Comparative PoliticsVolume 41 Number 3 April 2009

Contents

More than Just the Final Straw: Stolen Elections as Revolutionary Triggers 253Philipp Kuntz and Mark R. Thompson

The Politics of Citizenship Policy in New States 273Oxana Shevel

Live and Let Buy? Consumerism, Secularization, and Liberalism 293Guy Ben-Porat and Yariv Feniger

The Rise of Islamic Capital and the Decline of Islamic Radicalism in Turkey 315Seda Demiralp

A Politics of Difference versus a Politics of Equality: 337 Do Constitutions Matter?

Priscilla A. Lambert and Druscilla L. Scribner

Review Article

The Political Effects of Inequality in Latin America: Some Inconvenient Facts 359 Robert R. Kaufman

Abstracts

381

273

The Politics of Citizenship Policy in New States

Oxana Shevel

How do states choose citizenship rules? This study addresses this question by examining the politics of citizenship policy in the former Soviet region. Fifteen states that emerged as new polities from the USSR had to adopt citizenship laws. In doing so, they had to formally delineate the “us” from the “other” by defining what could be called the “official” nation of a given state: a group of people entitled to citizenship of the state without having to fulfill naturalization requirements.

How do states determine the boundaries of their official nation? Empirical studies of citizenship investigate this question. The empirical study of citizenship is a relatively new avenue of inquiry into the field of citizenship. Traditional approaches from political theory and sociology treat citizenship as a set of rights and/or as civic engagement, while the empirical study of citizenship treats citizenship as a legal category and investigates requirements for acquiring citizenship.1 Empirical studies of post-Soviet citizenship policies have focused largely on Latvia and Estonia, the only two former Soviet republics where initial citizenship laws did not extend citizenship rights to all permanent residents.2 Because Latvia and Estonia excluded many permanent residents, most of them ethnic Russians, from the initial body of citizens, their citizenship policies are commonly characterized as ethnic. The rest of the former Soviet republics followed the so-called zero option and extended citizenship rights to all Soviet citizens permanently residing in their territories. Their citizenship policies are therefore characterized as civic.

This dichotomous distinction between Estonia and Latvia and the rest of the post-Soviet states obscures an important and thus far unexplained variation within the purportedly civic camp. As Table 1 shows, citizenship laws of, not just two, but eight post-Soviet states include provisions that grant preferential treatment to coethnics. Privileges range from a waiver of certain requirements (residency in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan; income in Belarus; language in Kyrgyzstan) to a virtually unconditional and indefinite right to citizenship (Lithuania). The remaining seven laws are indeed civic.

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This variation is puzzling in two respects. First, why were ethnically tinted citizenship laws adopted not only in states where ethnic nationalism is known to be strong, such as the Baltic states and Armenia, but also in states where ethnic nationalism is significantly weaker, such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus? Second, why do civic citizenship laws exist at all, given that none of the post-Soviet states have historically developed the conception of civic national identity that many citizenship theories consider a prerequisite to civic citizenship laws? This study focuses on this second puzzle of civic citizenship rules and develops a theory of citizenship policy that reconceptualizes the role of national identity as a source of citizenship policies in new states.

Why is the politics of citizenship policy in the post-Soviet states—and arguably in new states in general—different from the politics of citizenship policy in older, established nation-states? It is because the politics of national identity (defined as contestation between citizenship policymaking elites over the question of the nation’s boundaries) is a particularly important source of citizenship policies in new states. At the same time, in new states national identity may matter in a manner different from the one posited by existing theories. The prevailing approach attributes ethnic or civic citizenship laws to historically formed ethnic or civic national identity. In new states, however, this pathway is often not available because there may not be a dominant conception of national identity that can translate into citizenship law. How can civic citizenship emerge under these conditions? Civic citizenship laws can arise as a side effect of contested politics of national identity. By tracing debates over citizenship policy in Ukraine, it can be demonstrated how this “accidental” civic citizenship comes about. Alternative hypotheses will also be examined: that in Ukraine civic citizenship policy emerged due to pressures from Russia or pressures from international institutions. These hypotheses are plausible, but the evidence does not support them.

Table 1 Civic and Ethnic Post-Soviet Citizenship Laws

Laws with provisions for coethnics Laws without provisions for coethnics

Armenia Belarus Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Lithuania Turkmenistan

Azerbaijan Georgia Moldova Russia Tajikistan Ukraine Uzbekistan

Source: Texts of post-Soviet citizenship laws in International Organization for Migration,

Sbornik zakonodatelnykh aktov gosudarstv SNG in Baltii po vporosla migratsii, grazhdanstva i sviazannym s nimi aspentaki (Collection of Legal Acts of the CIS and Baltic States on Migration, Citizenship, and Related Issues) (Geneva: IOM, 1995).

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Does National Identity Matter in Citizenship Policymaking?

To argue that the politics of national identity is an important source of citizenship policies is to take a side in an ongoing scholarly debate. In his seminal study of the difference between French and German rules governing admittance to citizenship, Rogers Brubaker argued that the main source of citizenship policies in modern states is national identity. National identity (in Brubaker’s terms, “distinctive and deeply rooted understandings of nationhood”) has “shaped and sustained differing definitions of citizenship” in modern states.3 Brubaker specifically links inclusive citizenship rules that extend the right to citizenship to immigrants with a historically formed civic and territorial understanding of the nation (the case of France) and citizenship rules that exclude immigrants while including coethnics, even if they never lived in their ethnic homeland, with ethnocultural understanding of the nation (the case of Germany).

Brubaker’s argument that conceptions of national identity determine citizenship rules remains widely accepted and has subsequently been fine-tuned by other scholars.4 At the same time, critics have asserted that “there is no causal link between national identity and nationality laws.”5 The critics of national identity-based explanations raise several objections. One objection is against interpretation of jus sanguinis (acquisition of citizenship by blood/descent) and jus soli (acquisition of citizenship by place of birth) as products of, respectively, an ethnic and a civic understanding of nationhood. In the twentieth century, German law was indeed based on jus sanguinis and French law on jus soli, but historically jus sanguinis was more progressive than jus soli. The creation of Roman law, jus sanguinis was reinvented at the time of the French Revolution when it broke with the feudal tradition of jus soli that saw all people born on the territory of the king as automatically his subjects.6 As an attempt to liberate the individual from the state, jus sanguinis was more progressive then than jus soli, and the 1804 French Civil Code rejected jus soli in favor of jus sanguinis. France introduced jus soli for third generation immigrants in 1851 and for second generation immigrants in 1889. Weil disagrees with Brubaker that the introduction of jus soli in France “can be explained only with reference to a distinctively state-centered and assimilationist understanding of nationhood.”7 Instead, Weil attributes it to pragmatic demographic and military concerns—the need to assimilate rising numbers of immigrants and prevent children of immigrants from escaping military service.8

