Citizenship

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. 

So the question as far as I'm concerned is that lots of people have now in a sense rejected that older type of social organisation, the social contract that you were talking about based on debt and consumption. And the reason I think a widespread demand for different ways of relating to others, relating to the community and dealing with power. So I'm optimistic about that. It seems to me you’d expect that whether or not the left in other parts of the world win elections, I think we've moved perhaps away from the model of the 1990s and the 2000s and a greater sense of community, of going back to certain common values and virtues and idea of the good, the public good, of the Commons, has returned. This is extremely hopeful. 

I can’t pretend that the aesthetic dimension of a writer’s work isn’t the most important thing, nor that being a writer and an activist are the same kinds of role. But if we don’t want to influence people’s thoughts and beliefs, why do we bother to write? Isn’t there always a degree of didacticism? I don’t think it’s superfluous or redundant to pose that old question: what is literature for?

As the case of on-going transformations of sexual citizenship in post-Yugoslav space shows, globalization and EU-isation open up a space for introducing positive practices related to sexual citizenship into the local contexts. However, as this case also reveals, the improvement of citizenship policies may easily be instrumentalised by different actors involved at the national and international arenas. Thus, more attention should be paid to the ways in which LGBT rights intersect with other discourses and relations of power on the global and local levels.

In my terms, ‘perceived co-ethnics’ are defined as people who are recognised by the citizenship (or ethnizenship) conferring state as belonging to its main ethnic group although they themselves not only do not embrace that definition but have a distinct national project of their own. In other words, this imagined political community is seeking recognition in its own right under a different name and with different claims from that of the self-fashioned kin-state. However, the self-fashioned kin-state offers citizenship to them.