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Introduction Citizenship in the new states of South Eastern Europe
Jo Shaw and Igor Štiks
School of Law, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
This special issue of Citizenship Studies comes out of the first phase of research conducted under the aegis of the CITSEE project (The Europeanisation of Citizenship in the Successor States of the former Yugoslavia), during which the research team concentrated on in-depth country case analyses. This introduction briefly presents the CITSEE project, locating it within the broader frame of current trends in citizenship studies, and defines the notion of citizenship regime as it is used in the following analysis, before highlighting some critical and common elements that emerge in the papers, including the ongoing processes of Europeanisation evident in the region.
1. Introduction: why study citizenship in Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslav states?
The ambition of this volume is twofold: to show how important it is for citizenship studies to take into account the main changes in and varieties of citizenship regimes in the post-Yugoslav states and, on the other hand, to demonstrate to scholars of Yugoslavia and the wider Balkans that the Yugoslav crisis, disintegration and war as well as the current functioning of the new and old Balkan states, and the process of their integration into the European Union (EU), cannot be fully comprehended without a deeper understanding of their citizenship regimes.
The post-Yugoslav landscape offers a unique situation when it comes to citizenship. It is simultaneously a post-socialist, post-partition and post-conflict region which has witnessed, over the last 20 years, multiple processes of disintegration, successful and unsuccessful attempts at secession, and a huge variety of internal political and territorial arrangements. It is also a region that is currently a geographical enclave encircled by Member States of the EU that these states aspire to join. Thus the EU integration process, with its successes and failures, is coupled with EU’s direct interventions stemming from crisis and post-crisis management. All these elements have directly influenced the new citizenship regimes. The experiments in this domain resulted in diversified regimes, the functioning, changes and results of which challenge normative and practical assumptions about citizenship. As such they are of interest to scholars of both citizenship theory and citizenship in other countries and regions.
After 1991, as Yugoslavia began to disintegrate, new states emerged, each with its own citizenship regime determining who was a ‘citizen’ and therefore had the privileges of citizenship (residence rights, welfare rights, property rights, political rights, etc.) as well as its obligations (military service, etc.). In place of a multinational federal state, with a system of multi-level federal and republican citizenship, emerged a series of smaller states. The complex system of titular nations, nationalities and minorities applicable in Tito, s Yugoslavia was replaced with an equally complex system of multiple and overlapping citizenship regimes privileging often the dominant ethnic group. This was combined with a legal system of minority protection within each state (easily betrayed politically and practically), built on a groundwork of international and EU norms in the field.
But even this ‘transition’ was not smooth. It occurred across an entire decade marked by a series of wars, conflicts, massacres and ethnic cleansing that involved not only post-Yugoslav states, entities and groups but also the international community either as passive observers, negotiators, active brokers or intervening military and political force. Many who resided in the newly independent states were not of the titular nation, or had republican citizenship of one other former Yugoslav republic from birth but had subsequently during the socialist period moved to reside in another republic without changing their republican citizenship. This group suffered immediate degradation in their civic status once Yugoslavia began to disappear. They became, either for a shorter or longer period of time, aliens in the place where they had long resided, or simply stateless. It was the problem of statelessness caused by the first disintegration in the former Yugoslav space, as well as widespread human rights abuses during the 1990s in particular, that drew international attention to the region. A number of international organisations including the Council of Europe, the International Law Commission1 and the UNHCR led the way in combating such statelessness and human rights abuses, and in supporting work to document the ‘dark side’ of new citizenship regimes in more detail (Pejić 1995, UNHCR, Regional Bureau for Europe 1997, Dika et al. 1998, and much later on, Imeri 2006).
