526 S. POGONYI One may wonder how it is possible that Central and Eastern European regimes could implement ethnically selective citizenship policies that seem to be in stark contrast with European principles of non-discrimination without the intervention of the international community. It may seem particularly puzzling that even those CEE states that joined the EU introduced citizenship policies with the clear purpose of ‘ethnic engineering’. The main reason for this is that European citizenship norms have for long focused only on immigration. Until the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the unavailability of citizenship was a problem of Western European states that were unwilling to offer membership for immigrants. Concerning state succession, very few international norms and precedents existed. Thus, newly independent, restored and new states in the postCommunist space enjoyed broad sovereignty in whom to attribute citizenship to and whom to deny it to. More recently, the Council of Europe as well as the European Union could pressure many of the new states and demand more inclusive citizenship policies that make membership available for parts of the resident non-citizen populations that were denied citizenship at independence (Kelley, 2010; Kochenov, 2004; Krasniqi, 2015; Kruma, 2013). As a result, citizenship attribution and naturalization laws have become more inclusive in the post-Communist region, although statelessness is still an issue in Latvia and Estonia. But internally more inclusive citizenship policies have not fully resolved the issue of ethnic engineering. As mentioned earlier, ethnic citizenship regimes are marked not only by internally restrictive, but also by internally overinclusive regulations. As part of ethnic nation building projects, former Socialist bloc countries introduced facilitated citizenship policies targeting non-resident ethnic kin in order to strengthen the domination of the titular ethnic group. As Peters has noted in his work on selective citizenship policies, there is a very fine line between legitimate preferential admission policies available for non-resident co-ethnics, on the one hand, and prohibited racial and ethnic discrimination on the other (Peters, 2010, p. 666). In terms of expansive kin-citizenship, the EU and other international organizations have been even less successful than in the case of stateless persons. The primary aim of international law on citizenship attribution is to prevent statelessness. International regulations thus try to facilitate the naturalization of resident individuals, but not much attention is given to over-expansive citizenship attribution. Though international human right documents also emphasize the importance of non-discrimination standards, the principle of equality concerns citizens only, and does not rule out the legal possibility of preferential treatment of co-ethnics in the acquisition of citizenship. Ethnic selectivity: the normative problem Taking into account the normative problems of ethnic selectivity in citizenship, it is quite peculiar that such policies are still in place in countries where citizenship attribution regulations are subject not only to national, but also international norms. In terms of citizenship policy, the European Union is inevitably the best example of international legal harmonization. Nonetheless, as the above examples illustrate, citizenship is still used as a means of ethnic engineering in several European states. This seems a puzzle, bearing in mind that determining membership in a political community through ethnic criteria appears to be a blatant violation of basic liberal and democratic norms. And the