Framing the Erasure

In December 1990, during the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia adopted the “Statement of Good Intentions”, promising that all those with permanent residence on Slovenian territory would be able to acquire Slovenian citizenship if they wished. On June 25, 1991, Slovenia declared its independence and adopted legislation on internal affairs, citizenship, and sovereignty. Article 40 of the Citizenship Act (1991) provided that citizens of other republics of the former Yugoslavia could acquire Slovenian citizenship if they met three requirements: they had acquired permanent resident status in Slovenia by December 23, 1990;Footnote ² they were residing in Slovenia; and they had applied for citizenship within six months of the Citizenship Act entering into force (Citizenship Act, 1991).

For various reasons, a small proportion of citizens of other republics of the former Yugoslavia residing in Slovenia did not attain Slovene citizenship. Some were not properly informed about the deadline for applying, some did not wish to acquire citizenship, and some were not eligible.Footnote ³ All became aliens, as stipulated under Article 81 of the Aliens Act (1991). They reasonably expected to maintain their permanent residency status, as had all foreigners of other nationalities who were living permanently in Slovenia at that time. However, Article 16 of the Aliens Act (1991) allowed permanent residence permits to be granted to those who had been living in Slovenia for three years on the basis of temporary residence permits—which did not exist for citizens of the Yugoslav republic before the breakup. The government did not adopt preliminary provisions for citizens of Yugoslavia living and working in Slovenia that would enable them to keep their permanent residence status. Consequently, this bureaucratic error effectively made them foreigners wishing to enter Slovenia for the first time, disregarding the genuine and effective link of many individuals with the Republic of Slovenia and their habitual residence.

On February 27, 1992, the then interior minister, Igor Bavčar, instructed local officials to start “clearing up the records” and managing the status of all citizens of other republics of the former Yugoslavia who did not apply for citizenship of the Republic of Slovenia by the deadline (Ministry of Internal Affairs 1992a). Although there were no provisions in existing legislation that would provide a legal base for such a measure, 25,671 people, citizens of other republics of former Yugoslavia who had not attained Slovene citizenship, were removed from the Register of Permanent Residents of Slovenia. They became known as the “Erased.” Some left Slovenia. Others stayed on the basis of temporary work permits, while some had no choice but to live without legal residency status or even stateless. The Erased are a heterogeneous group of people; some were internal immigrants from other republics of the former Yugoslavia, while others were born and raised in Slovenia. Most had spent much of their lives in Slovenia, where they had developed personal, social, cultural, linguistic, and economic bonds.

In June 1992, when confronted with several open questions regarding the implementation of the Aliens Act, Bavčar suggested that the existing rights of individuals who did not apply for Slovenian citizenship, or whose applications were rejected, needed to be taken away (Ministry of Internal Affairs 1992b). It took seven years before the Constitutional Court struck down the Aliens Act in 1999; the court recognized the unconstitutionality of Article 81, which did not specify how citizens of other republics of the former Yugoslavia could obtain permanent residency, and called for the reinstatement of their status as permanent residents within six months (Constitutional Court Decision U-I-284/94, 1999). Despite the required deadline, it took another 11 years for the government to adopt the Act Regulating the Legal Status of Citizens of Former Yugoslavia Living in the Republic of Slovenia (2010). Following a European Court of Human Rights judgment in the case of Kurić and Others v. Republic of Slovenia (European Court of Human Rights, 2012) that there had been a violation of the eighth, 13th, and 14th articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, the Slovenian government finally adopted, in 2013, a compensation scheme for those who had been erased.

Erasure and Ethnocultural Nationalism

Ethnocultural nationalism is frequently defined as “necessarily ascriptively closed, and thence illiberal” (Brown 2003, 50 [emphasis original]); it often associated with militarism, war, homogenization, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, ethnic cleansing, even genocide (Brubaker 1999, 55). For obvious reasons, some academic discussion tends to understand the erasure as a consequence of ethnocultural nationalism. For instance, Jelka Zorn (Reference Zorn2007, 53) claims that erasure is a byproduct of Slovene ethno-citizenship; Marta Gregorčič (Reference Gregorčič2007, 121) believes the government used the erasure to reach its primary political goal of “national homogeneity” or “purity”; Jasminka Dedić (Reference Dedić2003) deems the erasure “administrative ethnic cleansing”; while Veronika Bajt (Reference Bajt2010, 200) claims officials executed the erasure to homogenize the population structure and bring it closer to the nationalist ideal equating the nation and state. It is true that Slovene nationalism and the concept of the Slovenian nation are predominately built upon ethnocultural elements, and that the Republic of Slovenia is perceived as an instrument of the ethnocultural nation. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that the erasure must be understood above all through the logic of ethnocultural nationalism and the above-mentioned arguments.

