This paper provides an alternative approach to how Europeanization and domestic change in the Successor States of Former Yugoslavia are traditionally understood. Employing constructivist insights from International Relations, the paper is concerned with the post-Cold War European context as constituting a particular normative environment that promotes liberal ideas about citizenship and rights. A constructivist approach suggests that this normative environment is generative in two ways. First, it creates an international judgment in relation to how internal populations are treated/qualified within states. Second, it fosters explicit and implicit criteria that define rightful membership of a state within the EU. These dimensions are promoted through what could be defined a process of socialization that facilitates domestic transformation. This paper defends such a constructivist approach but nonetheless asks the question of how, despite the significant rapprochement of Croatia with the EU and its liberal standards on citizenship rights, the Croatian government has not yet substantially modified its 1991 ethnocentric citizenship law? At the beginning of the 1990s, state-led practices to form an ethnically exclusive political community were put in place in the objective of justifying the creation of an ethnic Croatian state identity. Yet, despite the EU rapprochement, this paper shows that certain ethnically exclusive practices persist. The paper suggests that these practices are related to the very definition of the Croatian state that was given by its national authorities in order to justify its initial creation. The paper will specifically look at the Croatian citizenship right regime through what will be called “domestic practices of hierarchical membership”. These refer to state-led practices that deliberately create the possibility for more or less exclusive hierarchies between certain population groups.
