Governments-

in-Exile in
Contemporary
World
Politics
Edited by
Yossi Shain

ROUTLEDGE
NEW YORI( AND LONDON
(!Cf<il)

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168 I Khachig Tololyan
nation. Future analyses of the sources of the legitimacy of all governments, at home
or in exile, must look not only at their continuity with previous regimes but also at the
way in which they perform these material and cultural services. The nature of such
services, as well as the effort and resources devoted to each, differs greatly in the
cases of exile and sovereign governments, but there is nevertheless an overlap rather
than a radical chasm between the two, as the Armenian case shows.
Our understanding of the full spectrum of issues raised by the study of exile
governments has been slow to develop until recently, not just because of the
dominance of the formal-statist model but also because the groups most accessible
to scholarly study have been Western, short-lived, and lacking a stable mass
population base in exile. Much of the research that has been directed at a small
sample of examples provided by World War II-the Polish and Baltic governments-
in-exile, for example-is influenced by their seeming irrelevance during the Cold
War of the superpowers. The scholarship is changing rapidly, due to the recent
mass exodus of traditional peoples and their religio-political leadership (e.g., Tibet,
Cambodia, Afghanistan), and because of the sustained and visible struggle to
2
fashion both a nation and a government by the closely scrutinized Palestinians. In
this context, the Armenian polity, which has had an exile dimension for nearly a
millennium, offers one of several essential perspectives for the revision of earlier
models. I use "polity" instead of the words "nation-state" or even "nation" for
reasons that will soon become apparent.
In -what is easily the best; as well as the most up-to-date, book on the topic of
political exile, Yossi Shain helps to clarify the issues. He identifies two urgent
concerns that aff~ct all polities in exile and shape their behavior: "loyalty" and
"recognition. " 3 "Loyalty" here refers to more than verbal expressions of fealty or
adherence. First, the term underscores the exile groups' need to define varieties
of behavior as "loyal"; it also emphasizes the problems of extracting constant
manifestations of loyalty from co-nationals both in exile and at home, where they
are ruled by the regime the exiles oppose. The gravity of the latter problem is
accentuated, first, by the fact that co-nationals usually have the option of offering
the same behavior (their "loyalty") as testimony to the legitimacy of the ruling
regime; second, they can usually do the latter at less potential cost and with the
hopes of greater reward, since states, even the least legitimate of regimes in power,
have greater resources with which to reward or punish their subjects.
Shain's second term, "recognition," refers to the international dimension of exile,
to the fact that all operations of an exile group or government depend, at a minimum,
on receiving .refuge in a host country and permission to operate in as well as from
it. Of course; under optimal conditions, host/patron countries extend various levels
of diplomatic and material support, up lo and including recognition of a group
as a de facto government-in-exile. Sometimes, such recognition can have barely
perceptible results for decades, as when the U.S. continued to "support" the '.>
governments-in-exile of the Baltic Republics after they were seized by Stalin's .;'
armies. American refusal to let?rimiz.e that annexation seemed an insigni.fican.t."'
epiphenomenon of the Cold War, but in the GorbacheY era the extrao~'
Exile Govemmerus in the Armenian Polity I 169
inventiveness and daring of nationalist movements in precisely these republics
results in some small part from that refusal. The population of these regions withheld
the full measure of legitimating loyalty to the Soviet state in part because it
was encouraged by the continued if symbolic existence of governments-in-exile,
reminders of the lost past and possible future of such "captive" nations.
The Armenians, who have been equally restive in the Gorbachev era, have
not had an obviously comparable, Western-recognized government-in-exile to call
upon, save briefly and in unusual circumstances between 1921 and 1924. Instead,
coalitions of alternatively cooperating and competing elites have worked through
several evolving institutions as a government of exiles. These have plausibly, even
successfully, claimed that they represented the authentic interests and aspirations
of the "Armenian Nation." This nation has not been coextensive with a sovereign
nation-state; rather, it has been a polity half or more of which has lived in exile for
centuries. Yet it has been the focus of the loyalty of the majority of Armenians for
more than a century, and of a plurality of Armenians for even longer. Such long
loyalty has manifested itself in a double sphere of operation: international, as when
Armenians have sent people they cons.idered authentic representatives of national
interests to great-power conferences; but also intra-national and intra-state, as when
the sultans of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire received al court, as legitimate
representatives of the ethno-national entity, leaders selocted by their Armenian
4
subjects.
