I've been wondering whether it is easier for people of different beliefs and identities to bond nostalgically over a fondly-remembered home patch if they are far enough away to be immune to the harsh realities, and perpetual tensions, of life back home. For example: are Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs from the same corner of south Asia more likely to get along in Britain or Canada than they are back home? Or less likely?
There is plenty of raw material to support either case. It is a telling fact there is a word—"Desi"—which describes a generic south Asian culture, practised in the diaspora by migrants of many religious backgrounds. If there were no cross-cultural, cross-religious relationships between exiled south Asians, there would be no such term. But it's hard to generalise. Among migrants to Britain from Bangladesh, there is a cleavage between those who hew to their Bengali identity, and therefore bond easily with Hindu Bengalis, and those who regard themselves as Muslims first and associate mostly with co-religionists, wherever they are from.
At least on the micro-level, it is easy to think of cross-religious friendships, based on common homesickness, which could never flourish back home. In the liberating atmosphere of London, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Bosnian Muslims from the heart of Balkan darkness could form warm friendships, even when war was raging. Admittedly, these friendships did not usually draw in the people who felt most passionately about their affiliations. It helped that these homesick Balkan folk could look back fondly on a time as well a place. In fairly recent memory, cities like Sarajevo and Mostar had been places of co-existence; they knew that their groups were not doomed by some iron law to fight.
A couple of homely anecdotes on an equally positive note. Around 1890, a time when Irish society was deeply divided by religion, an Irish Protestant lad, on his first trip selling textiles in America, befriended an Irish Catholic customer by bringing news of the client's home patch, a tiny island; the result was a torrent of orders. The other concerns two people from a remote town in central Turkey whose Christian population was expelled in 1924. Quite recently, the head of the global club of Christian families from that town was on a liner in the mid-Atlantic when he somehow guessed that his waiter, a Muslim Turk, was from the same little place. They embraced, and the traveller got extra food for the rest of the voyage. On the ocean waves, memories of the same mountains and olive groves mattered more than any scars of history.
But it's significant that these incidents happened between individuals, with nobody else looking. I only know about them because the travelling Irishman was a forebear and the seagoing Anatolian a friend. Especially when people migrate en masse from troubled places, the experience of diaspora can often intensify religious and other social divisions, not heal them. Conflict in many parts of the world, from the Caucasus to Ireland to Kashmir, has been exacerbated by the way that migrant groups cling to their ancient grievances more passionately than their cousins back home. The inter-communal passions of Cyprus are depressingly reproduced on the streets of London. Secular leftist parties with Cypriot roots try sporadically to bridge the gap between the island's Greek Orthodox and Muslim Turkish residents; but the two communities, albeit selling the same food in the same gritty neighbourhoods, form very separate worlds.
In some cases, exile makes people more attached to their religion (and hence more inclined to bond with co-religionists) while detaching them from the home country's culture. Olivier Roy, the French scholar of global Islam, uses the word neo-fundamentalism to describe the mindset of many second-generation Muslims in Europe: estranged from their forebears' material culture (clothes, recipes, customs) but passionately defensive of their religion. They are not much interested in their grandparents' home patch, and even less in people from that patch who follow a different faith.
A generation ago, Europeans moving to the United States were moving to a place where religion mattered more as a determinant of social life than it did in many parts of Europe. Catholic emigrants from Ireland, Italy and Poland found themselves drawn into a Catholic social network, and marriage market; north German and Scandinavian migrants into a Protestant one. Whatever held these networks together, it was not nostalgia for a single fondly remembered homeland.
"Place nostalgia" probably works best as a binding force when memories of the homeland include at least some periods of happy co-existence, as was the case in Tito's Yugoslavia. It is less likely to work when one group of people were forced to leave, in unpleasant circumstances, by their neighbours; and when the conflict back home remains unresolved. People who still hope to play a part in the affairs of their homeland and perhaps avenge past wrongs are unlikely to bond with the other side.
Here is a final example, which illustrates both sides of the argument. Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, was once a brassy, cosmopolitan city where notionally Shia Muslim Azeris rubbed shoulders with Jews as well as Armenians and ethnic Russians of loosely Christian heritage. Its residents, the Bakintsi, had a strong identity. But things grew darker for the Baku Armenians after race riots in the adjacent city of Sumgait in 1988; virtually all had to flee after a week of mayhem in January 1990 (and Azeris living in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, were forced out not long after.) If two Bakintsi aged 60 or so with different beliefs were to meet now in some distant spot, they might well bond over common memories of jazz clubs and school classes in scientific socialism. But it would probably be easier if they had both left before 1988; otherwise the questions about "what was he doing when...." would be too painful.
Correction: The original post has been amended so as to make clear that most Armenians left Baku in 1990 rather than 1988. This was corrected on June 10th 2013.
