Les Balkans, laboratoire de la citoyenneté?

 Balkan Laboratory of Citizenship

One could argue that Yugoslavia was a ‘legitimate’ child of Hobsbawm’s ‘short twentieth century’ (1914-1991); a political and historic entity that appeared at its beginnings and vanished at its end. Moreover, the twentieth century started or, rather, the nineteenth century ended, in the very region that would become known as Yugoslavia, and in one place in particular, the city of Sarajevo. If at the beginning there was, in the words of Lawrence Durrell, the fatal ‘echo of a pistol-shot’ on the right bank of the Miljacka river that pushed Europe into disaster, the twentieth century — like a snake that eats its own tail — ended in .ames with the destruction of Sarajevo between Spring 1992 and winter 1996 during one of the longest sieges in recorded history. The beginning of the siege of Sarajevo historically coincided with the advent of the European Union. If the formation of the EU as one of the most powerful economic blocs in the world — though politically and militarily weak — could be seen as historic milestone, then Yugoslavia’s successor states clearly went in other directions, choosing first to fragment their former supra-national federation whose essence was supposed to  be captured in its motto of ‘brotherhood and unity’. They tried to constitute themselves as European homogeneous nation-states — the high cost in human lives and widespread destruction having been the price to pay — before joining the supra-national EU guided by a similar motto of ‘united in diversity’. This seems to be both an irony and tragedy of history at the same time. If indeed all post-Yugoslav states join the EU one day, then over the last century South Slavic peoples will have been through two integrations (in 1918 and 1945) — during which they experimented to varying degrees of success with unitarism, federalism and confederalism — and two violent fragmentations (in 1941 and 1991) — in order to eventually re-integrate within a larger European union of states. When discussing the EU integration of the Western Balkan states, one often hears of dubious concepts of historic belatedness or ‘necessity’ for this region to finally ‘catch up’ with the rest of the continent. On the other hand, confronted with a supra-national European integration, former Yugoslavs can ironically say ‘been there, done that’. Indeed, the former citizens of Yugoslavia often point to the institutional similarities between the current EU and de facto confederal Yugoslavia between the late 1960s and 1991. These include a rotating presidency, the policies of parity, agreement and consensus, funds for underdeveloped republics and regions (and never-ending clashes over economic policies between a ‘developed’ northwest and ‘underdeveloped’ southeast), a weak central government filled with commissaries equally distributed among member states, ethno-national disputes and rivalries, to name just a few similarities. There is also a symbolic level of unity in the same visa-free red passport for holders of the shared citizenship.
At the time of writing, the total number of post-Yugoslav states has stabilised at seven. The last one, Kosovo, is only partially recognised by the international community and is the only post-Yugoslav state whose independence another former Yugoslav state (Serbia) and its own ethnic minority (Serbs in North Kosovo) refuse to accept. By summer 2012 all of these countries (except Kosovo) had embarked officially on the EU accession path or had been already integrated. Slovenia became a member in 2004; Croatia will follow suit in summer 2013. Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia are official candidates, albeit slow-moving ones. Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina are lagging behind. For optimists, the integration of all of Yugoslavia’s successor states (together with Albania) should be completed during the next decade, whereas pessimists condemn these countries (except Croatia), along with Turkey, to the EU’s waiting room for many years to come.
In the present paper, I focus on shifting conceptions of citizenship in Yugoslavia, from its establishment in December 1918 to its disintegration in 1991/1992, and in its successor states from the early 1990s to the present. Broadly 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. ‘In the citizenship context, therefore, the concept encompasses a range of different legal statuses, viewed in their wider political context, which are central to the exercise of civil rights, political membership and – in many cases – full socio-economic membership in a particular territory’ (Shaw and Stiks 2010, p. 5).
I 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.

