Laurie A. Brand

EXPATRIATES AND HOME STATE POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

Abstract
Recent scholarship on diaspora-host state relations has increasingly examined the many dimensions of the involvement of communities abroad on the sending state. Much of this literature has focused on economic, political, and sociocultural remittances. This article shifts the focus to more structural elements as it seeks to read in various sending state institutions the very presence of a diaspora. Examples of institutional developments dating from independence to the present in government ministries, political parties, electoral and nationality laws, national boundaries, and sovereignty itself, are taken from the cases of Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia. The analysis is intended to serve as a first step in establishing a new research program aimed at discerning the deeper structural impact of diasporas on state formation in the sending country.

Recent scholarship on diaspora-host state relations has increasingly examined the influence of communities abroad on the sending state. Much of this literature has focused on economic, political, and socio-cultural engagement, most of the effects of which are easily observed, such as sending financial remittances or involvement in conflict or post-conflict situations. This article seeks to lay the groundwork for exploring what are often less obvious effects of the presence of a diaspora. Specifically, it is concerned with possible implications of the existence of communities abroad for key aspects of state formation, most immediately, the nature, composition, or configuration of home state institutions, broadly defined.

In a number of critical ways, diasporas are not comparable to other external actors. First, not only are they not unitary actors, they also consist of a series of sometimes far-flung, often multi-generational and heterogeneous communities, each composed of individuals or groups whose interest in, identification with, and loyalty to the sending country cannot be assumed. Second, diasporas are not represented by a single or even limited set of groups, and therefore have no single leader or leadership. Thus, they are not manageable or controllable in the same way a small set of organizations may be: interests will be multiple and perhaps contradictory, just as they will likely vary over time. That said, the home-state leaders’ view of the diaspora communities may not admit to such lack of coherence, leading them to behave toward the diaspora as if it were a unity actor, with all the policy missteps that such a conceptualization may trigger. Finally, the presence of co-nationals or co-ethnics inside the sending state to whom diaspora members are connected may mean that diasporan actors are able to count on insiders to deliver or amplify their demands or concerns, and vice versa. Taken together, these characteristics make diasporas more difficult, but also potentially more interesting, to study than other actors external to the sending state.

To begin the exploration of the impact of the existence of diasporas on sending-state structures, the discussion will first review the most relevant threads of the existing literature on diaspora-homeland engagement. The presentation then turns to examine several sets of state institutions from Middle East North Africa (MENA) countries with a long history of significant migration.¹ These institutions have (been) developed in countries that manifest notable variation in regime type, location of their most important diaspora communities, length of history of modern migration, and degree of overt state involvement in the affairs of their diaspora communities. While the existing literature on migration in the MENA region has discussed the history and functioning of some of these institutions, the presentation here explores the differential ways in which one may “read” the existence of a diaspora in them, as well as what these institutions and others may suggest regarding less obvious influences of the existence of migrant communities abroad on state structure. The article concludes with suggestions of directions for further research.

THE LITERATURE ON DIASPORA ENGAGEMENT

Much of the literature on the political impact of expatriates on the homeland—as opposed to work on diaspora community lobbying of the host state²—has focused on the nature of diaspora involvement in conflict and post-conflict state rebuilding.³ However, a small number of cases—with Ireland,⁴ Sri Lanka,⁵ and Somalia⁶ prominent among them—account for most of the studies, and they have generated diverse conclusions. For example, some large-N studies, such as those of Collier and Hoeffler, suggest a correlation between civil war (or its reigniting) and the existence of large diasporas,⁷ while other studies have shown that diaspora groups can become active advocates for peace.⁸ Using the Sri Lankan case, Orujela shows that, depending upon the ways in which the diaspora engages in homeland politics, it can either reproduce the grievances that led to the initial conflict or mitigate the elements that fueled it.⁹ Koinova, who has examined a number of diaspora examples, uses social mobilization theory to explain patterns of sustained versus episodic involvement of conflict-generated diasporas in sending state politics,¹⁰ while Baser, looking at Turkish and Kurdish cases, explores the phenomenon of homeland conflicts that are imported into the diaspora.¹¹

Perhaps the oldest and most common topic in the literature on diasporan involvement in or impact on the state of origin is that of remittances. Here, financial and in-kind remittances have received the most attention: monies and consumer goods going to households, financial donations to communities in the sending state, and capital investment in real estate and businesses. A large literature has also been produced on factors shaping migrants’ remittance levels. Increasingly, it focuses on the degree to which such flows may contribute to sending-state economic development through serving as a critical supplement to, if not a substitute for, foreign economic assistance.¹²

Scholars and policymakers have also been interested in social remittances, such as diasporan expertise mobilized by programs like the United Nations Development Program’s TOKTEN (Transfer of Knowledge Through Expatriate Nationals), to aid home-state governments, firms, or NGOs. Looking at what may also be conceived of as a form of political remittances of benefit to the home state, Tsourapas has explored sending-state use of labor migration by its nationals as an instrument of soft power in the service of regional foreign policy goals.¹³ Another example of what has been called social or political remittances is the less tangible transfer to the sending society of values and practices learned in the diaspora. Here, while one can imagine other forms of impact, the emphasis has been on the degree to which extended residence in democratic countries may lead migrants to advocate for greater rights and freedoms in their authoritarian countries of origin.¹⁴

Thus, while the literature on migrant communities abroad has grown exponentially in recent years, and many of the research questions touch on the impact they have on state-institutional development, to date there has been no sustained research focusing specifically on the impact of diasporas on broader sending-state institutional development.

