Introduction: A Balkan Laboratory of Citizenship

1(…)

2Broadly speaking, citizenship is the legal link between a state and individuals, involving rights guaranteed by the state to its citizens and duties citizens owe to their state. Citizenship has two general dimensions: a legal one that binds citizens and their polity and involves the citizens’ civil, economic and social rights and duties, and another that implies political activity on behalf of citizens. I claim that citizenship is a tool of the modern (nation-) state. It is the tool that binds the legal status and political membership of an individual and defines his or her relationship to the state. It is a necessary tool of any state-or nation-building process as it is supposed to provide for elementary solidarity and legal equality among the individuals who form a community of citizens. In order to better understand citizenship as a multi-purpose tool, we should complement it here with the concept of citizenship regime. By citizenship regime we mean not only the citizenship laws, regulations and administrative practices regarding the citizenship status of individuals but also the existing mechanisms of their political participation. More precisely, a citizenship regime is based on a given country’s citizenship legislation defining the body of citizens, its administrative policies in dealing with citizenship matters and the status of individuals, and, finally, on the official or non-official dynamic of political inclusion and exclusion. (…).

3I argue throughout the present paper that the history of Yugoslavia and its successor states provides an instructive and rare example of how citizenship can be used for different and even opposing goals: as a tool of national integration in the first Yugoslavia (1918-1941), as a tool of socialist re-unification after the failure of the previous national integration and the war-time inter-ethnic conflicts (1945 to the mid-1960s), as a tool of cooperation among nations and their republics in a socialist multinational (con)federation (beginning in the late 1960s and continuing until 1990), as a tool of fragmentation and dissolution (1990-1992) and, finally, of ethnic engineering. Since 2000, the process of joining the EU has been under way with various degrees of success in all post-Yugoslav states. One can observe that in this context citizenship is used both as a tool of reconciliation and of creating new divisions.

The Brothers United: Citizenship as a Tool of Integration in the First Yugoslavia, 1918-1941

4The first Yugoslavia was born out of the chaotic final days of the First World War that opened up a possibility for the realisation of a nineteenth century idea: that South Slavs should form their own national state. They were eventually united under the Serbian crown. (…). To paraphrase Massimo D’Azeglio’s famous judgment on the Italian Risorgimento, after the creation of Yugoslavia it was necessary to create Yugoslavs, out of South Slavs and numerous minorities. Therefore, the Yugoslav Kingdom was conceived as a unitary state with a single citizenship and as one nation, though composed of three ‘tribes’ that gave to the country its first, long, and unusual name: the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

5Post-war peace treaties with Austria and Hungary established that a person who had the ‘homeland’ or rather ‘municipal’ right (zavičajno pravo or pravo zavičajnosti), or domicile on former Austrian-Hungarian territory should have citizenship of the country currently exercising its authority on that territory. The treaties also established the right of option for adult persons and, more significantly after the dissolution of the multiethnic empires and during consolidation of new nation-states, the right of option for members of ethnic minorities to live in their kin-state, i.e. to emigrate to their kin-states1. It is, however, interesting to note that the laws and regulations on citizenship —enacted by the defunct Habsburg Empire and the post-Ottoman kingdoms— remained in force in the Yugoslav lands for a whole decade after unification. Finally, in 1928, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes enacted its own citizenship law that established a single Yugoslav citizenship. The law had retroactive application. Its intention was to determine who had actually acquired and who had lost Yugoslav citizenship between 1918 and 1928. According to the law, Yugoslav citizens consisted of all persons who, on the day of unification (1 December 1918), had citizenship in the Kingdom of Serbia, the Kingdom of Montenegro, or the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia, if they had not lost that citizenship as a result of the Peace Treaties. The law also provided that ‘every citizen must have zavičajnost in one of the Kingdom’s municipalities’. Zavičajnost —the term can be imperfectly translated as ‘homeland’ or rather ‘municipal’ belonging— signified permanent municipal residence and a legal link between the individual and the municipality or county where he or she lived. Zavičajnost remained an important legal device up until 1948, when it constituted the basis for the establishment of citizenships of the republics of the new federal Yugoslavia.

6It very soon became clear that it was easier to create Yugoslavia than Yugoslavs. Yugoslavia simply came into being too late. The ‘long nineteenth century’ in the South Slavic lands had produced powerful regional nationalist movements aspiring to form an independent state or, short of that, more autonomy for their units within Yugoslavia. Early Yugoslav nation-builders (…) promoted national unity at the expense of local cultures. However, to do so in the context of the political hegemony of the centre (Serbia) and with the Serbian royal family enthroned, at the very moment when separate national groups (especially Slovenes and Croats) were already formed with different political and historic memories and different and sometimes opposing political goals meant from the very outset that these integrative policies would almost certainly meet fierce resistance. (…)

7On the eve of the Second World War, and twenty years after the establishment of the South Slavic national state, the Yugoslav political elite acknowledged their failure to create a Yugoslav ‘community of citizens’ that was intended to be, as elsewhere, a cross between a unified political nation à la française and the South Slavic ethnic base (in spite of numerous minorities within its borders). It also acknowledged that there was more than one nation in Yugoslavia. In order to solve the Croatian question, it created a semi-independent Croatia in 1939 and therefore started the federalisation of Yugoslavia.

Brothers Reconciled, Brothers as Partners: Citizenship as a Tool of Reunification and Cooperation in the Second Yugoslavia, 1945-1990

8The idea of a South Slavic state did not disappear after the unhappy experience of the first Yugoslavia and the war-time inter-ethnic massacres. What was certainly politically dead was unitarism. The federal vision of Yugoslavia, which had its roots in the nineteenth century and was often advocated in the Habsburg South Slavic lands, lived on. After initial disputes on the nature of Yugoslavia, Yugoslav communists adopted and never really abandoned —even under pressure from Moscow and the Comintern between 1924-1925 and 1934-1935— federalist Yugoslavism as the formula both to solve the national question in Yugoslavia in a Marxist way and to save the country itself. When combined with the resistance struggle against the occupiers and their local allies, the perspective of overcoming fratricidal violence, and the promise of social emancipation, federalism turned out to be the winning ticket.

9Although the influence of the Soviet teachers was fully acknowledged, the Yugoslav communists introduced important variations into their own federalist solution to the national question. Other than the fact that one republic (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and one autonomous province (Vojvodina) were formed not only on ethnic bases but according to historic criteria, one crucial innovation from the very outset was to add citizenship to the republics’ attributes of ‘statehood’. Citizenship in socialist Yugoslavia was from the very beginning defined as having two-levels and it was legally and politically bifurcated into federal and republican citizenship. As part of the package of the ‘just’ solution to the national question, bifurcated citizenship in post-war federal Yugoslavia was a tool for the socialist re-unification of the country. It meant both a commitment to the idea of a South Slavic state and the acknowledgement that its brotherly nations should develop fully and independently but preferably —as advocated between 1945 and the mid-1960s— in the direction of a higher socialist unity.

10From the mid-1960s, (…) it was acknowledged, not without grievances, that over the years the South Slavic brothers had evolved into independent partners and that the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was not their ‘family home’ but ‘a communal building’. Yugoslavs called it a ‘cooperative federal system’ and its main ideologist, Edvard Kardelj, qualified it in 1971 as ‘no longer classical federation nor classic confederation, but a socialist, self-managing community of nations’. Once it became clear that partnership and self-interest rather than family (ethnic) ties were keeping the Yugoslav nations together, it was impossible to preserve the same constitutional setting. The only possible new direction was towards more decentralisation and towards making the republics the primary political arenas in Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, the federal centre became increasingly dependent on the ups and downs of their partnership.

11Yugoslavia’s internal structure and the relations among the republics were defined by what I call centrifugal federalism. Centrifugal federalism was the device that transformed Yugoslavia from a centralist federation into a confederation. My definition of centrifugal federalism stresses the process, which gradually but irreversibly empowers the subunits over the centre. This process is characterised by accelerated decentralisation and constant concessions to the subunits, which then prove to be impossible to revoke without a serious destabilisation of the whole system and without the potential for violent conflicts. I argue that Yugoslav centrifugal federalism also transformed bifurcated citizenship in Yugoslavia from a tool of re-unification of brothers into a tool of cooperation among equal partners. Although the internal division into federal and republican citizenships seemed to be purely formal and juristic, it started to play a significant political role during the decentralising process and within the system of centrifugal federalism in Yugoslavia. I claim that Yugoslav bifurcated citizenship changed its political character (without being codified in law as such) from being purely federal (between 1945 and the constitutional amendments of 1967-1971) to confederal citizenship (progressively from 1967, and definitely after 1974).

12The hybrid structure of Yugoslavia was also manifested in the constitutional definitions of federal and republican citizenship. According to art. 249 of the last Constitution of the SFR Yugoslavia (1974), citizens possessed a ‘single citizenship of the SFRY’ and every citizen of a republic was ‘simultaneously’ a citizen of the SFRY. The third line of the article confirms that ‘a citizen of a republic on the territory of another republic has the same rights and obligations as the citizens of that republic’. Federal citizenship was thus always both single and dual by its very nature since the simultaneity of republican and federal citizenships was established. This, in fact, created confusion in legal literature over the question of primacy between federal and republican level citizenship. During the heyday of socialist Yugoslavia, it was mostly Students of the law who took an interest in this tricky question, to which the precise answer became of utmost importance when the dissolution of the federation occurred. No consensus exists on the question of primacy; some authors cite the simultaneity and identity of the two citizenships or find, in the equality of the rights and duties of a citizen of one republic living in the other, evidence of ‘the primacy of Yugoslav citizenship over those of different republics’ and describe the pre-eminence of federal citizenship as ‘an important guarantee for minorities facing the majority “nation” of one or another republic’. Others (…) argue that, although only federal citizenship was legal in the international arena and republican citizenship had an ‘exclusively internal legal role’, republican citizenship had primacy over SFRY citizenship.

13Nevertheless, the 1976 Law on Citizenship of the SFRY brought with it another element that could confirm the primacy of the subunits and the confederal nature of Yugoslavia’s bifurcated citizenship. The Act regulated conditions for acquisition and termination of Yugoslav citizenship, but transferred the competences for implementation of the citizenship legislation from the Federal Ministry of the Interior to the republican authorities. These competences included the registration and termination of Yugoslav citizenship. Furthermore, the republican supreme courts were deemed competent in citizenship matters (such as, for instance, in complaints against decisions related to citizenship). (…)

14Another striking feature of confederal citizenship in Yugoslavia —another element that since the beginning had been silently reinforcing the power of the republics vis-à-vis the federation— was that in Yugoslavia only republic-level registers of citizens existed between 1945 and 1991. In other words, Yugoslav citizens were registered only as republican citizens and only at the republican level. Furthermore, only republican centres (and even regional centres in Vojvodina and Kosovo) were entitled to issue Yugoslav passports with their own numbers (preceded with the letters signaling the republic or the autonomous region of origin). This resulted in a plethora of various Yugoslav passports. For instance, passports issued in Kosovo had the letters KA before the number and were printed in Albanian, Serbian and French. Yugoslav passports issued in Macedonia were only in Macedonian and French (but not in Serbo-Croatian).

15Multiple changes in citizenship laws (which were similar but not identical in each republic!), a general unawareness of the importance of republican citizenship, and sometimes chaotic administrative procedures often resulted in incomplete registers of citizens. Later, this would prove to be a major obstacle for a significant number of individuals at the moment of their registration as citizens of new states. This almost total lack of awareness of the dual character of citizenship in Yugoslavia —legally existent but of no great practical concern— also extended to citizens themselves, the administration and, even legal scholars. (…)

16Since republican citizenship was of no significant practical relevance, citizens usually did not change their republican citizenship status if they moved to another republic, and often they did not even register changes of residence. Internal Yugoslav migration established strong personal and family ties across republican borders, while economically motivated migrations and the resettlement of federal administration and army personnel resulted in a considerable number of individuals living outside of their republic of origin. (…) At the moment of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, federal citizenship ceased to exist and republic-level citizenships became the only criterion for the acquisition of citizenship in the successor states. ‘Internal’ Yugoslav migrants, residing in a republic whose citizenship they did not possess and to whose ethnic majority they did not belong, were the first to suffer the consequences of the new citizenship regimes.

Partners into Enemies: Citizenship as a Tool of Fragmentation, Dissolution and Ethnic Engineering in Yugoslavia’s Successor States

17After being used in the first Yugoslavia as a tool of integration, and after 1945 as a tool of re-unification and cooperation, citizenship became one of the factors behind Yugoslavia’s disintegration at the beginning of the 1990s. I claim that some of the fundamental questions related to citizenship — namely, to what state do I owe my loyalty? And, which state guarantees, or promises to guarantee my rights and protection? — critically influenced the democratisation process and Yugoslavia’s violent disintegration. (…)

Democratisation, Fragmentation and Dissolution

18By the end of the 1980s, the partnership between Yugoslav republics had been tainted with different visions, bitterness and opposing ambitions. The disintegration of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in January 1990 and the first democratic elections in the Yugoslav republics that took place between the early spring and late autumn of 1990 brought this malfunctioning cooperation to the brink of a final and violent break-up. Democratisation came to Yugoslavia via its republican backdoor and never reached its federal institutions. The right to participate in the liberal democratic game of free multi-party elections and post-electoral formation of coalitions, minorities and majorities was at first extended to all residents of the republics. The civic conception of citizenship (all citizens of a given republic) was combined with openness towards residents who came from other republics and to whom the still valid federal laws guaranteed equality throughout Yugoslavia. In spite of this initial non-discrimination between republican citizens and residents (citizens of other republics), and in the context of the pending disintegration of the Yugoslav federation whose republics —all but one— had an ethnic base, ethnic solidarity began to dominate the Yugoslav political space. Trans-republican ethnic solidarity necessarily involved the vision of an ethnocentric state that would reassemble most, if not all, ethnic members in one state. It is therefore not surprising that the election results revealed strong support for ethnic leaders and ethnic parties whose message of ethnic solidarity crossed over republican borders. They promised to ‘protect’ and guard the interests of their ethnically defined electorate in the inter-republic and inter-ethnic conflicts.

19Perhaps, predictably, these ethnically defined republics did not adopt civic democracy as republican communities of citizens, which negotiated or confronted each other over the future of their common state (union or separation?). Civic democratic movements and parties based on the shared Yugoslav citizenship —that they hoped could still be used as an integrative tool— failed almost everywhere (their backing was strongest in Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina). (…). The democratic elections confirmed the conflict between the citizens’ civic/republican and ethnic identities. These two political identities could be easily reconciled only if a citizen resided in his or her own republic and belonged to its ethnic majority. However, this was not the case for the considerable number of individuals who lived outside the ‘national homes’ of their ethnic groups and were instead inside republics to which they had historically belonged civically (as republican citizens) but not ethnically.

20Another question was heavily debated: who was sovereign in federal Yugoslavia? Was it the Yugoslav nations, or the republics and their citizens? Serbia and Montenegro argued that the former was sovereign; all of the other republics insisted on the latter. Furthermore, the question was related to the even more explosive issue of the constitutionally guaranteed right to self-determination and secession. It was unclear again as to who the bearers of these rights were —the Yugoslav constituent ethnic peoples regardless of their residence or the citizens of the republics— and as to the status of various Yugoslav nationalities. Within this volatile debate, Milosevic´ launched an argument that resonated heavily among ethnic Serbs. It could be summarised as follows: if the republics have the right to secede, then ethnic Serbs as a whole have the same right to secede from everybody else. He was, of course, not ready to apply the principle within his own republic or to acknowledge an equivalent right of secession for ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Magyars in Vojvodina, or ethnic Muslims in the Sandjak.

21The ethno-national conception of citizenship finally prevailed and fueled violent conflicts (Stiks, 2010) over the redefinition of national borders within which the ethno-national states were to be formed on the basis of the absolute majorities of the core ethno-national groups. Democracy, on this view, was seen as workable only if it was essentially ethno-national. (…)

From Equal Citizens to Unequal Groups: Ethnic Engineering

22Almost all of the successor states of the former Yugoslav federation have used their respective citizenship laws as an effective tool for ethnic engineering. By ethnic engineering I mean an intentional policy of governments and lawmakers to influence, by legal means and related administrative practices, the ethnic composition of their populations in favour of their core ethnic group. Similar intentions have influenced the writing of new constitutions. (…). Citizenship laws played a key role in determining the citizenry of the new states, as well as the rights guaranteed to citizens by the new state. New legislation in almost all of Yugoslavia’s successor states offered a privileged status to members of the majority or core ethnic group regardless of their place of residence (inside or outside their borders). On the other hand, they substantially complicated the process of naturalisation for those outside the ethno-national core group, especially for ethnically different citizens from other former Yugoslav republics who were permanent residents on their territory when the new citizenship regime came into effect. In their extreme manifestation, citizenship laws and practices have also been used as a subtle, but nonetheless powerful tool for ethnic cleansing. The deprivation of citizenship, and the subsequent loss of basic social and economic rights, has been quite effective in forcing a sizeable number of individuals to leave their habitual places of residence.

23New citizenship legislation and related administrative practices, together with political activities centered on ethnic solidarity, created four different groups of individuals in Yugoslavia’s five initial successor states (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) and Macedonia) based on their citizenship status: the included, the invited, the excluded, and the self-excluded.

The Included

24All of the successor states of Yugoslavia adopted policies for legal continuity between the new citizenship and previous republican citizenship. All former citizens —regardless of their ethnic backgrounds— who were registered in the citizens’ republican registers, were automatically transferred into new registers. Possessing the citizenship of the new state was essential when individuals requested new documents such as IDs and passports, but also for maintaining previously held jobs, access to health care, and property rights. The problem with the civic registers was their occasional incompleteness. This was due to confusing regulations or simply to administrative incompetence.

25The principle of legal continuity would not have been problematic had it not left a considerable number of people in a legal limbo, usually Yugoslav citizens who resided outside the republic whose citizenship they possessed, whether they knew it or not, and their children who were mostly unaware of their republican citizenship. An alternative approach would have been collective naturalisation —to register all residents on a given territory as citizens of the new state, which was seen by some as a more appropriate solution. This was practiced by some post-Soviet states —the ‘new state model’ according to Brubaker— and Kosovo (since 2008). However, there might have been much more restrictive approaches to the determination of the initial citizenry, such as in Estonia and Latvia which followed, as Brubaker defined it, a so-called ‘restored state model’. These countries excluded their sizable Russophone population from citizenship and included only descendants of the inter-war citizens of independent Estonia and Latvia. The dissolution of federal Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia clearly shows the third model (the ‘federal dissolution model’) for the initial determination of citizenship after the collapse of multinational socialist federations. It involves the automatic acquisition of citizenship of new states by all previously registered republic-level citizens.

The Invited

26Almost all of the new citizenship regimes invited certain individuals —mostly ethnic kin in the ‘near abroad’ i.e. the neighbouring republics and ethnic Diaspora in Europe or overseas— to join the citizenry of their states. A very explicit invitation to citizenship was included in the new law on Croatian citizenship in 1991. For those who were invited to acquire Croatian citizenship on the grounds of their Croat ethnicity, one must define three sub-categories: those ethnic Croats who resided in Croatia but who did not have its republican citizenship; those residing in ‘near abroad’, mainly in Bosnia-Herzegovina —as the main target of the invitation— and finally, those members of ethnic Croat Diaspora in Europe or overseas (pre-Second World War, economic or post-1945 political Diaspora, and Croat guest workers). Since the grounds for granting citizenship to these individuals was their Croat ethnicity, the question immediately arose as to what proves one’s Croat ethnicity. In a number of documents such as school certificates or university certificates or some other administrative forms —but not IDs and passports— citizens were asked to declare their ethnicity. Yet Roman Catholic Church certificates were also accepted by the Ministry of the Interior as proof of someone’s ‘Croatness’. Art. 16 of the law on citizenship even provided a facilitated naturalisation procedure for those ethnic Croats not residing in Croatia, mostly in Bosnia-Herzegovina-. According to some estimates, more than 1.15 million people have become naturalised Croatian citizens since 1991; up to 800,000 of these are from Bosnia-Herzegovina, or previously held citizenship of Bosnia-Herzegovina, around 100,000 from Serbia and Montenegro combined, and some 10,000 from Macedonia (these numbers also include a considerable number of non-Croats who somehow managed to get Croatian passports for practical purposes such as visa-free travel). Not only did this eventually create individuals with dual citizenship and questionable loyalties —which had its strong political function during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina— but also a number of individuals with dual residency, especially in the border regions between Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

27Bosnia-Herzegovina, a multi-national country without a core ethnic group, also issued an invitation to acquire citizenship in the 1993 amendments to its 1992 decree on citizenship, but only to certain individuals within its borders. It provided that all SFRY citizens residing on the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina on 6 April 1992 —the day of its international recognition and the beginning of the war— should be automatically considered citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which basically followed the new state model. However, some other more problematic ‘invitations to citizenship’ were issued during the war. The same amendments facilitated the naturalisation of those who had been actively involved in the defence forces. Bosnian citizenship was granted on this basis to a limited number of foreigners (up to 2,000), mostly from Islamic countries, who had fought on the Bosniak side. This problematic citizenship also involved a certain number of Serbs from Serbia and Croatia who had acquired citizenship from the Serb entity (that introduced its own extremely ethnocentric citizenship regime in 1992), and ethnic Bosniaks from the Sandjak region who were naturalised in the Bosniak-Croat entity. The Dayton Peace Agreement annulled all war-time legislation. It introduced, following a familiar pattern of socialist Yugoslavia, a new two-level citizenship regime in Bosnia composed of the state and the entity of citizenships.

28The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, formed by Serbia and Montenegro in 1992, only adopted its own law on citizenship in 1996, after the wars ended in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (in which both Serbia and Montenegro were heavily involved). Individuals entitled to FRY citizenship were those in possession of the republican citizenships of Serbia and of Montenegro on 27 April 1992. A clearly problematic dimension of this law was its retroactive application. Those who were invited to hold FRY citizenship were permanent residents from other republics living in the FRY on that very day, if they did not already have a foreign citizenship. In other words, when it comes to this category, the FRY retroactively applied the ‘new state model’. The apparent liberal approach of the FRY authorities towards this group must be explained by two factors. The FRY unsuccessfully tried to portray itself as the sole legal successor of the SFRY —therefore accepting all SFRY citizens permanently residing on its territory as its citizens— but one also has to take into account that a vast majority of these individuals were also of Serb ethnicity. Ethnocentric migrations within Yugoslavia were a recurrent phenomenon. (…)

29However, in spite of the positioning of Belgrade as the political centre of ethnic Serbs, and not only of the FRY, and its attempt at territorial expansions, the law offered to thousands of Serb refugees settled in the FRY a narrow possibility for acquisition of its citizenship. (…) The deliberate political manipulation of the refugee problem was part of Milosevic´’s Serbian war strategy. Many refugees were redirected to the multiethnic region of Vojvodina, and to a lesser degree to Kosovo and Montenegro, where they influenced the ethno-demographic balances.

The Excluded

30Since legal continuity with republican citizenship was established as the rule, the group that was immediately excluded were the Yugoslav citizens residing in republics other than their own. Their situation was often even more complicated if they were of a different ethnicity as the core ethnic group of the republic where they lived. Once Yugoslavia had disappeared, these lawful citizens were, literally overnight, turned into aliens and, in many cases, the stateless. For the most part they were required to follow naturalisation processes reserved for aliens, requiring a certain number of years of continuous residence and certain additional tests. The Ministries of the Interior that were in charge of deciding on the validity of the applications often had no obligation to state the reasons for refusal; many reports testify to widespread discrimination against members of ethnic minorities.

31The most drastic case of administrative exclusion happened in Slovenia. (…) The only former Yugoslav republic to become an EU member state, (…) (it) has often been held as example in protecting human rights. This image would probably remain unquestioned were it not for the case of the so-called ‘erased’. The citizenship law adopted in June 1991 provided that individuals from other republics who had had lawful residence in Slovenia on December 23^rd 1990 —the day of the referendum on Slovenian independence— could become Slovenian citizens upon request within six months. The law (…) enabled policies contributing to a strategy of ethnic engineering. (…) On February 23^rd 1992, according to official sources, 18,305 lawful residents (…) from other republics were literally erased from the civic registries in Slovenia. In the months to come, their documents (e.g. passports, driver’s licenses, IDs) were invalidated. They lost all civic and social rights, jobs, health care, and social benefits, and became ‘dead’ from an administrative point of view —they were izbrisani, i.e. erased. This was facilitated by a short application period of six months, confusing application procedures, numerous difficulties in obtaining all necessary documents and finally by the overall political confusion since Slovenia was still legally part of the SFRY and was not internationally recognised until January 1992.

32In war-affected Croatia, as with residents from other republics (non-Croats, mostly ethnic Serbs) who were struggling to resolve their citizenship status in new Croatia, the most significant problems concerned the status of Serbs living in the breakaway Krajina region. (…)

33In Macedonia, one provision of the first law on citizenship from 1992 (…) proved that Macedonian legislators at the time were also preoccupied with ethnic engineering. The provision affirms that a permanent resident must have lived continuously in Macedonia for no less than fifteen years. (…) It was clear that one particular group had been targeted: ethnic Albanians, who had moved to Macedonia during socialist Yugoslavia and were thus numerically reinforcing the relative size of the Albanian minority. (…)

34In the FRY, or more precisely in Serbia, the politics of exclusion took on a different, political and non-legal shape, and were mostly concentrated in one particular region, Kosovo. Although ethnic Albanians continued to be Serbian and thus FRY citizens, in the period between Serbia’s revocation of Kosovo’s autonomous status in 1989, and the expulsion of Albanians from state institutions, up until the 1999 NATO intervention, the province of Kosovo was a place of continuous violations of their citizenship rights. Under Serbian administrative, military and police rule, this group of Yugoslav citizens was deprived of political and civil rights. (…)

The Self-excluded

35Self-exclusion from existing citizenship status (of one’s own republic) —with the idea of forming one’s own ethnically-based state and/or joining the kin-state and its citizenship— was part and parcel of the Serb rebellions in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Bosnian Croats’ political strategy in 1993 and 1994. Already in August 1990 —three months after Tudjman’s nationalist party took power in Croatia— (…) Serb police officers refused to commit their loyalty to the Croatian Ministry of the Interior (…). In October of the same year the Serb autonomous region of Krajina was declared; local Serb leaders openly advocated that, in case of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, Yugoslav Serbs should unite in a greater Serbian state regardless of the actual republican borders. (…)

36A similar scenario occurred in Bosnia-Herzegovina where (…) Serb autonomous regions’ were formed in 1991. In early 1992 they declared themselves a republic and sought separation from Bosnia-Herzegovina. (…). As for nationalist Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina, (…) (they) rejected Bosnia-Herzegovina as a multinational state, established their own statelet, the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosna, and tried to get as much territory as possible with the intention of attaching it to Croatia.

