Abstract
Remaining true to the spirit and logic of the war-torn territories, the Dayton Peace Agreement highlights the interdependence of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s (B&H) 'local' problems with the wider region’s problems, and indeed, global problems. 25 years after the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement, we have gained a democracy without a people, a democracy with MP’s defined by their ethnicity, who, at their discretion, interpret the will of the people and dispose of the mandate entrusted to them by their convictions. This paper aims to open up the question of whether the Dayton Constitution alienated B&H’s citizens from their political community. Pointing to the process of alienation from citizenship, which is, among other things, caused by a constitutional architecture that does not conceive of the citizen as an abstract category, the author focuses more on the conditions in which voters are denied real political participation. In theoretical terms, this participation would mean not only resistance to ethnonationalism, but also the creation of opportunities for citizens to unite and make political-strategic, and long-term decisions important for the future of B&H.
Highlights
Citizenship as a concept fundamental to both law and politics, has numerous definitions, and one of them defines it as; through individual rights and belonging to a specific community (Kymlicka and Norman, 1995:283). It is through the concept of citizenship that political theory teaches us about the interactions between the individual and society, about; “the ways in which we live with others in a political community” (Lazar, 2013:1)
Thanks to the constitutional and political structure of the state, based on the ethnic principle and full constitutional and legal competencies of the entities, national or leading ethnic parties become the owners of Bosnian society as a whole, which devalues and limits any other form of citizenship and pan-ethnicity in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H)
Constitutional reform has been reduced to the issue of political agreements between representatives of the three ethnically dominant groups, who do not show interest in the integrative function of the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina
Summary
Citizenship as a concept fundamental to both law and politics, has numerous definitions, and one of them defines it as; through individual rights and belonging to a specific community (Kymlicka and Norman, 1995:283). It is through the concept of citizenship that political theory teaches us about the interactions between the individual and society, about; “the ways in which we live with others in a political community” (Lazar, 2013:1). We can understand citizenship within the context of nationality, and in terms of the Other and Otherness, because this symbiosis makes politics possible This process of constituting the nature of citizenship, requires that members of the political community develop certain qualities, rights, and virtues in order to distinguish themselves from foreigners, outsiders and, others. As Jelena Vasiljević notes, citizenships formulates the conditions of belonging to the political community
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