EXPLORING THE DOMESTIC IMPACT OF THE EXISTENCE OF A DIASPORA

In the search for insights into the potential broader structural effect of diasporas, two potentially fruitful sources are the literatures on sanctions and on foreign aid.¹⁵ The example of Iraq, which suffered under a punishing international sanctions regime for more than twenty years, is quite instructive: the structural impact of the sanctions can be seen in changes in the class structure (the destruction of the middle class and dramatic expansion of abject poverty), in the development and functioning of the economy (the decline of the state sector, the gutting of the once generous services of the welfare state, and the rise of private, informal, profiteering activities), and in the bases of citizenship and women’s rights (with a revival of tribal and more conservative values).

Analyses of foreign aid have also explored the impact of external assistance on receiving-state domestic structures through, among other means: strengthening authoritarian capabilities (by providing goods and training to the military and security services); helping give rise to new socioeconomic classes or class fractions (through promoting what has often been crony capitalism tied to aid projects); empowering the NGO sector (through various forms of training and technical support); and reshaping economic production patterns by enabling states to avoid producing some goods or, in effect, forcing them into particular kinds of agriculture, industrialization, or private sector development. There have also been the high profile democracy-promotion initiatives of the United States under various names and guises over the years, but aside from some limited initiatives in gender equality (such as electoral quotas), it is difficult to point to concrete domestic structural impacts. That is, unless one considers the invasion of Iraq as an example, in which case the disastrous effects of, among other things, the de-Ba’thification policies on the Iraqi bureaucracy and military, continue to be brutally felt today.

Thus, these literatures suggest a wide range of possible influences of external actors and policies on internal structures, ranging from changing class relations and the reorganization of the role of the state in the economy, to basic questions of citizenship, identity, and sovereignty. All of these are critical areas to explore if we are to reach a fuller understanding of the scope of the diaspora-homeland relationship; however, they are also difficult to address given the current state of the literature. Therefore, as a first step in laying the bases for future work on the deeper, or less obvious, structural implications of a diaspora presence, the discussion now turns to constructing categories of institutions in which the presence of a diaspora can most easily be discerned. In other words, the institutions discussed in the seven sections that follow either would not exist or would likely look quite different, were there no communities of nationals abroad.

INSTITUTIONS ESTABLISHED TO DEAL SPECIFICALLY WITH THE DIASPORA: THE AMICALES

The last ten years have seen a dramatic expansion in the literature analyzing state efforts to establish separate institutions to deal with expatriates, whether this means courting their remittances, providing language and religion instructors to maintain cultural ties, giving them the right to vote so as to reinforce national political identity, or surveilling them with the intent of preempting possible opposition.¹⁶ The presence of a diaspora does not in and of itself explain the existence of these institutions—many countries do not set up such structures—but it is nonetheless a sine qua non for them. In the case of the MENA region, the amicales or friendship societies are, therefore, the most obvious place to begin.

The first amicales grew out of the Algerian model of the Fédération de France du Front de Libération Nationale (FFFLN), which had been established during the Algerian revolution (1954-62). Although its official goals were to defend the large worker communities in the metropole, in fact the FFFLN sought to mobilize its members in support of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in its struggle for both political dominance in the communities and ultimate independence from France. After independence, the FFFLN was transformed into the Amicales des Algériens en Europe, again with formal goals related to immigrant integration and defense, but also with successive regimes’ clear intent to monitor immigrant political activity.

In the case of Tunisia, the first amicales were founded between 1956 and 1960 in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, and Nice. Established in the immediate wake of independence, they often had their headquarters on consular grounds and were barely veiled cells of the Parti Socialiste Destourien (PSD), the only legal political party in Tunisia at the time.¹⁷ As extensions of the state apparatus, their primary responsibility was to monitor Tunisian workers, many of whom had been involved in labor demonstrations and protests, in order to preserve Tunisia’s reputation as a source of reliable and compliant workers.

In the Moroccan case, the Amicales des travailleurs et commerçants were established in 1973 at a conference in Paris of Europe-based Moroccan ambassadors and consuls. Their official role was to initiate contacts with the consulates, the administrations of the two countries, and, in general, all the bodies concerned with the social situation of Moroccans abroad. However, as with their Tunisian and Algerian counterparts, the Moroccan amicales’ broader goals were to surveil the diaspora communities and encourage the migrants to continue to send home remittances.

Thus, in all of these cases, amicales were new institutions with a primarily security rationale. They required an extension of state bureaucracy, generally through embassies and consulates and thus as part of the respective ministries of foreign affairs. However, they also involved further activation of either the regimes’ single-party extensions of the state (FLN, PSD) or, in the case of Morocco, political parties sponsored by the monarchy. Most of the activity of the amicales did take place outside the home countries’ borders, but the institutions involved represented an expansion of state structure and authority.