37One needs to mention another self-exclusionary practice, namely peaceful rebellion —until the emergence of the Kosovo Liberation Army in 1997— of Albanians in Kosovo against the Serbian authorities. (…) After the unilateral revocation of Kosovo’s autonomy and the waves of political repression, Albanians opted for a boycott of the Serbian state and the construction of a parallel society and institutions. Eventually, the self-exclusionary practices failed in all but the case of the Kosovo Albanians. (…)

The Citizens, the Metics, and the Aliens

38One could safely conclude that the implementation of the new citizenship laws in the former Yugoslav states was marked by ‘confusion and arbitrariness’. Nevertheless, this confusion was only partly the product of an unstable political context. (…)

39The citizenship laws and the procedures for acquiring new citizenship proved to be part and parcel of administrative ethnic engineering. (…) (They) provided an opportunity to eliminate a certain number of citizens from the political, social and economic life of the new states. They were useful tools for the modification of ethnic balances and social and ethnic structures. The new aliens saw their rights reduced and their residency threatened, which proved to be a powerful means of forcing them out of their homes and usually out of the country, without employing physical violence.

40In general, we could conclude that the dissolution of a multinational federation and the common efforts by successor states to define their citizenry deprived a significant number of individuals of their previous status as lawful citizens —as was the case in some former Soviet republics and in the former Yugoslavia. When this break-up is followed by a violent conflict, it may also result in massive migrations and in millions of refugees and internally displaced persons. Citizens à part entière are thus transformed into metics, authorised residents with limited rights, or illegal aliens. (…)

41Classical citizenship entails a bipolar relationship between citizens and aliens, whereas citizenship in a federation is characterised by a triangular relationship between citizens of the member states, citizens of the federation and aliens. I call this triangular relationship the ‘federal citizenship contract’. It consists of offering equal rights to all federal citizens over the whole federation’s territory, regardless of their federated citizenship (the citizenship of a constitutive part, if legally provided). In the case of the dissolution of the Yugoslav federation and in some ex-Soviet countries, successor states broke the existing federal citizenship contract and adopted the classical citizenship contract that distinguishes only between nationals and aliens, a direct consequence of which was the transformation of vast numbers of lawful citizens into metics or aliens — legal or illegal residents with no right to the status of citizen or subject to overly complicated procedures for acquiring it — as if the previous federal citizenship contract had never existed.

42To say that a huge number of individuals in the former Yugoslavia experienced the fate of metics and aliens is not an exaggeration if we take into account the fact that refugees also belonged to this category. After fleeing from their republic of origin, they often found themselves in the territory of another republic with, in most cases, no right to its citizenship (even after several years) and with no possibility to renew their citizenship status in their republic of origin. To make the whole situation even more complicated, their republic of origin was more often than not in open conflict with the republic in which they found shelter. It was not until the late 1990s and after 2000 that the situation generally began to improve, with many aliens being turned into metics and metics slowly reacquiring their droit de cité, and with yesterday’s enemies gradually being transformed into neighbours.

Enemies into Neighbours: the European Union and post-Yugoslav Citizenship Regimes

43Since 2000 the region has been relatively calm, expect for a short-term but nevertheless violent inter-ethnic conflict in Macedonia in 2001. (…) Multiple changes and reforms of the citizenship policies and citizenship-related administrative practices —both improvements and regressions— have been introduced in post-Yugoslav states. The matter is even more complicated by the fact that we have since witnessed another disintegration (of Serbia and Montenegro in 2006) and secession (of Kosovo from Serbia in 2008), the result being three new states with three new independent citizenship regimes. Some problems similar to those of the 1990s thus arose again.

44In the former North-Western Yugoslav republics of Slovenia (that already joined the EU) and Croatia (soon to become an EU member), citizenship laws and regulations have not been profoundly modified since the independence. As noted above, Slovenia still has to resolve the problems of the remaining ‘erased’ and to accept full responsibility for such an act. Since 2000 Croatia has explicitly declared its willingness to satisfy all the conditions for joining the EU. One of the most important of these being the return of Serb refugees and the full restitution of their civil status and the reparation of their material goods. The actual practice of managing citizenship has demonstrated a greater degree of inclusiveness due mostly to the change in the political climate. (…)

45On the other hand, considerable changes in legislation and administrative practices have occurred in the former South-Eastern Yugoslav republics, post-conflict Macedonia and in the newly independent states of Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. (…) Ethnic Macedonian and Albanian parties committed themselves to a multiethnic Macedonia in order to end the Albanian rebellion. (…) Macedonia was re-defined as a ‘civic and democratic state’ (Constitution of the Republic of Macedonia 2001). The Albanian language was recognised as an official language in the majority of Albanian areas, and the greater representation of ethnic Albanians in the state sector was affirmed. (…)

46In 2004, the Serbian National Assembly also adopted a new Law on Serbian Citizenship (…). The main characteristic of the 2004 law is the invitation to acquire Serbian Citizenship given to ethnic Serbs and members of the Serb Diaspora. The law abandons the criterion of residence (…). The new Constitution (2006) defines Serbia as ‘the state of the Serbian people and of all citizens living in Serbia’. This ethnocentric definition —again similar to the Croatian Constitution— directly affected the law on Serbian citizenship that was further amended in September 2007. It confirmed that the road was open for ethnic Serbs from the former SFRY and abroad to acquire Serbian citizenship without the residency requirement, provided they sign a written declaration that they ‘consider Serbia to be their country’. The 2007 law has also smoothed the way for Montenegrin citizens living in Serbia to acquire Serbian citizenship.

