1996 AES distinguished lecture series, 1
transnationalism, nationalism, citizenship, and
property: Eastern Europe since 1989
KATHERINE VERDERY—University of Michigan
In the 1990s intense interest and activity have developed around the notions of transnationalism
and globalization. These topics have begotten new journals (such as Identities, Public
Culture, Diaspora, and Third Text) and sparked new career trajectories—not to mention the
1996 AES Spring Meeting theme for which this essay was prepared. Among the issues explored
are the changing regime of accumulation with which globalization can be linked; changes in
liberal notions of citizenship and state, particularly in the face of extensive worldwide migration;
and the relations between "global" and "local"—as well as among transnationalism, nationalism,
and identities of all kinds. Concomitantly, however, many of these same concepts have
themselves fallen under scrutiny. What is "the state" and what exactly is happening to "it"?1
What is "identity" and what hidden assumptions about it should we be questioning? What, for
that matter, is "capitalism"? How can we gain some purchase on the entirecluster of phenomena
long associated with liberal polities—states, nations, citizenship, property, democracy, identity,
and so forth?
These questionings come from research in many places, but their broadest phrasing makes
it clear that we have heard too little from one important precinct: Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union. Given Communist Party states' conscious efforts to transform the very meanings
of these fundamental terms—to create different kinds of nations and polities, with property and
citizen-state relations different from those of liberal capitalism, and partly insulated from
transnational processes beyond those with other socialist countries—this region provides us
with fundamentally different bases for engaging both the phenomena associated with globalization
and the literature about it.2
For instance, classic liberalism saw a tight connection among
certain understandings of citizenship, property, and identity. Membership in the body of citizens
was heavily dependent on having property—in particular, property in one's person—and
identities were rooted in "possessive individualism" or a possessive relation to the self (cf.
The formerly socialist societies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union offer an
unusual point of departure for considering the mutual interaction of transnationalizing
and localizing processes. In this essay I explore these processes with respect
to two topics—citizenship and property—important in classic liberal paradigms,
which writing on transnationalism often challenges. New citizenship provisions
and privatization programs in the former socialist bloc have both transnational
causes and nationalizing consequences, for reasons different from those encountered
in literature on transnationalism elsewhere, [transnationalism, national identity,
citizenship, property, socialism and postsocialism, Eastern Europe]
American Ethnologist 25(2):291 -306. Copyright © 1998, American Anthropological Association.
1996 AES distinguished lecture 291
Handler 1985; Macpherson 1962; Strathern 1988). In the socialist world, however, the
predominance of collective property and the attempt to weaken possessive relations to
individual selves precluded such forms of citizenship and identity. What can we expect now
with the collapse of the boundary that at least partially insulated the former Soviet bloc from
global processes? (Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that those processes precipitated the
collapse; see Verdery 1996:30-37.) What kinds of citizenship and identity will emerge as
collective property is dismantled under the press of global forces?
In the present essay I take up some of these questions for the countries of Eastern Europe and
the former Soviet Union—I call them the former Soviet bloc—since the breakdown of Soviet
hegemony as of 1989. I do so from the angle of the 1996 AES meeting's themes: transnationalism,
nationalism, and cultural identity (although I tend to elide the latter two, for in this region
ethnonational and cultural identities are largely synonymous). My examples cover only a small
part of what "transnationalism" has come to mean, focusing on questions of citizenship and
property as these appear in the former Soviet bloc. I select these two topics in part because of
their historical connection within the liberal tradition that socialism strove to alter, and in part
because they are fundamental means of establishing boundaries in both liberal and socialist
systems—boundaries now being thoroughly overhauled throughout Eastern Europe. These are
among the boundaries whose "transgression" the literature on transnationalism often points to,
sometimes in a celebratory way. By setting rules of inclusion and exclusion, citizenship and
property create "belonging"—what and who is in or out, and what belongs to whom—with
important effects on identities.
As a rule, I treat transnationalism and nationalism, or globalizing and localizing processes,
as mutually constitutive; they shape one another both simultaneously and sequentially. I tend
in this essay, however, to emphasize one side of the interactive relation: how transnationalism
nationalizes, more than how local processes affect global ones. I do so not because I think the
opposite movement is inconsequential, but because my data lend themselves better to this
treatment. In addition, although the processes I consider vary across space in their form and
effects, I do not treat variations within the region systematically but bring in one or another case
to illustrate specific processes. We gain an idea of spatial variation, however, if we compare
the localizing tendencies I underscore here to the rather different picture that Donald Robotham
so beautiful ly draws for the Caribbean in the essay that follows. In it he contrasts the two regions'
susceptibilities to the influence of global capital and emphasizes that instead of the "rupture"
characterizing the former socialist bloc, what ismorecommon in the Caribbean is a realignment
My discussion is in three parts. In the first I concentrate on citizenship, discussing how
transnational democratization prompted nationalist politics that invigorated boundaries yet also
cut across them, reterritorializing and deterritorializing at the same time. In the second part I
focus on property ownership, considering how transnational "privatization," particularly of
land, intersects with both citizenship and national identity in localizing ways. In both parts I
also seek to identify some of the features of socialism that give these processes a specific form;
occasionally I invoke comparisons with the Caribbean, site of the 1996 meeting (San juan, PR)
and subject of Robotham's companion essay. I conclude with an example that links citizenship
and land, transnationalism and nationalism: the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
transnationalism and citizenship
Let me begin with citizenship, a topic of greatly heightened interest in 1990s social science.
Ways of thinking about this topic have multiplied its meanings, producing talk of "flexible
citizenship," "the privatization of citizenship," "cultural citizenship," "destabilized citizenship,"
and so on.3
Discussions of citizenship quickly become entangled with the matter of national
and cultural identity, as in arguments about whether "civic" citizenly commitments are
292 american ethnologist
precluded by "ethnic" ones. Questions also arise about the political and cultural rights both of
minorities within heterogeneous nation-states and of emigrants relative to their sending and host
societies. Of particular concern is whether or not such groups should have voting rights and
other forms of political influence in their countries of origin. Benedict Anderson exposes this
latter issue to sharp critical scrutiny in his essay "Long-Distance Nationalism" (1992), in which
he objects to the "politics without accountability" of those emigres and refugees who contribute
funds to violent nationalist organizations in their home countries while living peacefully in a
suburb of Paris or Montreal.
