About the Greek Government’s Updated Strategic Plan for the Diaspora

To Whom it May Concern

Re. The Greek Government’s Updated Strategic Plan for the Diaspora

Installment I: What does “Diaspora” stand for, in the Strategic Plan for the Diaspora?

August 11, 2024

Earlier this summer, the Greek Department of Foreign Affairs made available in its website the government’s updated Strategic Plan for the Diaspora (referred from now on as “Plan”), seeking to elicit input from the interested public.

The document is exclusively in Greek, and represents, as some commentators have noted, an improved, ambitious programmatic document of goals and policies compared to the original. The Plan’s vision is to cultivate mutual relations between Greece (the historical homeland), and the “Greek diaspora.”

The fact that the Plan represents a governmental vision for diaspora’ future makes it a high stakes cultural and political project. It is positioned to shape the cultural lives of millions of diasporic people. A wide-ranging deliberation therefore is in order.

In this commentary I will be bringing attention to a key term in the title of the Plan, that of “diaspora.” The Plan is obviously a governmental project, and as such it seeks to define, shape and regulate the meaning of the Greek diaspora. But what does diaspora mean in the first place? Who defines it, and who speaks on behalf of its interests? What are those interests, anyway?

It is well-known that there are different, contested understandings of the concept diaspora and the realities it denotes. Any meaningful engagement with the Plan then requires that we first pause, chart and reflect a few basic (in the interest of space) facts connected with diaspora realities, and how they shape the debate about the diaspora.

To begin, a diaspora is not just about relations with its historical homeland, as conventional thinking has it. A product of population scattering and its historical memory across generations, a diaspora is shaped via its encounters with other cultures; it is produced via cross-cultural entanglements (sometimes conflicts), and historical negotiations with the power and policies of the dominant group across generations.

Diasporas involve a process of becoming and the making of new institutions and identities in response to historical pressures, contingencies, and needs. Think of AHEPA, for example, an institution formed in connection to the white 100% Americanization movement, or the role of Australia’s immigration policy in the 1950s and 1960’s shaping the occupational trends for immigrants. American McCarthyism in the 1950s decimated the Greek American immigrant left, while the active Australian labor movement at the time intersected with the interests of working-class immigrants.

This context-specific making of a diaspora is the reason we speak of Greek diasporas in the plural, a constellation of diasporas with some cultural overlapping but also crossed with significant differences in experiences. This historical and cultural specificity, in turn, points to the markedly different experiences between the diasporic and Greek people.

A diaspora involves dual loyalties, complex political and cultural affiliations, love, nostalgia and collective mobilizations on behalf of the historical homeland. But also, ambivalences as well as critique of the society left behind and its government, often for its paternalistic attitudes toward the diaspora.

Diaspora people straddle two languages, two cultural geographies (the here and there), two interconnected but different temporal realities (the immigrant past and the diasporic present). A diaspora involves cultural transformations within the immigrant generation and, certainly, intergenerationally.

 
Diaspora identities are constituted in an intersectional manner, in connection to local, regional, national, transnational and cosmopolitan discourses and experiences. A diaspora entails a heterogeneous and therefore complex field. Affluent and poor people, men and women, straight and gay, urban and rural, first, second and third may differ markedly in the ways they experience diasporic lives and belonging.

All this should not be surprising. Artists, authors, academics, and cultural activists have been investing immensely in articulating and exploring these historical and cultural facts. Thanks to their labor, the realities of the diaspora have been compellingly narrated and widely disseminated, available for anyone who cares to learn.

But diasporic experiences and historical memory work at yet another, visceral level. Among diasporic people they often produce a deeply felt “structure of feeling,” the demand for the Greek state and the people in Greece to recognize the realities of being diasporic. Hence the call, most explicitly expressed in Greek Australia and Greek Canada, for a new “diasporic paradigm”: the acknowledgment of a diaspora’s historical and cultural specificity, its experiences, its internal heterogeneity, and its identity narratives; the challenges it faces and the creativity it infuses in its cultural production.

If the Greek state has historically construed Greece as the metropolitan center of which the “Greek diaspora” constitutes an organic extension; and if the simplified notion of a uniform “global Hellenism”––a transcendental ethnonational entity––erases alternative Hellenisms produced in the diasporas, the diasporic paradigm offers an alternative based on historical and cultural realities.

Though it is not uncommon for diaspora groups to reproduce the state paradigm, sectors of the diasporas have produced alternative versions of Hellenisms. Their hyphenated identities signal syncretic affiliations, their biculturalism, their cross-fertilization with a host of cultural systems, including cosmopolitanism. Artists, authors, journalists, photographers, documentary makers, academic have been giving form and expression to the complexity of diaspora’s Hellenisms. It is this experience and cultural production that authorizes diasporas to see themselves as centers of Hellenism, one among many in a network of centers, not peripheral or lesser to the so-called “metropolitan center.”

We can speak of incompatible paradigms between the Greek state’s conventional renderings of the diaspora and the diasporic paradigm. Whereas the state strips diaspora from a range of its complexities, producing an abstract commonality which it seeks to regulate, the diasporic paradigm anchors identities in historical and cultural realities, featuring multiplicity in identity, emancipating itself from narrow appropriations.

The public circulation of the Strategic Plan enters then a contested terrain regarding its key concept. But it refrains from acknowledging the tensions, incompatible interests, and conflicting cultural visions at work in this landscape. The Plan, one might claim in its defense, is not a place for this degree of elaboration. But the fact remains, a governmental document circulating in the absence of sustained conversation about the meaning of a subject holding major public importance. What does this say about diasporic institutions, and the transnational Greek public sphere? Given the magnitude of these issues why there has been no extensive public engagement, beyond a few valuable position papers? Silence, let us not forget, could serve as a mechanism of regulation.

What strategies could empower the diasporic paradigm? And, on what grounds negotiating parties can make a persuasive case to the state about the value of the diasporic paradigm? With so much at stake, what is the role of diasporic institutions in the struggle to chart diaspora’s routes for the future and courses of action?

I will soon (I hope, given a hectic work load) be returning for additional thoughts in the next installment.

Yiorgos Anagnostou