The Power Politics of Institutional Nesting and Overlap: Human Rights Conditionality in Europe.

You might think that the politics of conditionality in Europe are straightforward, that states want to proffer human rights abroad and therefore create rules designed to do so. However, they are not nearly so linear. Instead, overlapping and nested institutions shape the EU's politics of human rights conditionality by encouraging political opportunism that affects negotiations and implementation. The European Union (EU) is nested within the World Trade Organization (WTO) as well as within the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT). EU Member States belong to an overlapping regional regime governed by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) as well as a global human rights regime governed by the United Nations (UN). The EU's location within these regimes, combined with its drive to promote respect for human rights in other countries, is transforming the politics of repression around the world. And the EU is pushing its agenda one state at a time through the use of regional trade agreements (RTAs). This paper explores how nested and overlapping institutions shape the EU's politics of human rights conditionality by encouraging political opportunism. It argues that nesting and overlap create incentives for actors (1) to choose venues that allow them to get what they want, circumventing the rules they do not like; (2) to choose venues that allow them to challenge the rules they do not like and to gain personal power;(3) to invoke venues 'a la carte' to best legitimize their contentious actions, relying upon a particular venue to govern a specific issue but not others; and (4) to flip-flop between venues when their interests in implementation change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]