Once again, Bosnia is a wake-up call for Europe

The European Union’s credibility as a security actor will not only hinge on its neighbourhood, it will also hinge on its ability to minimally manage hard-core files under its direct responsibility, particularly of those countries that have an official European integration perspective. If Europe is also struggling there, where the EU’s transformative power should wield maximum clout, then there is a fundamental problem of approach, beyond the specific challenges of context – an approach that thus must be revisited, in the context of the strategic stock-taking EU leaders agreed for 2015.

Bosnia confirms such a fundamental problem of approach. In this light, years after an unofficial change of command from American/NATO leadership around Dayton to European tutelage through enlargement, the country’s relevance cannot be sufficiently overstated – not least because its 1990s descent into the abyss was a catalyst for efforts towards a European foreign and security policy in the first place.

http://eeas.europa.eu/bosnia_and_herzegovina/index_en.htm http://eeas.europa.eu/bosnia_and_herzegovina/index_en.htm

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