When governments say Diaspora: Transnational practices of citizenship, nationalism and sovereignty in Croatia and former Yugoslavia

Abstract

A wide range of non-state actors are in competition to monopolize the discourse of diaspora: migrant association leaders, minority organizations, lobbies etc. But the efficiency of the diaspora discourse is also increasingly harnessed by governments. Yet what does it mean, for governments, to formulate claims of sovereignty over populations who reside precisely outside the very borders that legitimate them? The argument developed in this dissertation is that “diaspora” should be understood as a ‘speech act’, a performative utterance which enables transnational political practices that could otherwise not be justified in a normative structure of world politics, dominated by the imperatives of territorial sovereignty. The empirical analysis of the dissertation focuses on former Yugoslavia and contemporary Croatia. After a theoretical discussion of the concept of diaspora, a first part of the dissertation focuses on the heterogeneous categorizations of Croatian populations abroad, the emergence of the question of “emigration” as a problem of government throughout the 20^th century and the evolution of differentiated transnational practices of power to reach out to populations abroad. In the second part of the thesis, the dissertation explores how, in the nineties, the merging of bureaucratic categories and state practices into the category of ‘diaspora’ has been instrumental in justifying (1) the homeland’s tapping into the diasporic groups’ political, economic and humanitarian resources for the 1991-1995 war; (2) the reshuffling of the ethnic Croatian/Serb composition of the citizenry through diaspora citizenship, and the tactical electoral strategies through diaspora voting rights and representation in the parliament and (3) the de facto deterritorialized annexation of parts of neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina.