engleski

Citizenship in Croatia-Slavonia during the First World War

Citizenship is a multidimensional concept which can be defined as a belonging of an individual to a state which he acquires and losses in a special way and which gives him special rights and duties. As a multidimensional concept the citizenship includes the dimension of acquisition and loss of citizenship, the dimension of rights and obligations of citizens and the dimension of loyalty of citizens. Our main thesis is that the citizenship as a multidimensional concept is strongly connected with a society and that the changes in a society, especially a war, have big impact on it. We will elaborate our thesis on the case of Croatia-Slavonia during the First World War. In our analysis we will question the influence of the war on each dimension of citizenship. In the dimension of acquisition and loss of citizenship we can see that the war significantly influenced the practice of loss of citizenship by dismissal as well as the practice of loss of citizenship by absence in a way that made the loss of citizenship very difficult or in some cases even impossible. In the dimension of the rights and obligations the basic change has happened just before the war when the freedom of emigration of men was abolished. Since then the emigration of men has been possible only if the Ban of Croatia and the Hungarian Minister of National Defense gave special permission. In that way previous regulation by which the Croatian-Slavonian counties had autonomous power to issue passports has been significantly changed. Also, during the war the authorities strongly emphasized the importance of military service. The need for conscripts influenced the legal system in a way that meant break with the previous rule of allocation of only Austrian citizens in the Austrian part of the army and changing it in a rule by which it was possible to fill the Austrian troops for Galicia and Bukovina with the Hungarian-Croatian citizens. This indicates closeness of Austrian and Hungarian citizenship which became explicitly evident as a direct consequence of war. Finally, the war had changed attitude of authorities towards their own citizens which can be seen in introduction of ethnic criteria in the administrative practices. The use of ethnic criteria indicated the problems of functioning of citizenship as an ethnic neutral concept and accelerated its change from ethnically neutral to ethnically based concept.

Citizenship ; Croatia-Slavonia ; World War One

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