Coping with long-distance nationalism: inter-ethnic conflict in a diaspora context

How does the politics of one country play out in other countries through the presence and agency of migrants and their descendents? And how do countries of high immigration cope with conflicts between ethnic or migrant communities when those conflicts originate, or are strongly fueled by, homeland conflicts? This dissertation explores these questions through close study of the Croat and Serb diasporas in Australia and the United States in the 1990s. The answers to these questions hinge on the politics of migrant homelands and the types of opportunities that host countries provide to diaspora communities. The chief empirical finding is that conditions ripe for producing Croat-Serb conflict in host countries failed to do so. Why did diaspora groups rein themselves in? The short answer is that host state institutions matter, but that those host state policies usually championed by Australian and American politicians and academics, and formed to manage inter-ethnic conflict—such as multiculturalism and direct policymaker intervention—had a negligible effect in the Croat and Serb communities. Instead, ethnic elites credit liberal political cultures, self-policing, and self-imposed segregation as the prime controls of inter-ethnic tension.