Prof. Khachig Tölölyan on “The Armenian Diaspora Between Home and Homeland”

2026-02-03 - 20:26

The following is the transcript of a lecture delivered by Prof. Khachig Tölölyan on November 2, 2025 at St. Leon’s Church Hall in Fair Lawn, N.J. titled “The Armenian Diaspora: Today, and Perhaps Tomorrow.” In February 2002, I participated in a major conference on diaspora studies held in Poitiers, France. Two of its panels were dominated by Israeli scholars who repeatedly and programmatically spoke of Israel as “the home of the world’s Jews.” At the end of the second panel, a member of the audience, a woman, addressed the panelists. I paraphrase her unforgettable words quite accurately. “You repeatedly refer to Israel as the home of global Jewry,” she said. “I am a diasporic American Jew and I don’t accept your terminology. My home is the United States, where I was born and my parents were born, where we are citizens, and where I live and teach Sociology. My ancestors’ homeland was Hungary, where my family lived since the 1400s, until the Holocaust ended them. So, Israel is neither my home nor my homeland. But I am a Jew, I care and, of all the countries in the world other than the United States, Israel is the country I care about the most.” These comments set up the categories of home, homeland and the “most cared-about” other country, producing a trio that perhaps unnecessarily complicates the duo of home and ancestral homeland that we diaspora Armenians live with. In my own work, I have argued that every Armenian community surviving outside Armenia displays two tendencies, the ethnic, which is home-oriented, and the diasporic, which is homeland-oriented, though not only that. These tendencies exist in different proportions and intensities. Consider our own community in the U.S. There are many who live as Americans (who are also part-time Armenians) and display characteristic ethnic behaviors. For example, they acknowledge Armenian descent and claim an Armenian identity, try to maintain social and marital ties with others like themselves, know fragments of Armenian, occasionally or frequently attend an Armenian Apostolic church, or an Armenian Catholic or Armenian Protestant-Evangelical church, remember the Genocide and occasionally attend events organized by community organizations. They can be persuaded to donate money to support Armenian institutions and practices, ranging from Sunday schools to youth groups to summer camps to an athletic organization like the Homenetmen. They sometimes support and contribute financially to the political campaigns of fellow ethnics, whether they are Governors like George Deukmejian of California or members, for example, of the State Senate of Rhode Island like David Tikoian. Such behaviors constitute and sustain Armenian ethnicity in the U.S. Not all, but many, Armenian American ethnics also display specifically diasporic orientations and transnational commitments. These take two forms. The first is displayed by caring about other diasporic communities, places where their families used to live and other Armenians still do; Western diasporas support organizations like the Sourp Prgich hospital or the Getronagan high school in Istanbul, or the Jemaran or the Tarouhy-Hovagimian high schools of Beirut. The second diasporic commitment is, of course, directed toward Armenia, the homeland, the country other than the United States that is “most cared about,” to borrow the Jewish sociologist’s phrase. This was primarily manifested as a rhetorical commitment when Armenia was a Soviet Republic and, of course, is now enacted more materially. It is important to note that while the diasporic inclination is displayed by many, a smaller group forms the activist diasporic core whose members expend time, money and energy towards sustaining collective caring about Armenians and Armenia. The late Israeli political scientist Gabriel Sheffer and I have both argued that, until recently, this relatively small core of committed diasporic activists mattered enormously in sustaining the memory and vision of old and current homelands. However, the end of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a digital world of easy transnational connection with the homeland has increased the number of new, independent diasporic participant organizations as well as individual contributors to the homeland’s development. The older diasporic core and key organizations such as the Church, the political parties and philanthropic entities like the AGBU and ARS remain and continue to matter a great deal. Yet, consider this: in the 70 years after the genocide, alongside some minor groups, only two genuinely new and reasonably large Armenian organizations successfully emerged in North America: the Armenian Assembly and the Zoryan Institute. Since the earthquake of 1988 and independence in 1991, so many smaller, new organizations and initiatives have developed, with some success, that it is difficult to keep track: SOAR (Society for Orphaned Armenian Relief) and FAR (Fund for Armenian Relief) and COAF (Children of Armenia Fund) come to mind, but there are imaginative others, often driven by just a few individuals with money and vision, like the Tufenkian foundation and Birthright Armenia, the latter founded by New Jersey’s own Edele Hovnanian. Above all, the two most successful institutions that have emerged in the Republic of Armenia since the collapse of the Soviet Union have been initiated and sustained by diaspora Armenians: TUMO, now the much-imitated center for creative technologies near the Hovannes Toumanian park in Yerevan, and AUA, the American University of Armenia. The extent of these contributions has not been fully acknowledged, whether by homeland authorities or by many of those in the Diaspora who continue to undervalue their role and impact while celebrating the homeland. The nearly magical attraction of an independent homeland triumphantly endowed with a state, often celebrated by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, tends to occlude the facts concerning the efficacy of diasporic contributions. The one contribution that is consistently noted is diasporic return migration. Thus, those who affirm that Israel or Armenia are the natural homes and destinations