When a government acquires legitimacy in democratic elections and is then
expelled by brute force (e.g., by Nazi conquest), it carries this legitimacy with it.
The legitimacy of a government of exiles cannot equal this, but it is often comparable
to the legitimacy allegedly enjoyed by many governments founded in exile. In
narrating the remarkable longevity and successes of Armenian governments of
exile, this study runs the risk of being perceived as a triumphal celebration of an
implausible legitimacy in exile. But their longevity does not mean that these
governments always enjoyed the support of a majority, either in the homeland or
in the diaspora; the extent of such support is notoriously difficult to determine in
any case, whether one speaks of de Gaulle's government in 1940-1943, say, or
Afghanistan's coalition of mujahids toduy. In1 the Annenian case, in different
diasporan locations, over the centuries, under the rule of very different kinds of
states, ethnic and civic loyalties have fluctuated. The number of militant. cadres
has risen and fallen, as has the number of those who have been actively supportive,
passively affiliated, or indifferent, and oriented away from exilic and ethnic politics
and toward assimilation in the national polity of host countries. NeYertheless, the
recognition and loyalty offe.red to the Annettian exile gon~.rruuents must be judged
~ille, "hcthcr ~~ iu teruis of durotiou, sdt:.fo~ fu<:.dl lcYic..'1$,
~ o commi~t o '~\m~ khor ~nd time, oc i~ $()(lie ~ the s..'terifi<..""e
of l:ik il:>dt: Thi:; ~~y d:).j l>\.~ ~ ~ ;l ~~-tho~
foding, tfwugh ~A~~ a.re guilty of the .ro=b."c and u.ltiwatdy
t:ririaliring as.;;umprion th.at its groio-tli v-as i.oeritahle- Ra.tbe.r, the de\'elopment of
-, k.al:tr lD :! natinnaI ii.de.al .mid ~edershJ.p 1'Cll5 & rernlt .af ~ ~ &:'
:: - -
172 I Khachig Tololyan
exiles who had settled in the independent Kingdom of Georgia, to the north. They
persuaded one David Beg to form and head a government begun in exile rather than
a government expelled to exile. A descendant of the minor Armenian nobility,
David Beg was a skilled officer serving in the Georgian army, who seems to have
received tacit support from the latter, which may have hoped to weaken the Persians.
He surprised the notables by holding together the rebellion for a decade, in the
course of which he punished, sometimes by execution, the petty lords who came to
resist him. They had wanted an impartial exile not implicated in their local conflicts;
they got that, but also a leader whose vision of Armenia, not shaped by local
interests, was "national" in essentially the modem sense. Exiles and others removed
from distracting local disputes are often the first to envisage a nation. 10 It is a
pattern recently repeated by the Palestinians and, arguably, the Kurds and the
11
Afghans.
The importance of David Beg's rebellion cannot be overestimated. It showed that
leaders from the homeland and the diaspora could work together-that Armenians
could be t~ained in exile, in the armies of other countries, and seek and receive
their support, then return to lead military formations. Finally, the David Beg
rebellion provided the raw material for both literary and popular narratives of
resistance and nation formation; such narratives play a central role in the formation
of Armenian political culture, with effects that remain demonstrable down to modern
12
Armenian terrorism and the Karabagh movement of 1988-1989 in Soviet Armenia.
After the rebellion, and in particular from the 1740s to 1914, Armenians working
primarily in the intra-state diaspora did the ideological and organizational work
that fashioned their c~llectivity as a transnational nation-that is to say, as an
entity that thought of itself as a nation but existed without a state and across the
boundaries of empires. This polity was endowed with a vital culture and with a very
high degree of internal, communal organization; elites struggled for the control of
its institutions, even as they sometimes contested each other's claim to represent
the renascent nation in the eyes of its three imperial rulers. At the same time, they
argued over who could most effectively represent the Armenians in the courts of
the European powers who became increasingly concerned with their fate in the
Ottoman Empire over the course of the nineteenth century. These quasi-govern-
ments possessed two features essential to authority and legitimacy: they had continu-
ity (the Patriarchate dated from 1461) and they were the providers of a remarkably
large range of services within the Ottoman Armenian diaspora.