While the ethnocultural aspects are important for understanding the erasure in a full sense, the ethnic element is not as vital as suggested by the authors mentioned above. It is important to note that there were 203,000 citizens of other republics of the former Yugoslavia with permanent residency in Slovenia in 1991 (Šircelj Reference Šircelj2003, 141), 171,132 of whom acquired Slovenian citizenship under Article 40 of the Citizenship Act (European Court of Human Rights 2012). Considering this, it is not clear why authors disregard the fact that the Citizenship Act did not contribute to greater ethnic homogeneity; on the contrary, it changed the ethnic composition of the Slovenian electoral base by granting citizenship to nearly 85 percent of citizens of other republics of the former Yugoslavia who lived and worked in Slovenia. The claim that the elimination of 15 percent of citizens of other republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was applied as a tactic for the ethnic homogenization of the Slovene population is therefore unconvincing.

Nor was the erasure an attempt at administrative ethnic cleansing of certain parts of the population. The term “ethnic cleansing” is usually understood as the forced ethnic homogenization of a specific territory by physical expulsion, removal, or extermination of the minority population (Hayden Reference Hayden1996), which is based on “ethnic and religious exclusivity and the dominance [of particular ethnic groups] in certain historically claimed areas” (United Nations 1994, 33). The strategic element of ethnic cleansing is vital to understanding why this policy has been carried out in certain areas and not others (33). As explained by Micahel Mann (Reference Mann2005), the potential for cleansing is reached when two ethnic groups both lay claim to their own state over all or part of the same territory, and their claim seems to them to have substantial legitimacy and some plausible chance of being implemented. However, Slovene territory was never sufficiently ethnically heterogeneous to undermine the legitimacy of national emancipation and self-determination claims. Moreover, the elimination of minorities could not have been the goal of the Slovene government, because erasure was not directed against all citizens of other republics of the former Yugoslavia, nor did it affect them randomly. The erasure affected exclusively citizens of other republics who had not applied for Slovenian citizenship, whose application for citizenship was not accepted by the officials, or whose application for citizenship was rejected. It is the acquisition of citizenship, and not the ethnicity, that appears to be the main variable and factor of the erasure.

So can erasure be understood as a side effect of ethno-citizenship, as claimed by Zorn (Reference Zorn2007)? Again, some important indicators suggest not. The Citizenship Act (1991) stipulated two ways of obtaining Slovene citizenship for citizens of Yugoslavia: (1) residents who held citizenship of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia obtained Slovene citizenship automatically (Article 39), whereas (2) citizens of other republics of the former Yugoslavia who had registered permanent residence in Slovenia on the plebiscite day could apply with the competent local office (Article 40). Bajt believes that the case of the Erased demonstrates that Slovenian citizenship had been defined in terms of ethnicity rather than the territorial principle; otherwise, she claims, permanent residents would have automatically become Slovenian citizens rather than erased residentsFootnote ⁴ (2010, 199). But Bajt seems to ignore that the Citizenship Act enabled access to Slovene citizenship to all citizens of other republics of the former Yugoslavia on the basis of permanent residency (ius domicile), an entirely territorial condition. The liberal principles of Article 40 of the Citizenship Act (1991) in this aspect remain underemphasized, especially the fact that the Citizenship Act enabled acquisition of Slovenian citizenship to all citizens of other republics of the former Yugoslavia on the principle of residence, irrespective of the length of stay, employment, means of subsistence, or knowledge of the Slovene language, all typical requirements for naturalization. The wording of Article 40 of the Citizenship Act was actually more in line with the principles of “liberal” nationalism, as it allowed those from various ethnic backgrounds to enter this national community by pledging loyalty to the public institutions and way of life of their residential homeland (Brown Reference Brown2003, 123). In this sense, it has superseded the ethnic dichotomy between citizens and foreigners by including foreigners in the national polity.