Another issue critics take with Brubaker’s theory is that, while it predicts the persistence of national citizenship models, citizenship laws of western democracies with varying historical traditions have been converging, with previously restrictive laws being liberalized and previously liberal laws being tightened.9 Brubaker’s critics explain both initial divergence and recent convergence of citizenship rules in western states with nonideational variables. The initial divergence between jus sanguinis and jus soli citizenship rules is attributed to differences in the legal tradition. Following the French Revolution, jus sanguinis spread through continental Europe, while the British tradition of jus soli was transplanted unchanged to its colonies in North America, Australia, Ireland,

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and South Africa.10 Nonideational factors are said to drive more recent convergence of citizenship

rules as well. Starting in the late nineteenth century, rising immigration and resulting demographic, economic, and military necessities prompted jus sanguinis states of continental Europe to supplement their citizenship laws with jus soli provisions such as citizenship rights to children of migrants. After World War II, the spread of human rights values further mandated extension of membership rights to long-term resident migrants.11 At the same time, in traditional jus soli states such as the United Kingdom and Ireland growing immigration led to restrictions on access to citizenship for immigrants.12

In sum, why a state would define its official nation in ethnic or civic terms, and what role national identity versus other causal factors plays in policymaking process remain debated with regard to western states. When asking these questions in the post-Soviet context, it is necessary to consider that the politics of citizenship policy may be different in new and old states. In the post-Soviet region, the newness of statehood and the legacies of Soviet nationality policy make national identity a key source of citizenship policies, but national identity matters in a different manner than that posited by Brubaker’s theory.

Why National Identity Matters for Post-Soviet Citizenship Policymaking

Critics of Brubaker who argue that national identity has nothing to do with the content of citizenship laws in western states emphasize that there are many factors other than national identity that influence citizenship policymaking, including legal traditions and economic, demographic, and military implications of citizenship rules. These factors are undoubtedly at play in older states where citizenship laws have been on the books for many decades or even centuries and over time produced various consequences to which legislators respond as they legislate amendments to citizenship legislation. Since citizenship rules have consequences for other policy areas, bargaining and trading across issues can also affect subsequent citizenship rules. The image of the nation citizenship legislators hold is thus just one of many potential sources of the lawmakers’ preferences over citizenship policy.

In new states, however, the situation is different. Scholars have argued that the political and social uncertainty of postcommunist transition weakens “the constraining power of class power and inherited institutions” and makes ideological factors “stand out.”13 Economic and institutional constraints are especially weak, and ideational factors stronger, when it comes to citizenship policy.

When legislating first citizenship laws, legislators in new states are dealing with an issue that is entirely novel and unfamiliar to them. In new post-Soviet states citizenship policymakers could not rely on Soviet-era legislative or institutional legacies. In the Soviet period there were no republican citizenship laws and no republic-level institutions that dealt with citizenship matters.14 Nor was the Soviet citizenship law a useful guide

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for the newly independent states when defining their official nations. Soviet law was extremely inclusive, allowing literally anyone from anywhere in the world to acquire Soviet citizenship without satisfying any requirements.15 This formula may have served the ideological goal of a worldwide triumph of Communism, but it negated the very idea of bounded national communities which were supposedly the foundations of the newly independent states.

Potential other sources of citizenship policy were likewise absent. International pressures were not among sources of initial citizenship policies in post-Soviet states. Initial citizenship rules are also unlikely to result from bargaining and trading across issues. Brubaker argues that the politics of citizenship is “a politics of identity, not a politics of interest….The ‘interests’ informing the politics of citizenship are ‘ideal’ rather than material.”16 Even if one does not agree that the politics of citizenship is always the politics of identity rather than interests, bargains involving citizenship rules will be difficult at least initially, since it is not evident a priori what consequences citizenship rules will have for other policy areas and thus what bargains can be made.

This absence of other potential sources of citizenship policy in new states is one reason why policymakers legislating the novel issue of citizenship have little to guide them other than their image of the nation that they believe underwrites the state. In the post-Soviet region, the legacy of Soviet nationality policies is another reason why national identity affects citizenship policies. Marxism advanced an articulation of society and history opposite to nationalism, seeing class, not nationality, as the primary human affiliation. Marxism was supposed to be the ideological guiding light for Soviet leaders, but in practice, as numerous scholars of Soviet nationality policy observed, Soviet nationality policy did not consistently promote class identity as an alternative to national identity. Instead, Soviet nationality policy perpetuated the view of the nation as a cultural community associated with distinct territory and a necessary foundation of a legitimate sovereign state.17

As a result of this ideational legacy, Soviet citizens and elites entered the post-Soviet era with a belief that a legitimate state needed a bounded cultural nation. This world view created a link between one’s image of the nation, one’s preference over statehood, and one’s preference over the definition of the official nation in citizenship law because, depending on how the official nation was defined in citizenship law, existing statehood could be legitimized or delegitimized. Citizenship legislation was thus a battleground between elite groups that imagined the nation differently and that correspondingly had different preferences over statehood.

How National Identity Matters

Studies that use national identity as a variable are often criticized for not defining the “notoriously amorphous category of national character” precisely enough.18 The term

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“national identity” is used here to answer the question who the people are. Different research questions may require attention to the national identity of different actors within the state. For the question why states define the official nation in citizenship laws in ethnic or in civic terms, the group whose national identity is relevant is the elites that legislate citizenship (in the post-Soviet states, members of parliamentary parties and leaders of relevant executive agencies). Empirically, the national identity of this elite group is determined by sources such as party platforms and statements of party leaders where the party’s position on the question who the people are is expressed.

How, then, does national identity matter for citizenship policymaking? Brubaker argues that citizenship laws reflect the conception of national identity that has historically formed in a given state. Implicit in Brubaker’s theory is the assumption that each modern state features one dominant, historically formed conception of national identity. Such an assumption is problematic, however, in new states that emerge suddenly from the collapse of a multinational state. Because of the historic lack of congruence between ethnocultural and political boundaries in many new states, the question who the people are does not have one generally acceptable answer at either the elite or the societal level. Instead of one “habit of national self-understanding,” competing images of the nation and myths of national origin are propagated by different political forces and find resonance with different segments of the society. If different images of the nation are at hand, which one will affect the content of citizenship law? Two possibilities can be envisaged.