GOVERNMENT MINISTRIES: MINISTRIES OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

In addition to institutions established especially to reach out to, surveil, and control the expatriate communities, ministries of foreign affairs (MFA) are generally the institutions that are the most immediately and fully responsible for the administrative affairs of citizens travelling or living abroad. An examination of several of these ministries’ histories and structures offers evidence, both direct and indirect, of the impact of the existence of a diaspora.

In the case of Lebanon, the MFA had as part of its official title “and the Interests of the Lebanese Abroad” until May 1942; then in December 1946 “and Expatriates” replaced it. Given the balance among confessional communities that underpinned Lebanon’s political system, maintaining ties with the large number of Lebanese and their descendants in the diaspora was a continuing concern of the political elite. In 1989, the post-civil war reconfiguring of state institutions to reflect the changed domestic sectarian power balance led to a shift in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs away from decades of Maronite Christian control to that of the Shi’i community. It also led to the establishment of a short-lived, separate Ministry of Expatriates, headed by a Shi’i minister, although this ministry was later reintegrated into the MFA as the General Directorate of Expatriates. Nonetheless, the continuing importance of the diaspora for Lebanon can be read in what would otherwise be a surprisingly extensive set of embassies and consulates for a country with a population of less than five million: 138 embassies and consulates in 100 countries.¹⁸

Another small country that established an extensive consular network is Tunisia. The PSD’s view of the importance of the expatriate worker communities’ led the regime to establish what amounted to one consular office for every 11,000 Tunisians. Consulates in Paris, Lyon, and Marseille were opened between 1956 and 1964; then, with the further growth of the diaspora communities in France, additional second-tier establishments were opened between 1970 and 1975. In recognition of the continuing efforts to place workers abroad, the Ninth Development Plan (1997–2001) called for a further enlargement of the consular network. ¹⁹

In the case of Jordan, the employment of a significant percentage of the national labor force abroad—as high as 30 percent by the early 1980s—led the MFA to establish a dedicated expatriate section in 1981. Around the same time, labor attachés began to be appointed to Jordanian embassies in countries like Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, which hosted large numbers of Jordanian migrants.²⁰ Today, the name of the ministry bears witness to the importance of Jordan’s expatriate workforce: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates. However, there is nothing in the actual structure of the ministry that institutionally privileges expatriates: the work is organized according to countries, regions, or administrative functions, such that expatriates are dealt with through individual-country bilateral relationships, not as a single or set of groups.

In Morocco, the combination of the official recognition of the importance and increasing family nature of the Moroccan presence abroad, a gradual political opening, and growing calls from expatriates themselves seeking greater recognition, led to the creation in 1990 of a separate Ministry of the Moroccan Community Abroad. It was charged with dealing with the communities’ needs outside the realm of employment, which was to continue to be the purview of the Ministry of Labor. Unfortunately, turf wars between this ministry and the MFA, from which many of its responsibilities had devolved, let to a downgrading, then a freezing, and finally a reintegration of its functions into the MFA by 1997. In 2002, the position of minister-delegate to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation was created, charged with the affairs of the community abroad, but there has been no attempt to revive a separate ministry.

GOVERNMENT MINISTRIES: MINISTRIES OF LABOR

In the case of Egypt, the name of the ministry has changed over the years from the Ministry of Labor to the Ministry of Labor Power, and in recent years “and Immigration” (al-hijra)²¹ was added. Its purview included a range of issues related to labor opportunities abroad (in Jordan in particular), including providing information to those who had been forced from their work as a result of violence or war in Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. With the announcement of the Sherif Ismail government in September 2015, a new Ministry for Emigration and Affairs of Egyptians Abroad was separated from the Ministry of Labor Power and Emigration. However, the fact that its chief, Nabila Makram `Abd al-Shahid, holds the title of minister of state rather than minister, suggests a less than fully elaborated administrative structure for the new ministry. According to news reports, the ministry’s aim is to “coordinate communication between the government and expatriates” and to work to “eliminate any hurdles” that Egyptians face abroad. The new ministry also seeks to increase foreign investments in Egypt and strengthen cooperation between Egyptian businesses and expatriates.²² That said, news on the website of the Ministry of Labor Power indicates that it, too, continues to be involved with Egyptian workers abroad.²³

In Tunisia, as the government realized that its domestic development policies were insufficient to reduce unemployment, a set of state offices was established beginning in the mid-1960s to deal with labor migration. As a result, in the Second Plan (1965–68) the number of employment offices was projected to increase by ten.²⁴ Then in 1967, the Office de la Formation Professionnelle et de l’Emploi (OFPE) was created and charged with, among other responsibilities, determining the needs of countries likely to be interested in attracting Tunisian workers. The OFPE was tasked with selecting those who would go abroad and instructing them in the customs and practices of the receiving country in order to facilitate their adaptation. It was also responsible for monitoring these workers through a network of social attachés to make sure that their remittances flowed back to their families in Tunisia.²⁵ In 1973, the name of the institution was changed to l’Office des Travailleurs Tunisiens à l’Etranger de l’Emploi et de la Formation Professionnelle, thereby signaling a renewed state focus on emigration as a means of solving the country’s unemployment and labor market problems.

