Race in the Balkans: The Case of Erased Residents of Slovenia

Abstract

In this essay we demonstrate that the concepts of race and racism comprise an applicable theoretical framework for understanding the Erasure – when the authorities of newly independent Slovenia erased 25,671 people from the register of permanent residence in 1992 – and particularly for placing it in the wider context of Europeanization and the transition from socialism to a liberal market economy. Taking into account legal, social, political, and economic aspects, we find parallels to other contexts, enabling us to conclude that the Erasure was more than a legal mistake in a nation-state formation. Rather, we see it as a process connected to the Europeanization of Slovenia, since it was partly a result of European migration policies implemented in its territory. Furthermore, by addressing the Erasure through a discourse on race, and in specifically framing it as a process of internal division and systematic exclusion through state institutions, we recognize these exclusions also as a means of extracting wealth, property, and accumulated labour, an integral part of the liberalization of the former communist states.

• Erasure
• Europe
• expropriation
• migration
• Slovenia
• state racism

Introduction

Defascization and denazification, historically speaking, unfortunately always begin outside of the community. The painful process of defascization and denazification must continue and conclude inside of the community, so that we achieve internal hygiene. A result has to be a legal prohibition of denying the atrocities (the Erasure), punishment for establishing the Nazi supremacy and sanctioning of Nazi-fascist perpetrators. (Petition “Xenophobia Doesn't Pay Off, Xenophobia is Paid For”)

In October 2012 Alexander Todorović, Mirjana Učakar, Stojan Bubanja, and Irfan Beširević began circulating a petition calling for a process of “denazification” of the Slovenian state, claiming it was built on the systematic exclusion of particular minorities (http://www.njetwork.org/Resolucija-Ksenofobija-se-ne). In other words, Slovenians first, then everyone else. For these activists, this was not hyperbole. It was based on their personal experiences of being among the more than 25,000 people erased from the register of permanent residence by newly independent Slovenia on 26 February 1992. This decision by the state condemned many of those affected to more than a decade of illegality in Slovenia, lasting poverty, and in some cases deportation. Those affected were mostly from Yugoslavia's other republics.

The petition was created by Erased activists and specifically references the Erasure, yet its language suggests a broader significance. It also provokes questions about other exclusions in Slovenia after 1991: what about the many workers from other Yugoslav republics who built Slovenian infrastructure but couldn't freely access it anymore, or the refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina or Kosovo who were suddenly treated as foreigners? We thus ask how can we understand the Erasure, the other exclusions and expulsions, and the formation of the new state, beyond its unique dimensions – only as a series of legal procedures with inevitable boundaries and errors? Or as integral to nation-state building, and the Europeanization of Slovenia triggered by its integration into the European Union (EU)?

We analyze these exclusions as historical continuity in the transition from socialist Yugoslavia to neoliberal Slovenia, rather than as ruptures or exceptions; as the process of consolidation of a new state upon the frame of an older one where exclusions took new shapes, targeting new populations. It is our claim that the Erased and all others excluded in Slovenia's path to independence and EU membership bear the hallmarks of state racism. Seen in this light, race and racism can provide clarity regarding choices made in citizenship and immigration legislation in the newly independent republic. The case of Slovenia is informative since the rapid and brutal collapse of Yugoslavia triggered swift social change from a socialist multi-ethnic state towards a single nation-state characterized by liberal democracy and a neoliberalization of social and economic life, together with overnight changes in the position of residents formerly regarded as co-citizens. We ground our analysis on Slovenia's relations with citizens of other republics of former Yugoslavia, especially the Erased, connected first with the independence of Slovenia, and later with accession to the EU. Following an in-depth look at the changes and continuities from Yugoslavia to independent Slovenia, we discuss how these cases can contribute to understanding race in the Balkans.

Evoking and connecting terms such as nazism and fascism with state formation, the above-mentioned petition pointed to the process that is predicated on the division and hierarchical categorization of people along racialized lines. We argue the Erasure was both a formative act in forging the identity of the nation-state, and symptomatic of the kind of racism produced through a struggle between the dominant and the dominated in a single state (Gramsci 2008 [1971]; Foucault 2003).

Our analysis thus centres on race, and the connected process of racialization. In both, we take a view that these are not natural, essential, or inherent. Rather, they are social and relational categories of power and domination. However, due to traces of scientific and biological definitions of race (that it is about skin colour), along with the particular history of European colonialism and settlerism, race is almost entirely absent in scholarship on the Balkans.¹ Yet race arises “out of social and political need to dominate enslaved and conquered people, and conversely out of the social and political imperative for resistance against those practices” (Winant 2015, 313). David Theo Goldberg defines race as “a way (or set of ways) of being in the world, of living, of meaning making” (2006, 334). Indeed, the prevailing assumptions around race have rejected biological definitions in favour of one that is contextual and shifting over time (Roediger 2001; King 2009; Berthold 2010).

