International Sanctions- Understanding their evolution
- jai ratnayake
- Jan 7
- 6 min read
Recently, many nations have utilized sanctions to penalize other nations; in particular economic sanctions on Iran, North Korea, and Russia by the US, Europe, and other nations. This blog post investigates the history and utilization of sanctions and their impact.
History of Sanctions
Economic sanctions have been around for a long time. The first recorded use of sanctions was in 432 BC, when the Athenian Empire banned traders from Megara from its marketplaces, thereby strangling the rival city state’s economy. However, in the 20th century, the use of economic sanctions became significantly more prominent. (Abughris). Sanctions shifted the boundary between war and peace, produced new ways to map and manipulate the fabric of the world economy, and altered thecourse of international law. "They caught on rapidly as an idea
propounded by political elites, civic association, and technical experts” (Mulder).
What are sanctions and what are their implications?
Economic sanctions are essentially a powerful tool of foreign policy. Governments seeking to influence a State’s behavior in situations where diplomacy is insufficient and military interventions are deemed unacceptable often rely on economic sanctions to further their policy interests (Abughris).
Sanctions are also often confused with economic restrictions that have other kinds of political or economic purposes—things like tariffs and protectionism. Tariffs are a matter of domestic regulation and protecting one’s own market from foreign competition, while sanctions on the other hand are about trying to influence and deprive other territories (Serpe).
Country-based sanctions
Country-based sanctions are a form of restrictive measure imposed by one country or entity on another with the ultimate goal of limiting the target country’s trade and business relations.
Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, and Vietnam are all countries that have had country-based sanctions imposed upon them in recent years. The imposition of country-based sanctions can also have a massive adverse effect on the economy and humanitarian well-being of the targeted country. "As recognized by Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General to the United Nations in his 1997 report to the UN, country-based sanctions tend to inflict the most harm on vulnerable civilian groups and can cause great collateral damage to third states”
(Abughris).
Targeted or “smart” sanctions
Widely shared concerns about the adverse impact of country-based sanctions led to the emergence of ‘targeted’ or ‘smart’ sanctions in the early 21st century. Targeted sanctions typically aim to reduce collateral damage to the general
population and countries by "targeting specific individuals or organizations believed to be responsible for offending behavior” (Abughris). This development has arguably increased the effectiveness of sanctions as a foreign policy tool.
However, concerns over their impact on human rights remain: the European Court of Human Rights has questioned the legality of targeted UN sanctions and found them to be in breach of key procedural rights enshrined in the
European Convention of Human Rights, e.g. the right to a fair trial and the right to an effective remedy.
Historical sanction examples
The original impulse for a system of economic sanctions came at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference from the British delegate, Lord Robert Cecil, and his French counterpart, Léon Bourgeois. These men were unlikely partners. Cecil, an aristocratic barrister and renegade member of the Conservative Party, was a fervent free trader who became Britain’s first minister of blockade during the
war; Bourgeois, the son of a republican watchmaker, worked his way up the professions to become a Radical Party prime minister in the 1890s and advocated a political theory of mutual aid known as “solidarism”. But despite these different
backgrounds, both Cecil and Bourgeois agreed that the League could, and should, be equipped with a powerful enforcement instrument. They envisioned deploying the same techniques of economic pressure used on the Central Powers against future challengers of the Versailles order. Such recalcitrant countries would be labeled “aggressors”—a new, morally loaded legal
category—and be subjected to economic isolation by the entire League. The methods of economic warfare were thus repurposed and refined for use outside a formally declared state of war. What made interwar sanctions a truly new institution was not that they could isolate states from global trade and finance. It was that this coercive exclusion could take place in peacetime (Mulder).
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson described it as something more tremendous than war: the threat was "absolute isolation...that brings a nation to its sense just as suffocation removes from the individual all inclinations to fight...Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force. It is a terrible remedy. It does not cost a life outside of the nation boycotted, but it brings a pressure upon that nation which, in my judgment, no modern nation could resist."