Although the erasure was neither implemented to increase ethnic homogeneity nor applied as a measure of ethnic cleansing, ethnicity of the Erased still played an important role in it. The fact that erasure affected only citizens of other republics of the former Yugoslavia—and not also other foreigners with permanent residency who did not obtain Slovenian citizenship—points to the significance of the Yugoslav legacy implied in their ethnic identity. Because of that legacy, they were seen as potentially threatening the existence of a community or as morally bad, uncivilized, conservative, and primitive. Intolerance toward ethnicities from other Yugoslav republics had been growing since the late 1980s, even more markedly at the beginning of the 1990s, when the political elite and media supported the push for national independence in terms of exiting Yugoslavia. A political turn to Europe and joining the European Community was supposed to foster democratic civil society and economic prosperity, which brought about what Milica Bakić-Hayden and Robert Hayden (Reference Bakić-Hayden and Hayden2007) call “nesting orientalism”; Slovenians not only started to see themselves as Western, European, superior, tolerant, and democratic, but also began to deny their historical connection with Yugoslavia and its socialist past, attempting to build ideological distance from all the meanings carried in the name of “Balkan” and “Yugoslavia.” Additionally, due to the political tensions accompanying the Yugoslav breakup and its aftermath, members of Yugoslav nationalities were often viewed with suspicion and resentment. For this reason, it is important to note that the ethnicity of the Erased and the undesirable political connotations of the “supra-ethnic” Yugoslav identity had significant symbolic weight and served as auxiliary backup to justify the exclusionist politics taken by Slovenian government in the form of erasure.

Erasure, Governmentality, and Raison d’État

The principles of the erasure can be examined without attempting, as Foucault puts it (Reference Foucault1972, 109), to discover a hidden element behind them or below their apparent surface that emerges through them without saying so. So why should erasure be understood in terms of ethnocultural homogenization if government officials justified it with economic and political arguments? Why not take their explanations at face value? As I show in this section, the concept of governmentality allows us to consider the erasure as a tactic of the government aimed at the level of people’s concrete lives in order achieve some desired effects. This approach, however, reduces the importance of ethnicity and points to the dimensions of erasure that are mostly related to raison d’état and governance of the population.

I start, then, with a short explanation of the concept of raison d’état and governmentality as used by Foucault. In his texts, raison d’état refers to the rationalities of the state as an autonomous entity involving particular logic and knowledge about what is necessary and sufficient for the state to exist and maintain itself, to develop and increase its strength (Foucault Reference Foucault2007, 339–340). This is a type of rationality that focuses on the maintenance and preservation of the state once it has been founded, in its daily functioning and everyday management (Foucault Reference Foucault2007, 314). Raison d’état is therefore not essentially related to the nation as an ethnic community; raison d’état may indeed rely on ethnic homogeneity and community insofar as it contributes to the power of the state (as, for instance, when claiming the right to self-determination), but it may also allow those of different ethnic backgrounds to become residents or citizens of the state if this benefits its development and competency (as, for example, evident in many contemporary migration policies).

Raison d’état is closely related to governmentality in the sense that governmentality is used to refer to a series of institutions, policies, reflections, techniques, and tactics implemented by the government, which build upon raison d’état and “the best possible way of governing” (Foucault Reference Foucault2008, 2). Governmentality refers to practices whose main method of operation is governing (not ruling), meaning that the government applies policies to achieve ends that cannot be attained by rule or an order (as, for example, the wealth of the state or a healthy population) but can be accomplished by “right disposition of things arranged so as to lead to a suitable end” (Foucault Reference Foucault2007, 134). As Foucault explains, governmentality “has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument” (2007, 108). The object of government is members of the population within its territory as resources to be fostered, used, and optimized (Dean Reference Dean2010, 29). Following Foucault’s reasoning, the erasure cannot be seen as an arbitrary act or a side effect of improper legislation, but rather a thoughtfully considered and deliberately applied governmental action with a specific goal in mind.