As we know from the work of T. H. Marshall (1950), citizenship is not a unitary concept:
Marshall subdivided it into civil, political, and social citizenship rights and saw them in a
historical progression. Different members of a given polity may have different sets of rights, such
as the Arabs in Israel who have equal political rights with others but lack the social ones that
accompany military service, from which most Arabs are barred.4
We might add to Marshall's
list "cultural" rights as well. These may constitute a fourth set, as in Rosaldo's "cultural
citizenship" (1994), or become grounds for allocating the other three, as when being culturally
Croat in Croatia entitles one to certain political benefits (voting, landowning, and so on) that
non-Croats lack. The concept of citizenship can be nuanced in other ways too. For instance,
according to Soysal (1994), in the new global context we see not just different sets of rights, as
with Marshall, but radical transformations in the very concept of citizenship. From being
organized and legitimated by nation-state belonging, citizenship is shifting toward a postnational
concept that is legitimated by deterritorialized universal principles of human rights and
personhood, enforced by international organizations.
Although in any given case one should distinguish among different sets and definitions of
rights, for my purposes here it is sufficient to follow Brubaker (1992) in seeing citizenship as a
membership category, a mechanism for allocating persons to states and thus as something that
creates belonging. Citizenship bounds in two ways: it distinguishes belongers from the excluded,
and it ties the former to the state as the guarantor of their rights, thus incorporating them
as subjects. The question I pursue is how cultural and national identities in the former Soviet
bloc jntersect with the citizenship criteria—such as voting rights, proprietorship, and welfare
entitlements—that have emerged in the newly defined or redefined states of the region.
I note first that new citizenship provisions have arisen in conjunction with a profoundly
transnational process resulting from the collapse of Communist Party rule: "democratization."
Democratization is transnational in at least three senses. First, "democracy" is a transnational
symbol, by which both dissidents before 1989 and anticommunist political groups afterward
invoked "the West." Second, international electoral observers oversaw its implantation, certifying
(inter alia) newly propitious climates for foreign capital investment; thus power flowing
across borders intersected with political pluralization inside them. And third, the politics of this
pluralization, in some cases, produced transnational definitions of voting rights and citizenship,
creating blocs of voters "abroad," as I will explain below.
In some countries of the region, an early effect of democratization was to invigorate
ethnonational identities. (I say "ethnonational" so as to emphasize that in this region the idea
of "nation" has long had primarily an ethnic sense rather than the political one more familiar
to North Americans.) These identities were there to be invigorated because, contrary to the
common view that socialism "kept the lid on" national consciousness, Soviet-style nationalities
policy had so thoroughly institutionalized it (see Slezkine 1994; Verdery 1996:85-86; Vujaci£
and Zaslavsky 1991). This was especially so in the region's three federations: the Soviet Union,
Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. In these states, where the main national groups all had their
own republics, the principle of national difference was constitutionally enshrined. Leaders of
nationalities held power in their republics qua nationals. More important, this was so in a social
environment that the Party-state had worked assiduously to cleanse of other organizational
1996 AES distinguished lecture 293
forms that might compete with its own initiatives. This ethnonational organization can properly
be said to have been part of socialism, and, although its effects were strongest in the federations,
one can see echoes of it elsewhere in the region, as in the Party-membership ethnic quotas of
states like Romania and Bulgaria and in the provisions for national minority rights in various
constitutions.5
One might even say that ethnonational identities were perhaps the principal form
of "collective consciousness" that socialism produced.6
Thus, after 1989, when the new democratic politics enabled politicians to organize popular
sentiments, it happened that in a number of countries (such as Croatia, Slovenia, Romania,
Hungary, and Latvia) the rhetoric and symbols with the greatest electoral appeal were national(ist)
ones. Among their partisans were new entrepreneurs—usually former Communist
apparatchiks—who saw in nationalist politics a way to protect emerging national markets for
local predators, rather than opening them to predators from outside. And among the people
whom national symbols mobilized were voters of the candidates' respective ethnonational
groups, in countries all of which are complexly multiethnic.7
This way of mobilizing votes was
convenient, given that parties with recognizable political platforms were, to put it mildly,
nonexistent. Because national symbols proved so potent that no political group could entirely
avoid them, nationalism in the region's politics became a matter of degree ratherthan a distinct
political option (see Verdery 1996:104-129). Thus, in the formerly socialist world, transnational
flows of capital and political interest turned nationalism into political capital, within
transnational^ fostered elections. Here the very processes that generated cross-border influence
also produced political groups and symbols aimed at reinforcing borders against, or channeling,
that influence.
Political mobilization of the vote through national symbols joined with another set of
nationalizing processes: the writing and rewriting of constitutions (in part modeled, transnational
ly, on those of Western Europe). Socialist-era constitutions had placed all socialist citizens on
formally equal footing, guaranteeing the rights of coresident nationalities and providing for
proportional representation of national minorities in Party organs. The collapse of socialism and
of several socialist states ended these constitutional protections. In both new (post-Yugoslav
and post-Soviet) states and ongoing ones (such as Albania, Romania, and Hungary), the process
of writing new constitutions enabled ambitious politicians to manipulate the very definition of
citizenship. This process was especially evident in the newly formed states, such as Latvia,
Estonia, Croatia, and Slovenia, in which new constitutions turned nationalities once equal
before the law into majorities and minorities bearing new, and differential, citizenship rights.
In a number of cases citizenship became relatively easy to obtain for nonresident ethnonation-
als,8
while provisions enabling resident nonmajority ethnonationals to become citizens were
cumbersome and often corrupted.9
Particularly restrictive citizenship procedures were implemented
in the Baltic states, disenfranchising large numbers of the resident Russians (who, it was
feared, might seek to reverse these states' independence). In the Estonian election of 1992, for
example, nearly 40 percent of the population (most of them Russians) were barred from
voting—a privilege reserved for citizens, who were defined by native Estonian language and
descent—and, three years later, the law was revised to lengthen residency requirements for
citizen status (OMRI 1995: February 4).
Hayden (1992) has termed the result "constitutional nationalism." By this he means constitutional
and legal structures that privilege members of one ethnonation over other residents.
Unlike Western democratic constitutions, in which the subject of rights and the collective
bearers of sovereignty are individual citizens, many of the new constitutions accorded sovereignty
to one ethnonation?0
As we might expect of socialism, collectivities thus take precedence
over individuals as social actors and as bearers of rights, but the collectivities are ethnonational
ones. In several cases, then, the national self-determination that gave birth to the new state
became a privilege of the majority group alone; other groups would now have to live as
294 american ethnologist
second-class citizens in ethnocratic states, their civil, political, and social rights curtailed by a
stigmatizing cultural identity that invariably had racist overtones.
