CITSEE Story

The legacy of the student protests in Croatia is multi-faceted. On a societal level, they were the first protests to bring into question the country’s contemporary economic and political order from a radical Left perspective, invoking Marxist vocabulary in the process. In the educational field, they were the first to exercise a critical reading of educational policies by locating them in the broader neoliberal context and critiquing them from a human rights and social justice standpoint. They were successful in terms of influencing tuition fee policy, innovative in terms of their organisational creativity, which included gathering in assemblies and exercising direct democracy principles, and using social network websites for mobilising. They provided a spontaneous site for citizenship education and they had a biographical impact on certain student protesters who became committed to activism. 

The current wave of protests and plenums in Bosnia and Herzegovina may thus represent the birth of true activist citizenship, and the profound politisation of a society over the most fundamental questions for any country, namely social justice and equality for all its citizens. What happens in Bosnia, will not stay only in Bosnia.

Citizenship legislation and the associated administrative practices highlight several key points. First, membership in a supranational entity such as the EU has far-reaching effects, erasing to some degree the distinction between citizens and non-citizens but also making Bulgaria a more attractive proposition for various “third-country nationals”. Second, the provision of citizenship via naturalisation has broadened rent-seeking opportunities and exposed institutional weakness, a painfully familiar story in post-communist Bulgaria. Third, and most important, citizenship continues to oscillate between civic and more ethnicised notions. 

In today’s Hungary the poor suffer from the attacks of the present political regime that has openly declared its intention to create a strong national middle class based on a firm work ethic principle. As the Prime Minister, Mr Orbán stated, “all countries have to undertake the correction of their welfare state. It is more difficult in the West because there they have well-established welfare regimes while it is less difficult in Central Europe because the welfare state has not been constructed here. (…) Our program is to create a society based on work instead of the uncompetitive Western type of welfare state.”

While contracts have been largely examined as potential new form of discrimination or, somewhat less worrisome, as a communitarian technique, it may be that they can also be explained as a neoliberal device for privileging those who possess the right knowledge and skills for the market. They are the ‘deserving’ ones who have ‘earned’ citizenship. The others may earn their rights only by learning a language, understanding the shared values, and becoming as profitable labourers as possible. Neoliberalism first, communitarianism to follow.