My observation is that erasure was built upon the raison d’état in the sense that it did not attempt to strengthen the Slovene nation ethnically, but rather to strengthen the state and the population economically and politically. This logic particularly resonates from an Official Communication dated June 4, 1992, sent to the government by Interior Minister Igor Bavčar. As evident from the text, employees at the local administration units faced several uncertainties regarding the implementation of the Aliens Act when arranging the residency of the Erased in 1992. Bavčar explained to the government that the question of recognizing the permanent residency of citizens of other republics of the former Yugoslavia had a “political connotation as well as financial effects” (Ministry of Internal Affairs 1992b). He expressed caution about continuing their rights because “granting residence permits to foreigners needs to be well considered, since once permission is approved it becomes difficult to revoke, which is especially important when dealing with problematic individuals such as criminals, offenders, disturbers of public order and individuals from the Yugoslav People’s Army” (Ministry of Internal Affairs 1992b, emphasis added). Bavčar clearly identified these categories as an undesirable part of the population to be governed through carefully thought-out rules on residency claims and restrictions on admission to Slovenian territory. The minister’s wording shows that the erasure was weighted and evaluated against the state and its rationality as the main criterion for deciding whether or not the individuals concerned should keep their rights as permanent residents or not. The erasure was therefore a governmental measure with a clear “political connotation” referring to raison d’état and an aim to achieve the effects at the level of the population; It was a decision that was expected to strengthen the state, especially in the light of accomplishing a consistent national polity of loyal citizens who obey the laws of the state.

The erasure was also grounded in the “removal” of people who were socially and economically undesirable. As further stated in the Official Communication, the dilemma of whether to recognize the rights appears to be “essential, since it comes to deciding on existential rights, which have to be provided by the state” (Ministry of Internal Affairs 1992b). Specifically, the permanent residence permit granted the holder 27 rights in the field of social care, including pension rights, education, health, and access to the labor market (European Court of Human Rights 2012, 46). As far as those rights were concerned, they had considerable economic weight, as recognized by representatives of the Interior Ministry. The logic of this was again justified in terms of raison d’état, as it concerned people who supposedly “wish to obtain Slovenian citizenship only because of the material benefits (purchase housing, receive military pensions), but are not willing to accept citizenship as an integrated relationship with the state and, therefore, submit to its sovereignty as loyal citizens” (Constitutional Court 1999). The issue of extending the permanent residency of the Erased was considered with regard to state expenses. Such an evaluation follows the logic of governmentality, as it arises from the tendency to regulate the population as a whole and efforts to establish the optimal conditions for the state’s economic prosperity and financial strength.

Erasure and Sovereign Power

I have so far explained the erasure within the logic of governmentality, but another important question remains unanswered: if the basic function of governmentality is to improve life, increase wealth, ensure public safety, and so on, how could such extreme violent measures as erasure happen? The answer can be drawn from Foucault’s theory of sovereign power, which in the case a state’s increased governmentalization expresses itself as state racism (Foucault Reference Foucault2003). As I explain in this section, the erasure appears as an extreme manifestation of sovereign power, introducing a punitive distinction within the population residing on Slovene territory.

Sovereign power, says Foucault (Reference Foucault2003, 247), consists in the power to take life and is exercised over subjects through law and the juridical and executive mechanisms of the state (Dean Reference Dean2010, 29). In contemporary states, sovereign power expresses itself in state racism, which appears as a way of introducing the break between “what must live and what must die” (Foucault Reference Foucault2003, 254); more precisely, it appears as a way of separating out the groups that exist in a population based on the presumption that they are harmful to society, not that they are racially dangerous at a genetic level (Kelly Reference Kelly2004, 62). State racism encapsulates the divisions within the population of a state and categorizes them into groups that will contribute to or hold back the general welfare and life of the population (such as criminals, terrorists, irregular migrants, the uneducated, and poor) as well as attempts to eliminate or reduce them (Dean Reference Dean2010, 119).

The sovereign “right to kill” does not mean simply killing as such, but also the segregation of particular groups, exposing some to death, increasing the risk of death for some, political death, expulsion, rejection, and similar (Foucault Reference Foucault2003, 256). Giorgio Agamben, introducing the idea of biopolitics to the domain of sovereignty, also recognizes that the “right to take life” might be taken “not in the literal sense of being killed, but in the figurative sense of being degraded or abandoned” (as quoted in Schütz Reference Schütz2008, 123). There is no doubt that the erased residents were exposed to all of the above exclusions as well as to “bare life,” (Agamben Reference Agamben1998) which dispossessed their lives without killing, and in case of the those without regular residency, resulted in living a life without any mediating role of public institutions or legal mechanisms, left to a physical struggle for survival beyond the sphere of public institutions and membership in a provisional, precarious state of existence.

