Dual loyalty

In politics, dual loyalty is loyalty to two separate interests that potentially conflict with each other.

While nearly all examples of alleged "dual loyalty" are considered highly controversial, these examples point to the inherent difficulty in distinguishing between what constitutes a "danger" of dual loyalty – i.e., that there exists a pair of misaligned interests – versus what might be more simply a pair of partially aligned or even, according to the party being accused, a pair of fully aligned interests. For example, immigrants who still have feelings of loyalty to their country of origin will often insist that their two (or more) loyalties do not conflict. As Stanley A. Renshon at The Center for Immigration Studies notes,

Lan Samantha Chang (1999), a novelist writing in response to the Wen Ho Lee case, could say in a New York Times op-ed piece entitled Debunking the Dual Loyalty Myth, "True, many immigrants have strong ties to their countries of birth. ... But cultural or familial loyalties are on a different level from political allegiances...I love China, but I am a citizen of the United States." Ms. Chang appears to want to distinguish a love for one's "home" country from being willing to commit treason against one's adopted one. This is obviously a fair, reasonable, and appropriate distinction.

Yet, in the process of making such a distinction, she acknowledges the duality of her feelings. The issue is not between love of one's country of origin and treason, but rather the multiple loyalties that appear to be part of many immigrants' psychology.

Some scholars refer to a growing trend of transnationalism and suggest that as societies become more heterogeneous and multi-cultural, the term "dual loyalty" increasingly becomes a meaningless bromide. According to the theory of transnationalism, migration (as well as other factors including improved global communication) produces new forms of identity that transcend traditional notions of physical and cultural space. Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton define a process by which immigrants "link together" their country of origin and their country of settlement.

The transnationalist view is that "dual loyalty" is a potentially positive expression of multi-culturalism, and can contribute to the diversity and strength of civil society. While this view is popular in many academic circles, others are skeptical of this idea. As one paper describes it,

On occasion, these imagined communities conform to the root meaning of transnational, extending beyond loyalties that connect to any specific place of origin or ethnic or national group. Yet what immigration scholars describe as transnationalism is usually its opposite ... highly particularistic attachments antithetical to those by-products of globalization denoted by the concept of "transnational civil society" and its related manifestations.

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