Cultivation of an Imperial Diaspora

Cultivation of an imperial diaspora is a deliberate policy of the former metropole aimed at maintaining and reproducing a distinct identity among the descendants of colonists and settlers who remained in territories that have left its control. This policy is implemented through an infrastructure of linguistic, educational, and media reproduction: funding of schools and cultural centers, television broadcasting in the metropole's language, simplified granting of citizenship and 'compatriot' status, and state and quasi-state diaspora support funds ^[1][2]. Alongside this institutional framework, the metropole cultivates an affective infrastructure: nostalgia for the imperial past, a narrative of cultural superiority, and, simultaneously, a narrative of the diaspora's victimization in the new state. This work aims to sustain identification with the metropole among the second, third, and subsequent generations, who have long had no personal experience of imperial life, and to prevent their social and political integration into the states in which they live. The ultimate goal of this activity is revanchist: the metropole regards the cultivated diaspora as a resource it can rely on at the moment it attempts to revise post-imperial borders, whether through the outright annexation of territories where the diaspora lives compactly, the instrumentalization of its protests as a casus belli, or the destabilization of the new states from within. Historical examples lay this mechanism bare: the Sudeten Germans in interwar Czechoslovakia, who served as the pretext for the 1938 Munich Agreement and the subsequent liquidation of Czechoslovak statehood; the Russian-speaking communities in Moldova and in Crimea, which became the rhetorical grounds for the Russian interventions of 1992 and 2014; and the Russian-speaking population in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as an ongoing object of the same policy.