A laboratory of citizenship: Nations and citizenship in the former Yugoslavia and its successor states

• Main Author: Stiks, Igor
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Subjects: political science, general
• ISBN: 9781109150162; 1109150164

The present study looks at the relationship between nations and citizenship in socialist Yugoslavia and in its successor states from 1945 to the present. By focusing on citizenship this study sheds a different light on the political history of Yugoslavia. In the first chapter I try to answer the question of why Yugoslavia was re-unified as a socialist multinational federation in 1945 and I examine history of the Marxist debates on the national question and history of Yugoslavism as the ideology of South Slavic unity. In the second chapter I describe the evolution of the Yugoslav federal system and how progressive decentralization resulted in significant changes in Yugoslav citizenship that was legally and politically bifurcated into the federal and republican citizenships. In the following chapter, I demonstrate that the duality of Yugoslav citizenship, and the confederal structure of Yugoslavia critically influenced Yugoslavia's democratization in 1990. I also introduce the rarely analyzed factor of citizenship into the debates about Yugoslavia's disintegration. In the fourth chapter I demonstrate that almost all Yugoslavia's successor states used their founding documents, namely their constitutions and citizenship laws, as an effective tool of, as I call it, ethnic engineering. In the last chapter, I analyze the EU's enlargement policies in the Western Balkans and I try to examine if and how they challenge the still dominant ethnocentric conception of citizenship.