The Paradoxical Nature of Diaspora Engagement Policies: A World Polity Perspective on the Karta Polaka

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This paper uses the example of the Karta Polaka to develop a more general argument about the place of diaspora engagement policies in the global political order. Specifically, I address the paradoxical nature of these policies, which are concomitantly undermining and reaffirming the nation-state form as a model for organising political communities. By combining insights from the literature on state-diaspora relations and world polity theory with empirical perspectives yielded from the example of the Karta Polaka, it is argued that diaspora engagement policies challenge an ideal model of the nation-state by reconfiguring citizenship, territory and national belonging as the basic tenets of this model. In this way, diaspora engagement policies such as the Karta Polaka can be understood as a reconfiguration of the nation-state model, which is not indicative of an erosion of state sovereignty but rather, on the contrary, of the resilience and adaptability of the nation-state form to challenges posed by globalisation.