Wolfgang Petritsch (born 26 August 1947) is an Austrian diplomat who served as the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1999 to 2002.
Early life and studies
Petritsch was born to a Carinthian Slovene family in Klagenfurt; he grew up in Glainach in a mixed Slovene/German-speaking environment. Besides his native tongues, he speaks English, French, and Serbo-Croatian.
Petritsch studied history, German studies, political science and law at the University of Vienna, where he obtained a PhD in 1972. He was also a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. From 1977 to 1983 he was secretary and press officer to Federal Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, about whom he published a biography in 2011.
Diplomatic career
After one year at the Austrian Mission to the OECD in Paris, between 1984 and 1992 Petritsch served as Director of the Austrian Press and Information Service Agency in the United States and as Minister Plenipotentiary to Austria's Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York. In 1992–1994 he served as Acting Head of the Department for Multilateral Economic Co-operation in the Austrian foreign ministry, as well as in the latter year as Head of Department for Information on European Affairs in the Federal Chancellery, supervising the Austrian Federal Government's information campaign on Austria's accession to the EU. Between 1995 and 1997 he headed the Department for International Relations of the City of Vienna.
From 1997 to 1999 he was Austrian Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. During the same period, between October 1998 and July 1999, he also served as the European Union Special Representative for Kosovo. In such a vest he chaired the EU negotiating teams in February and March 1999 at the Kosovo peace talks in Rambouillet and Paris.
In 2004–2005 he chaired the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and was in charge of its reform.