Throughout the course of this book, I have stressed the importance of enabling citizens to shape their own relation to the polity. Correspondingly, I have also stressed the need to create representative institutions that are open and responsive to the full diversity of interests and opinions in society. This is not to suggest that these ideals can be met in all instances. In divided societies, the threat of violence will often mean that ethnic claims will have to take priority over other kinds of claims, at least in the first instance. However, in so far as the received view that democracy requires citizens to share a sense of common national identity is correct, greater space must be made in the longer run for alternative forms and avenues of political expression. That space allows citizens to engage politically along non-ethnic lines, if and when they choose to do so. This is not to deny the saliency of ethnicity to political life in divided societies. On the contrary, once ethnic groups have become highly politicised, once they have demanded rights and protections as an ethnic group, nothing short of an institutional solution will meet those demands. Nevertheless, the point remains that citizens will not be able to think of themselves as sharing a common national identity unless there is some common basis upon which they can engage with one another on non-ethnic terms.

Civil society provides one such basis. More specifically, the various voluntary associations that it contains enable citizens from a wide diversity of social, economic and political backgrounds to come together and deliberate about issues such as the provision of public services, gender equality, health care, education, the environment and so forth. Civil issues are different to ethnic issues in the sense that they cannot be reduced to the interests of some particular ethnic group, but instead pertain to citizens in general.