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

The 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. This unification in a way mimicked the more famous unifications of Italy and Germany, during which various regions with different histories came together under the leadership of a rallying centre and its royal family. 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.
Post-war peace treaties with Austria and Hungary established that a person who had the ‘homeland’ or rather ‘municipal’ right (zavicˇajno pravo or pravo zavicˇajnosti), or domicile on former Austrian-Hungarian territory should have citizenship of the country currently exercising its authority on that territory (Jovanovic´ 1977, pp. 11-12). 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 kinstate, i.e. to emigrate to their kin-states.(1) 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 (in Tepic´ and Baaic´ 1965, pp. 105-130). 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 zavicˇajnost in one of the Kingdom’s municipalities’. Zavicˇajnost — 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 (Jovanovic´ 1977, p. 15). Zavicˇ ajnost 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.
It 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 followed the nation-building textbook rules on how to make a European nation state when they insisted on unitarism, neglected ethnic and linguistic specificities, refused to internally divide their country by ethnic but rather by geographic and regional criteria, and 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. To put it another way, separate nation-builders had already applied the nation-building textbook rules at the local, ‘tribal’ level.
The tumultuous history of the first Yugoslavia suggests that even if the classic nation-building rules were right, the time was definitely wrong. On 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 semiindependent Croatia in 1939 and therefore started the federalisation of Yugoslavia (Djokic´ 2003, p. 153). Nobody knows if the first Yugoslavia would have been further transformed and could have survived as such. Ultimately, its fate was not decided by the Yugoslavs themselves, but by the Axis powers, whose ‘solution’ for Yugoslavia was partition coupled with annexation of portions of its territory by its neighbours. This was welcomed by local extreme ethnic nationalists who immediately engaged in massive inter-ethnic violence and horrific crimes. Another ‘solution’, prepared by Yugoslav communists in inter-war years and during the war, combined the preservation of the country, inter-ethnic reconciliation, and national and social emancipation of its nations. This eventually gained the upper hand and Yugoslavia re-emerged on the political map of post-war Europe.

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

The subsequent history of Yugoslavia proves that ideas seldom die with their earthly embodiments. The 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.
Although 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 citizenships.(2) As part of the package of the ‘just’ solution to the national question, bifurcated citizenship in post-war federal Yugoslavia was a tool of 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.
From the mid-1960s, first within the Party and later in the far-reaching constitutional changes of 1967, 1968, and 1971 — that were further developed and confirmed in the new 1974 Constitution — 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’ (in Ramet 1991, p. 63). 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.
Yugoslavia’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, beginning with the introduction of a number of constitutional amendments between 1967 and 1971, and concluding with the last Yugoslav constitution of 1974. 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).
The 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 republicanlevel citizenship. During the heyday of socialist Yugoslavia, it was mostly students of the law who took an interest in this tricky question, the precise answer to which 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 (Pejic´1998) 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’ (Drouet 1997, p. 84) and describe the pre-eminence of federal citizenship as ‘an important guarantee for minorities facing the majority “nation” of one or another republic’ (Drouet 1997, p. 91). On the other hand, authors like Rakic´ (1998, p. 59) 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 according to art. 281 on the rights and duties of the Federation and respective provisions of the Law on SFRY Citizenship (see also Muminovic´ 1998, p. 73).
Nevertheless, 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 (UNHCR 1997, p. 8, Jovanovic´ 1977, pp. 50-51). 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). A somewhat confusing and unique situation — namely that subunits could decide on federal citizenship — prompted the author of an explanatory introduction to the Law on Yugoslav citizenship to question the existence of any role for the federal authority in this domain (Jovanovic´ 1977, p. 51). Jovanovic´ finds that there is still some room for the federal authorities on this issue considering that they alone are responsible for citizenship matters in the international arena, but he admits that the only safe conclusion to be drawn is that the new 1976 law did not regulate the matter.
Another striking feature of confederal citizenship in Yugoslavia — another element that since the beginning had been silently reinforcing the power of the republics vis-àvis 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 signalling 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).
 Multiple 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 (Medvedovic´ 1998, pp. 49-52). Since federal citizenship was the strong guarantor of the rights of citizens living outside of their native republics, a fact that also stimulated the free movement of people between republics, residence became the most important practical factor in the everyday life of Yugoslavs. Yugoslav citizens were, in principle, able to choose their republican citizenship depending on their residency or employment. It is interesting to note that after 1964 it was even possible to do so without further formalities. On the other hand, after 1976 a change of citizenship, though still allowed by republican laws, was possible only where certain conditions were met and only then after a legal procedure was completed (Medvedovic´ 1998, p. 49).
Since 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. To a certain degree this affected the balance of ethnic groups in Yugoslav republics. 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. 21
 