Let me give some examples. The starkest come from the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union
(especially those states having a substantial minority population of Russians),11
where the
exigencies of new nation-state formation have been vividly apparent. The preamble to Macedonia's
1991 constitution, for instance, defines Macedonia as the "national state of the
Macedonian [ethnic] people, which guarantees . . . permanent coexistence of the Macedonian
people with Albanians, Turks, Wallachians, Roma, and other nationalities living in the Republic
of Macedonia."12
(Note the distinction between "the people" and "other nationalities.") The
constitution of Slovenia defines a three-tiered system of privileges: there is the "sovereign
Slovene [ethno]nation," then there are recognized "autochthonous" Hungarian and Italian
minorities, whose cultural rights the constitution guarantees, and last come all other minorities
(Serbs, Macedonians, and so forth), lacking any such support for their cultural rights (Hayden
1992:659). In that country (as in neighboring Croatia), citizenship and the right to vote are much
easier to acquire for fellow ethnonationals living abroad than for nonnationals living on the
state's territory—all of whom the new constitution declares to be "foreigners." 13
A third example is Latvia, where Latvians comprise barely half the population and Russians
34 percent.14
The new Latvian constitution—represented, like so many others at the time, as an
act oi "restitution"—was not in fact new but largely restored the old constitution of 1922, when
the population was overwhelmingly Latvian. One could not say, then, that it was written
expressly to discriminate against non-Latvians (many of whom qualified for citizenship anyway,
despite the lengthy residence requirement).15
Nonetheless, implemented in multiethnic postsocialist
Latvia, it had that effect. As in many other countries of the world, resident noncitizens
(in Latvia, overwhelmingly non-Latvian) hold basic civil rights, such as freedom of movement,
expression, and religion, but not important political and social ones: the rights to vote, hold
civil service jobs, buy land, own shares in joint-stock companies, receive state benefits, or
possess weapons (Bowring 1995:123-129). Moreover, the extreme nationalist parties found
even this law too generous and, in January 1996, sought a referendum on a more restrictive
alternative, for which they fell just short of the necessary number of signatures—one-tenth of
the voting population. (Indeed, the parties had asked the election commission to extend the
deadline so as to secure signatures from Latvians abroad, but they were refused despite protests
from such groups as the Latvian Council of Canada.)16
Constitutional nationalism is not limited to newly independent states (or even, Hayden notes,
to the former East bloc).17
The revised constitution of Romania, for example, states that "national
sovereignty belongs to the [ethnic] Romanian people." Sometimes, as in the Latvian case, the
ethnocratic effect results from a strict restoration of pre-Communist constitutions, an act
governed not by discriminatory intent but by the desire to wipe out all vestiges of the socialist
period. In cases such as Croatia, however, which had no prior constitution, the ethnocratic
effect would seem intentional. Hayden's term for it is "bureaucratic ethnic cleansing."
With manifold examples of this kind, we see that citizenship rights have become an arena of
tremendous struggle in the former Soviet bloc, involving majority and minority nations particularly
within the new countries. This has not happened because people chose or were forced to
move, as is more usual with transnational ethnic communities of refugees, exiles, or immigrants;
when new diasporas in the former Soviet bloc were formed, what moved was not the people
but the borders.18
These citizenship struggles are also international, involving Western countries
and NGOs: for instance, the U.S. and West European governments have pressured the Czech
Republic and Latvia concerning citizenship laws seen to "hinder European integration and
foreign investment." 19
The stakes of these struggles, however, are not control over flows of
labor, as in so many other cases (including much of Robotham's Caribbean—see, e.g., Maurer
1995). Perhaps reflecting the dominant role of politics rather than "the economy" in the socialist
1996 AES distinguished lecture 295
organization of power, the stakes in the former Soviet bloc are, rather, access to "democracy,"
to state making, and to the political and civil rights that can affect the very form of the polity
and people's relation to it. This is particularly the case in the states formed or re-created from
the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, where newly empowered ethnonational groups
fear that resident members of the once-dominant nationality (Serbs, Russians) will try to
reestablish that group's dominance.
So far I have been speaking of how constitutional provisions have reorganized citizens'
belonging, differentially distributing civil, political, and social rights within these states, and I
have suggested some links between the ethnic bias of citizenship here and the organization of
socialism. The provisions have also reached across state borders in various ways to protect and
enfranchise coethnics abroad. For example, the Hungarian constitution announces, The
Republic of Hungary recognizes its responsibilities toward Hungarians living outside the borders
of the country and shall assist them in fostering relations to Hungary" (Dimitrijevic 1993:52).
Similarly, the Albanian constitution "looks after the recognition of national and democratic
rights of the Albanian population living outside the boundaries of the Republic" (Dimitrijevic
1993:52). Such expansive attitudes elicited predictable complaint. For example, when the prime
minister of Hungary declared in 1990 that he considered himself head of all the world's 15
million Hungarians (only 10 million of whom live in Hungary), he inflamed Hungary's
diplomatic relations with neighboring Romania, Slovakia, and Serbia, each of which has a
substantial Hungarian minority.
Solicitude for members of diasporas becomes concrete in the case of voting rights for people
who had emigrated or been exiled during the communist period, losing citizenship that in most
of these countries has now been restored. Some countries allow these Emigres to vote: Hungary
permits this only if they return to live in Hungary; other countries, such as Estonia, Poland, and
Croatia, permit emigre citizens to vote wherever they live. In the 1995 elections, Polish Emigres
could vote only in the primaries, while in Croatia they voted in the general election as well.
(Given that there are now more people holding Polish citizenship in Chicago than in Warsaw,
it is no surprise that preelection polling failed to predict the results of that election.) The electoral
laws in Croatia provide the most extreme case: these permitted voting by all emigres and ethnic
Croats abroad, whether they were Croatian citizens or not.20
In Croatia's November 1995
elections, 145 polling places in 41 countries recorded Croat preferences.