In 1988, shortly after Prime Minister Zayn al-`Abdin Ben `Ali overthrew President Habib Bourguiba, the Office des Tunisiens à l’Etranger (OTE) was established. Today it is housed under the Ministry of Social Affairs and charged with the responsibility for tracking and assisting Tunisians residing abroad. It offers a range of services during their summer holiday returns to Tunisia, but also in their countries of residence through the embassies and consulates. There is also a separate Ministry of Professional Training and Employment which, among other tasks, is charged with seeking out and evaluating opportunities for placing Tunisian workers abroad as well as reintegrating them upon their definitive return.²⁶

Finally, in the case of Jordan, a Directorate of Jordanians Working Abroad was established in the Ministry of Labor to replace an earlier Directorate of Expatriates. It played a major role in the post-1991 Gulf War period in assisting Jordanian workers and businessmen in submitting requests for compensation following their expulsion from the Gulf states.²⁷

The impact of MENA state concern with the importance of migration, and by extension with the presence of diasporas, is thus clear in the creation of new ministries or bureaus or the extension of existing ones. Yet equally clear is the variation among cases and over time in the form, content, and role of these ministries and associated structures, not only for the diaspora, but also for the sending state and its population. That said, this limited set of examples suggests that their economic role—supporting or expanding remittance flows and reducing domestic unemployment—was paramount, and thus that seeking further or deeper structural impacts related to remittance flows and the internal labor market are important lines of further inquiry.

CIVILIAN BUREAUCRACY EMPLOYMENT

Lebanon provides the clearest example of the direct impact of the existence of a diaspora on the formation and staffing of state institutions. When in 1943 the French began to prepare for the restoration of constitutional life in the country, there was an attempt to include the (overwhelmingly Christian) Lebanese abroad in calculations of how to apportion seats among the different confessional communities. Ultimately, a compromise was secured in the formula of six Christian to five Muslim seats in the parliament.²⁸ The National Pact of 1943 further reinforced this formula: based on the results of the 1932 census, which, by including an estimate of diaspora members determined that there was a slight Christian majority in the country, the 6–5 Christian-Muslim formula for the parliament was applied throughout the civil service and the government. Indeed, the acceptance of a slight Christian majority because of the presence of the diaspora was also the basis of the National Pact’s provision that a Maronite would be president, while the prime minister and speaker of parliament would be Sunni and Shi’i Muslims respectively, and that the command of the army and control of the critical Ministry of Foreign Affairs would go to Christians.

While the development of the hegemony of a political system anchored in confessionalism cannot itself be attributed to the presence of large numbers of Lebanese abroad, the intertwining of diaspora composition with the confessional system has had long-term politico-structural consequences for the country. The Lebanese leadership insisted upon including the diaspora in its only national census, and agreed to build a post-independence political system based on a sectarianism that the diaspora kept “balanced” between Muslims and Christians. These two factors have given the very existence of the diaspora a role in the constitution and composition of state institutions across types and levels of staffing since independence.

PARLIAMENT AND VOTING

It is in the right to vote and in the form of parliamentary representation that some of the most obvious changes in state institutional structure reflecting the existence of a diaspora have occurred in recent years. While the first examples of MENA out-of-country voting (OCV) date to the 1970s and 1980s, provisions for various forms of this right have come to be offered or expanded by more and more of the region’s states, with the Arab uprisings of 2011 a particularly important trigger.

In 1976, Algeria became the first MENA country to accord its nationals abroad the right to participate in elections back home. However, emigrants’ numbers in comparison with the rest of the population were not large enough to make a difference in outcomes. Indeed, the goal behind the extension of the vote was probably that of asserting regime claims to the loyalty of the Algerian community in France in the ongoing battle over the legacy of the 132-year colonization and liberation struggle, as well as the regime’s desire to surveil the community to suppress or discipline any dissent.²⁹ Nevertheless, in the presidential elections held in 1995, during some of the worst days of the bloody insurgency that plagued Algeria in the 1990s, the high level of expatriate participation sent a powerful signal to forces inside the country that Algerians abroad supported finding a means of ending the violence. Two years later, in 1997, Algeria modified its OCV provisions to adopt the model of establishing extraterritorial electoral districts: six districts (two of which were in France, each with two representatives) with a total of eight seats. The number of expatriate seats has remained constant since then, even though the total number of seats in the parliament has risen from 380 in 1997 to 389 in 2002 and 462 in 2012.

Turning to Tunisia, shortly after assuming the presidency in November 1987, Ben `Ali extended the right to vote in presidential elections and referenda to Tunisians residing abroad. Their first opportunity to exercise this franchise came in April 1989, as consulates and embassies were turned into balloting stations. Following Ben `Ali’s overthrow in January 2011, and in response to calls from within Tunisia as well as from the diaspora communities, on 3 August 2011, Order 1088 created eighteen seats (out of a total of 217) in six new, extraterritorial electoral districts: two for the large community in France; one each for Germany and Italy; one for all those living in the Western Hemisphere as well as the rest of the countries of Europe; and one for Arab countries and the rest of the world.³⁰ In the November 2011 elections that followed, the Islamist al-Nahda party won nine of the eighteen expatriate seats, thereby contributing significantly to its securing a plurality in the Constituent Assembly and giving its representatives a more powerful voice in the ensuing political transition than would have otherwise been the case.

