The European Union's approach to conflict resolution: Insights from the constitutional reform process in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article sets out to challenge a core assumption of much of the recent literature on the role of the European Union in conflict resolution, namely that the Union's approach aims at the transformation of conflicts over and above their management. It does so through an analysis of the EU's engagement with the process of constitutional reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Making use of discourse analysis of EU policy documents and speeches by key actors, supplemented by interviews with policy-makers in Brussels and in Bosnia, I argue that the EU's approach is based on the acceptance and attempted accommodation of distinct and antagonistic ethnic identities rather than any attempt at their transformation. While EU officials are highly critical of nationalist politicians in Bosnia and praise the efforts of civil society organisations that attempt to overcome ethnic divisions, they nonetheless view Bosnia through an ‘ethnic conflict’ paradigm that sees resistance to constitutional reform by nationalist elites as an inevitable symptom of deeper divisions in Bosnian society. Based on this reading, I conclude that EU conflict resolution policy is much more conservative than those stressing the Union's transformative power in conflict situations envisage.