The Limits of Foreign Authority
This chapter shows how foreign officials, like the High Representative and a range of Bosnian political elites, used mass publicity to legitimize and authorize their state-building actions and delegitimize those of their opponents. It investigates how Wolfgang Petritsch used the media to engage domestic politicians in attempts to guide their behavior toward foreign state-building goals, even as they sought to shape his actions to serve their own goals. In doing so, the chapter identifies political innovations as well as important limits to internationally instigated political transformation. In discursively stabilizing the ambivalence of his position, Petritsch relied upon and reproduced an image of postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina as caught in a transitory temporality, a temporary state of exception to the normal nation-state order of things. Operating according to a logic of ambivalence afforded Petritsch a calculated flexibility to tack back and forth between various positions of legitimacy and authority.