The first possibility, consistent with Brubaker’s theory, is that, even if in a particular state different images of the nation exist, as long as a majority of policymakers, even a slim one, visualizes the nation similarly, this common image can be reflected in the citizenship law. In other words, the dominant national identity conception does not need to be truly dominant; it just needs to be a majority view. A number of ethnically tinted post-Soviet citizenship laws, such as the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian laws, as well as the laws of Armenia and Turkmenistan, can thus be explained.

Elites in all three Baltic states shared an ethnic understanding of the nation.19 In Estonia and Latvia popular fronts swept the 1990 elections to the Supreme Soviets and reinstated the interwar citizenship laws, limiting the right to citizenship to citizens of interwar Estonia and Latvia and their descendants. With voting rights limited to citizens, nontitulars were disenfranchised from first postindependence elections in both states. The new legislatures had majorities necessary to adopt citizenship laws that made it difficult for nontitulars to acquire citizenship while giving privileges in citizenship acquisition to coethnics.20 In Lithuania the 1989 citizenship law adopted before the first competitive legislative elections of February 1990 did not contain an ethnically based right to citizenship. After Sajudis, Lithuania’s popular front, committed to national independence and revival of the Lithuanian nation, swept the February 1990 elections, the 1991 citizenship law gave “persons of Lithuanian descent” living in other states preferential access to Lithuanian citizenship.21

The adoption of an ethnically tinted citizenship law in Armenia was also a product of a majority elite view of the nation. Armenia, the most ethnically homogeneous of the

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Soviet republics, is arguably the post-Soviet state that is closest to having a historically formed and dominant conception of national identity; this conception sees the nation as “a historically constant, held together by blood, territory, religion, language, and history.”22 The 1995 citizenship law gave ethnic Armenians the right to simplified access to citizenship.23

Until his death in 2006 the autocratic ruler of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, was in total control of the political process. This control made Niyazov’s personal whims, above any other factor, the determinant of citizenship and other policies. Yet, if a ruler is firmly in control of the policymaking process and the ruling elite is behind him, the image of the nation the ruling circle embraces can translate into citizenship policy following the logic of Brubaker’s argument. Niyazov legitimized his rule as the self-proclaimed “father of all Turkmens” and the protector of the Turkmen nation. Reflecting this idea, Turkmen citizenship law had an ethnic tint: it gave ethnic Turkmens residing in other states simplified access to Turkmen citizenship.24

Two sets of post-Soviet citizenship policies cannot be explained with the logic of Brubaker’s theory, however. The first set includes three remaining ethnically tinted citizenship laws—in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. In these states, ethnic nationalists never commanded legislative majorities, so there has to be another explanation for the inclusion of provisions privileging coethnics in the citizenship laws of these states. Due to space constraints, this question cannot be addressed here. The second set of citizenship policy outcomes that Brubaker’s theory cannot explain, the focus of this article, are seven purely civic post-Soviet citizenship laws in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

According to the logic of Brubaker’s theory, for civic citizenship laws to materialize there must be a preexisting historically formed conception of civic national identity shared by the majority. Yet, as discussed above, no post-Soviet state historically developed a conception of civic national identity. Brubaker’s critics, such as Weil, would also find these civic laws puzzling. Weil specifically argued that large minorities, diasporas, and unstable borders “make it impossible, even unthinkable” to adopt inclusive citizenship laws based on jus soli. 25 All seven post-Soviet states with civic citizenship are plural societies. In four of them (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan) ethnocultural divisions escalated into open conflict. Yet the unthinkable happened: these divided states adopted civic citizenship laws. Ukraine offers an example how this unthinkable outcome came about and shows how contested politics of identity can accidentally result in civic citizenship rules.

The Accident of Civic Citizenship in Ukraine

The May 1990 law “On Citizenship of USSR” made it possible for the union republics to adopt citizenship laws. Article 5 of the 1990 law ruled that citizenship of union republics is to be determined by republican citizenship law. Ukrainian citizenship policy was born

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shortly thereafter. The July 1990 Sovereignty Declaration stated: “The Ukrainian SSR has its own citizenship.…Acquisition and loss of citizenship are regulated by the law on citizenship of the Ukrainian SSR.” The first Ukrainian citizenship law was adopted in October 1991 and amended in April 1997, January 2001, and June 2005. Table 2 shows how each version of the law defined the official nation, those who were included in the original body of citizens and who were entitled to become citizens under simplified rules.

As Table 2 shows, the Ukrainian citizenship law defines the official nation by the territory of the state. Those who were born or had at least one parent or grandparent born on the territory of Ukraine became the official Ukrainian nation. This definition was reflected already in the 1991 law and was upheld and expanded in subsequent versions. How did the Ukrainian political elite arrive at the territorial definition of the official nation? The territorial definition might have resulted, first, from the politics of national identity, second, from pressure from Russia, or, third, from pressure from international institutions.

The elite groups crafting Ukrainian citizenship law were members of parliament representing political parties and the citizenship department of the presidential administration. Given the fluidity of the party system in Ukraine, it is more appropriate to focus on ideological groupings rather than individual parties. There are three distinct ideological groupings, the right, left, and center, represented in the Ukrainian parliament (Verkhovna Rada) since the late Soviet era. All three had views on citizenship policy, but they did not have a common conception of national identity. The right and the left embraced ideologically competing conceptions, while the ideologically amorphous center was not ideologically committed to any particular image of the nation.

Table 2 Official Nation in Ukrainian Citizenship Law, 1991–2005

1991 citizenship law (Article 2, paragraphs 1 and 2; Article 17,

paragraph 2)

1997 edition of the 1991 law

(Article 2, paragraph 3)

2001 citizenship law (Article 8, paragraph 1)

2005 amendments to the 2001 law

(Article 8, paragraph 1)

Permanent residents as of November 13, 1991, plus those who were born on the territory of Ukraine, or at least one of whose parents or grandparents was born in Ukraine

Those who were born on or permanently resided on the territory of Ukraine, and their descendents (children, grandchildren)

Those who were born or permanently resided on the territory of Ukraine, or at least one of whose parents, grandparents, a full-blood brother or a sister, was born or permanently resided on the territory of Ukraine

Those who were born or permanently resided on the territory of Ukraine, or at least one of whose parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, full or half-blood brothers or sisters, was born or permanently resided on the territory of Ukraine

Sources: 8 October 1991 law no. 1636-XII; 16 April 1997 law no. 210/97-BP; 18 January 2001 law no. 2235-III; and 16 June 2005 law no. 2663-IV.