Morocco first inscribed the presence of its diaspora in domestic politics in 1984. In January of that year, a draft electoral law increased the number of members in the Chamber of Representatives by thirty-nine, five of whom were to be elected by and represent Moroccans residing abroad according to extraterritorial electoral districts, similar to those that Tunisia and Algeria now have. Although Moroccan migrants have continued to have the right to vote in referenda, the extraterritorial electoral districts and their seats were eliminated in the electoral law of 1993.³¹ In the context of the Arab spring of 2011, King Muhammad VI proposed several constitutional amendments, one of which enshrined full citizenship rights for diaspora Moroccans, but subsequent legislation failed to reinstate the direct parliamentary representation and expatriate voting provided for in the 1984 law.³²

In the case of Egypt, following the ouster of President Husni Mubarak in February 2011, activists in the diaspora who had long sought the franchise were reenergized. No law or article of the constitution had previously forbidden OCV; and in early November 2011, after many demonstrations, much lobbying and even several legal suits, the Ministry of Justice agreed to a constitutional amendment to allow Egyptians abroad to participate in parliamentary elections.³³ While no changes were made to designate separate parliamentary seats to represent them, it is worth noting that expatriate ballots accounted for twenty-five percent of Muhammad Mursi’s nearly 889,000-vote margin over challenger Ahmad Shafiq in the 2012 presidential elections.

In Lebanon, after years of lobbying for OCV, legal provisions (not including expatriate- designated seats) were finally put in place in 2008, but delays prevented their implementation in time for the 2009 parliamentary elections. The greatest proponents of extending this right historically had been Christian politicians and parties, because, as discussed above, they expected that their purportedly larger numbers in the diaspora would give them additional clout.³⁴ It must then have been a great disappointment that, out of a diaspora population claimed to number in the millions, only 10,201 Lebanese expatriates registered to vote from abroad.³⁵

While the number of countries that have implemented OCV has expanded dramatically, voting from abroad is still not a right that is accorded to all diasporas. Just as important, as this handful of MENA examples has shown, the form and timing of its implementation vary significantly, and are often related to changes in regime or shifting domestic political alliances. These institutional developments offer some of the clearest evidence of the impact of sending-state domestic politics on state structural responses to the existence of migrant communities abroad.

POLITICAL PARTIES

Closely related to the importance of OCV is the question of the transnational development or survival of political parties. Communities abroad have often served as either an incubator or refuge for groups that might otherwise have been crushed by an authoritarian regime. Survival in the diaspora may then position them to play a key role in the sending state if there is a change or opening in the political system.

In the case of Tunisia, al-Nahda, which emerged in the late 1980s, had its origins the Mouvement de la Tendence Islamique (MTI), which had itself grown out of the Groupement Islamique en France, established in 1980. It was led by Rachid al-Ghannouchi, who had previously led the Union of Islamic Organizations in France and who later continued his exile in London. Repressed in the latter days of Bourguiba’s presidency, the MTI counted a large number of Tunisian students abroad among its adherents. Much of this support carried over into support for al-Nahda after its founding. Another Tunisian political figure who operated from abroad was Moncef Marzouki, who had gone into exile in France because of state harassment owing to his human rights work, but continued to run the political party he had founded in 2001, the Congress for the Republic.

Following the overthrow of Ben `Ali, both Ghannouchi and Marzouki returned to Tunisia as central figures in the political transition: Marzouki as president, and Ghannouchi as the eminence grise of al-Nahda, which enjoyed significant support in the Tunisian diaspora. Indeed, headed by long-term exiles skilled in cultivating powerful networks, no other Tunisian political party was in a position to operate, organize, and collect money in the Tunisian expatriate communities as was al-Nahda, whose important impact on the elections for the Constituent Assembly and hence the larger transition was noted above.

Turning to Jordan, there is no question that the regime’s fraught relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB)³⁶ is directly related both to the MB’s significant appeal among Jordanians of Palestinian origin, who constitute about half of the kingdom’s population, and to its ties with the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, Hamas. This is not to say that absent Hamas, the Jordanian MB would be free from outside influences, or that its relationship with the regime would be unproblematic, but for reasons that the discussion in the next section will further detail, the shared Palestinian component—an example of a complex diaspora constituency—has had significant implications for the strength of the MB inside the kingdom.

Finally, although the Lebanese case is not quite comparable, it is worth mentioning because a number of Lebanese political parties have long had strong relations with emigrants. In the mandate and early post-independence periods, both the largely Greek Orthodox Syrian Social Nationalist Party, which was founded by Antun Sa`adeh, who had himself spent many years living abroad, and the overwhelmingly Maronite Kata’ib Party saw in the Lebanese diaspora communities a source of political and economic power. More recently, the importance of diaspora financial support for Hizballah, Amal, as well as the Kata’ib and the Lebanese Forces has at times been asserted. Clearly, these are not examples of parties whose activities or actions were outlawed in Lebanon; however, because the communities abroad have historically offered them support, it is reasonable to conclude that this assistance has enabled them to operate inside the country and affect Lebanese domestic politics in a way that they otherwise could not or might not have.

CITIZENSHIP/NATIONALITY

The sending states’ concerns with maintaining a degree of control over their diaspora communities have been clear in many of the institutional examples discussed so far. One of the most direct ways of asserting such an official prerogative, or what is in fact extraterritorial sovereignty, is through legislation or constitutional provisions regarding citizenship.