This early work engaging with the new citizenship regimes was primarily descriptive in character, and only Slovenia – where the attention of some scholars was caught by the case of the so-called ‘erased’ (see Deželan in this issue), whose fate sat uneasily alongside Slovenia’s rapid acceptance into the European mainstream as a member of the EU and NATO – attracted substantial academic interest (Dedić et al. 2003, Zorn 2005, Blitz 2006, Medved 2007). In contrast, little work focused on states such as Serbia and Montenegro, where there were multiple processes of disintegration and fragmentation, first in 1991, then in 2006, with the Montenegrin independence, and finally, in 2008 with Kosovo’s secession. There has also been concern about Bosnia and Herzegovina, FYR of Macedonia (hereafter Macedonia) and Kosovo2 where there was direct impact of external forces on civic status of individuals and citizenship laws via the medium of international intervention, but hitherto this has received little scholarly attention. Even Croatia, where there has been a relatively stable citizenship regime in place for around two decades, has been little studied (see Omejec 1998, Ragazzi and Štiks 2009). Recently, a new endeavour to re-examine some of the key questions about political transformation in the former Yugoslavia through the lens of citizenship has emerged. In some of his early works on the topic, Štiks (2006, 2009) sought to examine the transformations of citizenship from the establishment of Yugoslavia in 1918 until the present day (2010). More generally, the CITSEE project,3 to which this collection of papers belongs, has begun the process of putting citizenship at the centre of the analysis of the post-Yugoslav political constellation, using it – as with the seven case studies presented here – to raise some fundamental questions about the direction of travel of the still generally unconsolidated political and constitutional regimes of the new states of South Eastern Europe.
This special issue of Citizenship Studies represents the major output from the first phase of CITSEE, s programme during which the research team concentrated on in-depth country case analysis. This introduction briefly presents the CITSEE project, locating it within the broader frame of current trends in citizenship studies, before highlighting some critical and common elements that emerge in the papers, including the ongoing processes of Europeanisation evident in the region.
2. Methods and frames of analysis
CITSEE aims at a rich interpretative comparison of the citizenship regimes of the successor states4 of former Yugoslavia, placed in the broader context of the evolving processes of European integration and its effects on the new states in South Eastern Europe. The comparison is guided by a method loosely termed as ‘constitutional ethnography’. This is a term coined by Scheppele to describe work that involves the ‘study of the central legal elements of polities using methods that are capable of recovering the lived detail of the politico-legal landscape’ (2004, p. 391). The goal of such scholarship is not prediction, in the social scientific sense, but comprehension: ‘not explained variation, but thematization’ (Scheppele 2004, p. 394; emphasis in the original). Such an approach to comparison needs to be built on detailed and fully contextualised studies of the constitutional objects in view, studies which place at centre stage political struggles over the bargains which underpin newly created polities.
Alongside the broad method of constitutional ethnography, we make substantial use of the organising notion of ‘citizenship regime’ to limit the field of study. By ‘citizenship regime’ we generally mean citizenship laws, regulations and administrative practices regarding the citizenship status of individuals but, in addition to that, it also refers to existing mechanisms of political participation. More precisely, a citizenship regime is based on a given country’s citizenship legislation defining the body of citizens (i.e. who is entitled to citizenship and all duties and rights attached to that status), on 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. As we have argued elsewhere:
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 Štiks 2010, p. 5)
This is a term adapted from gender studies where scholars use the term ‘gender regimes’ to refer to the range of institutionalised practices relating to how gender issues are regulated in a given society, acknowledging that these differ from state to state (Walby 2004). Our notion of citizenship regime is inspired by Jenson’s definition of a ‘citizenship regime’ as ‘the institutional arrangements’ rules and understandings that guide and shape concurrent policy decisions and expenditures of states, problem definitions by states and citizens, and claims-making by citizens’ (2007, p. 5). Casting the net widely, Jenson (2007) identifies four dimensions to a citizenship regime, namely the boundaries of state responsibilities (‘the responsibility mix’), acquired rights and duties, governance or the ‘governance arrangements of a polity … [including] the institutional mechanisms giving access to the state’, and belonging or the definition of the boundaries of membership. Methodologically, Jenson (2007) – in common with Scheppele (2004) when dealing with constitutional ethnography – highlights the explanatory force of the ‘lived in’ dimension revealed by sociological or socio-legal exploration of rules and practices. These concerns animate in like maimer the CITSEE research.
It is with a focus on the latter dimension of boundaries that the CITSEE project first set out, as the notes above make clear, to illuminate the new citizenship regimes in South Eastern Europe. However, as the papers in this collection show, it is not possible to close off questions about the link between the citizen and the state, such as rules and processes governing the acquisition and loss of membership statuses, including external citizenship and various internal ‘quasi-citizenship’ statuses, as well as the rights and duties which are central to the exercise of full membership of the polity, from the wider context of political contestation over the question of ‘who belongs?’ and ‘why?’. In other words, the boundaries to polity membership are not just external, but also internal. Moreover, it is not just formal rules that define a citizenship regime, but also informal ideologies, narratives, beliefs and practices, which are often just as important.