Michel Foucault suggests state racism produces a race and is inherent to biopolitical regimes by which the regulation of life and death emphasizes letting die for particular social categories. Racialization is then the process by which the category of race is imposed on an other, from external forces, and from within, where before such labelling had not existed. We thus understand it to “signify the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group” (Omi and Winant 1994, 14). We strongly agree with these readings of race, racism, and racialization, but note that, to a large extent, all stop their analysis at the (fluid and shifting) West European borders to Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

Slovenia's new demography and the erased

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was a state composed of six constituent republics and two autonomous provinces.² Post-World War II Yugoslavia was established as a multinational federation, simultaneously re-creating the Yugoslav polity (on a federal level) and a construction of the sub-state entities and their political communities (on republican levels). Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the relationship between the federal and republican levels oscillated between Yugoslav socialist unity and the decentralization process empowering the republics. Between 1945 and 1974 Yugoslavia adopted four constitutions. These led from centralist or administrative federalism to centrifugal federalism, transforming the state into a confederation of republics by transferring ever more power from the federal centre to the subunits (Štiks 2015, 55–88).

This constitutive process thus needs to be seen as a balancing act among different interpretations over what the characteristics of this polity are. By treating Yugoslav constitutive nations as completed … and their republics as sovereign states (as formulated in the 1974 constitution), the ideological narrative of Yugoslav communism in practice shielded and promoted nationalisms in its constitutive nations. At the same time as Yugoslav nationalism and the Yugoslav state were being weakened, the nationalism of the constitutive nations was getting stronger. (Jović 2001, 105)

That Yugoslavia, despite the adoption of a socialist economy, had not fundamentally broken with the paradigm of the nation-state or basic capitalist relations had already been suggested by C. L. R. James in State Capitalism and World Revolution (1986). James points to both the presence of a “secondary” nationalist perspective in Yugoslavia, and the fact that the actual working-class perspective was being strangled by a state apparatus determined to impose its control over the state in the form of bureaucratic domination. At the core of this strategy of domination was the economy.

This remained the case and the balancing act proved even more challenging in the 1980s and 1990s, when economic crises contributed to prevailing nationalistic tendencies and ultimately a brutal dissolution of Yugoslavia.³ The Yugoslav debt, which had previously tied the state to the global economy and reflected its geopolitical importance, became a central weakness with the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The need to pay ever-greater interest on their loans meant revenue had to be increased, which was only possible by cutting services and selling assets. In other words, austerity measures and rationalization (Živković 2014). This led to growing resentment over the redistribution of wealth from wealthier republics to the poorer ones. In both Croatia and Slovenia there were increasing calls for republican ownership of local assets and profits. Susan Woodward (1995) writes that reforms bolstered the hand of the republican leadership in Slovenia, who argued “that individual rights were a matter of republican protection, not Yugoslav” (100).

The dynamics between the federation and the republics was also apparent in the arrangement of citizenship in Yugoslavia. Every citizen had a dual citizenship: from their respective republic and from the federation. This was the result of a legal provision accepted in 1945 by the authorities of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia and was maintained until the dissolution of SFRY.⁴ However, the relationship between the two citizenships was modified over time. All modifications kept a basic principle for the acquisition of citizenship: ius sanguinis, in some cases combined with ius domicili and ius soli. Conditions for acquiring republican citizenship were identical to the requirements for federal citizenship (Dedić 2003, 45) and both citizenships presented an inseparable unit, since every citizen of SFRY was simultaneously a citizen of (only) one of the republics.

At the same time, new citizenship laws followed broader constitutional changes, whereas each amendment of the federal law on citizenship brought about changes at the level of republican citizenship. These changes reflected the relationship between the federation and individual republics, in which the latter were gaining powers, among which were determination and registration procedures for citizenship, which after 1976 were handled entirely on the republican level. “In other words, Yugoslav citizens were registered only as republican citizens and only at the republican level.⁵ Furthermore, only republican centres … were entitled to issue Yugoslav passports with their own numbers (preceded with the letters signalling the republic or the autonomous region of origin)” (Štiks 2010, 8).

Despite this, a citizen of one of the republics had entirely equal rights and duties on the territory of other republics if they had their permanent residence registered in it. As a result, and regardless of politically and legally important developments of the SFRY citizenship, a republican citizenship didn't have many practical implications in the life of citizens. The key statuses in that respect were federal citizenship and permanent residence registered on the municipal level, where an individual's personal documents were issued as well, irrespective of his/her republic citizenship. Persons on the register of permanent residents were defined as commoners. Maja Breznik and Rastko Močnik claim that from the constitution of 1963 on, “commoner” was a category with which a socialist system strove to overcome a bourgeois dichotomy between a citizen (political subject) and a bourgeois (a civil society member).

‘Commoner’ was the individual taken in her or his concrete social existence, a member of the community where … she or he provided for the basic necessities of life and exercised basic practices of solidarity … One of the commoner's statuses was citizenship. However, since it was the commoner who was the elementary subject of rights and obligations, individuals exercised their rights and fulfilled their obligations, participated to social benefits and paid taxes not as citizens … but as commoners at the place of their permanent residence. (Breznik and Močnik 2011, 49)

This fact was very important for all republics but especially Slovenia, since it was a destination for many migrants from other parts of Yugoslavia. The peak of migration into Slovenia was between 1978 and 1980, though it was accelerating from the 1960s onward. Initially, most co-citizens migrated from Croatia, and later from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Most settled in urban areas due to employment in industry and construction (Dolenc 2007, 81 and Gulič 1983, 40; both in Zorn 2010, 26). In short, people migrated to Slovenia primarily as a labour force but also because of marriage, education, and/or federal employment, etc.