of their diasporas point to the fact that a certain number of Jews migrate back to Israel every year, or that nearly a 100,000 Armenians from the global diaspora migrated to Armenia in 1946-8 and others continue to do so today, either out of a desire to live in the homeland or because the countries of which they were native-born citizens were destroyed, as large parts of Syria, Lebanon and Iraq have been. But these figures must be contextualized. In 2024, 32,000 Jews performed Aliyah, settling in Israel as new citizens; 83,000 left. For many years now, the number of Israelis leaving the country has exceeded those settling in it, even if we don’t include recent departure figures, which have been inflated by the war against Gaza. We know that since Armenia’s independence, the number of Armenians leaving Armenia has far exceeded the number of Armenians choosing to settle there. There are no definitive numbers, but the last Soviet census of 1989 showed a population of 3,350,000, of whom 170,000 were Azeris and 30,000 Yazidis; 3.1 million were ethnic Armenians. Around one million Armenians have emigrated since then and about 200,000 have settled there, coming from Artsakh or the republics of the former Soviet Union and the Middle East, for a net loss of population of around 800,000. Another fact and figure that we must think about in this constellation is the number of diaspora Armenians taking on Armenian citizenship while remaining abroad. Where is home and where is the homeland for all these Armenians, what do they care about, how do they express and enact that caring? These are key questions for all scholars of the Diaspora. What is clear is that the rhetorically celebrated homeland has not so far been the diaspora’s preferred destination. My own prediction is that, in the near future, more diasporans will become full or part-time settlers in Armenia, at the same time that the exodus of many more will continue. We have had a homeland and a diaspora since the mid-11th century and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. For various reasons, the size, wealth and skill set of the diaspora has increased, yet the discourse of that diaspora continues to valorize, to attribute a powerful, inevitable magnetic pull to the homeland, even as more Armenians emigrate from it. As a diaspora Armenian scholar, I am interested in trying to understand how and why this disparity persists. The question for me is not primarily why the homeland is so highly valued, even as people leave it. I am more interested in why the diaspora lacks an accurate self-assessment, failing to appreciate properly both its achievements and its potential. Failures like the decline of Western Armenian are lamented while no one except Jennifer Manoukian points out that Western Armenian speakers actually increased in number in the Middle Eastern diaspora after 1923 because so many dialect-speakers and Turcophone survivors learned standard western Armenian for the first time and were schooled in that language in new schools arising, even among the huts of refugee camps around Aleppo and Beirut. The huge achievement of the Middle Eastern diaspora, helped by European and American diasporic donors, was in constructing a government of exile (not in exile) from 1923 to 1975, that in turn fashioned a new, stateless but robust community. That inadequately celebrated achievement is a good example of what I have called in my scholarly work the “stateless power” of diasporas. There can be no doubt that all diasporans care and should care about their homeland. With the single exception of the Roma (or Romani people), all diasporas have some form of explicit orientation towards their homeland. But when many leaders add that such orientation means that a diaspora cannot also be ինքնանպատակ, that it cannot be a goal for itself, they are simply denying reality. No diaspora’s goal is to become fully assimilated either into the hostland or the homeland, thus in effect ending itself. Rather, the goal is to be integrated as fully as possible, without assimilation. The urge to survive as a distinct entity is quite strong. I enjoy quoting a remark uttered by a lapsed Jewish diasporan philosopher, Spinoza, who said Unaquaeque res, quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur. [Spinoza, Ethics, IIIP6]. “Each thing [insofar as it is in itself,] endeavors to persevere in its being.” That portion of the transnational Armenian people that thinks of itself as a diaspora works hard in order to persevere, to remain, to endure, to develop as a stateless social entity in which stateless power can sometimes be skillfully exercised. Two of the factors that sustain and bolster our Diaspora are, first, its attachment to lost, historic Armenia and second, a deep caring for the Republic that we have today. The former does not undermine the latter commitment. Perhaps understandably, the governments of all existing homelands would prefer not to share their diasporas’ affection with other entities. They also definitely do not aspire to be the equal partners of their diasporas but rather to guide, lead or dominate them. Yet, at this moment, neither the culture nor the economy of the Armenian homeland is powerful enough to dominate its diaspora fully and I, for one, think that is good. Most of the leadership elites of the Republic have not gained the respect of either their own citizens or of diasporans. This is true whether we speak of political, cultural or religious elites and leaders. In the past, it has often been the case that Armenian diasporic elites have guided, even led, the homeland. That is no longer the case, but we are not yet at a reversal point where the homeland can dominate its diaspora or lead it wisely, nor should it. Currently, this general situation has morphed into a particularly interesting problem because the homeland’s government is actively seeking to redefine the very concept of the Armenian Nation. It is an old concept, first formulated by the Armenian Apostolic Church, which has had a sense of the Armenians as a nation of religious believers in the Armenian Apostolic Church for centuries, some scholars argue since the early fifth century. Again, this historical pattern is not unique to us. As late as 1898, the