A citizenship regime could also include certain statuses of internal ‘quasi-citizenship’ for non-national residents where these extend to electoral rights and related political rights which are normally restricted to national citizens alone, and of external ‘quasi-citizenship’ for non-nationals residing outside the territory of the state, who receive special benefits as former nationals (or their descendants) or ethnic kin groups related to the protector state. Ethnocentric citizenship policies, a common phenomenon in the wider Balkan and Central European region, generally involve invitations to ethnic kin in the neighbouring states and overseas to acquire citizenship of the kin state through a facilitated procedure. This includes not only all political rights in the kin state, but also often rights of political participation for non-resident citizens.
More generally, a citizenship regime could be said to encompass certain key individual and collective rights protected by national and international human rights law, such as minority rights and non-discrimination rights which profoundly impact the exercise of full civic membership within a society and a polity, in particular the right to non-discrimination on grounds of race or ethnic origin, gender and religious affiliation. This is the case even where the exercise of these rights is not strictly limited by reference to citizenship status or where the source of the norm being invoked for protection is not to be found in the national constitution or legislation, but in international law.
It is important to clarify that citizenship in the CITSEE project includes, but is not limited to, what is termed as ‘nationality’ in international law, in the sense of the internally and externally recognised link between the citizen and the state.5 The rules which govern effective access to a given citizenship status, such as the requirements of civic registration, are often important issues in regions which have seen violent conflict, war and forced population movements, especially in the case of socially, politically and legally marginal groups such as the Roma, who are among the most vulnerable groups in the region to the long-term exclusionary effects of forced population movements. However, other groups of internally displaced persons and refugees find it difficult to resolve their citizenship status even many years after conflicts. Where applicable, the concept of citizenship regime must also include the status and rights attaching to citizenship of the EU, as well as the effects of EU law, such as rules on visa liberalisation or facilitated entry mechanisms (e.g. for students or those seeking family reunification), giving due recognition, of course, to the important differences in character which exist between Union citizenship and national citizenship.
The main question, then, concerns the possibility for a citizenship regime to operate as a central element for a wider political settlement, reflecting, for example, contestations and conflicts between, for instance, titular ‘nations’ and minorities, among ‘constitutive peoples’, political and ideological groups or simply citizens over citizenship and related rights, especially rights of political participation. A related question concerns whether it makes a difference that these regimes all originally shared a common root in the socialist Yugoslavia, and that – conversely – in all cases are subject to influences and effects from the perspective of EU law? We argue that the former two-tier Yugoslav citizenship regime as well as the two-tier EU citizenship regime, existing within the past socialist and the current liberal – democratic ideological setting, play a huge role in the making and shaping of post-Yugoslav citizenships. In other words, all existing post-Yugoslav citizenship regimes (with the exception of Kosovo) had been developing as legal entities since 1945 within the federal two-tier citizenship regime and each of the states aspired, after the break-up of their previous federation, to join the EU. All these regimes are, to put it that way, in the post-federal and pre-federal constellation at the same time, or, in other words, between the past and future two-tier citizenship regime (see Džankić in this issue for the Montenegrin case), with Slovenia having the shortest route, some 13 years, from the South-Slavic citizenship regime to that of the EU. Being in the ‘Europeanising’ constellation clearly has an influence on the region and the way citizenship is conceived and functions there. Croatia will become the 28th member of the EU in 2013, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia are candidate countries although none have yet begun negotiations and, it is possible that they will be joined in the medium term as candidate states by internationally supervised Bosnia. Only Kosovo’s place in this jigsaw does not appear to have a reasonably clear perspective vis-à-vis the EU, even though the role of the EULEX mission there is seen as crucial for Kosovo’s state-building efforts.
Alongside the concept of citizenship regime as redefined and adapted here, a number of insights from recent conceptual and theoretical work in the field of citizenship studies have proved to be particularly helpful for the purposes of shedding further light on these membership statuses. A favoured move is to offer a triptych as the basis for organising the material. For example, Joppke (2007) draws distinctions between citizenship as status, citizenship as rights and citizenship as identity. Wiener (1994) uses a triad of rights, access and belonging to express a similar endeavour to invest the notion o...