In the first decade of the League’s existence, the instrument described by Wilson was often referred to in English as ‘the economic weapon.’ In French, the
Geneva-based organization’s other official language, it was known as ‘l’arme économique.’ Its designation as a weapon pointed to the wartime practice of blockade that had inspired it.” (Mulder)
When the victors of World War I incorporated the economic weapon into Article 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, they transformed it from a wartime to a peacetime institution. Like other innovative aspects of the League’s work in the realms of global economic governance, world health, and international justice, sanctions outlived the organization itself and continued as part of the United Nations after World War II. Since the end of the Cold War their use has surged; today they are used with great frequency.
The United States, for most of the Cold War period, only used sanctions against smaller countries, as a kind of containment device in situations where there was a large power imbalance. It was quite moderate in the use of economic pressure against the Soviet Union and China. It only really used strategic export controls, and when it tried to go beyond that, you had some of the key inter-Atlantic
crises of the Cold War. In the early 980s, there was a massive crisis when Reagan imposed sanctions on pipelines between the Soviet Union and Europe—a direct antecedent to the Nord Stream 2 saga. But generally, they were used as a kind of American imperial policing device in cases when there was a big power differential—with Cuba and North Korea in particular.
That, of course, has changed since the end of the Cold War. There was an explosion in the use of sanctions, because no great-power opponent would act as an obstacle. And this coincided, of course, with financial globalization in the wake of the 1970s and Bretton Woods, the Volcker Shock—the expansion of the transatlantic, dollar-based global financial order. That shows, again, that you need to think about the economic historical underpinnings. The sanctions environment today was not purposely created by the U.S. government; it is rather a side effect of its stabilization strategy in the 1970s and ’80s under Carter and Reagan. It wasn’t until George W. Bush and Barack Obama that the financial sanctions we’re familiar with today began to be developed. (Serpe).
They’ve historically been contested
An armistice was signed to end the First World War, but Entente countries still maintained the blockade. Economic pressure that began in war was carried on into peacetime. It was applied not just against Weimar Germany but also against Soviet rule in Russia and Hungary in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. That prompted massive public outcry across Western countries, by a broad coalition of different groups; feminists and women’s organizations; groups out of an older, free-trade, radical liberal tradition, that wanted to separate the private economy from interstate war. That moment showed how deeply contested this practice was as it emerged. (Serge)
The future of sanctions
At the 48th session of the Human Rights Council, on 16 September 2021, Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called for governments to reassess and critically re-evaluate their use of sanctions to avoid adverse impacts on human rights, highlighting the severe impact that economic sanctions targeting an entire country or sector can have on the most vulnerable people in the country, who have neither perpetrated crimes nor have any responsibility for improper conduct.
Ms. Bachelet further explained that punitive restrictions on banks and financial institutions led to over-compliance which in some instances created obstacles to importing basic food and medical supplies and "risked causing more suffering and death and wider contagion around the world"(Abughris).
As an increasing number of governments seek to increase and diversify the type of economic sanctions they impose, equal if not even more vigilant effort needs to be made to ensure that the sanction regimes of restrictive measures enforce both secure respect for human rights and foster accountability. "It’s very important to study sanctions as a historical process: they aren’t just about pain and gain, about this utilitarian, game-theoretical language that much of foreign policy discourse uses. It’s vital to look at them much more holistically, with the
tools of not just social sciences but also the humanities and culture
and the study of ideology and ideas, because they have long-lasting
effects, and they shape outlooks dramatically" (Serge).
Sanctions do not operate in a frictionless decision-making space, where you can just increase pain in the right way and then hopefully the right response
will follow. They are deployed in a world in which states already have all sorts of uncertainties and antagonisms.
References
Abughris, Noura. A Brief History of Economic Sanctions. Carter-Ruck.
Mulder, Nicholas. (2022, February 24). The History of Economic Sanctions as a Tool of War. Yale University Press.
Serpe, Nick. (2022, March 4). The History of Sanctions. Dissent Magazine.
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