Citizenship practices of non-citizens in Slovenia: ‘you cannot fight the system alone’

Abstract

In the period of state formation (1991–1992), the Slovene Ministry of the Interior erased, that is, excluded from legal status, those immigrants from other parts of the former Yugoslavia who did not become Slovene citizens when citizenship was available under initial simplified criteria. Compared with the processes of independence in Estonia and elsewhere, exclusion in the form of erasure from the register of permanent residents in Slovenia extended beyond the creation of foreigners within the country (i.e. foreign citizens with the right to remain and support themselves); this exclusion created outlaws, legal freaks (Arendt) or homines sacres (Agamben) – bare human beings who were expunged from society and deprived of all former rights and roles. This article discusses the citizenship practices of the victims of the erasure and interprets these practices as emancipation processes: the erased used grass roots and legal means to attempt to obtain the right to dignity, the right to stay and the right to compensation for their ‘lost years’. The effects of their struggle went beyond matters of mere utility: by publicly defining themselves as ‘the erased’ and acting upon injustice; the erased challenged the boundaries of citizenship in terms of membership and content.