ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter presents the main argument of this book, which suggests that the implementation of home state emigrant policies has an impact on how the emigrants foster transnational political practices. The empirical research provided in the book illustrates that the cases of Turkish citizens in France and the United States represent the shifts from difference towards convergence, in relation with the home state–emigrant society relations. In the post-2003 period, the narratives on building/integrating a community that would consolidate emigrants at the grassroots level and reinforcing ethnic lobbying aiming for higher-level politicization have emerged both in France and the United States and were even portrayed as the complementary factor of one another. As the policy making of the home state relied heavily on these two objectives, emigrant groups that worked on these particular fields had more access to the available political opportunities by the home state. Furthermore, the implementation of the state’s policy agendas has not been isolated from the ideological factors and messy politics; they contained a set of contestations and negotiations between the state and society actors that are politically loaded. Hence, in the post-2003 period, the changes in the policy making on emigrants have been coupled with the transformations of the state’s official state ideology from Kemalist republican secularism to AKP’s conservative globalism.