47This move provoked an angry reaction from Montenegro, which fears Serbia’s influence on a large number of its citizens. Montenegro reiterated that it would not allow its citizens to hold double citizenship and that those citizens violating the law would be stripped of their Montenegrin citizenship. As early as 1999, in preparation for eventual independence, Montenegro adopted its own law on citizenship, in which primacy over (and an open defiance of) the existing federal citizenship was clearly stated. (…) After many debates and delays, the Montenegrin parliament adopted a new law on Montenegrin citizenship in early 2008. The law, as with the Constitution, states in its first article that Montenegrin citizenship is ‘the legal tie between a person and the Republic of Montenegro and does not imply national or ethnic origin’. The law forbids dual citizenship, which, given the size of the Serb minority (28% according to the 2011 census), as well as many Montenegrins residing in Serbia, has been a source of continuous tension between these states.

48In Serbia and Montenegro, the laws on citizenship were once more used as a way to sustain and promote the demographic superiority of a core ethnic group. Since ethnic Montenegrins are numerically the largest (45%) but not the majority group in Montenegro, insistence on the civic nature of the state and its citizenship could be interpreted as a measure to reinforce Montenegro’s independent statehood — narrowly achieved in the referendum in 2006 — which still deeply polarises its citizens along ethnic lines.

49‘Newborn’ Kosovo declared independence in February 2008, and its new Constitution came into effect on the following June 15^th 2008 (…). Its first article defines Kosovo as ‘a state of its citizens’ that ‘shall have no territorial claims against and shall seek no union with, any State or part of any State’. On the same date the Law on Kosovo Citizenship came into effect. The law extended Kosovo citizenship to all citizens of the FR of Yugoslavia who had ‘habitual residence’ in Kosovo on 1 January 1998. However, a new example of self-exclusion immediately appeared. Kosovo Serbs largely refuse to accept Kosovo as an independent state with its own authorities and they have been building their own ‘parallel institutions’ in Serb-majority zones in North Kosovo.

50In the context of the region’s aspiration to join the EU and the EU’s influence in these countries, one wonders what the role of the EU is when it comes to the citizenship practices of Yugoslavia’s successor states today. The case of Slovenia, together with Estonia and Latvia, demonstrates that EU membership does not seriously call into question ethnocentric conceptions of citizenship and, moreover, that it fails to force its members to adopt inclusive citizenship policies. (…). However, the EU used the visa liberalisation process to influence certain administrative changes in the citizenship regimes of Serbia, Macedonia, and Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina that were put on the Schengen’s ‘white list’ in 2010 and, in the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 2011. (…) Since 2000, we have generally witnessed greater inclusiveness and less discrimination on ethnic grounds, as well as increased sensitivity to the political aspirations of ethnic minorities (…)

51However, this brief overview also shows us something else: one could see that the citizenship practices of Yugoslavia’s successor states within the context of eventual EU enlargement are used both as tools of reconciliation and of fostering divisions among neighbours. (…) Obviously, ‘citizenship struggles’ continue in what used to be Yugoslavia and what is today a landscape of increasingly overlapping citizenship regimes.

A Possible Epilogue: Neighbours into Partners Again?

52Could European citizenship serve as a tool of new cooperation among post-Yugoslav states? In order for this to happen, all of these states would have to become members of the EU and all former Yugoslav citizens European citizens. (…) European citizenship, however, is not federal (…) it is derived from the national citizenship of the member states and does not replace it (…). However, it provides some significant rights to its holders: free circulation and residence in other member states, the right to vote in municipal and European elections, and the provision of diplomatic protection by all member states for EU citizens outside the EU.

53One is tempted to ask what the practice of European citizenship would be in the countries that constituted the former Yugoslavia (…)? [It] would provide the right to circulate freely and to settle in other member states. In spite of the negative experiences of the recent past, we should not neglect the importance of a shared language and of personal and family ties for future migration within the region. It is hard to predict the scale of such migration, but the fact is that today —following the general democratisation of citizenship policies which favour civic solidarity but also the still existing ethnocentrism of many citizenship laws favouring ethnic solidarity— many individuals hold the citizenships of two and, in some rare instances, three former Yugoslav states, a fact which has already had a certain political and social impact. (…)

54The supranational roof of the EU, if it stretches far enough to embrace all former Yugoslavs and still keep its current construction, would indeed provide a framework for yet another experiment in a century-old Balkan laboratory of citizenship.