The Polis and the Citizen: What Ancient Greek Political Thought Can – and Cannot – Teach Bosnia and Herzegovina About a Civic State

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the phrase „civic state“ rarely remains a neutral constitutional term for long. To some, it promises equal political status regardless of ethnic identity. To others, it conceals a majoritarian project that could weaken the safeguards of the constituent peoples. The disagreement is not merely about electoral engineering. It reflects a deeper dispute over the nature of the political community: Who constitutes the state? What makes someone a citizen in the full political sense? How much unity does a plural society need – and how much can it endure before unity becomes domination?

Classical Greek political thought cannot resolve these questions for Bosnia and Herzegovina. The ancient polis was neither a modern nation-state nor a liberal constitutional democracy. Its citizenship was radically exclusionary: women, slaves, resident foreigners, and many others who lived and worked in the city did not participate as equal citizens.¹ Any attempt to present Athens or Aristotle as ready-made models for the twenty-first century would therefore be historically mistaken and normatively troubling. Yet Plato, Aristotle and Thucydides remain useful because they formulated, with unusual clarity, the basic questions that every constitutional order must answer. Their value lies not in the institutions they would have us copy, but in the distinctions they compel us to make.

Citizen as a Political Role, Not Merely a Legal Label

Aristotle’s most influential definition of the citizen is functional. A citizen is not simply a person born or residing within a territory. In the fullest sense, the citizen is someone who shares in deliberative and judicial office – in other words, someone who participates in governing the community.² Citizenship is therefore not exhausted by a passport, residence or private enjoyment of rights. It describes a relationship of political agency. The citizen belongs to the polity because the citizen takes part in shaping its common affairs.

This idea carries an obvious warning for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Article I(7) of the Constitution establishes citizenship of Bosnia and Herzegovina, while Article I(2) defines the country as a democratic state governed by the rule of law and based on free and democratic elections.³ At the same time, the constitutional design reserves membership in the Presidency and the state House of Peoples to persons who combine a prescribed ethnic affiliation with residence in the appropriate entity.⁴ The result is a gap between citizenship as a universal legal status and citizenship as an equal capacity to participate in the highest institutions of government.

The European Court of Human Rights exposed that gap in Sejdić and Finci, Zornić and Pilav. These judgments differ in their facts, but they identify the same structural problem: a citizen may belong to Bosnia and Herzegovina and still be excluded from standing for particular offices because of ethnic self-identification, refusal to identify ethnically or place of residence.⁵ As of June 2026, the Sejdić and Finci group remained under the supervision of the Committee of Ministers, demonstrating that the conflict between equal citizenship and the existing electoral design is not merely historical but ongoing.⁶

From an Aristotelian perspective, this is not a secondary imperfection. It reaches the political meaning of citizenship itself. A person who is permanently subject to public power but categorically denied an equal opportunity to participate in exercising it occupies an incomplete civic position.

That does not mean that a civic constitution must reduce every institution to an undifferentiated numerical majority. Aristotle did not equate political equality with identical institutional treatment in all circumstances. Nor does modern constitutional law prohibit arrangements designed to protect vulnerable communities. The more precise civic demand is that citizenship must remain the foundational political status. Group safeguards may qualify the exercise of majority rule, but they should not transform ethnic affiliation into a permanent title to public office or make non-affiliation a constitutional disability.

How Much Unity Can a Political Community Bear?

Plato’s Republic imagines the just city as a highly integrated moral order. Its guardians should experience the city’s successes and losses as shared, so that the polity becomes as unified as possible.⁷ The attraction of this image is easy to understand in a fragmented society. A state requires some shared loyalty, a willingness to accept common institutions, and a sense that public losses and achievements belong to everyone rather than exclusively to separate groups.

Aristotle’s response, however, is especially relevant to Bosnia and Herzegovina. He argues that a polis is, by its nature, a plurality. If political unity is pushed too far, the city ceases to be a city. A polis is not a household enlarged, nor a single person multiplied. It is an association of different persons and groups who become politically connected without becoming identical.⁸

This distinction exposes two opposite errors in the Bosnian debate. The first is to treat the country as no more than a negotiated coexistence of three self-contained ethnic collectivities. On that view, institutions belong primarily to peoples, while individual citizens appear as derivatives of collective membership. The second error is to assume that a civic state requires political identities to disappear from constitutional view. That approach mistakes equality for sameness and risks turning the language of citizenship into a vehicle for denying the relevance of historically formed communities.

