¹ For a general discussion of diaspora impact on the homeland, in particular through influence on the U.S. government and its foreign policy, see Shain, Yossi, “Multicultural Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy 100 (1995): 69–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the more general study by Sheffer, Gabriel, “A New Field of Study: Modern Diasporas in International Politics,” in Modern Diasporas in International Politics, ed. Sheffer, Gabriel (New York, 1986), 1–15.Google Scholar

² The countries included within the rubric central and eastern Europe were: European Russia, Austria-Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, European Turkey, and Greece. Statistics are drawn from Carpenter, N., “Immigrants and their Children,” U.S. Bureau of the Census Monograph, no. 7 (Washington, D.C., 1927), 324–25.Google Scholar

³ Twelve months' residence abroad was adopted by the International Labor Organization in 1920 as the basis for distinguishing between sojourners and those migrants who stayed longer. Gould, J. D., “European Inter-Continental Emigration–The Road Home: Return Migration from the U.S.A.,” Journal of Economic History 9, no. 1 (1980): 42.Google Scholar

⁴ The definition of the term diaspora varies greatly. I have followed the lead of Milton Esman, who adopted the most general understanding; that is, a diaspora consists of ethnic groups whose minority status results from migration. See the discussion of the various definitions in King, Charles and Melvin, Neil J., Nations Abroad: Diaspora Politics and International Relations in the former Soviet Union (Boulder, 1999), 4–8.Google Scholar

⁵ Duff, John B., “The Italians,” in The Immigrants' Influence on Wilson's Peace Policies, ed. O'Grady, Joseph P. (Lexington, 1967), 111.Google Scholar

⁶ Cited in Mamatey, Victor S., The United States and East Central Europe, 1914–1918: A Study in Wilsonian Diplomacy and Propaganda (Princeton, 1957), 179–80.Google Scholar

⁷ Cited in Gerson, Louis L., “The Poles,”Google Scholar in Immigrants Influence, ed. O'Grady, 281–82.Google Scholar

⁸ This phrase was initially put forth by Wilson in his May 1916 address to the League to Enforce Peace. Interestingly, it was absent from his January 1918 address to Congress, which included the Fourteen Points. This was only one of several reasons why many central European activists–with the exception of the Poles–were displeased with what they considered to be the ambiguous content of the Fourteen Points. Wilson himself later regretted that he had used the phrase “national self-determination.” See the discussion in Joseph P. O'Grady, “The Irish,”Google Scholar in Immigrants' Influence, ed. O'Grady, 73.Google Scholar

⁹ For details, see May, Arthur J., “The Mid-European Union,”Google Scholar in Immigrants' Influence, ed. O'Grady, 250–71.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Since the close of World War I, the Hungarian diaspora in the United States and Canada worked closely with revisionist organizations in Hungary. The American Hungarian National Federation (est. 1906) called for the revision of the Treaty of Trianon by promoting a series of English-language pamphlets, all published in 1921 in London, New York, and Budapest, with provocative titles such as: “Three Nationality States Instead of One”; “The Geographic Impossibility of the Czech State”; “Can Romanian Rule in East Hungary Last?”; “The Martyrdom of Croatia”; and “The Historical Right of the Hungarian Nation to its Territorial Integrity.” As late as 1970, the Hungarian Turul Society in Canada reprinted the 1930 edition of Légrádys, Ottó “muffled cry of a nation buried under the shambles of two World Wars”: Justice for Hungary!: The Cruel Errors of Trianon, 2nd ed. (West Hill, 1970).Google Scholar

¹¹ Nearly 60 percent of all immigrants admitted to the United States under the Displaced Persons Act were from “East Central Europe,” that is, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. More than half of them were originally from Poland, although they were largely ethnic Ukrainians as well as ethnic Poles. See the statistics in Puskás, Julianna, Ties that Bind, Ties that Divide: 100 Years of Hungarian Experience in the United States (New York, 2000), 262.Google Scholar

¹² For statistical data on return migration, see Wyman, Mark, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, 1993), 9–12.Google Scholar

¹³ An excellent case study of DPs and their impact on previous immigrants as well as on the host country is found in Luciuk, Lubomyr, Searching for Place: Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada, and the Migration of Memory (Toronto, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁴ There were, of course, leftist-oriented and openly communist-affiliated organizations among central Europe's diasporas in both the United States and Canada that demonstratively avoided association with anticommunist groups and often openly praised the Soviet Union and its post-World War II satellites in central Europe.

¹⁵ Post-World War II exiles convinced themselves as well as sympathizers in American and Canadian governing circles that they knew best the people of the countries they fled. When, after 1989, many began to return home as visitors, they finally realized how, after several decades, their “own” people had changed–and from the North American perspective, for the worse. This problem, as it pertains to the differences between historical memory among émigré Slovaks and their countrymen at home (with particular reference to the World War II-era head of the Slovak state, Josef Tiso), is discussed in Cohen, Shari J., Politics Without a Past: The Absence of History in Post-Communist Nationalism (Durham, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁶ Technically, the Serbian Parliament at Niš in December 1914 issued a declaration calling for the creation of a Yugoslavia, but it was in the diaspora that the details were worked out in the course of the World War I years.

