No abstract

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.

No abstract

The article critically examines EU-Australia relations through the negotiation of the 1994 and 2008 Agreements between Australia and the European Community on Trade in Wine. EU-Australia relations are often characterised as defined by Australia's focus on the UK and the EU's agricultural policies. This article moves beyond these assumptions and analyses the negotiation of the wine trade agreements through three factors: the pattern of political institutions, power asymmetry and subjective utility of non-agreement alternatives. It argues that perceptions, miscalculations, and misunderstanding have had an impact on how these factors shaped negotiation outcomes. These negotiations are an under-studied case in the development of EU-Australian relations, and are useful in understanding how the perceptions of negotiators shape outcomes in the EU's negotiations with Australia.