ABSTRACT
Transstate1 communities and associations have been at the centre of the optimistic visions of national and international economic development policy establishments since the early 2000s. There are three central elements of this new enthusiasm. First, over the past three decades the surge in remittances transferred by transstate migrants has given rise to a kind of euphoria (Kapur 2004). Migrant remittances2 are perceived to be a nearly ideal form of bottom-up financial development; indeed, looking at overall numbers, annual remittances to developing countries have more than doubled during the 1990s and have been approximately 20 per cent higher than official development assistance (ODA) to these countries. And certainly migrant remittances have been on a par with foreign direct investment in many parts of the developing world. Remittances have increased with the upward trend in the rate of transstate migration (United Nations 2004). Second, knowledge transferred through networks of scientists and experts from immigration to emigration countries are increasingly seen as ‘brain circulation’, beneficial to all parties involved (cf. Findlay 2003). The transfer of ideas is seen as helping developing and transformation countries to participate in knowledge societies, which are the basis for innovation, productivity and development. Third, even the transfer of political remittances, namely ideas regarding the rule of law, good governance, democracy, and human rights, has achieved a growing prominence in the aftermath of interventions into armed conflicts and efforts at reconstructing countries ravaged by civil war – evidenced lately in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Occasionally, diasporas made up of exiles, refugees, and labour migrants are hailed as mediators in conflict resolution – for example, in the cases of South Africa or Nigeria (cf. Shain and Barth 2003). The argument put forward in this analysis is that the new enthusiasm over
the crucial role of transstate communities and migrant associations constitutes an effort to fuse principles of community with those of the global market. Yet there are both compatibilities and incompatibilities between community and market principles. Moreover, the principles of transstate communities and the national state may clash – those who have chosen the geographical exit option of migration also have a voice because they
partake in decision-making but are not affected by the consequences of these decisions. How, in fact, do transstate communities and associations interact with the
principles of states and markets in flows across borders and boundaries? In order to answer this question it is necessary to first address the following questions. First, how has academic and policy thinking on development cast the role of communities and non-state organisations? Second, in what ways are the activities of transstate cliques, groups, and organisations that embody some of the community principles complementary to or incompatible with those of other institutions functioning according to the logics of states and markets? Indeed, little is actually understood about what role transstate groups and associations play vis-à-vis states and markets when it comes to the transfer of financial capital, such as remittances and investments, knowledge and political ideas. The perspective taken here is not one of global governance but of transstate subjects, starting with migrants and their communities. What is needed is an examination of the role of communities for development and the role communities actually play in relation to other principles of social order, such as the market and the state. The booming interest in the role of diasporas and transstate migrant organisations reflects changes in the concepts of development that guide public policies of international and national institutions and NGOs – and the shift in attention may signal more fundamentally the changing balance of communities, states and markets. Therefore, the problématique raised relates to the more general question of the shifting balance of community, state and market under conditions commonly called globalisation. Heuristically, one may distinguish three principles of social order: com-
munity, state and market. Here, the community principle refers to the notion that social order presupposes, or at least benefits from, the rights and duties that are attached to members of concrete communities of persons. Communities constitute the cement that integrates the members of concrete communities into sharing values of trust, reciprocity, loyalty, and solidarity, bounded by rights and obligations of members towards each other. Rights and duties delimit the boundaries of communities, which may rest on diverse mechanisms such as kinship lineage, shared knowledge and values, belief in common institutions, or religious beliefs. Here, the community principle is supplemented by association, which refers to organisations of persons interested in common causes. The boundaries of the market are quite different, in that dispersed competition is ideally driven by the interest of human agents in the purposive acquisition of individual goods without much, or indeed any consideration of or control over, what impact the pursuit of acquisitive purposes may have on others or on other persons’ future selves. The principle of state consists of hierarchical control, carrying out binding decisions in political communities. State authority is meant to serve the common good – in the case under consideration here, culminating in the notion of development. Whereas communities are characterised by various notions of boundaries of
‘us’ distinct from ‘others’ and markets exist without geographical borders, states – in their modern incarnations since the Westphalian Peace at any rate – are defined both by clear territorial borders and boundaries set by their function to implement authoritatively binding decisions by the force of power and legitimacy. In short, community and associations, market and state are master mechanisms of social order characterised by incompatibilities, yet also requiring one another in order to function (Streeck and Schmitter 1985). Empirically, the community and associations principle is studied through categories such as cliques, groups and organisations of mobile people, the state principle by looking at government and publicly authorised actors and the market principle by looking at firms. This analysis focuses on various transstate subjects – namely, groups and
organisations of mobile persons, including families, epistemic communities and diasporas. Such transstate social formations mobilise very diverse forms of capital: financial capital, such as money in the form of remittances and/or investments; knowledge and professional experience; and political ideas, such as ideas on forms of government, rights and responsibilities and democracy. Financial capital, knowledge, and political ideas can be mobilised within the bounds of social capital – that is, through various forms of reciprocity and solidarity (Faist 2000: ch. 4), sometimes called ‘social remittances’ (Levitt and Nyberg-Sørensen 2004). Accordingly, the notion of development is understood here in the way that
it is used by different kinds of transstate social formations: in the case of transstate families, as an informal insurance against economic risks and as an investment in their children’s future; in the case of village associations, as the improvement of the infrastructure and the provision of local collective goods such as education and health; in the case of networks of businesspersons, as opportunities for investment and optimal interest; in the case of epistemic communities, as the unhindered flow of knowledge; and in the case of national communities, as a high degree of political autonomy, sometimes even involving the formation of an independent nation-state. All these notions resemble the overall lowest common denominator that the term development has carried since the late 1940s – namely, the vague hope of progression and betterment for those parts of the world deemed ‘underdeveloped’ (for a trenchant critique, see Escobar 1995). A transstate approach means looking not only at developing countries and countries in transformation but also at highly industrialised countries. In the latter case, there is value added in; for example, the contributions of migrants to social security and welfare state provisions, the closing of labour market gaps in the informal service economy and the values of democracy and human rights transported by the highly skilled. The first part of this analysis outlines the ideational shift to communities
and associations as a reference category for development thinking on the part of international organizations and OECD country governments over the past three to four decades. The second part discusses the role of the three
principles of social order – in particular community and association vis-à-vis state and market in development processes – and looks at how migrant organisations and groups have been complementary or incompatible with state and market principles. Transstate analysis involves studying the ties that cross emigration and immigration states as well as sending and receiving regions, and must transcend the interdependence between closed units in opening up transstate social spaces. The third section of this analysis touches on the implications for further research and argues that the concept of transstate social spaces, that is, spaces in between the local and the global but also between national states, can be used as an instrument to shed light on the dilemmas of border-crossing democracy and citizenship without relying simply on state-centred notions. Of course it goes without saying that states themselves – in contrast to more recent ideas on the balance between state, market and community and association in development – have to be brought back into the analysis to unearth opportunity structures for the emergence of transstate social spaces and thus the role of transstate groups and associations in development policy.
