ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an analysis of the European Union’s involvement in conflict resolution in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It surveys European approaches to the country from its involvement in a number of attempts to end the Bosnian War of 1992 to 1995, through a period in which the Union attempted to promote reform of the consociational constitution established by the 1995 Dayton Agreement, to a more recent focus on promoting economic reform and the seeming abandonment of the constitutional reform agenda. The central argument of the chapter is that EU officials scaled down their demands for constitutional reform over time as they were faced with resistance by elites, whose nationalism they saw as reflecting deep divisions in Bosnian society. Rather than attempting to transform antagonistic identities, therefore, the EU has therefore pursued a relatively conservative strategy of conflict regulation. The consociational institutions of the Dayton constitution have been framed as European by EU actors through a process of framing that portrays BiH as Europe in microcosm.
