Country report : Serbia
This report has been produced by the CITSEE project (The Europeanisation of Citizenship in the Successor States of the former Yugoslavia) in close cooperation with EUDO CITIZENSHIP. CITSEE is a project based at Edinburgh University Law School and funded by an Advanced Investigator Award for basic research made to Jo Shaw by the European Council.
A Laboratory of Citizenship: Shifting Conceptions of Citizenship in Yugoslavia and its Successor States
This paper focuses on shifting conceptions of citizenship in Yugoslavia, from its establishment in 1918 to its disintegration in 1991, and in its successor states from early 1990s to the present. It analysis the history of Yugoslavia and its successor states as an instructive and rare example of how citizenship can be used for different and even opposing goals: as a tool of national integration in the first Yugoslavia (1918-1941), as a tool of socialist re-unification after the failure of the previous national integration and the ensuing inter-ethnic conflicts (1945 to the mid-1960s), as a tool of cooperation among nations and their republics in a socialist multinational (con)federation (beginning in the late 1960s and continuing until 1990), as a tool of fragmentation and dissolution (1990-1991) and, finally, of ethnic engineering in Yugoslavia’s successor state. It also shows that during the last decade citizenship was used both as a tool of reconciliation and of new divisions. It remains to be seen if the introduction of European citizenship, following the eventual EU integration of all of Yugoslavia’s successor states, will be yet another experiment in a century-old Balkan laboratory of citizenship.
“The Berlin Wall Crumbled Down upon Our Heads!”: 1989 and Violence in the Former Socialist Multinational Federations
This contribution deals with the violence, conflicts and wars that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in the former socialist multinational federations. The question of why these federations disintegrated so soon after the collapse of the communist regimes is followed by more puzzles. Why did violence occur in some places and not in others? Where, under what circumstances, and when was violence most likely to happen? Finally, why was the disintegration of Yugoslavia so uniquely brutal? In the author's view, two crucial questions determined the fate of many citizens of the former socialist federations in the context of their imminent disintegration: Did the incipient states (republics) and the federal centre accept the separation and the existing borders? Did all groups and all regions accept independence and the authority of the new states? The analysis of the possible answers to these questions across the former socialist federations and their former republics that experienced violence brings us to what the author defines as three decisive triggers of violence: citizenship, borders and territories, and the role of the military apparatus of defunct federations.