Lebanon is one of the more complex examples largely because of the changing confessional composition of the diaspora and the home state. The Treaty of Lausanne (1923) entrusted the successor states to the Ottoman Empire with the responsibility of conferring citizenship upon their residents. According to Lebanese law, those who had migrated—estimated then at half a million, a majority of whom were Maronite Christians—could opt for either Lebanese or Turkish citizenship. The response, however, was limited.³⁷ With independence, the question of citizenship remained sensitive, so a law promulgated at the end of 1946 extended the deadline for diasporans to claim it. This aspect of Lebanese nationality law, as well as its generous dual citizenship provisions which also date back to the Mandate period, can be clearly tied to the strategic depth that the diaspora is understood to constitute for (historically, primarily the Christian) domestic confessional communities.

For Tunisia, as economic developments in the early 1970s led France (as well as other Western European countries) to close the door to further immigration, an increasing number of Tunisians were choosing to settle permanently abroad. The country’s leadership, therefore, had two choices: to force diaspora members to renounce their Tunisian nationality if they acquired another citizenship; or to allow them to retain their Tunisian nationality while still benefiting from the new one. It was concluded that relaxing the long-standing exclusivity of membership in the political community afforded the Tunisian state a better chance of maintaining relations with its nationals than a strict insistence upon unique national membership would have.³⁸ As a result, the law was amended in 1973 to allow for dual citizenship. Since then, the only modification in the dual nationality provisions has been in the 2013 Constitution’s Article 74, which requires that a dual national commit to renouncing his/her second nationality if s/he runs for the presidency and wins.

In Jordan, the existence of a diaspora goes to the very heart of the country’s post-1948 self-definition. However—and here the Jordanian case is unique—it is not, largely, a diaspora of native East Bank Jordanian origin, but instead a Jordanian diaspora community that is overwhelmingly of Palestinian origin. The addition of the Palestinian component to the country’s population owed directly to the 1948 Palestine War: the fighting created more than 700,000 Palestinian refugees, some of whom came to reside on the East Bank, but it also opened the way for the Hashemite Kingdom to annex, along with its indigenous and then-new refugee population, a part of the former Palestine Mandate that came to be called the West Bank. Indeed, the regime was eager to embrace all of these Palestinians as full subjects of the monarchy. Hence, the Nationality Law of 1954 stated: “any person who, not being Jewish, possessed Palestinian nationality before 15 May 1948 and was a regular resident in [Jordan] between 20 December 1949 and 16 February 1954” was classified as a Jordanian national. As a result, Jordanians of Palestinian origin (JPs) came to constitute an overwhelming majority of the kingdom’s citizens.

King `Abdallah I’s intention was to foreclose any irredentist claims on land or people that might be asserted by another Arab leader or state, but his enfranchisement was unable to prevent these new Jordanians from viewing themselves as a part of another people, the broader diaspora of Palestinians dispossessed by the establishment of the state of Israel. The existence of this alternative national identity became increasingly sensitive in the 1960s with the reemergence of Palestinian nationalism and the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO): the growth of its popularity led to competition between it and Jordan’s King Husayn for the loyalty of the JP sector of the kingdom’s population. This contradiction of allegiances was one factor behind the Jordanian civil war (Black September) in 1970.

As time passed, large numbers of JPs migrated to the Arab oil-producing states in search of better jobs and to support families back home, whether on the East Bank or the West Bank, which Israel had occupied as a result of the June 1967 War. The remittances these migrants sent back, as well as the extent to which their work outside the kingdom alleviated unemployment pressures, gave these diaspora JPs significant economic weight. In the summer of 1985, in the first of a series of government-organized conferences held for expatriates in the Jordanian capital, Amman, the participants raised the demand for dual citizenship.³⁹ Given that, at the time, the regime was seeking greater financial investment from the diaspora for an ambitious West Bank development plan, it is probably not coincidental that the Nationality Law of 1987 allowed for dual nationality.

Another subsequent change in the law is also relevant to this discussion. Most Arab nationality laws do not (except under exceptional circumstances) accord women the right to pass their nationality to their children. However, after a great deal of civil society organizing and protest, in November 2014 a law was passed which, while not conferring citizenship, nonetheless provided for some “service-related privileges” for the (non-citizen) children of Jordanian women married to non-Jordanians.⁴⁰ The state’s continued refusal to offer full citizenship to these children owes to the fact that the majority of the non-Jordanian fathers are diaspora Palestinians (not JPs) married to JP women, and thus to the fallout from the 1970 civil war, after which the divide between East Bank Jordanians and JPs began to play a much more salient role in Jordanian politics. Various forms of subtle discrimination began to be practiced against the JP sector of the population, although they were never enshrined in law. To the extent that such policies aimed at halting greater JP integration into the kingdom are formally acknowledged, they have been justified in terms of preventing the weakening of the Palestinians’ right to return to Palestine. In fact, however, this discrimination seeks to restrict the growth in the number of JP citizens, and derives from East Banker fears of being overwhelmed by the JP sector of the population.⁴¹

In Algeria, the deep sensitivity regarding questions of nationality and identity owes to the long and brutal settler colonial past during which Algeria was annexed to France, and to the fact that many Algerians at the time of independence, whether abroad or in the country, held French citizenship. According to France’s ius soli nationality law, the children born to those living in France were then also French citizens. However, from the point of view of Algiers, the diaspora communities in France and elsewhere were regarded as Algerian, a claim that was reinforced with the 1976 extension to diaspora members of the right to vote from abroad, discussed above.