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

3. 1. Democratisation, Fragmentation and Dissolution
After being used in the first Yugoslavia as a tool of integration, and after 1945 as a tool of re-unification and cooperation, at the beginning of the 1990s citizenship became one of the factors behind Yugoslavia’s disintegration. 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. Citizenship was, of course, one of many factors, but it is one which has not yet received sufficient scholarly attention.
By 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 traversed republican borders. They promised to ‘protect’ and guard the interests of their ethnically defined electorate in the inter-republic and inter-ethnic conflicts.(3)
Perhaps 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). As in many other post-communist countries, the first democratic elections in Yugoslavia demonstrated the ‘ethno-national cartelization of opinion and electoral competition’ (Skalnik Le. 1999, p. 214). 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.
Another 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 (Dimitrijevic´ 1995, p. 58). Into this volatile debate, Miloaevic´ 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 (see Budding 2008, p.92, Dimitrijevic´ 1995, p. 58). 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.
The ethno-national conception of citizenship finally prevailed and fuelled violent conflicts (Stiks 2010) over the redefinition of national borders within which the ethnonational 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. In other words, majority rule should not entail a division between an ethnic majority and an ethnic minority but rather should be practiced within the core ethno-national group with the majority/minority divide formed on the basis of ideological preferences. From this perspective, a projected ethno-national state, territorially expanded in order to include most if not all members of the ethnic group, could be truly democratic only if the core ethnic group had an absolute majority and ethnic minorities were reduced to an insignificant percentage of the population.

3. 2. From Equal Citizens to Unequal Groups: Ethnic Engineering
Almost all of the successor states of the former Yugoslav federation — with some variations according to their specific contexts — 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 (Stiks 2006). Similar intentions have influenced the writing of new constitutions. The laws on citizenship and their administrative implementation are obviously closely related and even inseparable from the practice of ‘constitutional nationalism’ (Hayden 1992), that is, the constitutional redefinition of new states as, in broad terms, the national states of their core ethnic group. 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.
New citizenship legislation and related administrative practices together with political activities centred 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

All 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.
The 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 (Rakic´ 1998). This was practiced by some post-Soviet states (the ‘new state model’ according to Brubaker (1992)) 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 socalled ‘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 (Brubaker 1992, Sievers 2009). The dissolution of federal Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia clearly shows the third model (the ‘federal dissolution model’)(4) 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

Almost all of the new citizenship regimes invited certain individuals — mostly ethnic kin in the ‘near abroad’ i.e. 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 (see Ragazzi and Stiks 2009). 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 includes a considerable number of non-Croats who somehow managed to get Croatian passports for practical purposes such as visa-free travel).(5) 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.
Bosnia-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 inside 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 newstate 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 (Muminovic´ 1998, p. 79). 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 Sand~ak region who were naturalised in the Bosniak-Croat entity (see Sarajlic´ 2010, p. 20). The Dayton Peace Agreement annulled all war-time legislation. It introduced, following a pattern familiar from socialist Yugoslavia, a new two-level citizenship regime in Bosnia composed of the state and the entity citizenships.
The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, formed by Serbia and Montenegro in 1992, adopted its own law on citizenship only in 19966 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 (Pejic´ 1998). 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 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. Ethno-centric migrations within Yugoslavia were a recurrent phenomenon: Zagreb attracted many Croats outside Croatia, Belgrade many Serbs outside Serbia and Montenegrins, Pristina (especially after 1974) Albanians from Macedonia and Montenegro, and Sarajevo many ethnic Muslims from the Sand~ak region (its Serbian and Montenegrin parts).
However, 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. One might assume that this mistreatment of Serb refugees in Serbia and Montenegro — by contrast with the Croatian approach in treating ethnic Croats from Bosnia-Herzegovina, for instance — contradicts my claim about the general use of citizenship legislation to engineer ethnically homogenised states in the former Yugoslavia. However, this is not the case. The deliberate political manipulation of the refugee problem was part of Miloaevic´’s Serbian war strategy. Without the citizenship of their republics of origin, and without the real possibility of acquiring that of the FRY, Serb refugees became the true hostages to Miloaevic´’s policies and their failure in both neighbouring countries and within Serbia. 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 (see Rava 2010). Many, however, found ways (some less than legitimate) to obtain the citizenship of the FRY (Svilanovic´ 1998, p. 244). In 2001 new amendments to the law made it easier for this group to acquire citizenship status.
Finally, in Slovenia and Macedonia, which are countries with a small number of ethnic Slovene or Macedonian kin in neighbouring countries, the law also included a special provision for facilitated naturalisation of ethnic Slovene and ethnic Macedonian political or economic diaspora members.