A defensible civic state lies between these extremes. It does not abolish collective identities, but it denies that any identity can exhaust the political personality of the citizen. It protects groups from domination while also protecting individuals from being involuntarily absorbed into groups. In Aristotelian terms, the polity must be sufficiently united to act as a common state, yet sufficiently plural to remain a political association rather than an imposed uniformity.

Equality Before the Law – and the Ancient Limits of Equality

In Thucydides’s account of Pericles’s Funeral Oration, Athens presents itself as a democracy in which the laws provide equal justice in private disputes and public advancement depends more on ability than on social class.⁹ The passage has exercised enormous influence on later democratic imagination. It connects civic dignity, equality before the law, and public service.

But the historical limits of this ideal must remain visible. The equality celebrated in classical Athens applied within a narrowly bounded citizen body. The ancient city demonstrates that vigorous citizen participation can coexist with profound exclusion. This is precisely why „returning to the Greeks“ cannot mean recovering an allegedly pure civic model. Modern constitutionalism must preserve the participatory insight of the polis while rejecting its restricted understanding of who counts as a political equal.

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Constitution already contains the normative materials for that transformation. Its Preamble invokes human dignity, liberty, equality, peace, justice, tolerance and reconciliation. Article I(2) defines Bosnia and Herzegovina as a democratic state under the rule of law. Article II guarantees directly applicable human rights and prohibits discrimination. Yet the same constitutional text organizes central institutions through ethnic and territorial categories.¹⁰ The constitutional order therefore speaks in two grammars: the universal grammar of persons and citizens, and the power-sharing grammar of constituent peoples.

The Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina did not treat these grammars as mutually exclusive in its Constituent Peoples decision. It described Bosnia and Herzegovina as a democratic multi-ethnic state and emphasized pluralism, fair procedures, peaceful relations, effective participation and compromise. It also rejected both ethnic domination and territorial segregation.¹¹ This reasoning is important because it shows that the constitutional alternative is not „citizens or peoples“. The real question is how to arrange their relationship so that collective protection does not negate individual equality, and individual equality does not become an excuse for collective domination.

What Would a Civic Bosnia and Herzegovina Mean?

The phrase „civic state“ is too often used as a slogan when it should function as a constitutional test. It should not dictate one complete electoral model in advance. It should, however, impose several limits on every acceptable model.

First, every citizen must possess equal civic dignity. No person should be required to adopt an ethnic identity in order to enjoy the full range of political rights. Ethnic self-identification must remain free, and the refusal to identify must not produce inferior citizenship.

Second, mechanisms of collective representation should serve protection against domination, not establish ownership over institutions. A constituent people may have a legitimate claim to effective participation. It does not follow that particular political parties possess a permanent right to speak for that people, or that citizens must be constitutionally sorted into closed political compartments.

Third, residence should connect citizens to institutions, not convert territory into an ethnic credential. A Serb living in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a Bosniak or Croat living in Republika Srpska, a member of a national minority or a citizen who identifies only with Bosnia and Herzegovina should not encounter a different ceiling of political possibility because of where he or she lives.

Finally, civic statehood requires more than changing election rules. Aristotle’s citizen rules and is ruled in turn; citizenship is learned through practice. A civic political community therefore depends on institutions in which citizens encounter one another as participants in common affairs: public education that does not cultivate mutually exclusive constitutional memories, public services experienced as common goods, legislatures capable of genuine deliberation and courts whose decisions bind political power. Without such practices, „the citizen“ remains a constitutional abstraction, invoked ceremonially but displaced in everyday politics by party, territory and ethnicity.

The Civic State as a Common Political Home

Ancient Greek thought offers Bosnia and Herzegovina no constitutional blueprint. Its cities were small, its democracy direct and its citizen body exclusionary. But it offers three enduring insights. Citizenship is a practice of participation, not merely a formal status. A political community needs a common good, but excessive unity destroys the plurality from which politics arises. And equality loses its meaning when the community itself controls access to the category of persons entitled to be equal.