Regardless of the official values of brotherhood and unity and of the formal equality of permanent residents on the territory of the republics, nationalisms were a social fact across Yugoslavia. In Slovenia social exclusion of at least some of the migrants from other republics, primarily migrants regarded as temporary workers, existed well before disintegration was a realistic possibility (Debevec 1976; Mežnarić 1986; Zorn 2010, 27–9). Discrimination towards these residents existed, but it wasn't part of official state practice (Bajt 2010, 205). Therefore, “Southerners,” “Bosnians,” “Non-Slovenes,” etc. were regarded as formally equal but ethnically and thus culturally different. This became explicit after the collapse of Yugoslavia, when these attitudes became institutionalized – even though the succession in Slovenia didn't result in major military operations. It was at this point that the persistence of different characterizations of residents as “Yugoslavian Southerners,” a foreigner-from-within similar to Gramsci’s (2008 [1971]) Southerner, legitimized their institutional marginalization and exclusion from society.

Who are the Erased?

In 1991, during preparations for independence, Slovene authorities passed legislation regarded as crucial for establishing its sovereignty. Among the new legislation were the Citizenship of the Republic of Slovenia Act and the Aliens Act, aimed at reestablishing Slovenia's citizenship body and marking new divisions between its residents. The Citizenship Act made a clear distinction in the Slovene population by stating that all residents registered as citizens of the former Socialist Republic of Slovenia would obtain Slovene citizenship without any administrative procedures. Those residents who had other republican citizenships were legally transformed into foreigners required to arrange their status anew.

Among these new foreigners were around two hundred thousand permanent residents who were (by the same Act) granted the possibility of exceptional naturalization by applying for Slovene citizenship in a six-month period. Others, such as those registered as temporary residents, or without any registered residence in Slovenia, were obliged to obtain a residence permit through the Aliens Act. Overnight, the independence of Slovenia made changes in the organization of Slovene society that bestowed much more importance on the status of republican citizenship, a status which had not possessed much importance in the lives of SFRY citizens. By 26 December 1991, 171,127 citizens of other republics of Yugoslavia with permanent residence applied for Slovenian citizenship. Those who did not apply or were rejected faced a new and unexpected situation. On 26 February 1992 Slovene authorities erased their names from the Registry of Permanent Residence, an act that later became known as the Erasure and its 25,671⁶ victims as the Erased.⁷

The Erasure is a result of the above-mentioned acts⁸ and a series of internal instructions by the Ministry of Interior that exposed former permanent residents of Slovenia to sudden loss of all economic and social rights connected to the status of permanent resident. These individuals became foreigners without any legal status in Slovenia (i.e. undocumented migrants) and their personal documents were rendered invalid (since they were issued in Slovenia) without being officially notified about it. The only commonality shared by all the Erased was citizenship of other republics of SFRY who had permanent residence in Slovenia and had not applied for Slovene citizenship in 1991 or were rejected. They thus formed a heterogeneous group with different citizenships and backgrounds, including some who were born in Slovenia and/or regarded themselves as ethnic Slovenes.

The consequences of the Erasure were grave. The Erased became aware of their new situation individually. The notification came by chance, such as when they tried to renew their documents, returned to Slovenia after vacation abroad, were stopped by the police for unrelated reasons, or were fired due to lack of documents. Their only option was first to obtain a passport from one of the states slowly being established in the complicated process of Yugoslavia's disintegration. After that they had to rearrange their status based on the Aliens Act as if they had entered Slovenia for the first time.

The Erased lost their rights to participate fully in the labour market and the welfare system and as undocumented migrants were exposed to the threat of being deported.⁹ Possibilities for legalization were scarce in the 1990s; commonly, erased persons arranged their migrant status either on the basis of family reunification (if they had a spouse with legal status and a decent income) or a work permit for which they had to keep employment or find it anew. The Employment of Aliens Act from 1992 gave citizens of other republics of the former SFRY ninety days to acquire personal work permits that enabled them to change employment. Otherwise, they were dependent on a particular employer, since a residence permit was conditioned by a work permit and the latter was grounded in a contract (Razsa and Kurnik 2014, 216–20). Many erased persons with previously steady, regular employment had their contracts transformed into temporary jobs. Those who didn't fulfil the above conditions continued their lives in Slovenia without documents or tried to normalize them somewhere abroad.

The Erasure was an integral part of the new Slovene citizenship regime. Shaw and Štiks define a citizenship regime as 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” (2012, 311). As such, the Erasure was caused by a legal act of the Slovene authorities and implemented primarily by the officials of the Ministry of Interior, together with public servants in administrative units across Slovenia. Thus, a public administrative apparatus and other institutions (e.g. the police) had a central role in imposing the new legal status on the Erased. What further contributed to the precarization of their lives was the fact that the Erasure was enhanced, reproduced, and deepened by other segments of Slovene society. Analyzing the transformation of the welfare system at the beginning of the 1990s, Jelka Zorn writes:

The narratives of the erased people reveal that the authorities first degraded them to the level of bare life by depriving them of legal identity and leaving them at the mercy of various repressive bodies (police persecution, deportation). On the other hand, various public institutions endangered their bare life through ethically blind administrative approaches. Medical and social security blindly executed decisions taken by the repressive arm of the authorities. (Zorn 2010, 35)

In other words, as persons without permanent residence, they could only participate in the labour market and in the welfare system under more restrictive conditions, if at all. Moreover, since they were not citizens they were not entitled to access the exceptional post-independence privatization processes of social property, even though they participated as permanent residents in its production.¹⁰

Along with formal state and municipal institutions, the silence of the general public was part of the mechanism of exclusion. With few exceptions, the topic of the Erasure was not publicly discussed. Many erased persons had to cope with silence or the withdrawal of help from employers, family members, friends, and neighbours, and/or situations in which their vulnerable position was taken advantage of. To a large extent the whole of society cooperated in this isolation, marginalization, and expropriation of the Erased.