The Excluded

Since legal continuity with republican citizenship was established as the rule, the group that was immediately excluded were those Yugoslav citizens residing in republics other than their own. Their situation was often even more complicated if they were of different ethnicity to 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 (see Dika et al. 1998, UNHCR 1997, Imeri 2006).
The most drastic case of administrative exclusion happened in Slovenia, an ethnically homogenous country barely affected by violent conflicts. The only former Yugoslav republic to become an EU member state, Slovenia, with its functioning state apparatus, its respect for the rule of law and its successful adoption of EU legislation, has often been upheld as exemplary 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 23 December 1990 — the day of the referendum on Slovenian independence, not the day of actual independence, and a year before international recognition — could become Slovenian citizens upon request within six months.(7) The law itself becomes quite controversial when we consider that it enabled policies that might be qualified as contributing to a strategy of ethnic engineering. One such measure was taken on 23 February 1992. On that day, according to official sources, 18,305 lawful residents—according to the European Court of Human Rights the number amounts to 25,671—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 di.culties in obtaining all necessary documents at the moment of Yugoslavia’s break-up and subsequent escalation of violence, and finally by the overall political confusion since Slovenia was still legally part of the SFRY and was not internationally recognised until January 1992 (Medved 2009). (8)
In war-affected Croatia, together 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. Serb militias, acting in concert with the disintegrating federal army, took control of one-third of Croatia’s territory during 1991, extending beyond Serb-populated areas. Their rebellion or self-exclusion (on practices of self-exclusion, see below) from the Croatian legal framework was followed by exclusionary practices after the Croatian government retook control of these areas during two blitzkrieg operations in Western Slavonia and Krajina in 1995 (Eastern Slavonia was peacefully reintegrated into Croatia in January 1998). The majority of Croatian Serbs from these regions left or were forced to leave their homes and their property was damaged or occupied by Croat refugees or local Croats. The Tudjman government did everything to prevent their return to Croatia. They were all still legally Croatian citizens, but — since so many of them were refugees outside Croatia, in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and could not re-enter Croatia — they could not obtain the certificate of Croatian citizenship (domovnica) and therefore could not re-claim full citizenship rights (see the report on Croatia in Imeri 2006, pp. 129-131). However, after Tudjman’s death and subsequent political changes in 2000, and during Croatia’s bid for EU membership, this group of Croatian Serbs for the most part regained their citizenship status.
In Macedonia, one provision of the first law on citizenship from 1992 considering residents from other Yugoslav republics proved that Macedonian legislators at the time were also preoccupied with ethnic engineering. The provision affirms that a permanent resident must live continuously in Macedonia for no less than fifteen years. This affected all residents from other republics, but 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. Albanians complained that the new Constitution rendered them second-class citizens and that the law on citizenship purposefully excluded a considerable number of ethnic Albanians.
In the FRY, or more precisely in Serbia, the politics of exclusion took on a different, political and not legal shape, and were mostly concentrated in one particular region, Kosovo. Although ethnic Albanians continued to be Serbian and thus FRY citizens, the province of Kosovo, in the period between Serbia’s revocation of Kosovo’s autonomous status in 1989 and the expulsion of Albanians from state institutions, to the 1999 NATO intervention, 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. Ethnic Albanians often had problems not only with registering in the citizens’ register, but also with obtaining travel documents and even re-entering the country.

