Croatia

Although the language policies in the six states are broadly consistent with the multicultural conception of citizenship granting cultural and linguistic group rights in education, the promotion of the mutual respect principle and interethnic contact are limited, as are individual choices for the language of instruction by both majorities and minorities. The problem with homogenising groups for policy purposes – even where there is a degree of interaction between the groups – is that interactions take place between individuals who classify each other exclusively in terms of belonging to specific ethnic or cultural communities. 

Overall, the visa liberalisation negotiations have had diverse effects on the citizenship regimes of South Eastern Europe. While having contributed to resolving status-related issues of the Roma and displaced persons, there has been no major breakthrough in terms of substantive advancement of anti-discrimination policies. The pressure on the governments of the Western Balkans to take measures in the direction of limiting the freedom of movement of specific groups of citizens has added a layer of discrimination on the basis of ethnic background and social status. 

In 1946, for the first time, women’s rights as political, social and economic beings were inscribed in the new Constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, as a result of women’s participation in the antifascist Resistance during World War Two. In the 1970s, thirty years after the inscription of women’s rights in the Yugoslav Constitution, the country had undergone a rapid process of modernization and urbanization. Nonetheless, socialist politics appeared progressive in comparison to the process of “retraditionalisation” of gender relations which took place in the 1990s.

In deciding whether to seek access to a particular citizenship most people tend to be practically minded. However, the broader sum of these individual decisions, as well as the sheer symbolic potential of using citizenship to uphold special ties between a state and a particular group, have important implications for wider political issues, such as ethnic politics, the fortunes of political parties, control of diaspora organisations, and sometimes even the high international politics in the region.

Amongst broad layers of the populations in BiH and Serbia, I found over the years, the SFRY passport allowed people to articulate resentment of their current entrapment in terms of their own past, both remembered and misremembered. Notwithstanding its uniqueness on a global stage, they asserted an entitlement to smooth visa-free mobility like the one they had lost. The red passport allowed everyone who was old enough, regardless of how much they had actually travelled, to say that they could have.'Normal lives' in Yugoslavia, then, were not only recalled in terms of living standards, order and welfare, but also of what we could call a sense of geopolitical dignity. Here, the red passport joined forces with Tito.