In the shadows: Bosnia’s capital struggles to assert control over a fragmented state. Photograph: Christian T Joergensen/EUP & Images

Carl Bildt was the first international “viceroy” to run post-war Bosnia. He would have liked, in a manner of speaking, to have been the last one, too.

Fourteen years after becoming the first high representative for the country in 1995 at the end of the 42-month war, the Swedish foreign minister launched a sudden and bold attempt last October to close down the office, or OHR.

Personal ambition looked like a key ingredient in the scheme. Western policymakers have been talking for years about closing down the Office of the High Representative. But the timing is never quite right.

For Bildt, however, timing was everything. He pounced in the middle of Sweden’s six-month EU presidency and in the run-up to the decisions on the new posts of European Council president and foreign policy chief created by the Lisbon Treaty. Together with the Americans and latterly Olli Rehn, outgoing enlargement commissioner, Bildt ordered Bosnia’s bickering political leaders to “last chance” talks at the Butmir military base by Sarajevo airport on a new constitutional dispensation.

If the sundry Bosnian rivals could agree on a new deal aimed at reversing the entrenched dysfunctionality of their riven state, the OHR would be closed. A sovereign Bosnia-Herzegovina would then proceed onwards and upwards towards “Euro-Atlantic integration” – to EU and NATO membership.

The pay-off for Bildt might have been big – a foreign policy coup for Europe under Swedish leadership and a strong paragraph in the job application being penned for another high representative post – the new one for European foreign and security policy, since awarded to Catherine Ashton of Britain.

Alas, Bildt’s scheme backfired. The “last chance” formula was swiftly dropped, a casualty of intractable Bosnian realities. Instead the Butmir negotiations became a “process”.

The international ambassadors of the 55-strong Peace Implementation Council that oversees the OHR in Bosnia met in November and, yet again, had second thoughts about closing down the office.

The Bildt initiative flopped, although the talks will drag on. The question is whether the burst of activity has done more harm than good.

On the plus side, the involvement of Bildt, Rehn, and Jim Steinberg, the US deputy se......