The Self-excluded

Self-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 — the roads leading from Zagreb to the Dalmatian coast were blocked in the Serb-populated area and Serb police officers refused to commit their loyalty to the Croatian Ministry of the Interior as well as to wear new uniforms which were decorated with ethnic Croat insignia. 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. In March 1991, what would become known as Krajina declared independence from Croatia. Their separatist moves and the armed rebellion that escalated in the summer of 1991 were politically, materially and military backed by Serbia’s leadership and the federal Yugoslav People’s Army.
A similar scenario occurred in Bosnia-Herzegovina where — in spite of the fact that Serb nationalists shared power with Bosnian Muslim and Croat nationalists —‘Serb autonomous regions’ were formed in 1991. In early 1992 they declared themselves a republic and sought separation from Bosnia-Herzegovina. The mobilisation of Bosnian Serbs for war was also motivated by the Greater Serbia project that had already begun in Croatia in 1991 and was territorially inconceivable without the acquisition of large portions of Bosnian territories. As for nationalist Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina, their tactic, in 1991 and 1992, was initially to support Bosnia’s statehood. However, as the war progressed, in 1993 and 1994, Croats in Western Herzegovina and Central Bosnia — under direct influence and control from the nationalist government in Zagreb — adopted a position similar to that of the Bosnian Serbs. 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.
One needs to mention another self-exclusionary practice, namely peaceful rebellion — until the emergence of Kosovo Liberation Army in 1997 — of Albanians in Kosovo against the Serbian authorities.(9) Local Albanians judged Serbia’s presence in Kosovo to be illegitimate after the unilateral revocation of Kosovo’s autonomy and the waves of political repression against Albanians. Albanians opted for a boycott of the Serbian state and the construction of parallel society and institutions.
Eventually, the self-exclusionary practices failed in all but the case of the Kosovo Albanians. Thanks to the international intervention, they got rid of Serbian rule, formed their own institutions and established an independent citizenship regime in Kosovo and gained a partial international recognition after their declaration of independence in February 2008. The self-exclusion of Croatian Serbs ended with the disappearance of Krajina in 1995, Bosnian Croats re-joined Bosnian institutions after the Washington agreement in 1994 and the Serb Republic became an integral part of Bosnia-Herzegovina after the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995.

3. 3 The Citizens, the Metics, and the Aliens

One could safely conclude that the implementation of the new citizenship laws in the former Yugoslav states was marked by ‘confusion and arbitrariness’ (Pejic´ 1998, p. 173). Nevertheless, this confusion was only partly the product of an unstable political context. In the majority of cases, the governments involved in the conflict created confusion intentionally. Arbitrariness could be found in many of the legal prescriptions and actual administrative practices, and was clearly part of a general strategy of creating ethnically redesigned states — a strategy that often called existing borders into question — in favour of a given ethnic majority.
The citizenship laws and the procedures for acquiring new citizenship proved to be part and parcel of administrative ethnic engineering. The targeted populations were usually comprised of individuals living in republics other than their ‘own’, especially if they numerically reinforced a domestic ethnic minority (perceived as not sufficiently ‘loyal’ to the new state), or were simply of a different ethnic origin. Citizenship laws 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.
In 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. Rogers Brubaker’s description of the internal Soviet migrants in the post-Soviet period is equally valid for many former Yugoslavs: ‘The breakup of the Soviet Union has transformed yesterday’s internal migrants, secure in their Soviet citizenship, into today’s international migrants of contested legitimacy and uncertain membership’ (1992, p. 269). 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.(10) In other words, the former citizens became either legal alien residents or obtained only temporary visas, without a clear indication of whether they would ever regain the status of citizens under the law, and lived with a potential threat of deportation, or they were simply transformed into illegal aliens such as the erased in Slovenia and thus subject to immediate expulsion.
Classical 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 (Béaud 2002, pp. 317-318). I call this triangular relationship the federal citizenship contract. It consists of offering equal rights to all federal citizens over all 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.
To 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.