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Until its split in 1999, Rukh was the main political force on the right. At the heart of the right’s view of the Ukrainian nation and state is Ukraine’s, and Ukrainians’, distinctiveness, first and foremost from Russia and the Russians. The right imagines the Ukrainian nation as a multinational political community with an ethnic Ukrainian “core.”26 For the right, the answer to the question who belongs to the Ukrainian nation is straightforward. If Ukraine were a democratic multinational state, all residents of Ukraine could belong to the political Ukrainian nation, while ethnic Ukrainians outside Ukraine, by virtue of their belonging to the core of the Ukrainian nation, must also be included.

The Ukrainian left’s view of the nation and the state is very different. The Ukrainian left embraces the Soviet myth of Ukrainian national origin and civilizational belonging predicated on assumptions of East Slavic fraternity. Whereas the right emphasizes the distinctiveness of Ukraine and the Ukrainians from Russia and the Russians, the left fails to see such a distinction and emphasizes common origins and a continuity of fate of the three East Slavic people (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians). The left “imagines” the Ukrainian nation as constituent members of the “Slavic-Orthodox civilization” and/or a component of the single “Soviet people.”27 The “true” nation is larger than either ethnic Ukrainians or residents of Ukraine.

The third elite group was the so-called party of power. The term “party of power” describes the former Communist nomenklatura and “red directors” who became the ruling elite of independent Ukraine and who like to characterize themselves as centrists. The party of power has been a key political force in Ukraine, controlling a third to a half of the parliamentary seats in the 1990s. A defining feature of the party of power is ideological amorphousness.28 Consequently, the center has not elaborated its own ideological paradigm on the national question.29 The right’s understanding of the Ukrainian nation as a political community with an ethnic Ukrainian core, and the left’s conception of the Ukrainian nation as a constituent part of a larger Slavic (or Soviet) super-nation were the only options on the ideological menu.

The left’s and right’s strategy on citizenship was conditioned by their conceptions of national identity. Each time the Rada discussed citizenship law, the right advocated special treatment for ethnic Ukrainians. In 1991 MPs from the right proposed to extend the right to Ukrainian citizenship to ethnic Ukrainians who lived in the West and to Soviet citizens who had “ethnic Ukrainian” recorded in their Soviet passports.30 In 1997 and 2001 the right proposed to exempt ethnic Ukrainians from residency requirements.31 None of these proposals passed, because the right controlled less than a third of parliamentary seats in the 1990s and the left and the center did not support these proposals.

As for the citizenship strategy of the left, not surprisingly it opposed the right’s proposals to grant ethnic Ukrainians preferential treatment. Surprisingly, the left itself never initiated citizenship legislation; moreover, it actively opposed citizenship legislation from the time the issue first arose.32 The left’s opposition to the citizenship law would be inexplicable if the left were a proponent of a civic Ukrainian nationalism, as it is at times portrayed. Why would the left not champion a civic citizenship law? The left’s position makes sense, however, if one considers that the way political forces in new states imagine

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the “true” nation affects their preferences for statehood and in turn for citizenship rules. Since the left’s image of the “true” nation is larger than either ethnic Ukrainians or

residents of Ukraine, the “correct” state for this nation had to be something other than an independent Ukraine: a renewed Soviet Union, or a joint state with Russia and Belarus.33 If the ultimate goal is a joint state with Russia, the issue of Ukrainian citizenship creates a dilemma. The very question “what is the official nation of the Ukrainian state?” implies the normality of a situation in which the Ukrainian state exists and functions like other states. Any citizenship law that did not contain a mechanism for creation of a joint state with Russia did nothing for the left’s ultimate ideological goal. The Ukrainian left’s lack of interest in the Ukrainian citizenship law becomes understandable, and so does its strategy: to derail citizenship legislation altogether or, failing that, to institute dual citizenship.

Dual citizenship blurs the boundaries between nations, which could pave the way for a unification of these nations into a single state. While such a unification is not inevitable, the left saw the single/dual citizenship issue and the prospect of statehood as related, and repeatedly attempted to institute dual citizenship, first with the USSR and later with Russia.34 The first attempt came in the summer of 1990 during the sovereignty declaration debate. The left wanted to preserve a union state.35 It wanted the draft declaration’s clause, the “Ukrainian SSR has its own citizenship,” supplemented with the statement “citizens of the Ukrainian SSR remain citizens of the USSR.”36 When the Rada debated the first citizenship law in 1991, dual citizenship impinged on the possibility of a union state with Russia. The right, opposing any such union, favored the wording: “In Ukraine there is single citizenship.” The left wanted either to remove this clause or to supplement it with the statement “dual citizenship is allowed.”37 Communist MPs again tried to institute dual citizenship when the 1997 citizenship law was discussed, although by then there was a constitutional prohibition of dual citizenship and the Communists’ proposals were rejected as unconstitutional.38 The left’s latest push for dual citizenship, also unsuccessful, was in 2001.39

The left and the right thus tried but failed to translate their conceptions of national identity into citizenship law. To understand how a purely territorial definition of the nation became law, it is necessary to consider the position of the party of power. The party of power was not ideologically committed to any particular image of the nation. Yet, unlike the left and like the right, it wanted a citizenship law, and a territorial law without dual citizenship was the party of power’s first choice, although, crucially, not for ideological reasons.

The party of power came to support citizenship law after the August 1991 coup buried prospects of a union state. In June 1991 a draft citizenship law failed to pass the first reading by the votes of the left and the party of power. In September 1991 the left continued to oppose the law, but the party of power switched and voted with the right for the law. Independent Ukraine was now a real prospect. If the party of power wanted to rule it, state independence had to be legitimized, and a citizenship law that formally defined the nation legitimized the state as representing this nation. The nomenklatura in

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Ukraine came to favor citizenship law as a mechanism to achieve state sovereignty.40 The party of power’s pragmatic interest in Ukrainian independence also led it to

oppose dual citizenship. The party of power saw dual citizenship, especially with Russia, as a threat to Ukrainian independence. As Volodymyr Lytvyn, former speaker of the parliament and former presidential chief of staff put it: “If we have dual citizenship, we will not have the state.”41 True to its reputation, the party of power acted opportunistically and even got electoral mileage from promising dual citizenship with Russia at election time, but it never delivered on the promise.42 The party of power’s record of opposing dual citizenship is consistent and dates to the Sovereignty Declaration. Leonid Kravchuk, then second secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party and later the first president of Ukraine, was the one to propose a compromise wording of the citizenship clause that did not subsume Ukrainian citizenship under USSR citizenship, as the left wanted.43 When the 1991 law was discussed, Kravchuk again proposed a compromise clause that did not create dual citizenship.44

Finally, territorial definition of the official nation in the citizenship law suited the party of power also because it reduced the legitimacy of local secessionism (a concern, given Crimea) and because by supporting a territorial definition the party of power could maintain neutrality in the ideological dispute between the left and the right and so cast itself as a centrist alternative to the two brands of radicals (Communists on the left and nationalists on the right).

