Lebanese in West Africa also probably should be considered situational mobilized diasporas; Indians in Africa are convinced of their cultural superiority, according to Van den Berghe, Pierre L., Race and Ethnicity (New York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 277, 293–94Google Scholar.

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9 Fervent Lutherans did protest, but the extent of their concern and the numerous cases they cite are in themselves evidence of the tendency of the German diaspora to assimilate religiously. It had before it, of course, the frequent example of marriages and conversions to Orthodoxy among Lutheran royal families.

10 It is precisely this rejection of political ties with the homeland which distinguishes mobilized diasporas, as I conceive them, from minorities like English-speaking Canadians in Quebec, who can be more aptly categorized as outposts of a dominant ethnic group.

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24 Sanjian, Avedis K., The Armenian Communities in Syria under Ottoman Dominion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 36Google Scholar. On the ubiquity of Chinese tax farmers, see especially Purcell, , Chinese in Southeast Asia, p. 664Google Scholar.

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30 Castro, Américo, The Spaniards (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 502, 570Google Scholar.

31 Blalock, Hubert H. Jr., Towarda Theory of Minority-Group Relations (New York: Wiley, 1967), p. 81Google Scholar. On p. 79 Blalock appears to agree with my point that a mobilized diaspora is relatively secure in a traditional social order.

32 Coughlin, , Double Identity, pp. 128, 168Google Scholar; Purcell, , Chinese in Southeast Asia, p. 169Google Scholar.

33 Armstrong, John A., “Soviet Foreign Policy and Anti-Semitism,” Soviet Jewry: 1969 (Academic Committee on Soviet Jewry, 1969), pp. 65–69Google Scholar. I do not pretend that the explanation of internal factors presented above is adequate to explain all cases of persecution of mobilized diasporas, especially those involving recent anti-Semitism. Nolte, Ernst in Three Faces of Fascism (New York: Reinhart, 1966)Google Scholar, emphasizes quite rightly the importance of the search for scapegoats after military defeat (in Weimar Germany and late nineteenth-century France; he might have added Turkey after defeats in 1876–78 and 1915–19). Still, it can be argued that one significant factor in all three of these countries was the highly uneven pace of modernization, which made it profitable for elites of premodern origin to condone scapegoating by discontented members of their ethnic group. More directly contrary to my interpretation, at least on the surface, is the important study by Bettelheim, Bruno and Janowitz, Morris, Dynamics of Prejudice (New York: Harper, 1950)Google Scholar, which attributes increases in anti-Semitic attitudes in both Germany and the United States to downward mobility. Of course outbreaks of anti-Semitism occasionally occur in successfully modernized countries, despite what I contend is the generally favorable position of the vestigial mobilized diasporas there. Unfortunately, such an ingrained historical prejudice is hardly likely to disappear merely because of economic and social transformations. It is not surprising that when anti-Semitism does occur in a modernized society the causes are different from those in slowly modernizing multiethnic societies. Apart from the hideous Nazi exception, however, dominant elites in Western modernized societies have succeeded in preventing the attitudes Bettelheim and Janowitz note from resulting in catastrophic behavior.

34 Rosenau, James N., The Scientific Study of Foreign Policy (New York: Free Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

35 Deverdun, Gaston, Marrakech (Rabat: Editions Techniques Nordafricaines, 1959), p. 453Google Scholar; Inalcik, Halil, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), p. 129Google Scholar; Franco, Moise, Sur l'Histoire des Israélites de l'Empire Ottoman depuis les Origines jusqu'à Nos Jours (Hildesheim: Olms, 1973—reprint of 1897 ed.), p. 57Google Scholar.

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48 Ibid., p. 591; Braudel, Fernand, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), p. 24Google Scholar.

49 Braudel, , La Méditerranée, II, 46Google Scholar. The Spanish kingdom was obliged to import Flemish and Burgundian administrators from its outlying possessions and (more or less surreptitiously) French merchants and artisans (forty thousand in Madrid alone by 1655) to assume specialized roles Spaniards could not fill.