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

Since 2000 the region has been relatively calm, expect for a short-term but nevertheless violent inter-ethnic conflict in Macedonia in 2001. After the European Union, first in Zagreb in 2000 and then in Thessaloniki in 2003, promised ‘a European future’ for the Western Balkans, it seemed as if the region had entered an entirely new phase. Since then, the democratisation of the region, coupled with ‘Europeanisation’, by which is meant the process of stabilisation and structural reforms necessary for the region’s eventual accession to the EU membership, has been under way but with only partial success. Since 2000, 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 from the 1990s thus arose again.
In 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 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 is 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 political climate. To sum up, inclusiveness and fair treatment of minorities are here combined with the preservation of a trans-border ethnic Croat community tied together by the bonds of citizenship (Ragazzi and Stiks 2009).(11)
On 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. By signing the Ohrid Framework Agreement in August 2001, ethnic Macedonian and Albanian parties committed themselves to a multiethnic Macedonia in order to end the Albanian rebellion. Albanian demands for a reform of both the Constitution (in 2001) and, subsequently, the Citizenship Law (in 2004) were also met. Macedonia was re-defined as a ‘civic and democratic state’ [emphasis added] (Constitution of the Republic of Macedonia 2001). The Albanian language was recognised as an official language in the majority Albanian areas, and the greater representation of ethnic Albanians in the state sector was affirmed. Finally, in early 2004, Parliament adopted a new law on citizenship that reduces the controversial residence requirement to eight years.
In 2004, the Serbian National Assembly also adopted a new Law on Serbian Citizenship that annulled both the old one (1976-1983) and the Law on FRY 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 and basically invites ethnic Serbs from other former Yugoslav republics to acquire Serbian citizenship, regardless of their actual place of residence (in Serbia or abroad!). After Montenegro’s declaration of independence, Serbia automatically and unwillingly became independent state as well. This provided a good opportunity for a new exercise in ‘constitutional nationalism’. The new Constitution defines Serbia as ‘the state of the Serbian people and of all citizens living in Serbia’ (Constitution of the Republic of Serbia 2006). This ethno-centric 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.
This 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. Montenegro as a now sovereign and again internationally recognised state adopted a new Constitution on 19 October 2007. Its first article defines Montenegro as a ‘civic, democratic, and ecological country’ (Constitution of Montenegro 2007). 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’ [emphasis added]. 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.
In 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 and — in contexts where ethnic origin often determines one’s political preferences as well — as a means of reinforcing a particular political position. In the Montenegrin case we see, however, a novel approach. 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.
‘Newborn’ Kosovo declared independence in February 2008, and its new Constitution came into effect on 15 June 2008 following the basic lines of the Ahtisaari plan for Kosovo’s ‘supervised independence’. 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’ (Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo 2008). On the same date the Law on Kosovo Citizenship came into effect. The law extended Kosovo citizenship to all citizens of 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.
In 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 (see Stiks 2011). 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. In short, EU lever-age is stronger in the pre-membership phase, as demonstrated in the case of Croatia, or when the EU, or international bodies such as the UN, exercise direct influence on legislative procedure and administrative practices, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Macedonia. In these countries the constitutional reforms and laws on citizenship are usually offered ready-made to local politicians, or are closely supervised by international bodies. But in countries such as Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia, where the EU is not in a position directly to influence lawmakers, the ethnocentric legal definition of citizenship still prevails. 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. Sometimes the EU’s influence is not as direct. In 2011, Montenegro slightly liberalised its citizenship regime, a requirement posed by the opposition, in order to adopt the new election code that was in turn a pre-requisite for opening accession negotiations with the EU.
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 (most clearly in the EU candidate countries, Macedonia, Montenegro and Croatia). Montenegro, on the other hand, shows how even the civic definition of citizenship, although favoured by the EU, can be deeply divisive when combined with intolerance towards dual citizenship, which in the particular Montenegrin context has the effect of reinforcing the core ethnic group even though it does not have a majority of the population.
However, 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. More inclusive citizenship policies, coupled with political inclusiveness, definitely play a role in the reconciliation process in Croatia and Macedonia and are intended to promote reconciliation in Kosovo. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the two-tier system of citizenship at least provides common ground under which the state is providing equality for all citizens. However, one can clearly see that ethno-centric practices of granting citizenship to ethnic kin in neighbouring countries (practiced by Croatia and Serbia) are sources of new divisions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro. Serbia does not recognise Kosovo’s secession and considers citizens in Kosovo to be Serbian citizens (although its activities in reality are mostly directed towards the Serb minority and effectively ignore the Albanians), whereas Kosovo and the international institutions try to get as many Kosovo Serbs to accept and take part in Kosovo citizenship. 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?

Could 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. If this takes place — although reality is sometimes harsh for optimists — European citizenship would after more than two decades restore to the former Yugoslavs certain important rights that they enjoyed in socialist Yugoslavia. European citizenship, however, is not federal and it has been cautiously defined — it is derived from the national citizenship of the member states and does not replace it — in order to displace any discussion on primacy. 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.
One is tempted to ask what the practice of European citizenship would be in the countries that constituted the former Yugoslavia and if it can turn today’s neighbours into active partners again. Above all, EU citizenship 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. Furthermore, European citizenship would provide significant economic, social and political rights. Participation and eligibility at the local and the European level (the national level will, for the time being, remain inaccessible for non-nationals in almost every state across the world) will certainly add new dynamic elements to the relations between the former
Yugoslav states. The 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.

