Time & Perspective Quote by Paddy Ashdown

A deadline turns state-building into a sprint, and Ashdown admits it without romance. The “second job” framing is doing quiet work here: it shrinks the enormity of postwar Bosnia into a managerial assignment, as if reconstruction were an item on a crowded to-do list. That understatement is strategic. It casts him as a pragmatic operator, not a grand theorist, and it normalizes the extraordinary reach he held as High Representative, when “my power” could mean imposing laws, reshaping institutions, even removing elected officials.

The most revealing phrase is “the door was closing.” Bosnia’s future gets pictured as a narrow border crossing controlled elsewhere. The European Union isn’t merely a destination; it’s an external clock that dictates the tempo of domestic democracy. Ashdown’s urgency carries a double edge: it signals sincere anxiety about a fragile peace hardening into permanent dysfunction, but it also telegraphs the paternalism of the era’s international stewardship. “I wanted to get Bosnia through before it shut” makes the country sound like luggage being rushed onto a departing train.

Context matters: early 2000s enlargement was real, not rhetorical. Neighboring states were being pulled toward Brussels, and Bosnia risked being stranded by its Dayton architecture, ethnic veto points, and corrupt patronage networks. Ashdown’s intent is to justify speed and centralization as necessity. The subtext: reforms weren’t only about Bosnia becoming “modern”; they were about being legible to European gatekeepers in time. Integration, here, is less a shared dream than a ticking procedural window, and he’s betting that institutional shortcuts now will pay off as sovereignty later.