The Citizenship Conundrum in Post-Communist Europe: The Instructive Case of Croatia

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Notes

¹The Croatian language distinguishes gender, so the literal translation is ‘(Ethnic female) Croats and (ethnic male) Croats, (female) citizens and (male) citizens of Croatia’.

²A very simplistic psychoanalytic investigation would trace this desire to a historic and/or current weakness and vulnerability.

³Since the Czech Republic generally forbids dual citizenship, it remains a serious obstacle for those Czechoslovakian citizens that emigrated between 1948 and 1989 and whose citizenship was revoked by the communist authorities. The law allows this group to regain Czech citizenship. In fact, the wording of the law is seen as problematic, since it ‘grants’ rather than ‘returns’ citizenship. However, only a small number of Czech émigrés actually applied for citizenship because the re-acquisition of the original citizenship is conditional upon release from the citizenship of the country where they found refuge and settled. See ‘Few Czech Émigrés Reapply for Citizenship’, The Prague Post, 8 March 2006, available at: http://www.praguepost.com/archivescontent/1302-few-czech-and#233;migrand%23233;s-reapply-for-citizenship.html, accessed 18 August 2010.

⁴On the citizenship laws of the USSR see Ginsburgs (1983) and for the new citizenship laws of the Soviet Union successor states see Brunner (2001).

⁵Brubaker rightly points out the importance of timing (1992). One should bear this in mind when dealing with new citizenship laws adopted in Croatia and the rest of Yugoslavia's successor states.

⁶According to the UNHCR (Nationality Laws in Former USSR Republics, July 1993), there were almost 500,000 stateless persons living in Estonia as of 30 June 1993. During the EU accession process Latvia and Estonia removed some restrictions and amended their citizenship laws to allow non-citizens to apply for citizenship. Nevertheless, language requirements remain a huge problem for non-native speakers (Jackson 2004). Estonia, for example, does not allow dual citizenship to ethnic Russians, but offers this privilege to ethnic Estonians living abroad.

⁷For citizenship policies in Yugoslavia's successor states see Štiks (2006); Pejić (1998); Imeri (2006); UNHCR (1997) and Dika et al. (1998).

⁸Among them, however, an entirely different fate awaited ethnic Croat residents without Croatian citizenship (see below).

⁹On widespread ‘production’ of metics in the former Yugoslavia, see Štiks (2006, pp. 491–93).

This was the practice until 1993 when the Constitutional Court decided that the reasons for refusal must be stated.

For individual stories see the articles and reports on Croatia in Dika et al. (1998) and Imeri (2006).

Official Gazette of the Republic of Croatia (Narodne novine) 53/91.

Gazette of the Republic of Croatia (Narodne novine) 28/1992.

However, this was not a simple task since South Slavs of different ethnic backgrounds often share the same names (Imeri 2006, p. 127).

It is safe to assume that up to 800,000 individuals from Bosnia & Herzegovina acquired Croatian citizenship, the majority of them of Croat ethnicity, and also tens of thousands with other ethnic backgrounds. An article that appeared in the Croatian daily Vjesnik provides figures for other countries as well: 93,000 live in Serbia and Montenegro, 18,000 in Slovenia and 13,000 in Macedonia, whereas elsewhere in Europe, approximately 10,000 individuals applied for Croatian citizenship in Germany and 3,500 in Italy. The number of applicants was less significant in the overseas countries: 3,000 in Australia, 2,000 in Argentina, 1,600 in Canada and 1,500 in Chile. See ‘Državljanstvo u 15 godina dobilo više od milijun osoba’[‘More than a Million Acquired the [Croatian] Citizenship in Last 15 Years’, Vjesnik, 13 September 2006, available at: http://www.vjesnik.hr/html/2006/09/13/Clanak.asp?r=tem&c=1, accessed 18 August 2010. Recently the European Union Observatory on Democracy—Citizenship, a research project based at the EUI in Florence, obtained the official statistics from the Croatian Ministry of the Interior that roughly confirm the numbers cited in the above-mentioned article. (For more information on the project see www.eudo-citizenship.com, accessed 18 August 2010.)

I am grateful to Dejan Jović for pointing this phenomenon out to me.

See ‘Državljanstvo u 15 godina dobilo više od milijun osoba’[‘More than a Million Acquired [Croatian] Citizenship in Last 15 Years’], Vjesnik, 13 September 2006, available at: http://www.vjesnik.hr/html/2006/09/13/Clanak.asp?r=tem&c=1, accessed 18 August 2010.

See http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/166.htm, accessed 18 August 2010.

The last 2007 parliamentary elections show, however, that enthusiasm for participating at the Croatian elections is not that huge, except in Western Herzegovina. Of 405,092 registered voters abroad only 90,482 actually voted. See the official webpage of the Electoral Commission, available at: http://www.izbori.hr/izbori/izbori07.nsf/fi?openform, accessed 18 August 2010.

On the ‘non-territorial annexation’ of Bosnia & Herzegovinan Croats, see Ragazzi (2009, p. 147).

See also Djurić in this collection.