As seen from this, state racism thus does not strive for racial purity, but aims to define who shall be, in the name of maintaining a healthy core of a population, segregated, eliminated, or excluded. Governmentality and sovereign power are interrelated and draw on each other to sustain themselves; the practices and institutions of the state, which are applied to govern the population, also reinforce state sovereignty. In view of that, erasure as a manifestation of a sovereign power’s “right to kill” was aimed at sanitizing the undesired part of the population, which also allegedly contributed to affirming state sovereignty, its political reinforcement and strength. As explained by Andrey Makarychev and Alexandra Yatsyk (Reference Makarychev and Yatsyk2016), the state governs through normalizing, regulating, and administering bodies, with the ultimate goal of creating a nation as a coherent and unified community on the basis of loyalty to official policies while ostracizing those who do not fit the hegemonic standards. It is important to note that due to their refusal or failure to become Slovenian citizens, the Erased, as citizens of the former Yugoslavia, were viewed as not wishing to fully and unconditionally submit to newly established sovereignty, which was a particularly sensitive question in the 1990s era of political antagonisms among Yugoslav republics, national emancipation, and Balkan wars. The norms of loyalty, as seen in this case, stigmatized the Erased.

The state racism therefore constructs a self–other dichotomy based on standards of an acceptable way of life and norms of inclusion and exclusion and defines the absolute worth of certain groups within a population and the complete insignificance of others. In this way, says Elisa Fiaccadori (Reference Fiaccadori2015), state racism creates conditions for policies and measures that would otherwise be difficult to accept; it makes exclusion possible and acceptable, it licenses the sovereign “right to kill” in line with the question of belonging and benefiting to a community (163). What this means for erasure is that it can be grasped as a technique of sovereign power, which was bound up with the working of a state and used state racism to exercise and reinforce its sovereign power to make life in general “healthier” and “purer.” State racism in this sense not only explains the exclusionist measure of the erasure manifesting as a “right to kill” but also illuminates why citizens of other republics of Yugoslavia, who were granted Slovenian citizenship, were not erased—because by becoming citizens, they submitted to the newly established state and were less likely to be perceived as undesirable or as a political threat. In this respect, erasure manifests as state racism, which needs no basis on ethnic grounds—only the idea that these individuals, labeled as speculative individuals, criminals, offenders, disturbers of public order, and national enemies, are a risk to society.

The Civic Break of the Erasure

I now turn to the question that remained unanswered: How did the government determine the group of people to be erased? As indicated, erasure was not directed against all foreigners from other republics of the former Yugoslavia, nor did it affect citizens of other republics of the former Yugoslavia randomly. The erasure affected only citizens of other former Yugoslav republics who had not applied for Slovenian citizenship or whose applications were rejected or not accepted. Even if the primary problem of the Erased was not that they could not acquire citizenship but that they were not able to keep their permanent residency status, acquisition of Slovenian citizenship appears to be the vital element in explaining the erasure.

Citizenship is generally defined with reference to the state and the notion of belonging (Lister Reference Lister2003; Soysal Reference Soysal1994; Kymlicka and Norman Reference Kymlicka and Norman1994; Bauböck Reference Bauböck2006; Beiner Reference Beiner1995; Bosniak 2006). Although people have multiple loyalties and divided commitments, the commitments stemming from citizenship remain organized around political principles. Citizenship’s bonds of membership and allegiance are to the nation-state and the legal and political order that constitutes it, and not to the nation. Citizenship, in this sense, functions as an integrative force fostering “a direct sense of community membership based on loyalty” (T. H. Marshall as quoted in Lister Reference Lister2003, 14), a sense of belonging (Lister et al. Reference Lister, Williams, Anttonen, Bussemaker, Gerhard, Heinen, Johansson, Lira, Siim and Tobio2007, 49), and commitment firmly bound to nation-state (Bosniak Reference Bosniak2000, 463), which does not depend on a common ethnic origin (Devetak Reference Devetak2004, 35). Citizenship organizes the relationship between the state and the individual (Gilbert and Powell Reference Gilbert and Powell2008, 192) by producing a particular subjectivity and submissiveness, consequently structuring the possible field of the individual’s actions and shaping individuals’ and groups’ choices and aspirations. Seen this way, citizenship is not merely an institution but more a strategy of governing individuals’ expectations and practices (Procacci Reference Procacci2004).

