Better response needed it benefit of diaspora is to be realised in 21st century

IN his address to the joint houses of the US Congress on September 11th, the Taoiseach, Mr Bruton, made interesting references to the ways in which territorial and political allegiances have changed this century and how they may be expected to be expressed in the next.

They came in the course of a speech that drew parallels between constitution making in the history of the United States and the European Union, in which he applied some of these lessons to Northern Ireland.

His observations may be usefully extended to consider Ireland's relationship with its "diaspora". The word still attracts hyphenation, largely because we are unfamiliar with it in comparative, cultural or political terms. What is not widely realised is that the very changes in international affairs that are separating out territory, nationality and political allegiance are facilitating the creation of many more diasporic communities around the world.

We are, therefore, witnessing something new and more typical of contemporary global society, in what could prove to be a real resource for Ireland in the next century.

The phenomenon has spawned an academic journal, Diaspora, published from New York by OUP since 1991, and in the Irish case a quality glossy, published quarterly in that city, The World of Hibernia. This newspaper has had a very enthusiastic response from Irish people around the world to its availability on Abe World Wide Web, as has RTE to its satellite and shortwave transmissions. The Frankfurt book fair will also spread the word.

According to one recent study the number of diasporas has mushroomed in recent years, far beyond the original "victim diasporas", based on cataclysmic scattering of peoples such as the Jews to Babylon, Africans into slavery, the post famine Irish, the Armenians after the genocide and the Palestinians after the formation of the state of Israel. Diasporas are now taken to embrace expatriates, refugees, immigrants and ethnic minorities, as well as international ethnic trading and investment communities such as the Chinese, and even movements of colonisation, as with the ancient Greeks and the British, Spanish and Portuguese from the 16th century*.

Mr Bruton argued that political theorists in the 19th century assumed that people could have "only one sovereign allegiance to his or her territorial nationstate". In that period territorially based natural resources were crucial to the economy, so that nation and territory had to be one and the same.

"In contrast, knowledge, instant communication, multiculturalism and mobility will be characteristics of the 21st century economy, and nationalities will inevitably become more and more intermixed together". Political practice must follow these economic changes, as such as that of the Europeans Union, which recognises that people can have more allegiances than one and yet live and work happily together, is more and more appropriate.

Mr Bruton has put his finger on one of the most crucial, but under discussed aspects of the current EU Inter Governmental Conference to revise the Maastricht Treaty. If the EU is to function effectively as a post nationalist (not post national), entity it must be able to attract support from national citizenships who are all too often alienated by the loss of democratic access and control of its political decision making.

The same international forces that are stripping power away from the nation state are also eroding citizens' powers.

But if they are to be restored the question of the international political setting has to be addressed. It will be necessary to break the connection between the single allegiance model of the nation state, which is usually encased in a single, uniform, essentialist identity, and to substitute a much more open, contingent and multiple set of identities ranging through local, regional, national to supranational and even global dimensions.

One of the great arguments running through the IGC touches on these matters. It forms part of the strong British Conservative defence of the nation state, its resistance to surrendering their exclusivist conception of sovereignty represented by the crown in parliament, and the insistence that inter governmental rather than federal methods be used.

The Danes have also a problem with the idea of multiple citizenships and identities, for fear that they would undercut their own nationality or national citizenship. A clause stating that European citizenship would be supplementary would help that.

On the wider plane of diasporas, it can be seen that they become, in Cohen's words, "particularly adaptive forms of social organisation" in a world where globalisation has removed the genie of social identity from the bottle of the territorial nation state.

The Irish political class are very slow to respond. Just as the host nation states may feel challenged by the erosion of single loyalties and allegiances, so also do the home societies and polities. This may be seen in the suspicion and cynicism with which many politicians greet demands that the electoral franchise be extended to the diaspora and their reaction to Mrs Robinson's attempts to bring the issue into the public eye.

Emigration was and is a safety valve, a guarantee of social stability and conservative values. But if the advantages of the diaspora are to be harnessed in the coming century, it will require a much more generous response by official Ireland than has so far been the case.

* Robin Cohen, "Diasporas and the nation state: from victims to challengers", International Affairs, 72 (3), July, 1996.