What are the effects of these transnational citizenship rights? Or, to use the broader phrasing
of political theorist William Connolly (1994), what is the place of nomadic elements in
constituting a democracy? On evidence from the former socialist bloc, it seems that the
participation of such elements in elections strengthens ethnocratic tendencies. The reason is
that these Emigres and political exiles have tended to vote nationalist and to press for
ethnonational definitions of sovereignty against the democratic rights of coresident ethnic
groups. In Poland, Communist Party leader Kwasniewski's margin of victory over (the more
nationalist) Lech Wate§a in 1995 would probably have been greater without the Emigre vote
(Carole Nagengast, personal communication, 1996). In Croatia's 1995 elections, while President
Franjo Tudjman received only 35 percent of all votes cast in the capital city, Zagreb, the
diaspora vote in toto was 90 percent for Tudjman's party. It won its parliamentary majority
thanks to the Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose votes formed 80 percent of the diaspora
total and for whom 12 special seats are reserved in Croatia's parliament, even though many of
them are not even Croatian citizens.21
This is Anderson's "politics without accountability": the
votes of Croats abroad maintain in power a chauvinist regime waging war with the bodies of
Croats (and their non-Croat neighbors) at home.
Implicit in £migr£ voting (other than in the Croat case) is the question of dual citizenship, a
subject of particularly intense struggle in the former Soviet Union. Soon after that country's
disintegration, the government of Russia, seeking to increase its leverage over the post-Soviet
296 american ethnologist
successor states and to "protect" the 30 million Russians now living outside Russia's borders,
began pressuring those states to legislate dual citizenship.22
Fearing excessive Russian influence,
however, governments in the successor states protested that dual citizenship would cause
"divided loyalties" and provoke instability. Illustrative of this reaction is Estonia's revised
citizenship law, passed in January 1995, which banned a specific category of citizens inside
Estonia—resident Russians who had received Estonian citizenship—from claiming dual citizenship,
but permitted it to ethnic Estonians who were citizens of other countries (OMRI 1994:
November 2&-29, 1995: January 20). Thus ethnonational identifications pad Estonia's citizenship
rosters with an international archipelago of ethnic Estonians while disempowering similar
archipelagos for others on the state's territory.23
I emphasize again that the causes of these
particular national-transnational configurations lie both in the odd way in which the "diasporas"
were formed (by creating new state borders) and in peculiarities of the socialist experience, with
its reification of the principle of national difference.
The end of socialism meant importing "democracy," but it entered a context that was peculiar
in several ways. First, the post-1989 obsession with repudiating the communist era entailed
restoring older forms from the various countries' supposedly democratic precommunist past.
Often this produced discriminations between citizens and noncitizens that coincided with
ethnonational differences. Second, the communist-period organization of ethnonational groups
reified national consciousness rather than suppressing it, even while undermining other foci of
collective and individual identification. This consciousness, coupled with the general privileging
of "collective" ideas, made national difference a ready vessel for new political struggles.
Finally, the history of the concept of nation in this region made it an ethnic concept, rather
different from the liberal-democratic one meaning individuals' collective sovereignty.
Western purveyors of "democracy" (etymologically, "rule by the people") therefore brought
it into an environment predisposed to ethnicize it. As external observers came to ratify that
elections were free and fair, they failed to ask who "the people" were who would be allowed
into the social contract creating citizens and rights. In the history of democracy in the United
States, "the people" was bounded to exclude persons of the "wrong" sex and race. In the former
socialist world, the criterion that crosscuts citizenship is ethnonaf/ona/ being. Here, "people"
connotes the sovereignty of an ethnic collectivity rather than the joint sovereignty of individual
"social contractors." The sovereign thus becomes the ethnic collectivity; democracy becomes
ethnocracy. Constitutions and elections have traveled transnational ly, then, but with unanticipated
effects, producing transnational citizenships that nationalize. With this, the relationships
among sovereignty, citizenship, and national or cultural identity diverge both from those
thought basic to modern liberalism and from those characteristic of transnationalism in many
other contexts.24
privatization, property, and identity
Some of the questions raised by new citizenship provisions in the former socialist bloc spill
over into the unfolding of a second major process occurring there: privatization, or the creation
of individual ownership from the once-collective property of socialism. With the collapse of
party rule, the return of socialist property to private owners was a top priority both for
postcommunist governments in search of legitimation and for Western lending institutions and
NGOs. Like "democratization," privatization involves the transnational flow of ideas and
personnel. Especially visible agents have been the World Bank and International Monetary
Fund, which since 1989 have regularly made indicators of progress in privatizing land and state
firms the benchmarks for according or withholding loans. Privatization connects with citizenship
as well: some of the formerly socialist countries require that those who wish to recover
landownership or to obtain other privatized socialist property be citizens or local residents or
1996 AES distinguished lecture 297
both. I mentioned above, for example, that the Latvian constitution accords only to citizens the
right to buy land and to own shares in joint-stock companies; in addition, Latvian citizens
received more privatization coupons than other, noncitizen residents (Bowring 1995:129;
RFE/RL 1994: November 29). Although countries of the region vary in their citizenship requirements
for owning property, it appears that they place restrictions on landowning more often
than on other forms.
The return of private property is complexly tied both to changes in the form of states during
this period of enhanced globalization and to national identities. To begin with the obvious,
dismantling collective property weakens the socialist state by divesting it of its direct control
over revenue; privatization therefore changes the nature of the state's relation to its subjects.
More generally, liberal political theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, and Hegel argued over the
relations among property ownership, democracy, freedom, particular forms of state sovereignty,
and certain conceptions of the individual—that is, of the person. While I do not have the space
to explore the different positions (see, e.g., Macpherson 1962; Tully 1993), I mention them here
to further the point that in the former Soviet bloc, impropriation (the return of property)
necessarily entails rearranging state-subject relations. As Biolsi (1995) observes of the totally
different process whereby Native Americans were made property owners in the late 19th century,
for instance, impropriation creates individual subjects who look to the state to guarantee their
property rights. No such state-subject relation was possible under socialism, where individual
property rights were insecure and highly circumscribed. Thus, as with citizenship, establishing
certain rights (this time, to private property rather than to voting) both protects persons and
incorporates them into the state—and differently so from what happened under socialism.
The implications of privatization for national identity are, like its implications for state
transformation, multiple. First, privatization's impact on state-subject relations in itself affects
national belonging—a state-subject relation fundamental to the modern world. One consequence
is a sharpening of national identities, as such groups contest each other's property claims
(see, e.g., Verdery 1996:157-158). Second, although it is too much to say that through socialist
property communist parties successfully created a collective subject, a weaker variant of this
outcome may have contributed to the reinforced national belonging I noted above. As socialist
nationalities policy facilitated ethnicizing the subject of state sovereignty and the definition of
citizenship, which new constitutions in some (although not all) of these states confirmed, it
might thus have contributed to ethnicizing the subject of property rights. Thus socialist regimes
created a special nexus among state, property, and national identity that takes specific forms in
the changing global order.
