This article focuses on state recognition in the European context and on the admission of states to the Council of Europe after the end of the Cold War. It argues that two global trends identified by John Dugard in the 1980s have continued since then: a common approach to state recognition has been adopted and the criteria for state recognition have increasingly been given normative content. This reflects that the constitutive theory of state recognition continued to be popular. The two trends have not automatically resulted in a more legal approach to the issues, as the case study of Bosnia and Herzegovina illustrates.