Political loyalty was of crucial importance at the time of Slovenia’s emancipation. The state secretary of the Interior Ministry, Slavko Debelak, told the Mladina weekly (September 29, 1992) that “granting citizenship to an individual must not pose any threat to public order and national defense . . . the state must only accept loyal citizens, who shall follow its laws.” The idea of loyalty was likewise unambiguously embodied in the Slovene Citizenship Act (1991), which in Article 40 stipulated that application for citizenship will be rejected if the applicant has committed a criminal offense directed against the Republic of Slovenia. The sovereign ban here demonstrates the exceptional power of the civic mode of exclusion, which in wider spheres of public debate is never seriously questioned. The case of the Erased confirms that there is plenty of room for exclusion and suspicion stemming from citizenship and political communities based on a shared commitment to political principles. As Bernard Yack (Reference Yack1996, 208) rightfully proclaims for the concept of the civic nation, I, too, observe for the citizenry that it is no less exclusionary toward anyone who disagrees with its basic principles and is likewise inclined to exclude anyone who might only be suspected of rejecting shared political principles.

In this sense, citizenship not only defines the members but also the nonmembers and proves to be, in Michael Ignatieff’s (Reference Ignatieff1987) view, an exclusionary category, justifying the coercive rule of the included over the excluded, the rule of citizens over noncitizens, of members over aliens. Such understanding of citizenship may imply that the Erased, who did not obtain Slovene citizenship, failed to express their allegiance to the newly established state. In the context of the political uncertainties accompanying the Yugoslav breakup, the government implemented the erasure as a method for eliminating individuals who did not confirm their commitment to the Republic of Slovenia by becoming citizens. Moreover, in relation to the Erased Minister Bavčar stated in the Official Communication from 1992 that “the previously obtained rights of citizens of other republics of the former Yugoslavia must be disregarded, as [by not applying for citizenship] they gave them up self-consciously” (Ministry of Internal Affairs 1992b). But to be precise, not getting Slovenian citizenship could not have been the reason why citizens of other republics were erased. Instead, this only served for the demonization and dehumanization of the Erased and tagging them as speculative and disloyal individuals, which made it easier for the government to execute the erasure without any significant reaction from civil society and human rights bodies. Such dehumanization namely created a condition within which this particular group was made perfectly superfluous; as Hannah Arendt noted for Jews in Nazi Germany, “if nobody can be found to ‘claim’ them, may their lives be in danger” (Arendt Reference Arendt1979, 296).

The Ethnic Break of the Erasure

It was mentioned in the introductory part of this article that ethnocultural aspects are important for full comprehension of the erasure. In this section, I explain how the ethnicity of the Erased played a decisive part in introducing the break between foreigners who kept and those who lost rights stemming from permanent residency. The central question that explicates the rationale behind the erasure is: how could the government representatives have determined the group of the Erased as undesirable and dangerous if they had not checked any of their actual life circumstances? Why did the government not adopt preliminary provisions for citizens of Yugoslavia that would enable them to keep their permanent residence status? Why, in contrast, did the government allow foreigners from other countries (such as Italians and Austrians) to keep their residence permits?

It is important to understand that ethnicity is not simply a biological category, genetic descent defined according to one’s birth, or an ancestral line of the historical founder population sharing the same language, customs, and social norms. In modern nation-states, ethnicity typically works as a political technology—that is, it is how individuals are governed based on particular political reasoning that leads us to recognize our self-identity as members of a community, a nation, or a state. Ethnic identity, just like citizenship, can be thought of as the extension of the state’s power, constructing a subjectivity that makes individuals perform assigned tasks and behave in prescribed ways. The ethnic origin of the erased residents of Slovenia can thus be understood as an important reason for the erasure insofar as it implied an individual’s allegiance to the political adversaries of the Slovene nation-state, that is, in this case, loyalty to other republics of the former Yugoslavia.

Jeff McMahan gives support to this view when saying that an individual incurs obligations of loyalty and partiality by birth from which one cannot be released even by emigration (Reference McMahan1997, 133). He believes that people who belong to a nation by birth generally have a more secure status within the nation and are regarded as being under a stronger obligation of loyalty to the nation than foreigners who become members after leaving the nation of their birth. Although McMahan admits that this is a rather extreme conception of the involuntary character of national membership, he believes it helps us to understand that birth alone is a powerful source of duties and that a great deal is required in order to be freed from their demands. The power of birth and ethnicity proved to have a significant role also in the context of Slovenian emancipation, especially in relation to automatic conferral of Slovenian citizenship on persons of Slovene ethnic origin, confirming a special bond of loyalty between the nation-state and members of its core ethnocultural nation, which appears self-evident.

