The Paradoxical Nature of Diaspora Engagement Policies: A World Polity Perspective on the Karta Polaka

Abstract

This paper uses the example of the Karta Polaka to develop a more general argument about the place of diaspora engagement policies in the global political order. Specifically, I address the paradoxical nature of these policies, which are concomitantly undermining and reaffirming the nation-state form as a model for organising political communities. By combining insights from the literature on state-diaspora relations and world polity theory with empirical perspectives yielded from the example of the Karta Polaka, it is argued that diaspora engagement policies challenge an ideal model of the nation-state by reconfiguring citizenship, territory and national belonging as the basic tenets of this model. In this way, diaspora engagement policies such as the Karta Polaka can be understood as a reconfiguration of the nation-state model, which is not indicative of an erosion of state sovereignty but rather, on the contrary, of the resilience and adaptability of the nation-state form to challenges posed by globalisation.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, the journal's editors, and the participants of the conference ‘Poland's Kin-state Policies: Opportunities and Challenges’ held in Warsaw on 23–24 May 2019 for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1 The term ‘global nation’ implies more than a mere description of a nation's worldwide dispersal. Rather, global nations are the outcomes of specific state policies defining (parts of) the diaspora as constitutive elements of the nation (see Smith, 2003b). From this perspective, I argue that global nations are part of states’ constant efforts at nation-building which now, under conditions of globalisation, have become global themselves.

2 This paper mainly deals with the 2007 version of the Karta Polaka that focused solely on the diaspora in the post-Soviet space. Important later amendments extended the scope of the law to all persons of Polish origin regardless of citizenship (2019) and increased the rights and benefits side by granting an immediate right of residence as well as financial assistance and a quasi-diplomatic protection status (2016).

3 These are Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Latvia, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.