Trade policy is among the EU's most significant capabilities in promoting values including human rights. Yet trade policy and the EU's values‐based foreign policy are often in tension. Scholarship on the social dimension of trade policy has emphasized the tension between values and the EU's commercial interests. Human rights and conditionality clauses have not been the focus of analysis, yet conditionality is one of the EU's most visible links between the trade agenda and its values‐based foreign policy. Analyzing the EU's decision‐making in negotiating human rights conditionality, this paper employs the EU–Singapore free trade agreement and its negotiation as an in‐depth single case study. The tension between commercial interests and values results in decision‐makers promoting incoherent interests. We argue that organizationally defined preferences and issue salience circumscribed the Parliament's impact on decision‐making, resulting in concessions on human rights conditionality with Singapore.

Increasingly, trade agendas are expanding to include non-commercial objectives such as the promotion of fundamental political and human rights. Although the European Parliament (EP) positions itself as an advocate of such objectives in the conclusion of European Union (EU) trade agreements, it rarely insists on them in negotiations. Yet, in the negotiations with Canada, the EP successfully took a tough stance on a human rights conditionality clause. Why did the EP invest political resources in insisting on conditionality in the agreement with Canadaa country which is among the top five regarding fundamental rights? We argue that, due to limited organizational capacity, composite actors, such as the EP, have to select 'strategic issues' among political events that make them appear as unique supporters of public interest. In this context, composite actors factor in saliency in their utility calculation of investing political resources in a policy issue.

The behaviour of regional powers towards their own regions is often volatile in the developing world, which leads to unstable integration processes. This article argues that this volatility is due to limited intra‐regional gains from regional integration in developing regions, which implies that the behaviour of regional powers is constrained by extra‐regional economic interests. When regional integration is not in conflict with extra‐regional interests, regional powers provide regional leadership. However, when extra‐regional interests are in conflict with regional integration, regional powers become regional Rambos. This argument is illustrated with the two examples of Brazil's behaviour in Mercosur and South Africa's behaviour in SADC. Both regional powers provided leadership during some periods of the regional integration processes, but became Rambos when important extra‐regional interests were at stake. This damaged regional integration processes in South America and Southern Africa considerably.

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Trade policy is among the EU's major capabilities to promote fundamental rights in developing countries. Conditionality clauses thus accompany EU trade agreements and tariff preferences under the Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP). Yet while conditionality in trade agreements have come under the spotlight and the EP has stepped up its engagement in this area of decision‐making, the GSP has largely not been addressed in scholarly debate. This article fills this void in the literature by exploring the conditions under which the EP asks for trade sanctions on beneficiaries of the GSP. I argue that the EP invests political resources in a beneficiary when this country is salient under EU development cooperation. Hence, I observe a horizontal spill‐over effect whereby EP trade activities are driven by a country's salience in the area of development cooperation. However, this effect occurs only in the absence of security interests and the lack of development performance.