A follow-on to “The diaspora as asset and vector”
In August I wrote that Armenia’s adversaries view the diaspora not only as an asset for the homeland but as a vector for influence, and that security measures taken in response could strain the very bonds they are meant to protect. The Foreign Intelligence Service reports gave that warning an official vocabulary: hybrid pressure, cultivated political activity, networks activated from abroad. Five weeks later, the prime minister stated the other half of the problem in his own words.
On Sept. 11, Nikol Pashinyan observed that Armenians often speak of the diaspora as an instrument of Armenia in another country. “But the opposite is also true, and we have seen that recently. The diaspora becomes a means for that country to exert influence on Armenia.” He added that Armenia should not mentor the diaspora and the diaspora should not mentor Armenia. The relationship he described was partnership around a development agenda — institutions such as TUMO and COAF — rather than mutual political direction.
Taken together with voter eligibility rules that emphasize recent physical presence in the republic, and with proposed changes that would raise the cost of citizenship and require sustained residence, these remarks amount to more than a change in tone. They describe a state defining the nation primarily as the people who live within its borders and accept the consequences of its diplomacy. That is a legitimate exercise of sovereignty for a small country operating under asymmetric threat. It is also a departure from a longstanding understanding, widely held in the global community, that the Church, the memory of Artsakh and the organized diaspora remain part of a single national whole.
Both facts can be true at once. Armenia has a right to decide who votes and on what terms a passport is issued. The FIS assessments I discussed in August were not invented for domestic convenience. They document efforts to pressure Armenians abroad, including in business communities, to finance or organize activity directed at the constitutional order. Reporting around the June elections described information operations, financial networks and attempts to move people across borders for political effect. A state that ignores those patterns is not being generous to its diaspora. It is being careless with its independence.
It is equally true that most disagreement in the diaspora is not a foreign operation. Grief after the loss of Artsakh, attachment to the Apostolic Church and distrust of a peace many communities do not accept are authentic political facts. They predate any particular campaign and will outlast it. When government action against the church hierarchy, opposition financiers or overseas advocacy is described only as counter-interference, the line between a verified security concern and the marginalization of honest dissent becomes difficult to see. That is the proportionality problem I raised in August. It has not grown smaller.
The practical danger is that the gap between these two understandings has become useful to others. Russian-linked activity has an obvious incentive to work through institutions and narratives the republic no longer claims: church authority, opposition finance with roots in Russia and diaspora media that treat Yerevan’s course as abandonment. Azerbaijan and Turkey have an incentive to keep overseas advocacy and official diplomacy speaking past each other. Western partners supporting Armenia’s new intelligence architecture and election-period information defenses have an incentive to treat the government in Yerevan as the sole legitimate interlocutor — and then discover that communities in Los Angeles and Paris have not received the same brief. Each of these actors can call the others’ Armenian contacts a vector. Some of those claims will have evidence behind them. Many will not. The accusation itself becomes part of the operation.
American legal standards are of some use here, if they are applied as standards rather than as slogans. The Foreign Agents Registration Act and related counterintelligence work exist to identify a foreign principal, direction and control, and covert tasking. They do not exist to settle an argument about national identity among citizens of the United States. If every diaspora critic is framed as an instrument of another state, the prime minister’s warning fulfills itself. If every official warning is dismissed as a pretext, the community becomes easier to use. The distinction that matters is the same one a court would recognize: who paid, who directed and whether the conduct was open political speech or concealed agency.
Yerevan has begun to answer the hybrid problem with public reports, investigations and eligibility rules. Those tools can be lawful and still be unwise if they are not paired with transparency about how intelligence informs policy, and with process that can be examined. The FIS reports themselves, by coming into public view, modeled a degree of that transparency. Extending it would do more to preserve confidence — in Armenia and across the diaspora — than a widening list of people presumed to be near a foreign agenda.
The phrase “asset and vector” was a strategic warning. It is now a description of daily life. Development partnerships remain the part of the relationship least available to handlers. Political money, organized travel for electoral effect and the use of religious authority as a factional channel are the part most available. Armenia must continue to defend against genuine interference. The diaspora must continue to distinguish a grievance from an assignment. Neither task is served by pretending that the republic and the global nation still speak with one voice. They do not. Getting the classification right — partner or instrument, dissent or direction — may prove as consequential as any battlefield or any diplomatic text. Our homeland and its diaspora still deserve that care. They will not receive it from those who benefit when the two are set against each other.