Race in the Balkans

As discursive approaches, race and racism have generally not been applied in the analysis of the collapse of Yugoslavia (for overviews of approaches, see Jović 2001; Dragović-Soso 2008; Bieber, Galijaš, and Archer 2014). More commonly, we encounter descriptions of Yugoslavia and/or the Balkans that embrace a series of oppositions: “Europe/Balkan, West/East, urban/rural, and civilized/primitive” (Razsa 2016, 5). These explanations promote the notion that the Yugoslav collapse in the 1990s stemmed from backward elements, Ottoman legacies, or fundamental civilizational differences. This was also intentionally reproduced between states in the region as they sought European credentials (Bakić-Hayden 1995) and includes an assumption that this perceived backwardness is an unfinished process of Europeanization. Paradoxically, while this frames Europe as a progressive influence for the development of the region towards democracy and respect for human rights (even civilization), and recent human tragedies as a part of the region's slow integration into the European family, we would argue the opposite. The latter does not present the rooting out of archaic leftovers of past eras but, rather, fundamental acts in how these new states transformed themselves to become European. As Maple Razsa writes, the Yugoslav collapse was not “the inherent chaos of the Balkans but the supremely modern political logic of the ethnically defined nation-state – a violence that owed more to Herder and Hegel than ancient tribalism” (2016, 6).

In the following section we will explore this through theoretical approaches developed around the concepts of race and racism. We will argue that in the SFRY and later in Slovenia, racism and race appear as institutional power and domination. While racism can be used in different contexts, the question of race is rarely deployed in this region. Race appears to be dismissed on two counts. First is the overwhelmingly white population, reproducing an essentialist view of race as reducible to skin colour. The second dismissal appears in the context of colonialism. The Balkans has not had a colonizing power since Europeans sought to claim people and resources in distant parts of the world. Indeed, this is exactly Marija Todorova’s (2009) claim: the Balkans cannot be considered within a postcolonial frame due to a lack of colonial subject, and due to its white, Christian, European population (see also Bjelić 2017; Baker 2018).

However, even a brief overview of scholarship on race and racism reveals that there is a strong tendency to reject historical biological science. The predominant perspective is that race is constructed, shifting, and contextual, designed to divide society, and which inscribed itself into the state apparatus at the time when European colonialism was pervasive. Omi and Winant argue race is part of all social relationships, and cannot be placed under other categories (1994, 12).

To understand better how this is the case for the Erased, and why race should be applied to the Balkans, we can turn to Foucault's work on state racism. He suggests racism can inscribe itself in the mechanisms of state through biopower. Biopolitics is a technology of power that focuses on man-as-living-being (man-as-species) and thus takes the population and its improvement as an object of control. Thus, one of the basic characteristics of biopower is a transformation of the sovereign's attributes in the ninetenth century from the right of life and death to the power to make live and let die. But that presents a dilemma: how can power, whose basic function is to improve life, kill? (2003, 254). Foucault claims it kills with racism, which is

primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races … all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. (Foucault 2003, 254–55)

In this context state racism is the broad, systematic policy of internal purification of the society pursued by the state in order to reproduce its own hegemony and normalize the society (63). The goal of state racism is thus not defeating an enemy, but rather removing the “biological threat,” which is the only justification for killing. The biological threat are certain populations that first must be established as distinct (e.g. to be racialized). So in a society organized and managed in a biopolitical manner, it is racism that establishes who can be killed, and put at risk of literal as well as social and political death by the state (256). State racism is the mechanism that allows biopower to work, justifying the murderous function of the state. “As a result, the modern State can scarcely function without becoming involved with racism at some point, within certain limits and subject to certain conditions” (254–58).

Zygmund Bauman (1991) also developed a connection between a modern state and removal of certain populations. In his work on the Holocaust and modernity he argues against the view that the most massive extermination of Jewish populations was a horrific deviation in an otherwise progressive historical development. Rather, it was possible precisely because it was a product of modernity and for these reasons took a particular form. He thus argues the Holocaust was a combination of very “normal” social components, inherent to modernity, and that – besides technology – a modern bureaucratic mode of rationalization, ethically blind in its pursuit of efficiency, was crucial for its development and management. When one population was viewed as a problem to be overcome,

the choice of physical extermination as the right means to the task of Entfernung was a product of routine bureaucratic procedures: means–ends calculus, budget balancing, universal rule application … the choice was an effect of the earnest effort to find rational solutions to successive ‘problems’, as they arose in the changing circumstances. (Bauman 1991, 17)

At this point we must reference Aimé Césaire, who in 1955 connected the Holocaust with its historical developments in the colonies. In his comments on colonialism, written after World War II and as a common Europe was forming, Césaire argued Nazism was in fact colonialism returning to Europe. The shock it provoked was not caused by “the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he [Hitler] applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then have been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa” (Césaire 2001 [1972], 3). Césaire recognized the inherent nature of the Holocaust in regard to the history of Europe, and could see how these exclusionary practices were developed on the populations that were racialized before, through colonialism and the institutions it promoted.