Territorial citizenship law without dual citizenship was thus the first choice of the party of power, although—crucially—not because it reflected its preexisting conception of national identity. Eventually each citizenship law passed with constitutional or near constitutional majorities; large segments of the right and the left thus came to support the law based on these principles. For the right, citizenship law that defined the official nation territorially and did not allow dual citizenship was the second best option. Territorially based citizenship law legitimized the state and strengthened Ukraine’s independence, the paramount value to the right. Such a law also left open the possibility of a possible future acknowledgment that ethnic Ukrainians are a group towards which the Ukrainian state has special obligations. For the left, the territorial law without dual citizenship was just palatable. Once it became clear that the adoption of a citizenship law could not be derailed altogether and attempts to institute dual citizenship failed, the law that defined the official Ukrainian nation territorially was simply more ideologically acceptable than the one that would privilege ethnic Ukrainians.

What about Russia?

The argument presented thus far is that the territorial definition of the official nation became the law in Ukraine not due to a preexisting conception of civic national identity, as Brubaker’s theory posits, but as an unintended side effect of contested politics of national identity. But could civic citizenship not have emerged for different reasons, such

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as pressure from Russia? Indeed, a citizenship law that gave all residents of Ukraine the right to citizenship was in the interest of Russia. If Ukraine’s twenty-five million Russians were not given citizenship, Russia could have faced a massive migration from Ukraine, something it was eager to avoid.45 Nevertheless, the evidence does not support the attributing of the content of the Ukrainian law to Russian pressure for several reasons.

First, the territorial formula that recognized as citizens of Ukraine all permanent residents of Ukraine was adopted already in the summer of 1991. In the records of the debate there is no evidence that during the turbulent months preceding the fall of the USSR Russia was in any way involved in citizenship policymaking in Ukraine. Nor did Ukraine consider excluding ethnic Russians from citizenship. The most radical proposal was to establish a five to ten years residency requirement when determining the initial body of citizens.46 Most Russians in Ukraine would have easily met this requirement. Besides, the residency requirement proposal was dropped before the Rada debated the draft in September 1991.

Starting in 1993, Russia turned its attention to Russians in the near abroad. It came to regard dual citizenship as an effective tool to defend compatriots and from 1993 until about 1997 was preoccupied with instituting dual citizenship with former Soviet republics.47 Yet Ukraine did not agree to dual citizenship despite Russia’s pressure. The Ukrainian right and center believed that Russia’s dual citizenship proposals threatened Ukrainian independence and “followed political rather than legal ends,” to quote the former head of the State Committee of Ukraine for Nationalities and Migration.48 If anything, Russia’s insistence on dual citizenship had the opposite effect of what Russia intended.

Finally, given that Russia’s primary objective was dual citizenship, it is likely that Russia would have in fact preferred a Ukrainian citizenship law that allowed some preferential treatment of ethnic Ukrainians if it also provided for dual citizenship with Russia. Thus, Ukraine defined the official nation by the territory of the state and made no provision for ethnic Ukrainians because of domestic politics.

What about International Pressures?

The hypothesis that post-Soviet civic citizenship rules are influenced by international pressure is compelling. Scholars have documented how pressure from international institutions influenced Estonia and Latvia to liberalize their citizenship laws.49 Ukrainian lawmakers also admit that they wanted Ukrainian law to comply with international standards.50 One study explicitly argued that Ukraine adopted a civic definition of citizenship after Ukrainian citizenship policymaking elites learned, embraced, and promoted the Council of Europe’s norms on citizenship.51 The evidence, however, does not support the hypothesis that civic citizenship policy in Ukraine, and in much of the post-Soviet region for that matter, was a product of international pressure or socialization.

The first reason to question this hypothesis is timing. Nine of the fifteen post-Soviet states, including four of the seven with civic laws, adopted initial citizenship laws in the

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late Soviet period, when they were administrative units of the USSR and not objects of international oversight or involvement.52 Latvia and Estonia were the first post-Soviet states to attract the attention of international citizenship watchdogs, but not until 1993.53 By 1993 two more civic citizenship laws (in Georgia and Uzbekistan) were adopted. In the latter half of the 1990s international actors’ attention to the issue of citizenship in the former Soviet space became more systematic, but by 1995 all former Soviet states had already adopted their first citizenship laws. Tajikistan was the last state to adopt a purely civic law, in 1995. In Ukraine citizenship policy officials confirm that they did not pay attention to international legal instruments on citizenship until “the middle of the 1990s.”54

Another problem with attributing civic citizenship policies to international pressure is the actual content of the international citizenship standards. The main principles of international norms on citizenship are the elimination of statelessness and a respect of the principle of “genuine and effective link” between an individual and the state when determining citizenship eligibility, not a preference for territorial and a rejection of ethnic criteria in citizenship acquisition.55 In the postcommunist region, as long as citizenship laws did not violate these two principles, international institutions did not pressure states to abandon ethnicity as a criterion for granting citizenship under simplified rules. In fact, some international citizenship policy experts even argued that in the post-Soviet context privileges for coethnics are desirable since their absence carried the risk of statelessness.56

The position of the international actors in the Baltic states shows that the main concern was the avoidance of statelessness, not an ethnic principle as such. Lithuanian citizenship law was the only one that international institutions did not criticize. However, the Lithuanian law grants preferential treatment to ethnic Lithuanians. Latvian and Estonian legislation similarly allowed coethnics to acquire citizenship, and it was not these provisions but the reliance on interwar citizenship status in determining the initial body of citizens that the international institutions criticized. The latter formally nonethnic principle excluded from citizenship most long-term residents of Latvia and Estonia whose ancestors were not citizens of interwar Latvia and Estonia. Most of the excluded residents were ethnically non-Latvian/Estonian, but it is important to realize that the international watchdogs objected to their exclusion because they were long-term residents.