It is necessary to stress that such developments did not come about as a result
of some plan or blueprint, but rather evolved in piecemeal fashion. Elites acted to
meet specific needs that declining, inefficient, and supremely indifferent empires
had no mechanisms to attend to. Such is the cunning of history that those leaders
and communal institutions that succeeded in meeting these needs found that to do
so was to be acknowledged in quasi-governmental terms they had not set out to
seek, especially in the Ottoman context, where for the leaders of Christian millet-s
to be perceived in overtly political terms was literally to court death. A cynical-
Exile Governments in the Armenian Polity I 173
or, depending upon one's temperament, a realistic-assessment of elites that accept
the responsibility of working to meet communal needs may conclude that all such
work is a prelude to power seeking. But in the situation of the diasporized Armenian
nation, the original motives of the elites were far less ambitious, far more local and
contingent: they sought to be caretakers (the Armenian word for the trustee of an
institution, developed in this period, is hokapartzoo, "care bearer") but their
successors found they had come to fulfill more functions than governments-in-exile
do, and to receive the loyalty and recognition due to such functionaries.
The empires that ruled the Armenians undertook none of these tasks, except in
very limited ways in particular times and places. They taxed without using any of
the revenue to fulfill communal needs. They excluded Armenians from the armed
forces, except late in the history of the tzarist empire, and instead of dying in
defense of their subjects, their troops often preyed on them in bouts of governmental
lawlessness. The Armenian elites attained quasi-governmental status because,
first in the intra-state diaspora and then in the homeland, they came to assume
responsibility for neglected services.
Throughout, the Church and its clergy, which functioned as a uniformed bureau-
cracy offering uninterrupted connection to the Armenian past, was omnipresent,
though its authority very slowly declined under the impact of secufa.rism. Within
the Ottoman Empire, the wealthy amira-s (Armenians who had attained wealth
and status as tax-farmers, financiers, industrialists, and government appointees)
struggled with the developing bourgeoisie of professionals and smaller businessmen
for control of the millet 's administrative machinery, which became steadily more
important as the notables and the rising classes competed by endowing schools,
charitable foundations, hospitals, and cultural organizations. Within these institu-
tions, a culture-rich and cash-poor "class" of the petty intelligentsia developed as
a cadre. After 1789 but above all after 1848, this cadre played a leading role in
articulating a national idea and in creating a new national written language (1840-
1870) which, without benefit of state machinery, became the unifying language of
the Armenians, in a remarkable fashion that has no exact parallels in prestate
formations. 13 The revival of Gaelic in Ireland, and Hebrew in Israel, are not directly
comparable, because of differences in circu_mstiance-and the former, at least, is
a failure compared to the success of modem Armenian. A better analogy may be
offered by the Bulgarization of the language and national self-identification of the
South-Slavic population of Macedonia in the late nineteenth century, which was
14
also the work of exiles. It is no accident that both successes happened in an
--~ Ottoman Empire unwilling and unable to educate even its Muslim subjects, let
alone the Christian ones. This responsibility was left to a communal leadership,
with the state only half-aware that to cede such responsibility to ethnonational
elites is to endow them with a quasi-governmental legitimacy, should they prove
successful.
In the Ottoman Armenian diaspora, and then increasingly in the homeland, the
Armenian leadership was extraordinarily successful. There was one school for this
176 I Khachig Tololyan
for those in the homeland. Repression led to the forging of underground party
organizations in both th~ tzarist and Ottoman empires; these maintained close
contact among the home territories, the intra-state diasporas, and the overseas
diasporas, such as the American, especially after the massacres of 1894-1896.
