Citizenship After Yugoslavia PDF Download

The break-up of Yugoslavia and its two-tier citizenship regime opened a two decade-long period of continuous experimenting with defining and redefining political communities through citizenship laws and citizenship-related practices. New citizenship regimes, in various ways, effectively turned equal citizens into members of unequal groups. Almost all of the successor states of the former Yugoslav federation have used their respective citizenship laws as an effective tool for ethnic engineering as 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. The creation of post-Yugoslav citizenries was based on four legal pillars: initial legal continuity with republican citizenship, ethnicity or facilitated naturalization for kin members abroad, naturalization of residents, i.e. citizens of other republics, and regular naturalization procedure for aliens (with a defined period of residence). These policies, together with political activities centred on ethnic solidarity, resulted eventually in replacing equal Yugoslav citizens with de facto four different groups of individuals in the successor states: the included, the invited, the excluded and the self-excluded. Since 2000, multiple changes and reforms of the citizenship policies and citizenship-related administrative practices - both improvements and regressions - have been introduced in the post-Yugoslav states. The break-up of Yugoslavia and its two-tier citizenship regime opened a period of continuous experimentation with defining and re-defining political communities through citizenship laws and citizenship-related practices. New citizenship regimes, in various ways, effectively turned equal citizens into members of unequal groups. In the words of Pierre Bourdieu, 'legal discourse is a creative speech that brings into existence that which it utters' (1991: 42). The main 'creative' role of citizenship laws was to bring into existence new political communities, within which the dominance of the major ethnic group would be undisputable. This group would be consolidated, often across borders, by uniting all of its members, regardless of where they resided, by the bonds of citizenship. 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. This practice was widespread in the 1990s but, in various forms, continues until this very day. 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 (Štiks 2006). Similar intentions have influenced the writing of most of the 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 re-definition of new states as, in broad terms, the national states of their core ethnic group. Thus, ethnic engineering, in constitutional and citizenship matters, paved the way for the establishment of a series of ethnic democracies either at the state or at the sub-state level (see below). 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 various ways in almost all post-Yugoslav 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 naturalization for those outside the ethnonational 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 sizable number of individuals to leave their habitual places of residence and move either to 'their' kin states or abroad. The break-up of Yugoslavia and the other two multinational federations meant that millions literally went to bed as full-fledged citizens and woke up as individuals with questionable status.