But this logic affected not only ethnic Slovenes, who became Slovenian citizens automatically, but also other foreigners, who might be expected to have similar attachments toward the republics of their citizenship. The Serbs, for example, were therefore erased not because they were Serbs ethnically-wise, but because of fears about their potentially dangerous political loyalties stemming from their ethnicity. The Erased were perceived as foreigners displaying political loyalties to political structures that were at that time in direct opposition the newly established Slovenian state. The implications of ethnocultural nationalism referring to political loyalties pledged to the “national enemy” are crucial for understanding the erasure and explaining why the government did not erase other foreigners with permanent residence in Slovenia (such as Germans, Austrians, and Italians), who likewise did not apply for Slovenian citizenship at the time of emancipation. The case of the Erased shows that the doctrine of ethnocultural nationalism prevailed where it implied the political dimensions of ethnic identity (that is, political loyalty) but not ethnicity (such as ethnic origin) as such. A similar argument is found in Andreas Wimmer’s (Reference Wimmer2004) view that soldiers from other national backgrounds are viewed with distrust since political loyalty is now no longer perceived as a matter of fidelity to one’s lord or of good pay, but of national background.

Moreover, the case of the Erased proves that the demands for absolute subjection to the political order are especially acute in the context of separation, emancipation, and establishing of new states and political systems, because antagonism between the new and old regimes generally does not allow in-between positions; even less does it allow political opinions supporting political opponents. This is what Richard Devetak (Reference Devetak2004, 27) calls “the modern norm of loyalty—namely allegiance to a single nation: one person, carrying one passport, declares allegiance to one flag, one nation, one sovereign state.” Also, Bhikhu Parekh (Reference Parekh1995, 28), for instance, observes the profoundness of restrictions in warlike situations, when all ties between two opposing countries are expected to be suspended. As manifest in the case of the Erased, foreigners staying in the country in conflict are most likely to find themselves at risk of being suspected of subversive actions; in times of war or separation, their loyalty to the nation-state will readily be called into doubt, even against all available evidence.

The Nation-States and Human Rights

After analyzing the micro-physics (Foucault, 1995) of the erasure, let us now turn to analytically approach its macrostructures. Just as Andrew Vincent (Reference Vincent2010) and Zygmunt Bauman (Reference Bauman2000) believe for Nazi genocide, I too claim that erasure is a crime that rests upon the resources and policy commitments of the modern nation-state and follows the rationality of the nation-state given certain circumstances. The logic is simple but far-reaching, says Vincent: a unified nation linked to the massive power and resources of the modern state generates an immediate dilemma as to what to do about nonmembers and foreigners (Vincent Reference Vincent2010, 108). Yet nation-states do not routinely commit extreme violence. I observe, as have many authors before me (Vincent Reference Vincent2010; Bauman Reference Bauman2000; Hardt and Negri Reference Hardt and Negri2000; Agamben Reference Agamben1998), that the nation-state and the form of its organization carry with it the possibility of such violence because it embodies a legitimation for focusing on nonmembers as a source of anxiety. In this section, I consider the context of the erasure, highlighting the potentialities and limitations stemming from the organization of the nation-state.

Erasure can be explained as organized bureaucratic mass violation of human rights, in line with the logic of nation-state, which provides the framework and rationalities for the crime. First, erasure is related to idea of sovereignty. Sovereignty, which in nation-states resides in the nation, creates the relationship that is supposed to guarantee the human rights of nationals, as they are those who autonomously decide their political and economic affairs and development. But, as noted by many authors (de Tocqueville 1856; Balibar Reference Balibar2004; Hardt and Negri Reference Hardt and Negri2000), national sovereignty does not liberate the people but instead enforces a form of subjection of individuals to the nation as the sovereign; sovereignty, to exist, namely demands from its subjects that they obey the laws, and therefore also submit to rules and practices, which are designed so that they respect and reproduce the established order of sovereignty (Foucault Reference Foucault2007, 98). Such power tends to exclude anyone who is not willing to submit to the rules of the political order. In this manner, the process of Slovenian emancipation, which was perceived as a path to democracy and greater respect for human rights, actually accomplished this aim by trying to diminish the threatening elements by eliminating, excluding, and finally violating the human rights of the Erased, who were in principle viewed as a threat to sovereignty. National sovereignty appeared as the power of a nation-state to defeat those who oppose its will and—in François Furet’s words (cited in Kates Reference Kates2002, 6)—used democratic ideology to rule in a despotic manner. What can be seen in relation to the Erased is that within the logic of national sovereignty, the value of human life is decided upon political parameters, which renders null the idea of universal human rights regardless of political identity.