Thus, rather than explicitly prohibiting ethnic citizenship criteria, international citizenship standards left new states a rather broad range of policy options. As long as statelessness was avoided and long-term residents were granted citizenship, states were free to choose additional eligibility criteria for citizenship acquisition. In Ukraine citizenship rules favored by both the right and the left would have been acceptable from the standpoint of international law. The policy preferred by the right was identical to the Lithuanian law: to extend citizenship to all current residents and to make Ukrainian ethnicity an additional eligibility criterion for simplified access to citizenship. The policy favored by the left (dual citizenship) also would have been compliant with international standards.57

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Finally, the evidence also does not support Checkel’s argument that Ukraine adopted civic citizenship law because citizenship policymaking elites in the presidential administration were socialized into accepting the Council of Europe’s norms on citizenship. Checkel argues that as a result of their interaction with the Council of Europe the Ukrainian citizenship policymakers “learn[ed] new understanding of nationality” and that such socialization was possible because the Ukrainian elites had “unclear preferences” over citizenship policy by virtue of being “novices with few engrained conceptions of nationality and citizenship.”58

The Ukrainian elites in fact had very clear preferences over citizenship policy. The presidential administration was the domain of the party of power, whose interests were independent Ukrainian statehood and avoidance of dual citizenship. Ukraine responded to international criticisms and amended citizenship rules, but these changes upheld the single citizenship principle, and recommendations seen as threatening to this principle were rejected.

Ukraine came under scrutiny of international citizenship policy watchdogs in the middle of the 1990s, when it became clear that of some 250,000 Crimean Tatars who were deported from Crimea on Stalin’s orders in 1944 and returned to Ukraine, 108,000 who returned after the 1991 citizenship law had entered into force were de jure or de facto stateless. Giving Crimean Tatars citizenship was in the interest of the Ukrainian government. In the early and mid 1990s pro-Russian separatism in Crimea presented a major problem, and the Crimean Tatars sided with official Kiev in this conflict. Crimean Tatar citizenship was thus desirable, but only as long as the single citizenship principle was not compromised.

The Crimean Tatar citizenship problem was solved in two steps. April 1997 amendments to the 1991 citizenship law eliminated residency, language, and source of income requirements for those who fell under the definition of the official territorial nation. This cleared the path to Ukrainian citizenship for some 25,000 Crimean Tatars who were de jure stateless. The amendments did not create dual citizens, and since the government submitted the amendments to the parliament by June 1995 (three months before the first meeting on citizenship between the Ukrainian government and international experts took place), these changes likely would have been adopted even without international pressure.59

The 1997 amendments did not help some 83,000 de facto stateless Crimean Tatars who legally were citizens of other Soviet republics, since the requirement to obtain proof of release from prior citizenship remained. The international actors continued to call on the Ukrainian authorities to do more and proposed a solution: to allow Crimean Tatars who were legally citizens of other former Soviet republics to submit with their application for Ukrainian citizenship a notarized personal declaration renouncing prior citizenship. The OSCE High Commissioner for National Minorities, the UNHCR, and the Council of Europe made this recommendation.60 The Ukrainian officials rejected it because they saw it as creating dual citizens. A personal declaration submitted by applicants would not prevent dual citizenship, the Ukrainian officials reasoned, because neither the applicant nor

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Ukraine as a state had legal authority to annul another state’s citizenship.61 The Ukrainian officials decided that the only way to solve the citizenship problem of Crimean Tatars was to draw up in collaboration with competent authorities from foreign states bilateral agreements that would establish a mechanism for terminating foreign citizenship upon acquisition of Ukrainian citizenship.62 The drafting of bilateral agreements eventually resolved the citizenship problem of Crimean Tatars. The evidence thus clearly shows that, while international actors influenced citizenship policy in Ukraine, their impact did not change the preferences of domestic actors through either socialization or pressure. Only when a compromise solution was found that did not violate the single citizenship principle did policies change.

Conclusion

Almost half of the purportedly civic non-Baltic post-Soviet states privilege coethnics in access to citizenship. This overlooked variation in citizenship rules of post-Soviet states raises two puzzling questions. First, why are ethnically tinted citizenship laws found in states where ethnic nationalists do not command political majorities? Second, why in the absence of a historically formed civic understanding of the nation did some post-Soviet states adopt civic citizenship laws? In answer to the second question, civic citizenship policies can emerge as an unintended side effect of contested politics of national identity.

Several findings are important for the debate about national identity as a source of citizenship policies. First, the age of statehood may be a factor in the impact of the politics of national identity on citizenship policymaking. The politics of national identity may matter more in new states than in old because in new states other potential sources of citizenship policy are absent.

Second, to understand how national identity affects the content of citizenship laws it is important to acknowledge that not all states feature a dominant conception of national identity. In some states competing conceptions may exist, none of them dominant. A theory of how the politics of national identity will affect citizenship policy under these circumstances is needed. Ukraine demonstrates how in the absence of a dominant conception of national identity civic citizenship based on a purely territorial definition of the nation may accidentally emerge out of elite contestation over the nation’s boundaries.

Third, there is more than one pathway to civic citizenship. The dominant civic idiom of nationhood may be one source of civic citizenship, but divisions on the national question may be another. To be sure, divisions on the national question do not always result in civic citizenship. To determine when they do or do not, research on citizenship policymaking in other ethnoculturally heterogeneous new states is needed. The evidence from the post-Soviet region suggests that the degree of contestation on the national question and the likelihood of civic citizenship policy are related not only in Ukraine, but in the region

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overall. Of the seven post-Soviet cases with civic citizenship laws, all are ethnoculturally heterogeneous, and in four ethnocultural cleavages were so divisive that they led to violent conflict. Given that these conflicts occurred despite civic citizenship laws, the relationship between ethnic divisions, ethnic conflict, and civic citizenship policy needs further investigation.

Fourth, internationally compliant citizenship policy outcomes are not necessarily a result of international pressure. Such policies may emerge for domestic political reasons, not because domestic policymakers are socialized or coerced by international actors into accepting internationally compliant citizenship rules. Besides, in the process of negotiations both international and domestic actors can modify their original positions, so the influence can go in both directions.

Finally, these findings have implications for theories of democratization. Prominent scholars from John Stuart Mill to Dankwart Rustow have argued that national unity is a prerequisite for democracy.63 This thesis remains widely accepted. However, as the evidence presented here shows, when national identity is contested, the unintended outcome may be democratic and inclusive citizenship policy. Other scholars have recently also concluded that divisions on the national question can present an obstacle to the consolidation of authoritarian rule and enable greater political pluralism.64 While it would be a stretch to argue that cultural pluralism necessarily brings democracy, the idea that ethnocultural heterogeneity necessarily precludes democracy is also problematic.

NOTES

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers, Jessica Allina-Pisano, Lowell Barrington, Peter Rutland, and participants of the Danyliw research seminar at the University of Ottawa and of the Post-Communist Politics workshop at Harvard University for useful suggestions and feedback on earlier drafts, and Dominique Arel for stenographic records from Verkhovna Rada.