To explore the connections, I will give some examples concerning privatization of property
rights in land.25
Land has a special place in post-1989 Eastern European economies, for, in the
inflation that has plagued them all to some extent, landholding is the ultimate insurance policy
and pension plan. This is true regardless of the distribution of the labor force across sectors but
is most important in countries experiencing high inflation and massive industrial restructuring.
For people who lose their jobs and whose savings evaporate in the inflation, to control land—or
to have kin who do so—increases the odds of having something to eat. Bounding land and
establishing its relation to particular persons, then, become critical. Although land represents
only part of the values being privatized, I focus on it because changes in land ownership show
with particular clarity howtransnationally fostered privatization intersects with citizenship and
property laws in ways that reterritorialize. That is, through ideas about property, enhanced flows of
capital and concepts serve to tie interests to specific places. They do so in two ways: through
legal restrictions on land ownership, and through localized understandings about personhood
and kinship. The former follows directly from changes in socialism's property regime, the
latter less so.
298 american ethnologist
As in Latvia, where only citizens have the right to buy land, a number of other formerly
socialist countries have linked citizenship with territory. The links are still being forged, for
policy concerning land ownership fluctuated throughout the 1990s as a function of international
pressure and of internal politics in each country. In Romania, for example, the 1991 land
restitution law enabled Romanians living abroad to claim their land only if they retained their
Romanian citizenship and chose Romanian domicile; £migr£s who for one reason or another
renounced their citizenship forfeited their land rights. The Romanian constitution, however,
legislated after the land law in a different political climate, eliminated the requirement that
citizens be resident to own land. A new government in 1996 strengthened this policy and moved
to permit some foreign land ownership, which Romania, along with other countries such as
Hungary and the Czech and Slovak Republics, had precluded (thus treating noncitizens much
like Jews in earlier periods of European history).26
In Poland and Estonia they could do so only
with the permission of local or national governments; in Lithuania new laws in 1996 enabled
noncitizens to buy land only if it is not classed as agricultural. The change aroused protest from
Lithuanian nationalists (see Baltic Independent 1996; OMRI 1996: March 3D.27
Although no
stable outcome has yet emerged in these countries (as of June 1998), the tendency has been
reluctantly to allow foreign companies to own the land beneath the buildings they purchase or
build but to prohibit them from owning agricultural land.
News reports indicate that restrictions on landowning, designed to impede the "foreign
takeover" of land, were the agenda of nationalist political groups. Striving to make land an
"inalienable possession," in Annette Weiner's words (1992), these groups have seen as their
opponents both transnational forces and local parties arguing fora "return to Europe"—a Europe
that insists on full alienability of property rights as a condition for European integration. Property
rights, particularly in land, thus constitute a terrain of struggle between transnational and
national forces. If we follow Weiner, this makes sense. In her analysis, inalienable possessions
fortify group identity, symbolizing a group's ancestry or mythological origins; what marks such
possessions is friction against ready transfer (such as the prohibitions on sale of land to foreigners
in many formerly socialist countries). I will adduce some ethnographic evidence to fill out the
linkages conjoining land and ancestry, land and inalienability, and land and national identity.28
My data come from my fieldwork carried out in a Transylvanian village during 1993-94 and
1996-97 on the privatization of land.29
From this research I learned that in conflicts over land,
villagers often justify ownership claim-rights by pr/orownership, kinship, and work. They defend
someone's claim to land on the grounds that it belonged to that person's ancestors and that the
claimants or their ancestors worked it. Villagers suing for their family land say they are doing
so because they owe this to their parents, who worked so hard for it. When asked if they planned
to sell land they could not now work, nearly all expressed reluctance to part with family
holdings.30
While these emphases on kinship and work may owe something to socialism, they
have roots in presocialist village notions about personhood as something constructed through
labor and possession—notions that Martha Lampland (1995) has illustrated for Hungary. One's
tie to the land was in part a connection through substance with the ancestors who had labored
to acquire it. Thus self, work, family ties, and possession of land are all mutually entangled (see
also Hann 1993; Shanin 1990:112-113).
Sometimes the connection is even more direct: the ground where the ancestors are buried
gives us, their heirs, strength and makes our crops fertile. For Romania, particularly vivid
illustration of this from earlier times is found in the protest written by Transylvanian writer Liviu
Rebreanu concerning the "dismemberment" of Transylvania in 1940, when Hitler moved
control over part of that region from Romania to Hungary:
For us, Transylvania can only exist whole, flesh of our flesh. ... For thousands of years, millions and
millions of Romanians shed their sweat in labor and their blood in battle, and died mixing their mortal
dust everywhere in this ancient soil, such that all the valleys and hills and all the mountains are drenched
1996 AES distinguished lecture 299
with Romanian blood, and the feet of passersby tread on soil commingled with the dust of Romanian
bodies. [Rebreanu 1941:9]
Although such notions were muted during the socialist period (particularly among youfiger
generations), many persons are still alive for whom these ideas are very potent. When people
fight now to control land, it is not only over the resources for physical survival that they fight
but also over the resources for social existence as persons living in meaningful human
communities.
Ideas such as these are not limited to village communities in Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union.31
Among the many other instances one could adduce, I signal one from the
Caribbean. Drexel Woodson (1990) has written at length on symbolic aspects of land tenure in
Haiti after the end of slavery there.32
He describes notions of personhood that derive from
people's relation to land, notions that link social status with having land and having land with
being free; owning a place became a condition for "being somebody." These notions have a
transnational dimension as well, for Haitian emigrants have long sent remittances back home
for the purpose of buying land and situating their "persons" in this way. The parallel with Eastern
Europe is not serendipitous. Both there and in the Caribbean, "coerced cash-crop labor"
(Wallerstein 1974) defined agricultural laboring regimes into the mid-19th century; the breakup
of plantations in favor of peasant smallholding occurred in both (and in Eastern Europe, yet
again!); and, in both, landownership after enserfment defined the "free," worthy person.