Nevertheless, in February 2016, amendments to two articles of the constitution challenged this relationship and underlined the continuing sensitivity vis-à-vis the (overwhelmingly France-resident) communities abroad. Article 51, addressing equal access to employment, makes singular Algerian nationality a precondition for the assumption of senior (although non-specified) government posts. Article 73 states that, among other requirements, a candidate for the presidency must: not have a foreign nationality; have only native Algerian citizenship; prove that his/her parents have native Algerian citizenship; prove that his/her spouse has solely Algerian nationality; and prove that he/she has been a permanent resident of Algeria for at least ten years prior to declaring his/her candidacy. It is worth noting that this was the third set of constitutional revisions in less than fourteen years that was not put to a popular referendum, thus excluding Algerians resident abroad from the right to participate in approving or rejecting the changes. In this episode, the sensitivity regarding national belonging led to a move away from an approach of inclusivity to one of depriving those holding dual nationality of certain citizenship rights, a development that was met with great consternation in the diaspora.⁴²

TERRITORIAL SOVEREIGNTY/INDEPENDENCE

For some countries in the MENA region, independence might have come much later, or the borders of the sovereign country might have been quite different absent the diaspora. For example, in the case of Algeria, it was from its community of migrant workers in France that the first calls for independence from the metropole came. Indeed, these communities were such important sources of financial support and external political lobbying for the FLN that it referred to them as the seventh wilāya or province, in addition to the six in Algeria itself. In Lebanon, it appears that the lobbying of French colonial authorities by Maronites in France had some influence on the drawing of the Mandate’s (later independent Lebanon’s) borders to include Muslim majority regions beyond historical Mount Lebanon.⁴³

Jordan’s situation with regard to the diaspora and national sovereignty is extremely complicated. Had an organization like the PLO not emerged laying claim to the political loyalty of all Palestinians regardless of place of residence or citizenship, the importance of a Palestinian diaspora for Jordan would have been of a different type or order. But Jordan had not only welcomed the refugees in 1948; by 1950 it had annexed part of historic Palestine. Thus, much of Jordanian state policy toward its Palestinian-origin citizens since the founding of the PLO in 1964 has been a direct or indirect result of the fact that a significant part of Jordan’s population was part of another nation’s—indeed a stateless one’s—diaspora, and that Jordan’s claim to the West Bank as part of its national territory was implicitly contested by the political representative of the broader Palestinian diaspora.

When in July 1988 King Husayn shocked his subjects with his announcement of Jordan’s administrative and political disengagement (fakk al-irtibāt) from the (since 1967 Israeli-occupied) West Bank, analysts pointed to concern over the possible spillover into Jordan of the Palestinian intifada, which had begun the previous December, as a key motivating factor. However, this dramatic move is comprehensible only against the background of Husayn’s long-standing political competition with the PLO, and the dual or conflicting political identities among JPs. The impact of this dramatic move cannot be overstated, for through it, the king both relinquished Jordan’s claim to part of its national territory and deprived of citizenship the hundreds of thousands of JPs whose normal place of residence was the West Bank. Thus, the politics and loyalty of West Bank-resident JPs, members of a complex diaspora, were central factors in reshaping the borders of the Hashemite Kingdom as well as in triggering a staggering reduction in the number of its nationals. It is hard to imagine a more disfiguring impact of diaspora relations with the home state sovereignty and territory than this.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

As this discussion makes clear, many different types of institutions bear the impact of the existence of a diaspora. The question, however, is how to proceed from a listing of the most easily observed effects to a deeper level. One initial way to organize the findings is to group these institutions according to: 1) if they are primarily a mechanism devised by the state to address the existence of the diaspora, or the product of non-state actors and 2) if should they be understood as a direct or indirect product of the existence of a diaspora. Using these criteria, the institutions discussed in this paper may be summarized in Table 1 below.

The greater population of the cells on the left of this matrix owes to the fact that much of what is most obvious in the realm of institutional development is, not surprisingly, initiated by the state, particularly in non-democratic political systems. It is when we move to the right side of the matrix that the populations diminish. Initiatives that come from outside the state sector may be more difficult to discern, or may also, as a result of the prevailing authoritarian systems of government in the region, have had trouble surviving. But to return to the problematique raised at the beginning, the larger question of the relationship between migration and political development goes well beyond the question of bureaus in a ministry of labor or employment that seeks to place workers abroad. What has been examined here, even in the boxes for “indirect effect” —the less obvious sources of structural change and the more diffuse forms of impact—does not begin to exhaust the directions future research may take.

For example, in the realm of the development of the state bureaucracy, as the earlier discussions of state institutions established in the diaspora indicated, security concerns were a driving force. This fact then raises the question of, to what extent the expansion and nature of the security state domestically may be attributable to the presence of a diaspora. In the case of Tunisia, we know that by the late 1990s, state security services’ harassment had left the Tunisian communities in Europe largely politically quiescent. One could reasonably hypothesize that such policies would have required an expansion in the size and functions of the Ministry of the Interior. Similarly, over the years, the Algerian state, in part through the amicales, surveilled the communities in Europe, especially in France. How important may the fact that Algerian diaspora communities counted many regime opponents have been for the subsequent development of the state security services?

