Citizenship, Ethnicity, and Territory: The Politics of Selecting by Origin in Post-Communist Southeast Europe

Abstract

This paper seeks to conceptualise, map, and make a step toward more comprehensively explaining variations in preferential naturalisation regimes in post-communist Southeast Europe. In doing so it makes three interrelated contributions to the field of citizenship studies. First, to conceptualise dependent variables more exactly I follow the recent trend of disaggregating the concept of citizenship by focusing on external selectivity regimes. I develop a typology of these regimes that combines dimensions of ethnicity and territoriality. Second, relying on the data and country reports produced in the first phase of the CITSEE and EUDO research projects I systematically map temporal and cross-case variations in external selectivity regimes of all 12 post-communist cases of Southeast Europe. Third, utilising advantages of this comparative view I build and demonstrate initial plausibility of a comprehensive explanatory model that builds on the existing research by delimiting scope conditions and relative causal weight of several existing explanations. I find that the politics of selecting by origin in post-communist Southeast Europe has been crucially shaped by differences (a) between old nation-states prone to act as external national homelands, newly emerging nationalizing states, and ethnically divided states; and (b) between the years of ‘thickened history’ in the early post-communist period and the later, politically calmer period after 2000.

Keywords: Citizenship, external selectivity regimes, naturalisation, ethnic politics, emigration, kin-state, post-communism