By Nicholas Walton BBC News, Sarajevo

Nikola Spiric will be the country's new prime minister

The national parliament in Bosnia-Hercegovina has approved a new government, four months after the country held general elections.

The prime minister will be the Bosnian Serb politician, Nikola Spiric.

The hope was that those elected would take over running the country from the international community for the first time since the Bosnian war.

But that now looks very unlikely because more than a decade on, ethnic matters are still dominating politics.

Distant prospect

The last four months of negotiations between politicians have been a reminder of how far Bosnia is from functioning as a normal country.

Since the end of the Bosnian war of the early 1990s, ultimate power has resided with the United Nations and European community, in the shape of an envoy known as the High Representative.

The plan was for most of those powers to be handed back to local politicians in June this year.

That now looks extremely unlikely to happen.

The negotiations between the different elected parties have shown that ethnic politics are still centre stage in Bosnia, and that the reforms that the international community was wanting to unify the country are still a distant prospect.

The current High Representative, Christian Schwarz-Schilling, was hoping that the possibility of taking on responsibility for running Bosnia would encourage the politicians to agree on reforms, but the opposite has happened.

If, as expected, the international community is forced to continue overseeing the running of Bosnia, Mr Schwarz-Schilling has been told he will be replaced.