The Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina: ‘Captured Citizenship’ in a ‘Captured State’?

In 2025, Bosnia and Herzegovina will reach the 30-year of the Peace Agreement being signed in Dayton and Paris (November–December 1995), and the 20-year anniversary of the Venice Commission's Opinion on the constitutional situation. The early 2000s saw the opening of EU integration and accession horizons for this country and other Western Balkans, exposing the ambiguities and contradictions of its socio-political order. The citizenship regime became a key point of EU conditionality. In this paper, we analyse the constitutional order imposed on BiH by the GFAP in terms of its enduring impact on the effective possibility of citizens' participation in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the common political community. We start from the hypothesis of the existence of a 'captured citizenship', blocked in a state captured by the ethnonational elites, institutions and mindsets. While the political and academic discussion continues to focus on identifying the most effective power-sharing model – federation, confederation or consociation – to ensure formal citizenship and enhance the performance of political institutions and administrative bodies, our objective is to explore alternatives that would ensure better guarantees for the participation of each and every citizen in a substantial citizenship. Finally, the paper sets out to consider the effects and limits of EU politics and policies of conditionality on the empowerment of citizens in a reformed constitutional order. These questions define the framework within which the complexity of the case has been explored and analysed in the broader context of EU integration and enlargement.