For Bosnia and Herzegovina, a civic state should therefore not mean a state without Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs, national minorities or the many citizens whose identities do not fit neatly into constitutional boxes. It should mean a state in which none of those identities is a condition for being a citizen in the fullest political sense. Collective identities may be recognized and protected, but citizenship must provide the common constitutional ground on which their members – and those who reject collective classification – meet as political equals.

The most valuable Greek lesson is thus neither Plato’s unity nor an idealized image of Athenian democracy. It is Aristotle’s understanding that a polis exists where different people share in ruling and being ruled. Bosnia and Herzegovina will move closer to a civic state not when its differences disappear, but when those differences cease to determine whose citizenship is politically complete.

1. Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles, and Ideology 86-95 (J.A. Crook Trans., Univ. Of Okla. Press 1999); Aristotle, Politics 1277b33-1278a13 (C.D.C. Reeve trans., Hackett Publ’g Co. 1998). The citizen body of classical Athens consisted principally of free adult male citizens, excluding women, slaves, and resident foreigners from formal political participation.
2. Aristotle, Politics 1275a22-1276b15, 1277a25-1277b32 (C.D.C. Reeve trans., Hackett Publ’g Co. 1998). Aristotle connects citizenship with participation in deliberative and judicial functions and with the ability to rule and be ruled.
3. General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina annex 4 and Official Gazette of Bosnia and Herzegovina, No. 25/2009 – Amendment I, arts. I(2), I(7), Dec. 14, 1995, 35 I.L.M. 75 (1996).
4. General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina annex 4 and Official Gazette of Bosnia and Herzegovina, No. 25/2009 – Amendment I, pmbl., arts. I(2), I(7), IV(1), V(1), Dec. 14, 1995, 35 I.L.M. 75 (1996). Article IV limits the state House of Peoples to Bosniak, Croat, and Serb delegates, while Article V prescribes the ethnic and territorial composition of the Presidency.
5. Sejdić & Finci v. Bosnia & Herzegovina [GC], App. Nos. 27996/06 & 34836/06, §§ 43-50, 54-56 (Eur. Ct. H.R. Dec. 22, 2009); Zornić v. Bosnia & Herzegovina, App. No. 3681/06, §§ 40-43 (Eur. Ct. H.R. July 15, 2014); Pilav v. Bosnia & Herzegovina, App. No. 41939/07, §§ 45-49 (Eur. Ct. H.R. June 9, 2016).
6. Council of Europe, Committee of Ministers, Sejdić and Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Status of Execution, HUDOC-EXEC (last examined June 2026). The case group concerns discrimination resulting from ethnic-affiliation and residence requirements governing eligibility for the Presidency and the House of Peoples
7. Plato, Republic 462a-466d (G.R.F. Ferrari ed., Tom Griffith trans., Cambridge Univ. Press 2000). Plato presents the sharing of pleasures and pains, particularly among the guardian class, as an instrument for producing political unity.
8. Aristotle, Politics 1261a10-1263b36 (C.D.C. Reeve trans., Hackett Publ’g Co. 1998). Aristotle argues against reducing the city to excessive unity because a political community necessarily consists of persons who differ in kind and function.
9. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 2.37.1-.2 (Martin Hammond trans., Oxford Univ. Press 2009). The speech attributed to Pericles associates Athenian democracy with equality before the law, merit, freedom, and participation in public life.
10. General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina annex 4 and Official Gazette of Bosnia and Herzegovina, No. 25/2009 – Amendments I, pmbl., arts. I(2), II(1)-(4), IV, V, Dec. 14, 1995, 35 I.L.M. 75 (1996). The Preamble simultaneously refers to Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs as constituent peoples, „along with Others“, and to the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina
11. Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Case No. U 5/98-III, Partial Decision, §§ 54-60 (July 1, 2000). The Court connected the democratic character of Bosnia and Herzegovina with pluralism, fair procedures, peaceful relations, effective participation, compromise, and the prohibition of ethnic domination and segregation.