American Reform Jewish Movement declared, and I quote the Jewish historian Mark Mazower, that it was “unalterably opposed to political Zionism” on the grounds that “Jews are not a nation, but a religious community.” Parenthetically, the rejection by many in the homeland, and by most in the diaspora, of the Prime Minister’s current pressure on the Church at Etchmiadzin demonstrates the extent to which most Armenians still regard religion and the Church as essential to their identity, however inept or corrupt its leadership has been recently. I will add that this affirmation may need to be qualified by the data gathered in the ADS, the Armenian Data Survey, commissioned by the Gulbenkian foundation. There, only 30% of respondents ranked the Church as a primary factor in defining their identity. Since the genocide, most leaders of the diaspora, and many in the homeland as well — whether political, economic or intellectual and scholarly leaders or clergy — have affirmed that there now is an Armenian Nation with homeland and diaspora components. But the current government of Armenia finds that this unitary concept of the Nation powers a nationalism that is not suitable for a defeated state like Armenia because it complicates its dealings with Azerbaijan and Turkey. Therefore, the government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has been redefining both Nation and Diaspora in a struggle that is terminological and rhetorical but also more substantive. Instead of impulsively rejecting these attempts, we need first to understand them. The Prime Minister’s logic is that the Republic of Armenia he leads is the only real Armenia there is. All else is memory, fantasy or wish-projection. The Armenian Republic is an internationally recognized State, a Պետութիւն, and he claims that such a state has been the dream and aspiration of all who identified as Armenian for a long time. Parenthetically, I have argued elsewhere that this just isn’t so: the bantukhds, the migrant laborers of the 19th century who sang Groong Usdi Gu Kas were yearning with garod for a home village or hometown, for their native land, their homeland; they were not experiencing painful nostalgia for an Armenian State. However, now that we have such a precariously positioned state, PM Pashinyan affirms, we must make it less precarious by acknowledging as legitimate the decisions and actions of its government, thereby confusing the sanctity of the State with the legitimacy of its temporary current government. In order to fully assume its position as a state among states in the region, the Prime Minister argues, Armenia must safeguard its own, otherwise defenseless borders by acknowledging the legitimacy of other borders, those of Azerbaijan and Turkey, even if those borders are the result of genocide by Turkey and ethnic cleansing of Karabakh by Azerbaijan. Those events are now in the irretrievable past, which cannot be as real as the exigencies of the present. This logic quickly leads to other conclusions. For example, the Pashinyan government has argued that history books should concentrate on the Republic that exists currently, with its immediate ancestors from 1918 on, and concern itself much less with the much larger historic Armenia and the Nation that lived there. Furthermore, citizenship must be prioritized because it is a concrete link to the State, which now anchors identity and belonging; the diasporic claim of a collective identity proper to a globally dispersed Nation is less useful and perhaps inappropriate, untenable. In vocabulary that alludes to statements in the early 1990s by then President Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the Prime Minister says that he leads and is responsible to the citizens of Armenia, not the members of something called the ‘Armenian Nation’ dwelling in both homeland and diaspora. Interpreted severely, he is arguing that he leads a State, not a Nation-State, a պետութիւն, not an ազգ-պետութիւն. Many in Armenia, and even more in the diaspora, disagree with him. Part of the issue that confronts us today, and will continue to do so in the near future, is how to conduct a sane and productive debate about these claims and what they mean for the Diaspora. Since the homeland is one of the pillars of diasporic identity, what shapes it also partially shapes us. But there is much more that shapes our diaspora, as it does all contemporary diasporas. In 1995, I argued that we Armenians cling to the idealized self-image of being a nation, an ազգ, but have functionally become a transnation, an անդրազգ. It was not a popular claim. As far as I know, only one intellectual took note of it and he denounced it whole-heartedly. [Maitre Kasbar Derderian, in the Beirut newspaper Ararad, Արարատ]. At the time, I meant that the Armenians of Artsakh, the Armenians of the Republic and the several million Armenians of the diaspora — among whom there are now hundreds of thousands of emigrants from Armenia, most of whom retain Armenian citizenship — are far from united or uniform in their cultural and political values and preferences. All that unites us is that we care deeply about the welfare of the Republic of Armenia. We can build on that, but we can not build by denying the different features and interests of the Diaspora, which are pursued by a myriad different local organizations and efforts. Ours is a diaspora that cannot be governed from the homeland and cannot yet be united by a representative body. What it can do is learn to support both its small local and great transnational organizations, which operate across borders in homeland and diaspora. Finally, we in Diaspora must respect ourselves and expand and explore the stateless power we are capable of exercising as a kind of action analogous to the soft power that states can possess. Loving the homeland, we must also learn to love ourselves in, and as, a diaspora. I do not end with an invitation to self-congratulation, but to self-confidence in the collective work to come — work I wish we could do as a single united entity, but we are not ready for that. So, I hope our various organizations and our ever-more inventive independent agents can do it together. If not united, then together, at least. If not միացած, գոնէ միասին։ Thank you.