When we return to the Balkans we note that race appears to be “impossible” outside a colonial framework and is thus unconnected with social processes in a region that supposedly is not part of the history of colonial imperialism. Dušan Bjelić (2017) counters this notion with the example of Bulgarian Zionists who were first colonized at home and later became the colonizers in Palestine. He understands the Balkans as a colonized space despite its European geography and the apparent lack of different races. Baker (2018) goes further and points out that by the end of the 2000s some authors had begun to reject the assertion that the Balkans were white, arguing that this prevents exploration of how this idea was intertwined with notions of civilization and modernity to form a specific identity-making in Southeast Europe. Baker writes that symbolic binary oppositions (of modernity versus primitivism, etc.), which construct collective identities in the Yugoslav region, are part of a global framework, which divides the world into civilized and uncivilized zones and ascribes cultural and personal characteristics to people and communities based on which of these spaces they are presumed to have descended from. These spatialized hierarchies are integral to the history of race and racialization, therefore “the construction of social and ethnic identities around images of ‘Europe’ and ‘the Balkans’ in the Yugoslav region must already have been unfolding within this history” (Baker 2018).

This is important for further analysis of the Erasure. As stated above, in pre-1991 Slovenia a part of the population recognized as migrants from other Yugoslav republics was perceived as ethnically and culturally different, but only after independence were these perceptions institutionalized and integrated in a formal process of EU enlargement. Orientalizing ideas about Yugoslavia and its rootedness in the Balkans thus existed before its dissolution, as did a prevalence of convictions connecting Europe with civilization, democracy, and a free market. Public discourse in Slovenia strongly distanced itself from the Balkans after attaining independence by building a European orientation. “All traces of former shared Yugoslav history needed to be removed from the society for it to make the transition successfully into a modern European national state. Europeanisation was thus seen as separation from the Yugoslav legacy, and not as a possible result of democratization” (Mandelc and Učakar 2011, 31).

These processes contributed to the Erasure and deepened its consequences. By identifying the Erased as “from the Balkans” the Erasure removed their legal statuses and denied previous contributions to Slovene society. A common Yugoslav citizenship, together with all the ideas it represented, had to be erased in favour of the new national identity and the European vision. Yet these relations are characteristic not only for Slovenia and its “ethnic Other.” Writing about race and ethnicity, Baker (2018) states they are mutually entangled, but not the same. Ethnic relations, often used to describe social differentiation in the region, have been shaped by a global history of race. This prompts us to recognize the self-identification in the region with “Europe,” “modernity,” and “the West,” forming itself in opposition to the “Other of the Balkans” as a part of these historical developments. This reflects Balibar's articulation of a contemporary form of racism as neo-racism, a “racism without races,” to emphasize that its “dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences” (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, 21). Its essence thus not being the superiority of one group but the incompatibility of lifestyles and traditions.

Erasure and the process of Europeanization of Slovenia

In Dušan Bjelić's view the insistence on foreclosing the Balkans as a postcolonial space is

a fragment of much larger strategic manoeuvring inside a European historiography ruled by the national paradigm aimed at disowning colonial history. There is a creeping assumption that because European Union is a new political entity without a previous history and which has formally denounced colonialism and anti-Semitism, it somehow deserves a clean slate and the right to shift the ownership of its colonial histories to former colonial subjects. (Bjelić 2017, 3)

Claims that race and racism are denied in Europe reverberate in the work of different authors, many of whom connect a question of postcolonial condition with a contemporary regime of migration management in Europe (Bojadžijev 2006; De Genova 2010, 2016; Walters 2015). In his work on racial Europeanization, Goldberg (2006) analyzes how the disappearance of race is integrated into the structure of European societies. He argues the Holocaust serves as a main referent point for race and racially inscribed histories in Europe, which – built on the consensus of its condemnation – excised race from any characterizing of human conditions, relations, and formations. However, through this process, another history evaporated the European colonial legacy and its effects in the making of Europe itself (336).¹¹ Balibar (1991) argued neo-racism is composed of different historical influences, of which anti-semitism is only one. The other two are colonial legacy and anti-Islamism.

This approach reconnects wider European history with its colonial past. Considering that we cannot speak simply about continuity with colonial heritage and that racism is contextualized in its unique way within different national histories (Bojadžijev 2006), a relation between migration and racism can also be applied to the Erasure. While it was carried out in 1992, its consequences didn't end there. Developments in the interaction of Slovenia with the EU in the process of its enlargement reveal the connections between Slovene and European exclusionary practices. With the Erasure, post-independence Slovenian authorities didn't commit a violation counter to the standards of the “civilized world.” On the contrary, the Erasure was executed within the framework of structural adjustments required for Slovenia's entry into the EU. More concretely, the Erasure is an implementation of European migration policies in the Slovenian context.

To explain this connection further we need to elaborate on the European migration regime. In Balibar's words, neo-racism and the facets on which it operates are inherent to the era of “decolonization,” “of the reversal of population movements between the old colonies and the old metropolises, and the division of humanity within a single political space” (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, 21). Similarly, Walters states that the commonplace view sees migration policies as a set of laws, regulations, bureaucracies, and procedures that together form a necessary instrument for sovereign states in the regulation of the cross-border movement that is perhaps increasingly salient in a globalizing world of flows. But Walters challenges this with a view that “migration policy is not a second order effect of a world divided into states; it is an apparatus that is in part constitutive of that inter-nationalized world” (2015, 14).

