Writing my short essay on the wider methodological approaches to interwar statelessness, and to an extent statelessness in general, provided me a great many insights on the best method of approaching my project on the White Russian diaspora. One particularly valuable aspect was of course my realisation, or at least the discovery of my belief, that any one approach to statelessness, transnational, supranational, or comparative, each carries inherent flaws that make them ill-suited to a non-supplemented usage.
When reading the historiography I discovered a clear and present disparity between ambition and reality in relation to the universalist ambitions of supranational and international organisations and the material reality on the ground. This confirmed my previous suspicions on the matter that a purely supranational approach to the White Russian diaspora would be wholly inadequate. For such an approach would gloss over problems, such as what migratory freedom the Nansen passport, which both the French and Chinese government recognised, truly granted the diasporic communities within their newfound jurisdictions. Which neighbouring countries also recognised the passport? Did individual border control agents or administrations perhaps refuse to recognise the passport, despite the official policy of their nation? A purely supranational approach would fail to properly address these questions. An accompanying transnational lens would also allow me to cover the international activist-led organisations that agitated for the better treatment of these refugees, and the migratory patterns, if any, that existed within these two diasporas. For instance, did they grow and contract in size along a similar scale? It also became clear how easy it was to fall into the trap of reinventing the assumptions of so-called ‘methodological nationalism’, the assumption that nation-states are the default unit for analysing social issues. This ‘reification’ would most likely have come from a project solely rooted in, or overly weighted towards, a comparative approach, wherein I would approach the White Russian diaspora through a purely bilateral ‘host’ vs ‘home’ lens, when what could be classified as ‘home’ for many amongst the diaspora did not exist anymore in any meaningful sense of the word.
Overall, the short essay proved to me that my project on the White Russian diaspora requires a synthesised approach of all three methodologies discussed previously. This synthesis has pushed me to firmly adopt a combinatory method of analysis moving forward with my project on White Russian communities in Paris and Shanghai. The Nansen passport will serve as a supranational entry point, whose implementation, or lack thereof, can be analysed comparatively to investigate how it was locally adapted, contested, or outright ignored under dissimilar structural conditions. Finally, émigré-produced sources and infrastructure can be utilised transnationally to partially bypass the flaws inherent to applying an overly ‘from above’ approach to the project.