Like any effective exile government fighting to liberate its homeland, the Armenian
parties had a secret membership in the thousands, who were supported by tens of
thousands of noncombatants. The Dashnag party had a militia, weapons caches,
and the capacity to organize self-defense in certain mountainous areas, to carry out
terrorism elsewhere, and to distribute forbidden books and newspapers printed
ov'erseas and brought in from Persia or Bulgaria. Its leadership planned and carried
out actions from bases in Europe, the Russian Empire, and Persia. Its most
spectacular actions included the seizure of the Banque Ottomane in Istanbul,
arguably the first act of terrorist occupation or "hijacking" in history, and the raid
of Khanassor. Both were conceived at a moment of crisis, when the Turkish
government sponsored massacres of its Armenian subjects, and both were envisaged
as specifically transnational acts: that is, they were meant to demonstrate to the
transnational Armenian nation and to the European powers the fact that the Dashnag
party was a government, which functioned both from exile and at home, and that
it had what others since David Beg had lacked: arms and men, the willingness to
use them even if it usually meant losing, and a popularly recognized role as a
defender of the Armenian nation.
The seizure of the Franco-Ottoman bank ended in publicity, the deaths of most
of those who carried out the attack, and safe conduct for those surviving the
occupation of the bank. Khanassor, which took place on July 24-26, 1897, was
the more remarkable transnational event. It involved a battalion-size force armed
with Russian, Turkish, and German weapons assembled and trained in the tzar's
territories and in northern Persia, and equipped with banners and a clear command
structure that gave the temporary unit a military appearance. Members of the unit
came from both the home territories and exile. They crossed the Russo-Persian
border and raided and severely damaged the encampment of a Kurdish clan respon-
sible for the massacre of 800 Armenians the year before. At the time, this event
was noted with quiet satisfaction by Armenians; over the years, it became a topic
of songs and stories, an event etched in memory as proof that the nation had not
only masters like the tzar and the Sultan, but also its own defenders and leaders
in the Dashnag party, which henceforth became the most persistent and successful
17
modem aspirant to governmental status at home and in exile.
The persisting role of Khanassor in the representation of nationhood is indicated
by the fact that some Armenians tum to it as a paradigm even now. Thus, an
editorial headlined (in Armenian) "We Need New Khanassors" (July 28, 1989)
appeared in the normally moderate weekly Hye Gyank (Armenian Life) of Los
Angeles (circulation 10,000). It points to the killings of Soviet Armenian citizens
in Soviet Azerbaijan, which have remained unpunished and underreported, and
Exile Governments in the Armenian Polity I 177
states: "We need new Khanassors to strike at and restrain the Azeris who threaten
our compatriots in Sumgait and Shushi [Karabagh]." With a pun on "Dashnagtzoo-
tyun," (the name of the party, which also means "harmonious federation" in
Armenian), the editorial calls for the renewal of a federation of defenders, a role
it sees as not being fulfilled by the government of the Armenian SSR, which has no
army: "We need those who would make new Khanassors," concludes the article--a
new entity that can defend Armenians in and beyond the Soviet Union against
Azeris, Turks (who are mentioned elsewhere in the piece), and unnamed others.
Khanassor was the step by which a political party, operating in exile and the home
territories both, claimed for itself the most indispensable function of governmental
status, the right to make war in defense of the nation. Between 1897 and 1908, the
Dashnag underground army fought frequently in the Ottoman Empire and in 1905-
1907 in the tzarist empire. A discussion of the course of events of this conflict,
however, is beyond the scope of this paper.
In 1908, the Young Turk junta seized power in the Ottoman Empire and took
faltering steps to modernize Ottoman politics. The six years that followed were
marked by the first truly open competition in the ranks of the Armenian elites. To
counter the socialism of the Hnchags and especially Dashnags, the bourgeoisie
formed in 1908 the Ramgavar-Sahmanatragan (Democratic-Constitutional) party,
which was allied with the philanthropic Armenian General Benevolent Union
(AGBU), founded in 1906; the fiscal resources of the latter were and remain the
single largest economic force in exilic public life (an endowment of $75 million in
1988). These two groups, allied with the Church, competed with the two more
radical parties in free elections. While the Dashnags dominated in the public life
of the home territories (where its militia had earned it the loyalty of peasants), they
worked in an uneasy coalition with the old elite of the intra-state diaspora, especially
in Istanbul. In the tzarist empire, too, the Dashnags went through a certain rap-
prochement with the bourgeois Joghovertagan (Popular)-party. Thus, in 1914 the
Dashnags were the most important but not the dominant force in the transnational
nation, managing its civic life in a loose and uneasy alliance which left considerable
room for discursive struggle.