Second, it is also important to understand that violent state crimes flow from the structure of the nation-state, where national sovereignty is situated within the centralized state. This inherent connection between the sovereignty of the nation and the state brings a merging of both in a political sense. Therefore, it is possible, even inevitable, to defend them simultaneously (as, for instance, when the state is at stake, the nation is also endangered). This relationship brings the state to function as a fort of the nation and its sovereignty. The overpowering impact of raison d’état has been recognized by Nietzsche in his allegory “I, the state, am the people!” (as quoted in in Balibar Reference Balibar2004, 134); and by Étienne Balibar in his observation that “whenever the people is invoked, most often it is state interest that is speaking” (2004, 134) Hence, the fundamental paradox of this relationship lies in the argument that in order to protect the national sovereignty—and thus also the human rights of individuals within the nation—the state needs to be protected first, even if achieving this end obstructs the human rights of an individual. As evidently observed in the case of Erased, protecting national sovereignty ultimately manifests in treating individuals in line with the aims, objectives, and needs of the preservation, maintenance, or development of the state, which may in particular cases depart from the norms and commitments stemming from human rights law.

Third, the erasure is inevitably linked to the concept of the nation. In contemporary societies, the nation is perceived as a unified and undivided whole. The single will of the nation, which appears as a precondition for exercising sovereignty, rests on common identity and internal homogeneity, and at the same time excludes what remains outside of it. Such conditions, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000, 112) note, do not introduce democratic principles, but set the fundamental elements of totalitarianism and the continuation of extreme forms of racist nationalism. In the vocabulary of Hardt and Negri (Reference Hardt and Negri2000, 121), the nation does not tolerate the multitude as a multiplicity of wills, but depends on making one people with a common will out of the multitude while blocking the constructive interactions of differences within the multitude. In relation to that, Rousseau’s analogy appears especially compelling when he argues, “to protect the social contract from being a mere empty formula, therefore, it silently includes the undertaking that anyone who refuses to obey the general will is to be compelled to do so by the whole body . . . It means nothing less than that each individual will be forced to be free” (Rousseau Reference Rousseau1987, 25–26). Jean Jacques Rousseau provides an example of a radical ideology of popular sovereignty where any (ab)use of coercive power may be deemed acceptable as long it is exercised in the name of the people. Such a concept of nation does not build upon respect for freedom, especially in the view that it entails the governing of individual interests and adjusting them to the aims of the “public good,” while any attempt to operate against or diverge from these objectives is correspondingly suppressed or sanctioned.

As I have shown, the described diagram of sovereignty—nation—state requires that individuals fully submit to its legal and political order. What is important in this aspect, and in relation to respect for human rights, is that such an organization and functioning of power produces “bare life,” an empty space, a condition of complete rightlessness, where individuals (nonmembers) are left without a legitimate political identity. As highlighted by Arendt, the nation-state is not a place where the opinions of members (nationals) and nonmembers (foreigners) are equally significant, nor are their actions equally effective. By the same token, Agamben (Reference Agamben2000) adds that there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state that would allow for the existence of something like the pure human as the bearer of human rights because, even in the best of cases, the human rights of those who are left out of the community can be claimed only by inclusion in the polity; likewise the Erased claimed their human rights only after the Constitutional Court declared their irregular residential status unconstitutional and, moreover, they could only claim their rights as permanent residents and not as “bare humans” or irregular foreigners. Following Ayten Gündoğdu’s (Reference Gündoğdu2012, 17) thoughts on inclusive exclusion, the erasure can be seen as part of biopolitical sovereignty, which constitutes the political life. In that sense, while the erasure may have excluded individuals from political life, at the same time, because their erasure was founded in laws that institute, sustain, and define the political community, it therefore included them through exclusion. Consequently, violations of human rights such as erasure cannot be considered a temporary deviation from “democratic” political norms residing in the nation-state, as generally perceived, but exactly as the implementation and enforcement of this norm, its enactment in line with the political principles of the sovereignty—nation—state power diagram to which individuals’ interest and lives are largely subjected.