1. On the newness of empirical studies of citizenship and the research questions they ask, see Marc Morjé Howard, “Comparative Citizenship: An Agenda for Cross-National Research,” Perspectives on Politics, 4 (September 2006), 443–55.

2. Lowell Barrington, “Understanding Citizenship Policy in the Baltic States,” in Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer, eds., From Migrants to Citizens (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2000), pp. 253–301; Rogers Brubaker, “Citizenship Struggles in Soviet Successor States,” International Migration Review, 26 (Summer 1992), 269–91; Jeff Chinn and Lise Truex, “The Question of Citizenship in the Baltics,” Journal of Democracy, 7 (1996), 133–47; George Ginsburgs, “From the 1990 Law on the Citizenship of the USSR to the Citizenship Laws of the Successor Republics,” Review of Central and East European Law, 18 (1992), 1–55 (Part I); 19 (1993), 233–66 (Part II); Judith Kelley, Ethnic Politics in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), chs. 4, 5.

3. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany Press, 1992), pp. x–xi.

4. For example, Howard argues that early democratizers were more likely than late democratizers to develop civic national identity and inclusive citizenship policies. Howard, p. 447.

5. Patrick Weil, “Access to Citizenship: A Comparison of Twenty-Five Nationality Laws,” in Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer, eds., Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001), p. 34.

; (Cambridge, MA;;; Harvard University ;

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6. For a brief history of jus sanguinis and jus soli, see Randall Hansen, “Jus Soli,” in Matthew Gibney and Randall Hansen, eds., Immigration and Asylum: From 1900 to the Present, vol. 2 (Santa Barbara: Abc-Clio, 2005), p. 346; Rainer Olhiger, “Jus Sanguinis,” in ibid., pp. 342–45.

7. Brubaker, pp. 85–86.8. Patrick Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un Français? Histoire de la nationalité Française depuis la Révolution (Paris:

Grasset, 2002), ch. 2. Brubaker, p. 105, acknowledges that military recruitment and the desire to prevent the “development of different nations within the French nation” were key considerations behind the 1889 reform. Still, he maintains, p. 97, that jus sanguinis was rejected because “the requisite ideological base for such a commitment—an understanding of the nation as a community of descent—was missing” and, p. 109, that “the extension of jus soli was driven by political and ideological rather than demographic and military concerns.”

9. Christian Joppke, “How Immigration Is Changing Citizenship: A Comparative View,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (July 1999), 629–52; Randall Hansen and Patrick Weil, “Citizenship, Immigration and Nationality: Towards a Convergence in Europe?,” in Randall Hansen and Patrick Weil, eds., Towards a European Nationality: Citizenship, Immigration and Nationality Law in the EU (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 1–23; Weil, “Access to Citizenship”; Patrick Weil, “Acquisition of the Nationality of the Country of Immigration for the First and Second Generations of Children of Migrants (Principles of Ius Soli and Double Ius Soli),” paper presented at the Third European Conference on Nationality, “Nationality and the Child,” Strasbourg, October 11–12, 2004.

10. Christian Joppke, “Exclusion in the Liberal State: The Case of Immigration and Citizenship Policy,” European Journal of Social Theory, 8 (February 2005), 43–61; Weil, “Access to Citizenship”; Weil, “Acquisition of the Nationality.”

11. Joppke, “Exclusion in the Liberal State”; Weil, “Access to Citizenship.”12. Weil, “Acquisition of the Nationality,” pp. 7–8.13. Stephen Hanson, “Postimperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France,

Weimar Germany and Post-Soviet Russia,” East European Politics and Societies, 20 (Spring 2006), 370–71.14. The 1978 Soviet citizenship law established that every citizen of a union republic is simultaneously a

citizen of the USSR (Article 1) and that union republics regulate questions of Soviet citizenship delegated to them (Article 2). Foreigners permanently living in union republics submitted citizenship applications for Soviet and simultaneously republican citizenship to the supreme soviet presidium of the republic.

15. Article 15 of the 1978 Soviet citizenship law and Article 18 of the 1990 law.16. Brubaker, p. 182.17. On this point, see, for example, Ronald Suny, “Provisional Stabilities: The Politics of Identities in Post-

Soviet Eurasia,” International Security, 24 (Winter 1999–2000), 178–93.18. Douglas Klusmeyer, “Introduction,” in Klusmeyer and Aleinikoff, eds., From Migrants to Citizens, p. 4. 19. Barrington. 20. The 1994 Latvian citizenship law recognized as citizens of Latvia Latvians and Livonians who were

residing in Latvia, even if they or their ancestors did not have citizenship of interwar Latvia (Article 2) and allowed Latvians and Livonians returning to Latvia to naturalize outside of the standard naturalization process (Article 13). The 1992 Estonian Supreme Council resolution reenacting the 1938 citizenship law allowed those of Estonian descent to naturalize without meeting the language and residency requirements. Ibid., p. 273.

21. Article 17 of the 1991 Lithuanian citizenship law.22. Ronald Suny, “Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations,” Journal of Modern History,

73 (December 2001), 886.23. Articles 1 and 13 exempt ethnic Armenians from the residency requirement.24. Article 19 of the 1992 Turkmen citizenship law. 25. Weil, “Acquisition of the Nationality,” p. 14.26. See Rukh’s program, Narodnyi Rukh Ukrainy za Perebudovy, Prohrama, Statut (Kiev: Smoloskyp, 1989),

p. 18. 27. See the article on the national question by Petro Symonenko, leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, in

Holos Ukrainy, Mar. 21, 1996.28. As Wilson put it, “the center…never had much of an identity of its own, [and] has been occupied by virtual

politics, a shifting kaleidoscope of clan groups, shadowy business and old nomenklatura interests.” Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 185.

29. Even when writing specifically on the national question, the centrist elites do not move beyond asserting that “the Ukrainian national idea is first of all the statist [derzhavnytska] idea,” to quote from a book on the national idea by the head of the United Social Democratic Party of Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk. V. V. Medvedchuk, Suchasna ukraïns’ka natsional’na ideia i pytannia derzhavotvorennia [Contemporary Ukrainian National Idea and Questions of State Building] (Kyiv: Vyd-vo “Ukraïna,” 1997), p. 88.

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30. Statements by MP Ivanychuk during the June 28 and September 12, 1991, debate, and MPs Romaniuk and Vlohk during the September 12, 1991, debate.