¹⁷ Cited in Mamatey, , United States and East Central Europe, 130.Google Scholar

¹⁸ The classic study of this controversial document from a Slovak nationalist perspective is by Čuien, Konstantin, Pittsburghská Dohoda (The Pittsburgh Agreement) (Bratislava, 1937).Google Scholar See also Stolárik, Marián Mark, “The Role of American Slovaks in Creation of Czecho-Slovakia, 1914–1918,” Slovak Studies 8 (1968): 7–82.Google Scholar

¹⁹ For details, see Mamatey, Victor S., “The Slovaks and Carpatho-Ruthenians,” in Immigrants' Influence, ed. O'Grady, esp. 239–49Google Scholar; and Magocsi, Paul Robert, “The Political Activity of Rusyn-American Immigrants in 1918,” East European Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1976): 347–65.Google Scholar

²⁰ Cited in Mamatey, , United States and East Central Europe, 117.Google Scholar

²¹ For details on the various political orientations of South Slavic diasporan groups in the United States, see Prpic, George J., “The South Slavs,” in Immigrants' Influence, ed. O'Grady, 173–203Google Scholar; and Čizmić, Ivan, Jugoslovenski iseljenički pokret u SAD i stvaranje jugoslavenske države 1918 (The Yugoslav immigrant movement in the United States and the creation of the South Slavic state in 1918) (Zagreb, 1974).Google Scholar

²² Cited in Scammell, Michael, “The New Yugoslavia,” The New York Review of Books 37, no. 12 (1990): 42.Google Scholar

²³ On the evolution of Tudjamns thinking, see Hockenos, Paul, Homeland Calling: Exile Patriotism and the Balkan Wars (Ithaca, 2003), 42–51.Google Scholar

²⁴ Ibid., 41.

²⁵ King, and Melvin, , Nations Abroad, 122.Google Scholar For details on the impact of the Galician-Ukrainian diaspora on independent Ukrainian political and economic life, see Motyl, Alexander, Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality: Coming to Grips with Nationalism in the USSR (New York, 1990), esp. 132–45.Google Scholar

²⁶ Deák, István, “Hungarian Political Emigration and the Early Years of the Cold War,” in Küzdelem az igazságért: Tanulmányok Randolf L. Braham SO. születésnapjára (A struggle for truth: Studies on the 80th anniversary of Randolf L. Braham), ed. Karsai, László and Molnár, Judit (Budapest, 2002), 99–112.Google Scholar

²⁷ There are, of course, individuals like the American philanthropist of Hungarian origin, George Soros, whose ideals are driven by integration and not the nation-state. But he is hardly representative or an active participant in any diasporan group.

²⁸ Mamatey, , United States and East Central Europe.Google Scholar

²⁹ Danforth, Loring, The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World (Princeton, 1995)Google Scholar; Hockenos, , Homeland Calling.Google Scholar

³⁰ The influential source of this point of view is the Pulitzer Prize-winning study by Handlin, Oscar, The Uprooted (Boston, 1951).Google Scholar For challenges to the Handlin paradigm that newcomers were initially alienated and then beholden to America as a promised land, see Vecoli, Rudolf J., “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of The Uprooted,” Journal of American History 51, no. 3 (1964): 404–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³¹ Wyman, , Round-Trip to America, 10–11.Google Scholar

³² For fascinating details on these and other reasons for returning home to Europe, see ibid., 76–133.

³³ Return to the Russian Empire was negatively influenced by news of the Kishinev (Chişinău) pogrom of 1903; nevertheless, Jews continued to return, with returnees comprising 6 percent of the total immigration between 1908 and 1914. Sarna, Jonathan D., “The Myth of No Return: Jewish Return Migration to Eastern Europe, 1881–1914,” American Jewish History 71, no. 2 (1981): 256–68.Google Scholar

³⁴ Thernstrom, Stephen C., ed., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Mass., 1980)Google Scholar; Cordasco, Francesco, ed., Dictionary of American Immigration History (Metuchen, 1990)Google Scholar; Galens, Judy, Sheets, Anna, and Young, Robyn V., eds., Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America, 2 vols. (Detroit, 1995)Google Scholar; Levinson, David and Ember, Melvin, eds., American Immigrant Cultures: Builders of a Nation, 2 vols. (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Magocsi, Paul Robert, ed., Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples (Toronto, 1999).Google Scholar

³⁵ This topic is taken up in de Conde, Alexander, Ethnicity, Race and American Foreign Policy: A History (Boston, 1992)Google Scholar, although with little attention to central European groups.

³⁶ Klima, Ivan, The Spirit of Prague and Other Essays (London, 1994), 50.Google Scholar

³⁷ Safran, William, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (1991): 93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁸ Ukraine's position is complicated by the fact the Rusyns are recognized as a distinct national minority in neighboring countries, including Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. One of the reasons behind Ukraine's policy, as expressed by Volodymyr Troshchyns'kyi, first secretary of the State Committee for Nationalities and Migration, was the likelihood of protests against possible recognition of Rusyns lodged by the Ukrainian diaspora, which “our government takes seriously.” Interview with author, September 1998.

³⁹ Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001), xiii.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Ibid., xviii.