50 Notably in nineteenth-century Hungary, where Jews replaced the urban German diaspora in many occupations with the tacit acquiescence of the Magyar elite, which regarded Jews as more assimilable, Kann, , “Hungarian Jewry,” pp. 371 ff.Google Scholar

51 I have analyzed the social implications of the pace of Russian modernization in “Communist Political Systems as Vehicles for Modernization,” in Political Development in Changing Societies, ed. Palmer, Monte and Stern, Larry (Lexington: Heath, 1971), pp. 135 ff.Google Scholar

52 Gitelman, Zvi Y., Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 23Google Scholar.

53 Mendelsohn, Ezra, Class Struggle in the Pale (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 17Google Scholar; cf. Weinryb, S. B., Neueste Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden in Russland und Polen (Breslau: M. and H. Marcus, 1934)Google Scholar.

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55 Ibid., p. 116.

56 Armstrong, John A., The Politics of Totalitarianism (New York: Random House, 1961), chapter 11Google Scholar.

57 See footnote 33 above.

58 Mendelsohn, , Class Struggle in the Pale, p. 9Google Scholar.

59 Castles, Stephen and Kosack, Godula, Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 310Google Scholar; Jackson, John A., The Irish in Britain (London: Routledge and Paul, 1963), pp. 79, 81Google Scholar. It is true that at times specific proletarian diasporas have tended to take unskilled jobs in particular economic branches, but these are almost always characterized by greater job turnover and geographical mobility than roles occupied by the dominant ethnic group, and by less status mobility.

60 Castles, and Kosack, , Immigrant Workers, pp. 182, 191Google Scholar.

61 Fishman, Joshua, Sociolinguistics (Rowley: Newbury House, 1970), p. 78Google Scholar.

62 Castles, and Kosack, , Immigrant Workers, especially p. 476Google Scholar.

63 Kindleberger, Charles P., Europe's Postwar Growth: The Role of Labor Supply (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 204 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grandjeat, Pierre, “Les Migrations de Travailleurs en Europe,” Cahiers de l'Institut International d'Etudes Sociales, I, Cahier 1 (Paris, 1966), pp. 62 ff.Google Scholar; Rose, Arnold M., Migrants in Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), pp. 150 ff.Google Scholar

64 Braudel, , Capitalism, pp. 380–81Google Scholar. Braudel's generalization is supported by the ingeniously compiled statistics presented by Mols, Roger, Introduction à la Démographie Historique des Villes d'Europe du XIVe au XVIIIe Siècle (Louvain: Duculot, 1955), II, 379 ff.Google Scholar Cf. Glazer, Nathan and Moynihan, Daniel P., Beyond the Melting Pot, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1970), p. 10Google Scholar: “The classic heterogeneity of great cities has been limited to the elite part of the population … not, as in the United States, the masses.”

65 Braudel, , Capitalism, pp. 380–81Google Scholar; Chevalier, Louis, La Formation de la Population Parisienne du XIXe Siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1949), pp. 21, 165, 210Google Scholar.

66 Girard, Alain and Stoelzel, Jean, “Français et Immigrés,” Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques, Cahier No. 19 (Paris, 1953), p. 19Google Scholar.

67 Castles, and Kosack, , Immigrant Workers, pp. 296, 432Google Scholar.

68 Rose, , Migrants, p. 24Google Scholar.

69 Ibid., p. 115.

70 Girard, and Stoelzel, , “Français et Immigrés,” pp. 37, 41Google Scholar.

71 Sheehan, Edward R. F., “Europe's Hired Poor,” The New York Times Magazine, December 9, 1973Google Scholar; cf. The New York Times, May 2, 1973, and Sartre's, Jean-Paul editorial article in The New York Times, March 11, 1973Google Scholar.

72 The poor excuse for a colonial empire which the Second Reich cherished produced no significant labor export; in a sense, of course, the Ostarbeiter compelled to work in Germany during World War II constituted a temporary proletarian diaspora.

73 Castles, and Kosack, , Immigrant Workers, p. 19Google Scholar; Kindleberger, , Europe's Postwar Growth, p. 177Google Scholar; Rose, , Migrants, p. 24Google Scholar; The New York Times, November 24, 1973.

74 The New York Times, July 11, 1972, on increased Polish and Rumanian export of contract labor to West Germany, despite East German opposition.

75 Armstrong, John A., “The Ethnic Scene in the Soviet Union,” in Ethnic Minorities in the Soviet Union, ed. Goldhagen, Erich (New York: Praeger, 1968), p. 7Google Scholar.

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