1 Following the Rapallo Treaty with Italy, ethnic Italians from Dalmatia and Istria acquired the right of option for Italian citizenship without the obligation to emigrate. 2 It is important to remember that this was not the case in two other socialist multinational federations. Republic-level citizenships were established in Czechoslovakia only in 1969 and the first Soviet republic to enact its own law on citizenship was Lithuania – but not until November 1989. 3 The Serb Democratic Party (SDS) was established in both Croatia and Bosnia and was then under the direct influence of Slobodan Miloaevic´ who was already perceived (and often portrayed himself) as not only the leader of Serbia but of all Serbs. Similarly Franjo ............’s Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) founded a Bosnian branch and ............8 though the president of the Republic of Croatia, fashioned himself as the ‘president of all Croats’. Alija Izetbegovic´’s SDA (The Party of Democratic Action), meanwhile, founded a Sand~ak branch. 4 I am grateful to Rainer Bauböck for this suggestion. 5 See ‘Dr~avljanstvo u 15 godina dobilo viae od milijun osoba’ [More than a Million Acquired the [Croatian] Citizenship in Last 15 Years], Vjesnik [online], 13 September 2006. Available at: http://www.vjesnik.hr/html/2006/09/13/Clanak.asp?r=tem&c=1 [Accessed 1 April 2010]. Recently, the European Union Observatory on Democracy – Citizenship, a research project based at EUI in Florence (for more information on the project see www.eudo-citizenship. com), obtained the official statistics from the Croatian Ministry of the Interior that roughly confirm these numbers. For other sources, see UNHCR (1997) and Omejec (1998). 6 Both Serbia and Montenegro retained old republican-level laws on Serbian citizenship (dating back to 1979; amended in 1983) and Montenegrin citizenship (from 1975). Montenegro changed its law on republican citizenship in 1999 and Serbia only in 2004.7 According to some estimates, up to 300,000 non-Slovene residents lived in Slovenia in 1991. Obviously, the idea of having such numerous ‘non-autochthonous minorities’, as they are called in the Slovenian constitution, consisting of Croats, Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians and Roma from other Yugoslav republics, was problematic for the administration of the first Slovenian independent state. Some 170,000 of this group regulated their status, whereas the status of the others remained unresolved. Many of them left Slovenia (e.g. federal army personnel and their dependents, others with non-regulated status), but those who remained in Slovenia and did not apply for or obtain the new citizenship in time were later erased by an administrative decision. 8 Although in April 2003 the Constitutional Court of Slovenia ordered the administration to immediately issue permanent residence status to this group, the whole case became highly politicised with the right-wing government showing a lack of will to resolve the issue. In recent years, the centre-left administration apparently started to solve the remaining cases. It is expected that the ‘erased’ chapter will soon be closed after the European Court for Human Rights in July 2010 found Slovenia guilty of breaching the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in the case Kuric and others v. Slovenia (initially known as Makuc and others v. Slovenia). The Court’s Grand Chamber unanimously confirmed the verdict on 26 June 2012. 9 We should add that Albanians in Macedonia boycotted the referendum on Macedonian independence in 1991, held their own referendum on the creation of their own autonomous region, but eventually, although grudgingly, accepted Macedonian institutions. In 2001, Albanian armed rebellion in Macedonia played again with the prospect of self-exclusion. Both times — either peacefully or violently — the prospect of self-exclusion was mostly used to gain more political rights. 10 Of relevance here is Michael Walzer’s analysis of the status of metics in Western Europe and in North America as residents who, like Athenian metics, are not citizens: ‘They are ruled, like the Athenian Metics, by a band of citizens-tyrants’ (1983, p. 58). In post-Yugoslav states, the major difference is that, unlike the metics in the ancient Greek polis that had never had the privileged position of citizens, or immigrants today, the post-Yugoslav metics and aliens used to be citizens enjoying full citizenship rights in their places of residence. 11 Besides minor corrections, the Croatian citizenship law had not been changed since its creation in 1991 until very recently. In late October 2011, during the last session of the outgoing Croatian parliament before the new elections, the right-wing majority voted for new changes to the law without a public or significant parliamentary debate. Among others, these changes make the acquisition of citizenship harder for permanent residents (requiring 8 instead of 5 years of continiuous residence) and introduce clearer criteria for ethnic Croat applicants (in terms of documents needed to prove their ethnic belonging) and Croat emigrants (limiting the right to Croatian citizenship to the third generation). In other words, the basic ethnocentric character of Croatian citizenship has not been questioned.