NATIONAL IDENTITIES 527 application of ethnically selective regulations has indeed served ethnically discriminatory political projects. How come that in the European Union such policies are still present? The answer for this lies in the controversial legal formulations regulating membership in the European Union. While citizenship attribution is still a domain reservé of European states, national citizenship regulations are subject to international treaties. The international regulations in Europe can have only a limited impact on national policies. But even then, ethnic discrimination is in clear violation of the most basic membership norms outlined in the European citizenship framework. The most important document regulating citizenship attribution in Europe, the Council of Europe’s 1997 European Convention of Nationality (hereafter ECN), makes a very clear case against ethnic discrimination. The Convention stipulates ‘rules of a State Party on nationality shall not contain distinctions or include any practice which amounts to discrimination on the grounds of sex, religion, race, color or national or ethnic origin’ (Council of Europe – ETS No. 166 – European Convention on Nationality, n.d., pt. art. 5. para. 1.). This formulation, however, was never intended to rule out membership rules that give preference to ‘ethnic’ kin populations living beyond their homeland. The guiding principle of the ECN is to ban signatories from denying citizenship to members of ethnic and national minorities residing within their territories. As mentioned above, successor states of the Soviet Union as well as Yugoslavia denied citizenship to minorities. While such exclusion clearly targeted undesired ethnic and national minorities, the discriminatory laws avoided ethnically discriminatory formulations. Successor states of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia attributed citizenship on the grounds of republican level membership, and curtailed the access of national minorities to citizenship. The ECN was designed to rule out such discriminatory policies by stipulating that in the case of state succession, all residents (rather than formal republic level citizens) of the successor states should be eligible for citizenship in the successor states (see article 20). The Explanatory Report also specifies what illegitimate discrimination on the grounds of ‘national or ethnic origin’ entails. The Explanatory Report explains that preferential treatment of non-resident ethnic kin-minorities does not necessarily amount to ethnic discrimination on the grounds of knowledge of the national language, descent, or place of birth (Council of Europe – Explanatory Report to the European Convention on Nationality (ETS No. 166), n.d., para. 40). The ECN also finds it normatively legitimate to offer facilitated citizenship for descendants of former citizens, noting that national origin defined as having ancestors with citizenship is not an indication of one’s ethnic origin (Council of Europe – ETS No. 166 – European Convention on Nationality, n.d., pt. art. 2 (a).) This would be hard to deny. Ethnic origin, or rather, as Max Weber defined it, the belief in common ethnic descent has little to do with ancestry defined in terms of citizenship. European soft law is even less restrictive with regard to the preferential citizenship policies facilitating the inclusion of ‘ethnic kin’ populations. The OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities in the 2008 Bolzano/Bozen Recommendations on National Minorities in Inter-State Relations outlining best practices as well as perils of non-resident citizenship points out that extraterritorial citizenship1 legislation may have severe negative effects, including the extension of sovereignty over the territory of other states. The HCNM contends that the preferential treatment of external kin minorities may create discrimination if the inclusion of non-resident ethnic kin is accompanied by the exclusion of resident aliens. At the same time, however, the Bolzano