These examples show us land as a spatial realization of personhood: persons are propertied,
and land is part of persons. Land belongs to them and they to it. The ownership relation in
question is not, however, that of Euro-American liberalism's property ideas—exclusive and
individual—but collective, enmeshed in networks of kin. In this context, privatization of land
is not inherently individuating; rather, it underscores the extent to which the condition of
possibility for "individuals" is the group. Clusters of such groups form the collective individual,
"the nation"—the same collective that has been constituted as the bearer of citizen rights and
sovereignty (see above). It is collectively possessive, as well, owning a "national patrimony"
(sic)that includes both the land (associated with the nation's ethnogenesis) and cultural property
as well.33
Such ideas, linking kinship, nation, collective individuals, and property, ramify widely
in directions I cannot explore here.34
I have been pointing to conceptions of land and person that are localizing—that tie
"identities" to the soil and place friction in the way of its market transfer as land is privatized.
This friction is connected to the broader legal constraints I have described on alienating land
outside "the nation." Immovable property is thus made inalienable—precisely as "foreigners"
hover over the nation's more movable wealth, hoping to acquire decisive ownership shares in
it. A clue to what may be happening lies in Weiner's view of the role of "inalienable
possessions," a formulation similar to Max Gluckman's (1965) concerning immovable property:
symbolizing group identity, these possessions serve to stabilize hierarchy and political order
against erosion by "free exchange." The hierarchy and order being stabilized in the former Soviet
bloc are at one and the same time internal to nation-state borders (ranking the various
ethnonational groups on state territory) and external to them (in the global hierarchy of nations).
Land would appear to be very significant as an inalienable symbol of group identity, not only
because of the modern association of states with territories but also because of the connection
between ancestors and soil.
I am suggesting, then, that certain conceptions of property and property rights—let me call
them "nationalizing" conceptions—participate in political struggles; they constitute resistance
to transnational forces, efforts by particular national(ist) groups to prevent "their" nation from
slipping in the hierarchy of nations in a period of global uncertainty. This observation reminds
us that "nation," like those comparable differentiating constructs of "gender," "race," and
"class," not only creates categories of same and different but sets up relations of dominance
300 american ethnologist
between them; in this dominance, property plays an important part.35
Once again, transnational
and national processes appear as mutually constitutive.
This is not news, but perhaps it is worth underscoring against those tendencies in transnationalist
scholarship that emphasize crossings rather than the borders being crossed, and whose
horizontal imagery of circulation through global networks may obscure how the networks'
elements are hierarchized Circulation metaphors privilege flow; yet flow occurs against
obstructions and also precipitates further obstructionism by those whom circulation will drain.
An important political task for anthropology, I believe, is to call attention to the fixing,
racializing, and hierarchizing that seem everywhere to accompany global transformation, even
as we explore the emergent networks of quickened flow that are its sign.
land, identity, and citizenship in the Yugoslav succession
The best example in the formerly socialist world for showing that our era is not simply one
of greater flow but one of reconfiguring the relations of flow and obstruction comes from the
wars of Yugoslav succession. In the pages above I have given many examples to show how
these reconfigurations affect citizenship; I will now briefly link them with questions of land and
identity, bringing the themes of this essay together in yet another way. My vehicle is Susan
Woodward's superb analysis of the breakup of Yugoslavia, Balkan Tragedy (1995). In it she
describes how land became central to this conflict, not because of decollectivization (in
Yugoslavia land had never been collectivized) but because the collapse of multinational
Yugoslavia resulted in a fierce struggle to form new nation-states, which were to be based on
control of territory and filled with a homogeneous population—the classic agenda of nationstatehood.
That the populations were not homogeneous led to the "constitutional nationalisms"
I have already mentioned, through which the Croatian, Serbian, Slovene, Macedonian, and
other constitutions defined the bearers of sovereignty as the titular nationalities and restricted
full citizenship rights to them.
New constitutions, however, did not solve the problem of carving up territory, necessary
because, despite global changes in state forms, secure and recognized territorial demarcations
are still what define states in the international system. Producing them in ex-Yugoslavia was a
matter of drawing lines in space according to which national groups lived where. In Woodward's
view, the problem was exacerbated by the European Union's decision to ratify the new
territorial borders by referendum, rather than simply to impose new borders by international
fiat. As Woodward puts it, "the fight to create states out of nations in territories that are ethnically
mixed essentially becomes a fight over persons and their rights to live on particular tracts of
land" (1995:241). It was therefore essential for Croatia's and Serbia's politicians to assure the
vote in territories of mixed residence by killing off or chasing out groups other than "their own."
This meant full-fledged physical (rather than just bureaucratic) ethnic cleansing.
As formal institutions and state guarantees collapsed, localized populations throughout the
various ex-Yugoslav regions fell back on their communities and households, relying on their
control of land and the kinship obligations associated with it to ensure their survival. This
localized resort to land-cum-kin ties intersected fatefully with the state-creating actions of
nationalist political elites, for whom securing borders inevitably meant localized warfare toward
controlling particular settlements. To bring state-level politicking home to localized groups,
nationalist politicians manipulated the notion of hearth, used as a "metaphor for property,
community, citizenship, and patriotism, all in one." People's "hearths," with the land they
occupied, came to be defended by and in the name of localized kin groups and village
communities (Woodward 1995:237, 242). Thus the Yugoslav wars as a whole were about
establishing new nation-state borders, while their local conduct was driven by people's defense
of communities and land rights. In this way, Woodward's analysis brilliantly links land and
1996 AES distinguished lecture 301
kinship with larger issues of state-forming, nationalism, and international relations, all tied
together by that archetypal democratic ritual—voting—transnational^ enforced.
The Yugoslav case shows us a hierarchy of transnational and national boundary processes,
reconfigurations of exclusion and inclusion, which were governed by the ownership imperative
of modern nation-states: that the collective individual, "nation," should "have" its "own"
territory. Two sets of boundaries, of belonging, came together: those concerning relations
among persons with respect to the polity, and those concerning persons' relations to things—
specifically land, defended as the collective property of kin groups. The critical transnational
and national elements of these processes, to recapitulate, were as follows. First was the
transnational imposition of liberal Western procedures—referenda and democratic process. It
was more important to other European governments to press for voting than it was to find ways
of ensuring the participatory rights that Yugoslavia's socialist constitution had guaranteed to the
national minorities who lived in a republic dominated by some other nationality. With
Yugoslavia's disintegration, no comparable form emerged to mediate incompatible territorial
claims. Second, "long-distance nationalism" came from the transnational support of emigres—especially
Croats in Germany, who pressed for early German recognition of Slovenia's
and Croatia's independence.36
Third, skillful use was made of Western public relations firms
and the international media (see Copley 1992; Thompson 1994). Fourth, Croat and Serb
nationalist politicians manipulated symbols, including not only the notion of "hearth" but also
a meaning-saturated politics of corpses, evoking the "memory" of wartime massacres (see
Denich 1994; Hayden 1994). Finally, the peculiar nationalities policy of socialist Yugoslavia
(transnationally imported from the Soviet Union) reinforced a sense of national difference as a
fundamental fact of the political order.