Table 1. State and Non-State Initiated Institutions of Diaspora.

Jordan’s situation is somewhat different, in that the majority of its expatriates were living in the authoritarian states of the Gulf region where, unlike in France, political freedoms were already significantly circumscribed. Nevertheless, in the post-1970 period, the presence of a largely JP diaspora population that was more loyal to the PLO than to the Hashemites was one argument for an expansion in state security monitoring abroad. Relatedly, in the case of Morocco, it has long been contended that the Moroccan government deliberately targeted the Sousse and Rif regions to find potential migrants. This was certainly the case during the period of the French Protectorate, when these areas were labeled “le Maroc inutile.” If such a policy continued after independence, was this largely politically or economically motivated, particularly given the Rif’s history of rebellion? Finally, to bring this security sector-related discussion to the present, how important has the surveillance of communities abroad been for the development of state units engaged in cybersurveillance or harassment of anti-regime activists through social media?⁴⁴

Possible anti-regime agitation based in the diaspora is only one migration-related security issue. Another is the link between domestic stability and out-migration. For example, one could plausibly make the argument that, absent the significant out-movement of largely JPs, maintaining domestic stability in Jordan would have been more difficult, as the combination of a growing number of the un- and underemployed, many of whom additionally felt little political loyalty to the monarchy, could have led to serious social unrest. This “migration as economic safety-valve” argument can be usefully applied to all of the labor-exporting MENA countries, and a systematic counterfactual analysis could provide interesting avenues of inquiry regarding the broader structural impact of migration, including on such structures as the working class and organized labor. Indeed, the possibility of finding work abroad, combined with significant unemployment at home, would seem to work against the development of a strong labor movement, which is usually closely related to the development of the political left. Thus, what impact may the presence of a diaspora have had on labor movements or on leftist politics? In the case of Morocco, for example, the Union Marocaine de Travail (UMT), was closed by the regime in 1973; thereafter, the political left in Morocco remained active primarily though the communities in Europe.⁴⁵

The other side of the safety-valve argument is the impact of remittances. In each of these MENA states, remittances from the diaspora have supplemented hard currency reserves and helped to raise the overall standard of living. A careful re-examination of the large literature on remittances on individual country cases should, either directly or perhaps using counterfactual analysis, provide important insights into the many ways that the flow of remittances has affected state structures. For example, what kinds of domestic spending has the state been able to engage in as a result of the presence of remittances that it could not have in their absence, and what have the implications of that spending been for domestic political development?

Even more broadly, a number of official Jordanian reports in the 1970s claimed that imposing restrictions on labor outflows might negatively affect the level of support the kingdom enjoyed from the Gulf oil states, noting a close relationship between foreign aid receipts and the supply of labor.⁴⁶ In this way, an argument was being made that exporting people actually helped to cement ties with these states. Indeed, one part of the kingdom’s development strategy deliberately focused on cultivating human capital, with the understanding that many of those who graduated were not being prepared for the home labor market, but instead “for export.” Given that remittances are considered a form of economic rent, to what extent do the large Egyptian and Jordanian migrant populations in the Gulf states and the large North African populations in Europe constitute, through their remittances, a significant basis or driver of the rentier nature of their respective home states and economies?

Turning to more sociocultural or sociopolitical issues, several possible examples worthy of exploration suggest themselves. One concerns the role of Berber cultural activism in the diaspora, particularly in Europe, in reinforcing or supporting the drive for greater recognition of Berber languages (in the case of Morocco), in the formal recognition of Tamazight as a national language in the 2002 revision of the Algerian constitution, and in opposition politics more generally. Did the presence of large numbers of Berber language-speakers in the sizeable diaspora communities in France, a country to which both Morocco and Algeria look as a key political force in North African or Mediterranean politics, help pressure either leadership to make these changes? And farther to the east, what may have been the impact of the return to Egypt of large numbers of migrants from conservative Gulf states in expanding popular support for more conservative political parties?

Finally, there is the question of state sovereignty. The extension of dual citizenship, as well as the right to vote from abroad, both reshape the extent of state sovereignty, whether one is dealing with the sending or receiving state. Sovereignty has never been absolute—hence Krasner’s conceptualization of it as “organized hypocrisy”⁴⁷—but migration and its impact have certainly further reconfigured the bases of the state’s so-called “sovereign claim” to its citizens and its territory. No institution underlines this more forcefully, than the form of OCV that divides the world into extraterritorial electoral districts that are apportioned seats in a national assembly, as we saw in the case of Algeria, Morocco (1984–93), and Tunisia (2011–present). The broader salience for what on the surface is a shocking violation of host state sovereignty and an extension of home state sovereignty in a single institution is worth deeper theoretical and practical exploration.

All of these observed or suggested effects of the presence of diasporas raise critical questions for understanding state formation, regime maintenance, and socioeconomic development. All require in-depth research based on creative approaches to discerning the role and impact of factors far less obvious than the presence of a bureau in a Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the legalization of dual nationality. It is my hope that this paper will intrigue other students of international relations, comparative politics, political economy, citizenship, and migration, and serve as a starting point for exploring these and related questions in greater detail in the MENA region and beyond.

NOTES