The period 1908-1914 also obligated the old j\rmenian elites to compete more
directly for the loyalty and recognition of their co-nationals across the Ottoman-
tzarist bo~ndary. This struggle required new alliances. One that would have major
consequences for the post-war governments of exile was created at the initiative ol
the Catholicos Kevork V. This cleric held the position that made his ancienl
predecessors head of the Armenian Church in the Armenian Kingdom; the prestige
(but not always the actual power) of the position was and remains higher, to thio
day, than that of any other Armenian cleric. To bolster it in the new transnationa
arena, the Catholicos allied himself with Boghos Noubar Pasha, a founder of the
AGBU, the leading conservative notable of his day and one of the two or three
wealthiest Armenians in the world; his family was of Ottoman Armenian descen
180 I Khachig Tololyan
the two delegations were symbolic of the representation of all Armenians, exiles or
not, at a crucial moment.
21
The dissenting private assessments point to the fact that Western, especially
British and to a lesser extent French diplomats preferred to discuss matters with
the urbane and wealthy pasha (whose mansion in Paris is now an impressive library
and museum) than with a poorly funded socialist and radical like Aharonian. There
is evidence that the pasha negotiated with Kurdish and French representatives
without consulting with Aharonian. Unfortunately, what is most crucial to discover
is also what has proven most difficult to assess: What did the pasha's group identify
as the specifically diasporan interests that his exile government was to protect and
promote? Was there a specifically exile view of what the new Armenian Republic
should be? These questions may not have seemed urgent when both delegations
were sure of success-that is, as the U.S. recognized the republic (April 1920)
and others followed suit (France, Britain, Japan, Italy, Brazil, Belgium, Persia,
Georgia, Azerbaijan}, and lavish promises were made .to the Armenian victims of
Ottoman Turkey. But by the summer of 1919 Mustapha Kemal (Ataturk) had
launched the struggle that, coupled with the rise of the Soviet state, would catch
the new republic in a pincer and would eliminate it before all but the most modest
hopes of the Armenians were realized.
The existence of two delegations in Paris was to prove prophetic of the future
divisions of post-genocide exile governments. On December 2, 1920, the Dashnag
governinent of the Armenian Republic surrendered to the Red Army, on conditions
that were generous, but immediately violated as the nascent secret police began to
arrest and execute Dashnag leaders. On February 18, 1921, a Dashnag-organized
revolt sought to overthrow the government of Armenian Communists which the Red
Army had imposed. A doomed struggle continued until July 1921, after which the
surviving members of the Dashnag government fled to Persia and then France,
where they joined the members of the republic's delegation to the 1919-1920 peace
conferences.
Government-in-Exile and After:
The Contemporary Moment
By 1921, the population distribution of the Armenian nation had changed radi-
cally. Three-fourths of the world's surviving Armenians lived in the USSR: just
over one million in the Armenian SSR and one-half million as the intra-state
diaspora of the Soviet Union. In Ataturk's new Turkey, 150,000 Armenians were
left, cowed a~d no longer permitted to take part in any nonreligious activity (today
only 55,000 are left). Around half a million Armenians lived in diaspora, in Iran,
Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Greece, France, and the USA-later also in Australia,
Canada, and Argentina. The questions and problems that faced the exile leadership
of this new diaspora were both massive and new: Who would lead? To what purpose,
given that the larger proportion of the homeland was denuded of Armenians and
Exile Governments in the Armenian Polity I 181
incorporated into the territory of the Turkish Republic, with the assent of the
Western signatories to the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), while the rest of the old
homeland was part of the USSR, soon to descend into the Stalinist night?
