Transnational Ethnic Communities: The Cases of Croatia, Israel, the Netherlands, and Slovenia

Dates: June 21-22, 2008
Call for Proposal Deadline: April 30, 2008
Location: Ljubljana, Slovenia
Website: www.inv.si/trans/index.html#2 

Objectives
People have always been migrating. It was not until mid-19th century that this basic human behaviour was surrounded with powerful ideologies of the nation-state and its concerns for population policies. Not only was there concern about the structure of home population, its physical, mental, racial, moral... and otherwise health; migration from the country was increasingly seen as a transgression, and immigration as danger. Throughout the 20th century in Europe, borders between states were contested, among other, on the grounds of ethnic affiliation of the population in disputed areas. Diasporic ethnic communities in the neighbouring states and in far-away places were established, or else invented, as ‘severed limbs’ of the national bodies that were seen as historically, linguistically and culturally pure and existing in a correct national spirit and form, while diasporic communities were seen as threatened by assimilation, degrading culture, loss of language, and loss of national consciousness. Diasporic ethnic communities invented their own histories that span from colonial ‘civilising missions’ to political persecution, to stories of dire hardship in the homeland that sent people on a quest for better life in masses.
In this conference, of special interest to us is the way contemporary nation-states manage the relationship between themselves and the communities they consider their ethnic diaspora. To quote Nina Glick Schiller, “‘Long distance nationalism’ can be defined as a set of ideas about belonging that link together people living in various geographic locations and motivates or justifies their taking action in relationship to an ancestral territory and its government.”
Our primary question therefore is, how do the nation-states reciprocate these ideas of belonging, the actions, and the ancestral notion? How do they invent and instigate, ideologically, legally and possibly financially manage, maintain and support the relationships with their diasporic communities?
To address this question within a framework of comparative evidence, we are inviting discussion on four separate cases: those of Croatia, Israel, the Netherlands, and Slovenia. The questions we are asking are, among other possible, these:

?? What is the history of a nation-state/diaspora case?
?? Which ideologies have dominated, and still dominate, the relationship?
?? How are these relationships legally encoded?
?? Which forms of mutuality exist between the national and the diasporic communities, and how are they sustained?
?? Which ideas and teleologies are being (re)produced in the relationship?