British Foreign Policy in former Yugoslavia 1989-1999: Brotherhood and Unity Lost, gives a broad analysis of Britain’s foreign policy during the wars of Yugoslav secessions from 1992 to 1999. Normative approaches to Britain’s foreign policy during this period ‘have tended to place it’ in to two halves. The notion, there was a new morality in Britain’s foreign policy appeared after New Labour‘s election landslide on 1 May 1997. Robin Cook declared shortly after the victory there would be an ‘ethical dimension’ to Labour‘s foreign policy, and this appeared to chart new territory. As a result, this would be a departure from what former US Assistant Secretary of State, James Rubin, believed was the hyper-realism of the traditional British kind under British Prime Minister, John Major. The book includes interviews with key actors, provides new archive material and re-examines claims by the ‘New Orthodoxy’ which became prevalent after 1999.

This book discusses the impact of the process of accession to the European Union (EU) – i.e. Europeanisation – on the formulation of the ethnic identity of Bosnian Serbs and the political identity of Republika Srpska (RS) in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The centrepiece of the book is an examination of how it is possible that the expected effect of Europeanisation on ethnic identities in a post-conflict environment – a transformation of ethnic identities through desecuritisation – does not materialise in the case of BiH and the RS. The book starts from the assumption that the political elite in the RS uses Europeanisation as a context for the securitization of two sources of threats – the internal and external Other. This prevents the transformation of ethnic identities in BiH, and as a result also the desecuritisation of antagonisms among the ethnic groups of BiH. The results show that any attempt at a more active engagement by the EU and international community was interpreted by the RS political elite as Bosniak agenda aimed against the RS. In this respect, the book demonstrates that BiH’s EU accession process or a clearer EU perspective alone in scrutinized critical junctures did not outweigh the potential costs for the RS political elite if reforms aimed at creating a more functional BiH were to succeed. In all three analysed critical junctures, the political elite in RS presented motions for a more functional BiH as attempts to centralise the country and framed them as the beginning of the end for the RS as a political entity.