Countries

Thirteen countries, one turbulent century

There is a reason these thirteen guides read so differently from one another, and it is the twentieth century itself. A person born in 1910 in a Transcarpathian village could have died there in 1995 without ever leaving — and yet have been, in turn, a subject of the Kingdom of Hungary, a citizen of Czechoslovakia, of Hungary again, of the Soviet Union and finally of Ukraine. In this part of Europe, borders moved across people far more often than people moved across borders. When the Habsburg and Ottoman empires dissolved after 1918, the new states assigned citizenship not by where a family lived but by the municipality it formally belonged to — which is why a case today can turn on a homeland-right entry written into a town register before the First World War. Then came the ruptures that scattered the families these laws now reach for: Nazi persecution drove hundreds of thousands into exile; post-war decrees expelled and denaturalised millions more; the communist states stripped citizenship from those who fled across the Iron Curtain, and Romania made renunciation the price of an exit visa. After 1989, as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union dissolved into the states on this page, parliament after parliament wrote a way back into its citizenship law: Austria's declaration for descendants of those who fled the Nazi regime, the Czech and Slovak provisions for émigré families, Romania's restoration procedure, Hungary's simplified naturalisation reaching descendants of the old kingdom, Ukraine's citizenship by territorial origin. Poland, by contrast, never needed a restoration law at all, because Polish law holds that citizenship passed silently from parent to child unless a specific event in a specific year cut the line. Every one of these cases is therefore an exercise in legal history: the question is never only who your ancestor was, but which law was in force on the day of each birth, marriage, emigration and naturalisation in the line. The guides above set out, country by country, how we approach exactly that.