ABSTRACT
Mass emigration has a broad range of social, economic and political implications for the sending state. Diaspora and transnationalism studies have looked into state-diaspora relations and examined how they affect the nation-state (for theoretical accounts, see Bauböck and Faist 2010; Cohen 2008; Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy 2010; Green and Weil 2006). Given the significant share migrants’ remittances represent in some countries’ GDPs such as Mexico, the Philippines or Morocco, emigrant communities have also attracted the attention of international organisations and policy-makers as renewed expectations have arisen in relation to the migration-development equation (De Haas 2010). This enthusiasm, as well as arguably democratisation processes, has
The Journal of North African Studies, 2015 Vol. 20, No. 4, 522-539, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2015.1065037
fostered mimetic policy developments by sending states (Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy 2010) to the extent that today most UN-registered states dedicate some of their resources to engaging with their diasporas (Gamlen and Delano 2014). Much of the rapidly expanding literature on ‘diaspora policies’ has been historically developed
by political scientists and to some extent by political geographers (Gamlen and Delano 2014). At the other end of the spectrum, the study of migrants’ transnationalism has been mainly conducted by sociologists. At the intersection of these two fields of study, how are diaspora policies and migrants’ agency articulated? How has emigration transformed emigrants’ position in terms of power vis-à-vis the home country? What goals do diaspora policies pursue and to what extent are these policies reactive to emigrants’ involvement in the home country? In an attempt to bring these perspectives together, this paper analyses both state diaspora policies and emigrants’ agency in order to examine how state and non-state actors shape each other’s strategies. Moroccan state-diaspora relations appear to be a case in point. The increasing demand for
labour in post-war Europe triggered a postcolonial Moroccan migration of mostly young men into expanding Fordist industries, notably, but not only, in the framework of bilateral agreements. Today, the number of Moroccans living abroad is somewhere between 3.5 and 4 million individuals, representing around 10% of the Moroccan population. The most numerous community is settled in France (1,147,000), followed by Spain (672,000), Italy (487,000), Belgium (298,000) and the Netherlands (265,000), according to 2012 figures of the Ministry in Charge of Moroccans Living Abroad and Migration Affairs (Alaoui 2013). While acknowledging the social constructionist critique of the concept of ‘diaspora’ (Anthias
1998; Cohen 2008) and the concept’s shortcomings in terms of intersectional analysis, this paper uses the term ‘Moroccan diaspora’ as being constituted by first-generation migrants and their descendants who were born outside of Morocco. This diaspora can be described as ‘incipient diaspora’, for example, a diaspora in the making (Sheffer 2003) or ‘labour diaspora’ (Cohen 2008) whose characteristics are undergoing continuous transformations. Since the 1960s, the Moroccan state has been actively engaging with its expatriates, first chan-
nelling departures from specific regions, nowadays facilitating investment or return by targeted categories of emigrants. The progressive political liberalisation of the Moroccan regime since the mid-1990s has furthermore created opportunities for synergies between government and civil society organisations that were not foreseeable in the past. This history of Moroccan emigration gave rise to an interesting redefinition of power relationships between the state and marginalised populations that belonged to indigenous ethnic minorities from the South (Souss-MassaDrâa) and the Northeast (Oriental). These ethnic communities are widely referred to as ‘Berber’ in western scholarship, although the communities themselves use the name ‘Amazigh’ (Errihani 2008). Two questions thus emerge in relation to the Moroccan case: How are forms of belonging to the Moroccan nation re-invented and redefined through diaspora links? How does the involvement of diasporic organisations in turn impact the state? To answer these, I will make use of the literature around the dialectic between citizens’ ‘exit’
and ‘voice’ first advanced by Hirschman (1970). Ostergaard-Nielsen (2003b) referred to the idea of ‘exit’ leading to ‘voice’, in relation to Mexican and Dominican emigration. While she drew on his terminology, Ostergaard-Nielsen did not discuss Hirschman’s concepts; it appears indeed that these concepts prove to be to some extent problematic for an analysis of transnational migration. According to Hirschman’s initial conceptualisations, ‘exit’ and ‘voice’ were mutually exclusive alternatives: citizens could either decide to emigrate and leave the national political space, or engage at home. Thus, his conceptual framework suggested an interdependent dynamic according to which the more accessible ‘exit’ was, the less plausible ‘voice’ would be (Hirschman 1970).
