Member state-building versus peacebuilding: the contradictions of EU state-building in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article explores the European Union's (EU's) intervention in Bosnia and the problems it has encountered so far in promoting a ‘functioning state’ and compliance with EU reforms. Drawing on the second generation of Europeanisation literature, this state of affairs can be explained as a result of high domestic adoption costs and normative inconsistencies in the application of conditionality on the part of the EU. However, this view assumes that the EU's efforts in Bosnia are intrinsically coherent and that in order for the EU to successfully promote its conditions, what is required are just some fine-tuning and more ‘cooperative’ local elites. This article contends that, in effect, the EU's enlargement policy, and in particular, its state-building agenda, is undermined by a series of internal contradictions: between the EU's technocratic approach and the politics of state-building; between state-strengthening and state-weakening dynamics associated with the EU's intervention; between the external promotion of EU demands and local ownership; and more generally, between member state-building and peacebuilding. It is only if these contradictions are acknowledged and better understood that we can begin to comprehend the potential but also the limitations of Europeanisation in Bosnia.