In 1921, the government-in-exile was acknowledged by one country, France,
which let that recognition lapse in 1924, after it signed the Lausanne Treaty and
recognized the USSR. In itself, the lack of a more general recognition was not an
insurmountable problem: other exile governments have survived th.anks to the
patronage of one major state. France allowed the exiled government to issue the
identity cards oi Armenian refugees, which also functioned as passports across
European boundaries. That, and a certain minimal presence on the diplomatic
circuit of Paris, was all the service they extended to their impoverished co-nationals.
.f The Church and the AGBU were much better funded. Even the Dashnag party had
.1-:-
more funds than the government-in-exile, and indeed the latter very quickly became
a unit of the former: after all, its members had been party members all along, and
with the death of the republic they were no more than that, to the international
community. Among Armenian supporters, they were revered as reminders of past
hopes. Bearing the name Badviragootyun (Delegation), the shell of the government-
in-exile was maintained, in a Paris building and museum, until 1939, then again
from 1945 to 1965, when even the pretense was allowed to lapse.
-
".
However, as this essay has argued throughout, the Armenian diaspora had long
"' been organized and to a significant extent governed by elites that performed certain
services and had access to human, ideological, and fiscal resources. While these
resources were a pale shadow of their pre-war selves, there were enough militants,
and embittered sympathizers among the survivors, to reconstitute the old organiza-
tions to an astonishing degree. These debated and continue to debate questions
concerning the role and agenda of exile government. Even an outline of the stages
of that debate is beyond the scope of this paper, which instead will summarize the
issues that have remained important to this day.
The first and foremost of these is the question of the role of the Armenian Soviet
Socialist Republic in the diaspora. By 1923, the final arbiter of the ASSR's affair
was clearly the Kremlin-so much so that it was. powerless to defend the Armenians
in the Soviet intra-state diaspora (e.g., Ka)abagh was attached to the Turkic
Azerbaijani SSR, thus laying the foundations for renewed conflict during Gorba-
chev's reign}. On the other hand, the ASSR was the only remaining part of the
homeland, and ii{ it an Armenian Communist party and the government it dominated
was fully functional. What was to be its leadership role vis-a-vis a diaspora situated
in largely capitalist countries?
Here, a comparison with post-1948 Israel is not out of place. In both cases, a
state exists, as does a large nonstate population. Some members of that population
chose to settle in the state, giving ultimate proof of their acceptance of its legitimacy
and centrality. (Between 1923 and 1965, around 400,000 Armenians returned from
the diaspora to Soviet Armenia, despite unease about the Communist regime.)
Given this situation, the question that has been debated by Armenian governments
1B4 I Khachig Tololyan
resumption of armed struggle. Rejected by the elite leadership, an underground
faction named ASALA launched Armenian terrorism and was joined by other
groups. Before it stopped, ASALA terrorists had assassinated half a dozen Dashnag
leader$ of the exile government, as well as Turkish diplomats and others in Western
24
Europe, the USA, Canada, and Australia.
Elsewhere in exile, the struggle between various factions of the elite has been al
the level of philanthropy, community development, cultural production, and church
administration. Armenians living in France or the USA, for example, do not require
the level of services needed in parts of the Middle East (e.g., no Armenian hospitals
are needed), but the provision of specifically Armenian day schools (there are
twenty in the USA), churches (one hundred and seven), newspapers, and other
communal facilities still requires the raising and expenditure of tens of millions of
dollars every year and employs hundreds. Millions are raised and channeled to
needy Armenians overseas, as for example after the earthquake of December 7,
1988 to Soviet Armenia. This peaceful activity is accompanied by discursive war
within what we might more correctly call the leadership of the ethnic community,
rather than the exile government of a diaspora, though there remains considerable
overlap between the two; all but two leading Armenian organizations in the USA
are still transnational. Of the exceptions, one, the Armenian Assembly, is organized
as a Washington lobby but can be viewed as continuing the exile government
function of "representing" the community in ways appropriate to American democ-
racy. Th.e other, the Zoryan Institute, is an innovative and influential think tank
which brings together diasporan (and now Soviet Armenian) analysts of the Arme-
nian condition.
