(Page 2 of 30) - Banana Splits: Nested and Competing Regimes in the Transatlantic Banana Trade Dispute authored by Alter, Karen.

Introduction

Advanced industrial democracies belong to a plethora of international institutions.

Either individually or collectively, they are members of universal organizations (UN
agencies), regional blocs (e.g. EU, NAFTA, ASEAN) and issue-specific institutions (e.g.
WTO, NATO, OECD, WHO). These international institutions can be nested within each
other or overlap with each other, sometimes leading to conflicting commitments for their
member states. What do countries do when the requirements of membership in one
institution contradict those of membership in another institution? How do the nesting and
the overlapping of international institutions complicate the strategies of national decision-
makers? Does the nested and overlapping nature of international commitments in itself
generate a distinct kind of politics?

The possibility of conflicting international commitments has become an important

issue in international law, with legal scholars discussing the problems deriving from the
“fragmentation” of jurisdictions and debating the wisdom of introducing a hierarchical
system versus retaining ad hoc flexibility at the international level. Yet the nested and
overlapping nature of international commitments has not yet attracted too many studies in
the international relations literature. Political scientists have examined how states choose
different institutional forums for international cooperation, and there have been studies on
“forum-shopping” -- that is, self-interested actors seeking the institutional forum which
they expect to be most favorable for them, and even playing different forums off against
each other so as to get their desired outcome. These perspectives examine the issue of
overlapping and nested international commitments in terms of the opportunities that
strategic actors can exploit. Our focus is on how the existence of choice and multiple
institutional mechanisms complicates the task of national decision-makers. It is costly to
invest resources into making a policy, especially when it is likely that this policy may be
condemned, contradicted, or supplanted by another authoritative institution. How do
overlapping and nested institutions constrain decision-makers? This issue is especially
central in dispute resolution where the actors involved are asked specifically to help
reconcile the conflicts across the rule systems.

This paper is an inductive exploration of how nesting/overlapping shape the

behavior of decision-makers and, as a result, create distinct political dynamics. The
subject of investigation is the decade-long international conflict over bananas between
the European Union (EU) and the United States. Why this dispute persisted for eleven
years is itself a puzzle. The case involved neither significant factual disagreements, nor
disagreements over deep-seated values. It did not touch on the Pandora’s box of
agriculture, a traditional source of transatlantic acrimony. Nor did the US and EU have
high stakes in the dispute. The US and Europe do not have significant banana industries,
thus this was not an issue that mobilized politically powerful domestic constituencies.
And bananas accounts for only .03% of transatlantic trade. In addition, many actors in
Europe itself disliked the policy from the beginning. Our analytical focus is on how the
nesting of the banana regime- within the EU, the Lomé Convention, and the WTO-
contributed to the dispute by shaping the behavior of decision-makers, making a dispute
which was rather strait-forward very difficult to resolve.