"The Driving Force of Change" (continued) - Karen AGEKYAN

Karen Ageqyan's article "The Driving Force of Change" (continuation) is devoted to analyzing the structural obstacles preventing the Armenian diaspora from becoming a genuine subject of national development, and to a critical reconsideration of the concepts of "community," "society," and "Spyurk" as applied to the post-genocide dispersion of Armenians.

A Fragmented Environment

The author proceeds from the thesis formulated in the first part of the work: for the driving forces of national development to operate, an environment is required — a national society. In the author's view, Armenians in the diaspora do not even form a fragmented society, but rather constitute a scattered set of weakly connected groups and communities. The author emphasizes the fundamental distinction between nation and ethnicity: a nation is a political phenomenon, not a sum of representatives sharing the same blood, language, or culture.

Community and Society in the Spyurk

Drawing on F. Tönnies's classical distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society), the author demonstrates:

• the traditional community is held together by kinship, emotional closeness, and rootedness in a specific landscape;
• upon resettlement, especially forced resettlement, this rootedness is destroyed, and the community is formed anew;
• historical examples (the Armenian communities of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, internal conflicts in Lviv) show that even autonomous diaspora communities were internally disunited and weakly cohesive;
• contemporary diaspora communities have lost the compactness and everyday commonality underlying the very concept of "համայնք" / "community" / "Gemeinschaft."

The author points to the archaism of thinking whereby diaspora organizations continue to use the words "community" and "Spyurk" (capitalized), attributing to the dispersion a nonexistent unity and agency, and also draws attention to the absence in the Armenian language of a separate term for the political concept of "nation" (as distinct from "ազգ" — lineage, blood kinship).

Conditions for National Policy

This section shows that the participation of diaspora Armenians in the public life of their host countries (Brazil, Ukraine, Australia, etc.) has no bearing on the Armenian nation as such, even when it contributes to the progress of a particular ethnic minority. The activity of diaspora organizations — recognition of the Genocide, the erection of monuments, Sunday schools, cultural events — is interpreted by the author as "preservation" of potential rather than nation-building: such activity can only maintain the possibility of a future connection to national development as a whole, but does not by itself generate the corresponding impulse.

General Andranik

The case of the erection of a monument to General Andranik in Sochi is used as an illustration of the ambivalence of "national" diaspora activity: even the commemoration of a genuine national hero is fraught with problems of interpreting his image, inherited in part from the Soviet censorship tradition.

The key conclusion of the article is that the fragmentation of the diaspora environment and the substitution of concepts ("community," "Spyurk," "nation") preserve the illusion of national unity and block the formation of genuine driving forces of national development, which cannot arise from the everyday life of an ethnic minority without a powerful external impulse.