Citizenship and the democratic struggles in Montenegro and Serbia

Scholarship has established the centrality of citizenship policies in the state-building agendas, but has hitherto neglected their linkages to democratic struggles in post-communist contexts. The paper highlights the resilient nature of citizenship laws after the initial determination of citizenship, which has articulated the vision of the ‘people’ by the dominant political project. It argues that citizenship laws remain resilient when democracy levels are stable, but they are vulnerable to instrumentalisation during democratic backsliding, because populist and authoritarian leaders seek to selectively expand or contract the citizenry. The paper first contextualises these linkages by discussing citizenship policies and the different directions of democratisation, state- and nation-building in post-communist Europe. It then zooms in on the cases of Montenegro and Serbia, which were a part of the same state until 2006. Even so, the state- and nation-building projects and the democratisation trajectories of the two countries diverged substantively, allowing us to study the politics of citizenship resilience and reform in two different cases. The paper thus offers an understanding of not only ‘how’ citizenship policies evolved in the broader context of state-building and democratisation, but also of what enabled their instrumentalisation during periods of backsliding.