conclusion
For those who envision a new transnational world, the unrelenting insistence of participants
in the wars of Yugoslav succession on having nations rooted in the specific soil of their particular
states seems oddly anachronistic. How can this be happening when other countries are
experimenting with "diversity"—that is, with the assumption that what gives a nation strength
is the heterogeneity rather than the homogeneity of its population? How do the grim acquisitions
of territory and voters in former Yugoslavia make sense in this transnational time, when peoples
of many kinds across the globe are carrying their portable nations with them as they move? I
have pointed to just this kind of portable and deterritorialized nationalism even among East
Europeans, as citizenship and voting reach across national borders or Hungarian minorities in
Romania and Slovakia seek the backing of the government of Hungary in their quest for local
autonomy. So why such rooted, ethnically cleansing nationalisms too? It is because the two
forms implicate one another.
Just as the history of state forming, like the history of global capitalism, has not produced
uniform effects everywhere, Eastern Europe (along with other areas of the world) continues to
generate flurries of the older kind of nation-state legitimation alongside new evidence of
transnationalism. These flurries themselves, as I have shown, result partly from the transnational
influence of national emigres and other so-called external forces and partly from national(ist)
policies specific to socialism. Much of the turmoil in the former Soviet bloc comes precisely
from its hosting both sets of processes (national and transnational) with such intensity. The
processes are linked to changes of global scope—that is, they are not peculiar to postsocialism.
Their unusual intensity in Eastern Europe, however, comes from the earlier failed attempt in that
region to create states and property regimes different from those prevailing elsewhere: not
parliamentary democracies based in private property but Party-states as collective proprietors,
organized on different principles, and insulated to some degree from larger movements of
302 american ethnologist
capital. Those principles and that insulation have ended. Replacing them and adjusting to global
capital flows—even as "capitalism," too, changes form—involve dislocation, violence, struggles
over citizenship and ownership, protectionism, and new attachments to land, all infused with the
specificities of the socialist experience that undergirds the region's postsocialist transformation.
notes
Acknowledgments. The original version of this essay was delivered at the 1996 Spring Meeting of the
American Ethnological Society. My thanks go to its organizer, Lynn Bolles, and to the AES Board for offering
me the occasion to speak. The following people gave me very helpful comments on earlier drafts, and I
express my thanks to them here: Talal Asad, Jane Collier, Elizabeth Dunn, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Gail
Kligman, Roger Rouse, and Brackette Williams. I am particularly grateful to Donald Robotham for a thorough
critical reading of the paper. I owe a further debt to numerous others who provided me with information
about the citizenship, voting, and property laws of various states as reported herein: Ray Abrahams, Michaf
Buchowski, Toomas Gross, Robert Hayden, Eva Huseby-Darvas, Marika Kirch, Carole Nagengast, Daina
Stukuls, Nigel Swain, and Tarmo Tuisk.
1. For a very thoughtful and provocative treatment see Rouse 1997.
2. Because none of the societies in the Soviet orbit claimed to have reached the stage of "communism,"
I prefer to use the term socialism.
3. These phrasings appeared in papers delivered at the 1996 AES Spring Meeting.
4. I Thank Talal Asad for this example and the larger point.
5. The Romanian Communist Party claimed, for instance, to represent the national minorities proportionately
in its membership and governing bodies. This sort of "affirmative action" program necessitates, of
course, a prior reification of group identities.
6. This was partly so because many people in these countries refused to identify themselves with the
collectivist goals of the Party.
7. The reasons for the extensive group interspersal are numerous and span millennia; they range from
successive waves of immigration over many centuries, to deliberate settlement of different peoples by
historical empires, to forced colonizations and deportations in Stalin's time, to widespread migration within
socialist states toward their most industrialized regions (e.g., from Macedonia to Croatia and Slovenia in
Yugoslavia; from Central Asia and Russia to the Baltics in the Soviet Union). Especially noteworthy is that
25-30 million Russians live in what were formerly republics of the USSR and are now independent states
headed each by some other nationality.
8. Sometimes, as in Latvia, this easy naturalization of nonresidents was later modified.
9« Among the examples of corrupting these provisions are Estonia's suspension of decisions about
citizenship two months before the March 1995 parliamentary elections, an action that meant fewer
non-Estonian voters; Macedonian manipulations of citizenship definitions to disenfranchise Albanians; and
discriminatory application of citizenship provisions concerning language use, uninterrupted residency, and
"cultural" proficiency. See Hayden 1996:792-794, OMR11995: January 5, and RFE/RL 1994: October 27.
10. This is partly a consequence of the reified nationalism of Soviet-era constitutions, as discussed above.
11. The problem is particularly acute in Latvia and Estonia (where Russians amount to 30-35 percent of
the population), less so in Lithuania (where the "majority" Lithuanian population constitutes 80 percent of
the total and Russians only 10 percent).
12. This is quoted from Dimitrijevic 1993:51; see also Hayden 1992:659. I add the word ethnic in
brackets because the Slavic word narodthat appears in these constitutions has precisely the ethnic meaning,
rather than that of "people" as in "We the people of the United States."
13. Their applications for citizenship are often delayed or turned down on technicalities (Hayden
1992:667-668). To illustrate: 25,000 ethnic Slovenes from outside the country have obtained citizenship
while 50,000 non-Slovenes inside it have been denied, and in 1995 there was a broadly popular move to
revoke the citizenship of the latter. According to polls taken at the time, one-third of all Slovenes supported
this idea (Pamela Ballinger, personal communication, 1995).
14. These Russians, overwhelmingly manual workers, were brought into Latvia during the industrial drive
of the 1950s; many speak little Latvian, but they have minimal interest in returning to Russia, considering
themselves citizens of Latvia.
15. I thank Daina Stukuls for this observation.
16. The new law would have limited naturalizations to 0.1 percent of the population per year. See OMRI
1996: January 17-20 and Baltic Independent 1996). I thank Ray Abrahams for passing along the latter.