In this light we can see a migration regime as a management of the world's poverty and a subordination of migrant labour. A key purpose of a migration regime is not prevention but the establishment and reproduction of sophisticated mechanisms aimed at channelling migrants according to the needs of the economy. Its goal therefore is not to seal borders and keep non-citizens on the other side but to establish a porous border, which in a conjuncture permits required migrant labour in, while in recession enables layoffs of workers without any obligations since their migrant status can be transformed into the undocumented one. A criminalization of migration is thus crucial for enforcing precarious labour conditions and the transformation of underpaid labour into citizenship duty. A connection between access to a labour market, systems of social security, and a legal status is a mechanism of inequality because it legalizes exploitation of migrant workers through the legality of status.

As such, the disciplinary apparatus for production of “illegality” is never intended to achieve the goal of deportation. “It is deportability, and not deportation per se, that has historically rendered undocumented migrant labour a distinctly disposable commodity” (De Genova 2002, 438). In that sense we can speak about migrants’ inclusion through exclusion or their hierarchical inclusion in the EU labour market (Razsa and Kurnik 2014, 219). This situation also serves well as a defense against more general labour demands, since migration is used as a means to reduce costs and generate fragmentation of the working class.

The case of the Erased reveals how illegalization of certain populations is produced at the intersection of different social processes, especially since their legal status was transformed overnight, without them crossing international borders. Together with some other citizens of former SFRY, erased residents were a large segment of the population upon which the Slovene migration management apparatus was established. Specifically, they were among the first to wait long periods for residence permits; who depended on their employers to acquire work permits; who avoided police on the streets for fear of being detained and/or deported; who were taken to the borders and steered across. In short, they were first in Slovenia among those whose citizenship achieved migrant status so long as they integrated into less attractive and more precarious sectors of the economy.

The pressures the Erased were under derive from the fact that as early as 1991, with the initial citizenship legislation, Slovene authorities introduced a qualitatively different treatment of foreigners from “third countries,” characteristic for the EU. It has developed since then as a field of demographic management. An important landmark for Slovenia occurred

in 1999/2000, when European migration policy was absolutely implemented and Slovenian migration policy fully harmonized with it, as part of Slovenia's accession to the EU. In practice this meant that asylum, retention, detention and deportation procedures were brought in line with European legislation, while at the same time the regulation of economic migration was approached seriously for the first time. (Beznec 2009, 17)

Referring to the Erased, Andrej Kurnik writes that Slovenia “normalized the criminal nature … of the erasure by adopting the European migration and asylum policies. On the other hand, the EU normalized the criminal nature of its migration policy … in Slovenia by integrating the autochthonous forms of exclusion, denial of basic rights to certain segments of the population and normalization cleansing” (2007, 124–25; see also Pistotnik 2010).

By introducing this regime in the 1990s, Slovene state institutions helped to enable access to a precarious and thus less demanding labour force in the period of economic transformation from socialism to liberal capitalism. Slovenia imported migration policies with a new classification of migrant statuses and with the implementation of other mechanisms which enabled the removal of redundant workers through illegalization and deportation. Razsa and Kurnik argue “the ethnic exclusion of Slovene citizenship, especially as seen in the erasure, which overwhelmingly affected labourers from other republics, was foundational for the subsequent hierarchical integration of noncitizens into the labour force” (2014, 225).

Accordingly, Slovenia's EU accession in 2004 didn't lead to a correction of the Erasure. However, the individualization of circumstances erased persons had to cope with initially changed during the following years. The Erasure was not recognized or resolved as a violation of rights in the 1990s, but its consequences were partially alleviated by European Commission instructions to Slovenia, an accession candidate, and by the first Slovene Constitutional Court decision in 1999. Both led to the Act Regulating the Legal Status of Citizens of Former Yugoslavia Living in the Republic of Slovenia (ZUSDDD), enabling the provision of permanent residence permits to the Erased who lived in Slovenia without interruption since 1992, regardless of their status.¹²

From 2002 on, prompted by self-organized activities of the Erased, a second Constitutional Court decision followed, extending the deadline set out in ZUSDDD, and the Act Amending Citizenship of the Republic of Slovenia (ZDRS-Č) enabled some of the Erased to apply for citizenship. In addition, an attempt to pass another law was rejected through referendum, and ZUSDDD was amended in 2010, which opened more options for erased persons to acquire permanent residency. In 2012 the European Court for Human Rights (ECHR) ruled in favour of the Erased, leading to a final Act in 2014 – the Act Regulating Compensation for Damage to Persons Erased from the Permanent Population Register (ZPŠOIRSP) – which enabled the provision of permanent residence permits for some erased still living abroad, and granted minor compensation for those who had regained their status. At the same time, a persistent grassroots political campaign emerged to redress the enormity of what had happened. This process produced a turbulent and polarizing public discussion, but led to the recognition of the Erasure; it became an undeniable fact despite continued attempts to deny it.

