Multiple Citizenship at Stake: a Critical Assessment of the Croatian Citizenship Policy Towards National Minorities

The question of (multiple) citizenship of national minorities has been omnipresent in the intellectual and public discourse of the Republic of Croatia since the very beginnings of its independence in the course of early 90s of the 20th century. The transition period of the post-socialism era marked the effort of political elites to establish a balance among the democratic and nationalist concepts of the Croatian statehood, whereat the repercussions of this clash reflected on both the definition of citizenship and the fate of national minorities. With its ethnocentric approach, the Croatian citizenship regime comes out of standard frameworks which define citizenship as a legal bond between the state and an individual, thus adding a cultural and political dimension to the nexus in which citizenship frequently becomes an instrument of self-identification with ethnic Croats. The paper aims to shed light on the positioning of national minorities in such social constellations, accentuating the issue of their access to (multiple) citizenship and challenges they face thereof, as well as the inconsistent and selective nature of the Croatian citizenship policy towards different parts of its multi-ethnic corpus. This is primarily done through a concise analysis and interpretation of the Law on Croatian Citizenship – its evolution, core provisions and socio-political circumstances surrounding it. In that vein, the fundamental method used for scientific inquiry is legal dogmatic. The focus of the interest refers to the question to what extent the norms on multiple citizenship accommodate the needs of national minorities, help them preserve their peculiar identities and encourage their wider integration into the Croatian post-transitional society.