17. He cites the ease of obtaining citizenship for Irish and Jews outside the borders of the states of Ireland
and Israel, as compared with the difficulties for non-Irish and non-Jews inside those states (Hayden 1996:793).
18. The lifting of the Iron Curtain permitted some of this same kind of movement and thus the formation
of comparable transnational communities, especially from the former Soviet Union—although the
movement has been far less than many in those countries hoped, because they now find the Curtain
reconstituted from the other side in the form of restrictive visa requirements to enter western countries. The
1996 AES distinguished lecture 303
anti-immigrant sentiment of developed states seeking to limit flows of labor thus impedes the formation of
new diasporas from the East.
19. The Council of Europe announced that no one with such laws would find an easy path into the
European Union or post-NATO structures; members of the Council as well as the U.S. Congress repeatedly
criticized the Czech citizenship law, for instance, which denies citizenship to unprecedented numbers of
Gypsies, and EU representative Max Van der Stoel spent considerable effort trying to reconcile Romania's
political leaders and its Hungarian minority behind positions consonant with NATO and EU membership.
These transnational pressures, however, sometimes fuel nationalist reaction, as nationalist politicians
complain of European imperialism and unwarranted interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states.
See OMR11996: January 18, February 8, February 23; RFE/RL 1994; October 27.
20. See Election Commission of the Republic of Croatia, "The Principal Acts Regulating Elections," 1995.
I am grateful to Robert Hayden for providing me with this document.
21. Tudjman received low support, however, in the precincts (sic!) of Dayton and Paris, indicating that
£migr£s did not favor nationalist politics uniformly. I thank Steven Tull for this information, and for the further
datum that the diaspora vote was nonetheless disappointing to those in power in Zagreb: only 27 percent
(109,389 people) of eligible diaspora voters participated in the election, indicating considerably less interest
on the part of Croat einigr£s than had been expected.
22. Yeltsin, for example, made the dual citizenship provision a condition for signing the Russian-Ukrainian
friendship treaty in February 1995. See OMRI 1995: February 2.
23. Ethnonational identity is even stickier for Poles. Procedures for shedding Polish citizenship are so
complicated that few emigres bother to try, making dual citizenship the "default option" for Polish eYnigr^s
(Carole Nagengast, personal communication, 1996). Nagengast suggests that this stickiness probably stems
from socialist Poland's desire to facilitate repatriating foreign currency by Poles resident abroad.
24. I might note, however, that in a provocative review of democratization in Eastern Europe Ellen
Comisso (1997) calls the political variant I have been discussing "national democracy" and considers it a
specific substantive type of democratic order, defined by giving priority to communal rights over individual
ones but otherwise employing procedures common to liberal democratic polities.
25. There are equally interesting examples in the domain of movable property as well. From Elizabeth
Dunn's research on American factory management in Poland, for instance, we learn that, in both public
and private discourse, Poles puzzled over whether such firms were "Polish" or "American." When the
U.S.-based firm Gerber (itself wholly owned by the Swedish firm Sandoz) bought 98 percent of the former
Polish state firm Alima, was Alima still "Polish"? The newspaper Rzeszpospolita argued that it was, because
all the managers were Poles. Some of these, however, were born in the United States of Polish £migr£ parents;
they responded to the Polish government's entreaties that Poles abroad "come home" and set up businesses,
but they retained their U.S. passports. Are they, Poles wonder, still Poles? Polish workers at Gerber-Alima
saw the production buildings as "Polish" and the administration building next door as "American." The
examples show Poles thinking about transnational flows of capital and managerial expertise in a "national"
idiom, rife with ambiguities (Elizabeth Dunn, personal communication, 1996).
26. Noncitizens may, however, lease land, for periods that differ from one country to another.
27. I thank Ray Abrahams for the latter reference.
28. My material here helps to give greater substance to ideas such as the following, quoted by
Herloff-Mortensen: "Being Latvian means living on the territory defined as the residence of the Latvian ethnic
group" (1996:23).
29. The research was supported by grants from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX)
and the National Science Foundation. For further discussion see Verdery 1996:133-167.
30. They are able to retain land because the community formed an association, or producers' cooperative,
which works village land given over to it by those who lack the means of cultivation or adequate labor.
31. See especially the Caucasus (Sergei Arutiunov, personal communication, 1995), and Madagascar
and many parts of Africa (Gillian Feeley-Harnik, personal communication, 1996). It is for this reason that
resettlement schemes—like those entailed in building dams—so often produce resistance, as people are
forced to evacuate land where their ancestors lie and to allow them to be covered with water.
32. I am indebted to Brackette Williams for this reference.
33. In Romanian, the term used for collective property—even in particularized form, such as the property
that once belonged to a collective farm—is patrimoniu (patrimony). The same word refers to the collective
cultural repertoire of Romanians as a people: they speak of the cultural patrimony of Romanians, which
includes novels, poetry, academic writing, even the ideas and creations of Romanians living elsewhere in
the world (such as Nobel prize winner George Palade, sculptor Constantin Brancu§i, and avant-garde writer
Tristan Tzara). In this sense, Romanians collectively have a culture, just as they have a territory: a relationship
of property, of possession, defines both. Romanians are not, of course, the only people to have such
constructions of personhood and nationhood. Richard Handler (1988), for instance, has discussed the
importance of "having a culture" in his discussion of Quebec, where the same term—patrimony—is also used.
34. I offer two brief illustrative examples. First, such ideas ground the appeal of nationalist politicians
who raise alarm that irredentists (e.g., Hungarians) may be planning to "amputate" a nation's (e.g.,
Romania's) territory, the collective patrimony of generations of its people. The spatialization of personhood
writ large as "nationness" is what makes the territory of a country as (like) its flesh. Second, together with
citizenship, this complex of kinship, nation, and property enters into ideas about gender and the politics of
reproduction. Pronatalist nationalists, opposing abortion on behalf of "murdered fetal citizens" with slogans
304 american ethnologist
like "a fetus is also a Croat," portray pro-abortion feminists as selfish individualists responsible for the "death
of the nation." For more on this subject see Huseby-Darvas 1996, Salecl 1993, Supek 1991, and Verdery
1996:79-82.
35. One wonders whether this might have something to do with the growing nationalist emphasis on the
inalienability of cultural property too.
36. Germany's early recognition of Croatia was in part precipitated by the stand of the influential
Frankfurter Zeitung, one of whose main editors is a Croat (Susan Woodward, personal communication, 1995).
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