Seen this way, the interaction between the European Union and Slovenia was always ambiguous. On one hand, different EU institutions (the European Commission itself, various committees and commissions, the ECHR) participated in addressing the issue of the Erasure. Moreover, without those interventions it is questionable to what extent the Erasure would be resolved today. On the other hand, the unresolved issue of the Erasure didn't present any obstacle for Slovenia's EU accession. This reveals the exclusionary character of a European citizenship regime based on the sum of citizenship regimes of individual member states, and shared migration policies implemented differently across national contexts. The consequences of the Erasure for individuals were grave precisely because Slovenian authorities – together with the new citizenship regime – were meticulous in their implementation of European migration policies. The Erasure was thus not a coincidental act of “balkanized” Slovene authorities, but an act completely compliant with European treatment of foreigners from “third countries” and as such paradigmatic of European politics.

The integration of European migration policies, together with its postcolonial character, can help us trace the productivity of race in the region of former Yugoslavia. We have shown how they were applied in Slovenia, producing its own local variations of domination and exploitation. These mechanisms of exclusion are integral to the Slovene state-formation process and remained in the organization of society. Regardless of all attempts to address the consequences of the Erasure, we recognize the hostility of the Slovene authorities to systemic changes that would ensure similar violations are not repeated. No attempts were ever made to identify culprits or offer a serious apology to the Erased. This process echoes much wider social processes that enable the EU to present itself as free from the historical colonial legacy of its constituting nation-states, simply because it is a “new” political institution (Bjelić 2017; Danewid 2017).

Racialization is expropriation

There is a final point to be made that further connects the Erasure to the EU migratory regime, and Slovenia's harmonization efforts. There is a need to see race and racism as a mechanism that promotes flexibility and tames the labour force; as a mechanism of resource extraction, and consequently, expropriation.

We adopt a broad definition of expropriation, including loss of property and all other losses of income and living standards. Despite many developments in a relatively short period that point towards redressing the status of the Erased and a widespread belief that the issue is resolved, a closer examination shows the contrary and confirms a connection between migrant status and socioeconomic position. Numerous issues affecting the Erased remain unresolved, some due to the specificities of given legal solutions that fragmented a once-homogeneous group into many subgroups with various legal statuses.¹³ But many originate from the fact that the Erasure often influenced the lives of the Erased to the extent that regaining a legal status provided no return to pre-1991 normality. Many were erased during their most productive age and with the (sometimes long) period of illegality that followed they are permanently excluded from the labour market. Today, some still cope with poverty, unemployment, precarious labour conditions, low or non-existent pensions, debt, blocked personal accounts, evictions, serious health consequences, and an overall feeling of redundancy.

Thus, just as the Erasure didn't start on a particular date, neither did it end when persons regained their status. For many, it still characterizes their lives and as such it isn't solely an administrative category. Citizenship conditions access to rights and social resources, therefore a class perspective on the social exclusion it produced is particularly important. In the context of the economic and political crisis of the 1990s the Erasure must also be regarded as a tool for fragmenting the working class that enabled a transition to neoliberalism. Many Erased migrated to Slovenia for work, and thus regarded themselves primarily as workers (Zorn 2010, 29) contributing to the growing Slovene economy. But they were often those who lost their employment first in the process of Yugoslavia's disintegration when Slovenia faced drastic unemployment.¹⁴

In combination with loss of access to the welfare system – to which they had equally contributed – they were left with few resources. Thus, we see the Erasure as a means of expropriation, resulting from the immobilization of individuals in regard to the access to official social resources and power, which left them undocumented, marginalized, and disenfranchized. On the other hand, the benefits for the state and employers were considerable: “Labour regulation brought … some relief from heavy financial burden to employers and to the state: employers did not need to pay compensation for the dismissal to workers whose labour contracts expired by law, and the state had no obligation to lend social assistance to these persons” (Breznik and Močnik 2011, 53). For many of the Erased, reentering society meant either being legalized through the labour market, often in conditions of hyper-exploitation, or through family reunification, both in Slovenia or abroad.

For the Erased, the Erasure meant a loss of status, rights, and property. Yet persons regarded as ethnically Slovene, living abroad, even for multiple generations, could take advantage of a simplified path towards arranging Slovene citizenship. This enabled their participation in the privatization of property and other social resources in Slovenia.

The Erasure most clearly illuminates new mechanisms of exclusion implemented through changes in the citizenship regime. They were not the only citizens of other republics of SFRY whose position changed drastically in the 1990s, however. For other workers, those without permanent or even temporary residence, the disintegration of Yugoslavia meant the loss of easy access to the Slovene labour market and potentially a loss of access to the wealth generated in/for Slovenia. Their exact number is unknown (Mežnarić 1986, 69), but some authors estimate that before independence around thirty thousand migrants lived in Slovenia without permanent residence (Dolenc 2007 in Zorn 2010, 25). They weren't eligible to apply for Slovenian citizenship in 1991 and were able to arrange temporary residence permits only based on employment, which was precarized through tying the work permit to a job contract. Due to the changes after independence detailed above, many were forced to leave Slovenia, some for countries burdened by war.

This effectively means the new Slovenian state was founded on the resources built and developed in Yugoslavia. At the same time, it excluded many of the people who had built this infrastructure, both from using it and from the various accumulated rights that come from labour. That suggests that state racism and the racializing of particular groups in Slovenia was not just about ethnic exclusion, it had an obvious class dimension: exclusions were also a means to privilege Slovene nationals by cleaning out the workforce, and (to some extent) redistribute wealth along ethnic lines. To accomplish that, these populations were turned into “Southerners” (i.e. foreigners) when they were formerly co-citizens. Thus, it was an internal process at the moment of independence to make a foreign population where before there was none.