That nation is on the verge of another political transformation due to Gorbachev's
attempts at reform, the conservative counterattack upon Armenians in Soviet Azer-
baijan (where over 100 have been killed and 210,000 have fled or have been
25
deported), and the diasporan mobilization that has resulted because of these and
two other events: the Karabagh issue and the earthquake. These call forth emotions
associated with the genocide, the greatest disaster that has befallen the Armenian
people: the earthquake, because of its unusual destructiveness, and the Karabagh
crisis, because the Azeris are attempting to expel Armenians from the last fragment
of historical Armenia outside the SSR still inhabited by majority Armenian popula-
tion. Lost people and lost lands evoke loss, the central experience of exiles. The
fear of renewed loss has mobilized the diaspora, and the easing of constraints on
contacts between Soviet Armenia and exile leaders make future transnational action
more likely.
It is now easier for the exile government to deal with and perhaps to influence
the newly emergent Soviet Armenian leadership than it has ever been. Of course,
the reverse is theoretically also true, but in fact the delegitimation of all things
Soviet is so complete that the exile government is more confident of itself than it
has been for decades. Its ADL faction, which for too long served as the SSR's junior
partner, is discredited. The Armenian Assembly is courted by Soviet Armenia for
Exile Governments in the Armenian. Polity I 185
its access to U.S.-Armenian capital and to Congress; as a result, it is growing in
influence and prestige in the diaspora. The Dashnage, in particular, are bolstered
by the fact that the outlawed flag of the Republic they once governed is again the
flag of the Armenian SSR (renamed the Republic of Armenia in August, 1990).
Dashnag heroes are rehabilitated and demonstrators call for its full legitimization
as a legal opposition party inside the Armenian SSR. Should this happen, it will
be the first time anywhere in the USSR that an exile organization has returned to
compete for political power.
The elites of the exile government, then, matter more than they did, and different
elite matter differently. The old dream of a pan-Armenian polity led by cooperating
and competing elites at home and in diaspora is once again a beckoning temptation.
With or without a nation-state to call their own, the Armenians still seek their
transnational nation, of which the government of exile will remain an indispensable
part.
Notes
1. Quoted in Yossi Shain, The Frontier of Loyalty: Political Exile in the Age of the Nation-State
(Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 113.
2. In this respect, the study of exile governments resembles lhe study of terrorism, as described by
Gerard Chaliand in Terrorism (London: Saqi Books, 1987, orig. Terrorism.es el Gu.erril.Las, Paris:
Flammarion, 1985), 11-7. Many early models of terrorism were based on groups like the Daader-
Meinhof, who "represented no one bul themselves," lacked a mass base, bul were easily accessible
lo scholars living in the West and fluent in Western languages. The parallelemerges in that lhe
governments-in-exile mot studied until recently lacked a rnass base actually living where they
operated, in exile, and provided il with few services-but were accessible lo Western scholars:
The contrast emerges in considering th~ Palestinians, concenlraled in distant camps where they
lived with a government-like infrastructure bul accessible only to scholars who could cross an
ideological and linguistic divide.
3. I bid.. 165.
4. The central role of political culture in defining the authentic aspirations and interests of the exile
polity is the subjecl of my manuscript, Stateless Power: Representation and Hegemony in. the
Armenian Diaspora, in progress.
5. Daniel J. O'Neil offers an interesting if not fully convinci~g argument that modem Irish nalionalim
is an. example of "successful nation-building on the part of an enclave people." J. ofEthnic Stud<,s
15:3 (Fall, l987), 1-27.
6. What endured was the archaic classical Am1enian used by the clergy. Otherwise, there wu a
mulliplication and fragmentation of dialects; See Marc Nichanian, Ages et Usages de !a langu.e
Armen.ienne (Paris: Editions Entente, 1989), chapters V and VI.
7. Informed speculation about the extent to which the old leadership survived lo become the core of
new elites continues among historians. The besl recenl work is by Robert Hewsen, "Artsrunid
House of Sefedinian: Survival of a Princely Dynasty in Eccl.,siuslical Guise," J. of the Society of
Armenian Studies I (1984), pp. 133-7 and "In Search of Armenian Nobility," }SAS Ill (1987),
pp. 93-118.
8. The term was originated by Philip Curtin lo refer lo an African phenomenon, bul has b"en