31. In 1997 this proposal by MP Iavorivsky was included in the table of amendments no. 509 dated November 21, 1996, prepared for the second reading of the law but was dropped from the subsequent version of the table dated January 20, 1997. In 2001 MP Smirnov made this proposal during the January 18 debate.

32. On June 28, 1991, the left successfully prevented the draft citizenship law from being adopted in the first reading. In fall 1991 it again tried to postpone discussion of the law, this time unsuccessfully. Pravda Ukrainy, Oct. 10, 1991.

33. The 1998 electoral program of the Communist Party, for example, endorsed restoration of the Soviet Union and noted that the union of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus would be the first step in this direction. Politychni Partii Ukrainy [Political Parties of Ukraine] (Kiev: Tovarystvo “K.I.S.” 1998), p.109.

34. This position is evident, for example, in the 1998 electoral program of the Slavic Party that advocated union of Russia and Ukraine in a single state. The party program is forthright: “the introduction of the dual citizenship principle is the way towards one CIS citizenship.” Ibid., p. 71.

35. On the left’s commitment to preserving a union state, see, for example, the statement by the then-head of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Stanislav Hurenko, at the start of the debate on June 28, 1990.

36. Stenographic records from the June 12 and 13, 1990, Rada debate of the Sovereignty Declaration.37. Stenographic records from the readings of the 1991 citizenship law on June 28, 1991, September 12, 1991,

and October 8, 1991. 38. Stenographic records from the first and second reading of the 1997 citizenship law on October 30, 1996,

and February 27, 1997. 39. Stenographic records from the first reading of the 2001 law on May 17, 2000.40. A statement by MP Osadchuk that “there can be no sovereignty without a law on citizenship” clearly

shows that Ukrainian elites saw citizenship and state sovereignty as related. June 28, 1991, debate of the 1991 citizenship law.

41. Chas2000, February 28, 2003.42. In 1994 Leonid Kuchma campaigned for president with a promise of dual citizenship with Russia, only

to abandon it after he was elected. Igor Zevelev, Russia and Its New Diasporas Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2001), p. 137. In September 2004 the party of power’s presidential candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, promised to introduce dual citizenship with Russia if elected and claimed to have submitted a legislative proposal on dual citizenship to the Rada Tyzhden, November 1, 2004. No such proposal was submitted.

43. During the July 13, 1990, debate, Kravchuk proposed the clause “Ukrainian SSR has its own citizenship and guarantees every citizen the right to retain citizenship of the USSR.” The left wanted the wording “every citizen of Ukraine remains citizen of USSR.”

44. The right supported the clause “in Ukraine there is single citizenship”; the left wanted to add “dual citizenship is allowed.” During the October 8, 1991, debate Kravchuk proposed the clause “in Ukraine there is single citizenship; dual citizenship is allowed on the basis of bilateral agreements.” Ukraine never concluded such agreements.

45. On this point, see Zevelev, pp. 133–35.46. Article 2 of the draft citizenship law, published in Holos Ukrainy, July 25, 1991.47. Zevelev, pp. 132–42.48. Oleksandr Yemets, a one-time head of the State Committee of Ukraine for Nationalities and Migration, as

quoted in Galina Vitkovskaia, ed., Problemy stanovlenia institutov grazhdanstva v postsovetskikh gosudarstvakh [Problems of Establishing Citizenship Institutions in Post-Soviet States] (Moscow: Moskovskii Tsentr Karnegi, 1998), p. 78.

49. Barrington; Kelley.50. Petro Chaly, “Element derzhavnosti—instytut hromadianstva” [Citizenship as an Element of Statehood],

Polityka i Chas (January 2001), 38–46.51. Jeffrey Checkel, “Social Learning and European Identity Change,” International Organization, 55

(Summer 2001), 553–88.52. The six states that adopted first citizenship laws after December 1991 are Armenia (1995), Georgia (1993),

Kyrgyzstan (1993), Tajikistan (1995), Turkmenistan (1992), and Uzbekistan (1992). 53. The CSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities issued its first recommendations on citizenship

issues to the Baltic states in April 1993. On the timing of international involvement in the Baltics, see Kelley, pp. 84–89, 103–05.

54. Interview, Citizenship Department of the Ukrainian Presidential Administration, Kiev, May 26, 2003.

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55. Carol Batchelor, “Statelessness and the Problem of Resolving Nationality Status,” International Journal of Refugee Law, 10 (1998), 156–83; Council of Europe, European Convention on Nationality and Explanatory Report (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1997), pp. 21–27.

56. For example, Michele Iogna-Prat, Senior Legal Adviser of the UNHCR, reasoned that, because at the time the USSR disintegrated coethnics of one republic often lived in other republics, many were in danger of becoming stateless if they did not receive citizenship of the republic of their residence and if citizenship law in their homeland republic did not grant citizenship rights to coethnics. Michel Iogna-Prat, Nationality Laws in Former Soviet Republics (Geneva: UNHCR, 1993), p. 25.

57. In recent decades international law evolved towards greater tolerance of dual citizenship. Council of Europe Committee of Experts on Nationality, “Report on Multiple Nationality,” CJ-NA (2001), 13 (30 October 2000).

58. Checkel, pp. 573–75.59. Ukrainian policymakers and international experts began regular consultations on citizenship issues in

September 1995, when the first roundtable between Ukrainian and international citizenship experts was held in Crimea.

60. October 1995 (p. 2) and April (p. 3) letters of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, Max van der Stoel, to the Foreign Minister of Ukraine; recommendation of the UNHCR Kiev Protection Officer; Christoph Bierwirth, “Priority Citizenship Issues in Light of Practical Experience,” paper presented at the Expert Round-Table on the Law of Citizenship of Ukraine organized by the Council of Europe, the Administration of the President of Ukraine and the UNHCR, Kiev, April 23–24, 1998; Secretariat of the Council of Europe, “Draft Proposals for Amendments to the Law on Citizenship of Ukraine,” Working Paper prepared by the Secretariat of the Council of Europe as Follow-up to the Round-Table in Kiev, April 23–24, 1998, pp. 2, 5.

61. Interview, Citizenship Department of the Presidential Administration, Kiev, April 29, 1998; participant observation at the UNHCR-organized roundtable on citizenship held in Yalta, Ukraine, June 17–19, 1999.

62. On Ukraine’s preference for bilateral agreements, see Chaly, p. 41. 63. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958),

p. 230; Dankwart A. Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics, 2 (April 1970), 351.

64. Lucan Way, “Authoritarian State Building and the Sources of Political Liberalization in the Western Former Soviet Union, 1994–2004,” World Politics, 57 (January 2005), 231–61.

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