Conclusion

Though the petition we referred to in the introduction to this essay had limited reach, its relevance lies in reframing the Erasure as an inherent process of building the new nation-state, rather than as a legal mistake or a result of Balkan backwardness. The language of the petition resonates with readings of the state as the arbitrator of social division, guaranteeing particular biopolitical regimes, and suggests that fascism comes from inside society. Here we have placed emphasis on internal and external dynamics of race and state racism; our reading of the Erasure suggests it was a complicated interplay between internal state formation and the external dynamics of Europeanization.

We see the Erasure as a process induced by Slovene authorities in the moment of formation of a new nation-state. But we also recognize it as connected to the Europeanization of Slovenia, since it was partly a result of European migration policies implemented in its territory. Furthermore, by addressing the Erasure through a discourse on race, and in specifically framing it as a process of internal division and systematic exclusion through state institutions, we recognize that what happened in Slovenia, building on social divisions from Yugoslavia, is a racialization of particular populations. While the Erasure is the most paradigmatic example of state racism in the Slovenian case, there are also other forms of exclusion that were part of state formation in the 1990s. All these exclusions are also a means of extracting wealth, property, and accumulated labour and are an integral part of the liberalization of the former communist states in line with EU standards.

In short, we can trace forms of state racism that still persist, but are aware also of the limited number of examples we have used in this essay – there are similar cases in other former republics of Yugoslavia, as well as cases of statelessness that followed its disintegration. We have not been able to address these here. Nor have we considered the implications of the Erasure in Slovenia's terrible response to the so-called Refugee Crisis, and its longer-term significance. It is for further research to consider these things in much greater detail using the framework we have outlined here. There remains a need for wider application of the framework, to consider fully its contribution to understanding the transition, and the relationship of these spaces to the EU and the global context.

To understand and use race as a biopolitical mechanism for organizing society and ensure its reproduction along particular lines enables us to place the Yugoslav collapse within the Europeanization process. We thus affirm an approach to race that recognizes it as a discourse on power. Such a view reveals another important aspect: the racialization of certain populations in Slovenia led to a process of expropriation that took different forms and created a precedent for the treatment of persons regarded as foreign, setting the stage for Slovenia's response in many other situations, including the “refugee crisis” in 2015 – namely, with restrictive laws and barbed wire on the border.

Acknowledgments

The authors should like to thank C. Richard King for helpful comments on an early draft, as well as our two anonymous peer reviewers.

Notes

1 Catherine Baker recently published a book on the topic, but as its release date was shortly before our submission deadline, we were not able to include it.

2 SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, SR Croatia, SR Macedonia, SR Montenegro, SR Serbia, SR Slovenia, SAP Kosovo, and SAP Vojvodina.

3 For a detailed overview of the debt crisis and its interaction with nationalist forces, see Jović (2001); Woodward (2003); Živković (2014).

4 The Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was renamed the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in 1963.

5 In 1991 no central register of Yugoslav citizens existed.

6 Official figures from the Ministry of Interior after internal examination of databases in 2009.

7 The consequences of erasure were foreseen in the process of passing the Acts that caused it. For example, delegate Metka Mencin's amendment to article 81 of the Alien Act would enable citizens of other republics of the former SFRY with permanent residence to keep their status regardless of application for Slovenian citizenship.

8 Article 40 of the Citizenship of the Republic of Slovenia Act and article 81 of the Aliens Act.

9 Their loss of legal status includes the loss of health insurance, prohibition or loss of legal employment, denial of pension rights, impossibility of purchasing an apartment at a non-commercial price, impossibility of education at secondary level, family dispersion (actual separation because of expulsion or formal separation because of removal from household records), detention and deportation from Slovenia, violation of the right to free movement (vulnerability due to illegal residence within Slovenia; if outside, impossibility to return due to lack of valid documents), loss of the right to formal recognition of paternity, impossibility of entering contractual relations and legally driving or registering a car, exclusion from political participation, exposure to arbitrary conduct of police and administrative employees, loss of access to any social transfers, etc. (Zorn 2003, 134–35). For more, see Dedić (2003).

10 For example, they lost the right to buy apartments at affordable prices.

11 Nontheless we need to be careful when exploring the contours of race in former Yugoslavia. In her essay on the ambiguous role of Roma minority rights in a securitarian register and the conditioned hierarchical inclusion of Eastern European states in the process of EU enlargement, Ivasiuc (2017) warns that “Goldberg's focus on the colonial legacies of race in Europe implicitly posits ‘racial Europeanisation’ as Western Europeanisation, effectuating inadvertently an erasure of Eastern Europe from Europe itself.” Any further research on this topic should take seriously the complexity and contextualization of different geographical and historical race constructions.

12 However, it stipulated a three-month deadline for applications.

13 On 24 January 2009, internal examination by the Ministry of Interior showed that among 25,671 erased persons, 1,302 have died; 10,943 have arranged their permanent status (7,313 acquired Slovene citizenship); and 13,426 haven't acquired any status in Slovenia. Since then, new legislation was passed, which formed new categories of Erased.

14 Zorn (2010, 34) cites multiple sources on unemployment in Slovenia: 1980 – 10,000 persons; 1989 – 29,000 (3%); 1990 – 44,000; 1992 – 164,000 (12.6%).