There was an inverse-U-shaped relationship between the stability of democracy and support for binding human rights commitments. Moravcsik argues that governments turn to international enforcement when an international commitment effectively enforces the policy preferences of a particular government at a particular point in time against future domestic political alternatives. They try to "lock-in" credible domestic policies through international commitments. Governments will resort to this tactic when the benefits of reducing future political uncertainty outweigh the "sovereignty costs" of membership. Hence "self-binding" is of most use to newly established democracies.13
In contrast, dictatorships or transitional regimes oppose commitments, since such governments suffer large inconveniences from persistent challenge to their domestic order. Also, well established democracies tend to be reluctant to accept binding commitments since they incur an increased, if modest, risk of de facto nullification of domestic laws, of which they are usually proud of, without a corresponding increase in the expected stability of domestic democracy. Only when democracy is established but non-democratic groups pose real threats to its future is the reduction of political uncertainty likely to outweigh the inconvenience of supranational adjudication.
As an implication from this study, Moravscik expects to see a similar pattern of support from new democracies, suspicion from established democracies, and hostility from dictatorships to present day efforts to enforce human rights regimes more generally.14 Hence the consistent reluctance of the United States to accept multilateral constraints on its domestic human rights practices (for example, International Criminal Court negotiations).
Of course governments' attitudes in Europe changed over time and over the subsequent five decades all West European governments adopted the clauses and in many cases incorporated the ECHR into domestic law. On this aspect, Sikkink's explanation that the power of ideas shape understandings of national interest over the longer term seems to be the more appropriate analysis.
The adoption of human rights policies represented not the neglect of national interests. Human rights policies emerged because policy makers began to question the principled idea that a country's internal human rights practices are not a legitimate topic of foreign policy and the causal assumption that national interests are furthered by support of repressive regimes that violate the human fights of their citizens.15
Whether this tendency will continue to spread beyond Europe remains to be seen. But Moravcsik's study seems at least to encourage the value of "tying in" the newly established and unstable democracies to multilateral human fights regime.
In this section, I dealt only with international human rights regime as established institutions dealing with norms and legal procedures concerning human rights. In the next two sections, I will deal with UN intervention under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. This was formerly not considered to be part of established human rights institutions.
