GLOBAL DIALOGUE
Volume 2 ● Number 3 ● Summer 2000—Sanctions: Efficacy and Morality Sanctions: A Triumph of Hope Eternal over Experience Unlimited
The international community should be under no illusion: ... humanitarian and human-rights policy goals cannot easily be reconciled with those of a sanctions regime. —Kofi Annan
Recourse to sanctions—diplomatic isolation, restrictions on international air and sea travel, restrictions on trade and financial transactions, arms embargoes, etc.—rose dramatically in the 1990s. The Security Council imposed sanctions twelve times in the 1990s, compared to only twice previously (against Rhodesia in 1966 and South Africa in 1977).1 At the time of writing, UN sanctions were in place against Afghanistan, parts of Angola, Iraq, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and the former Yugoslavia. Yet their track record in ensuring compliance with Security Council resolutions is officially admitted to be “uneven”.2 In a Security Council debate in April 2000, not one member was prepared to offer unqualified support for the existing system and practice of sanctions. France and Russia issued a call for “sunset clauses” in sanctions resolutions, which would require complete reviews rather than periodic rollovers of sanctions once imposed by the council.
The United States took the contrary position, arguing that sanctions should remain in place until the target regime changes behaviour. Considering that the United States has imposed sanctions 120 times over the last century,3 this was not surprising. What is surprising is that the United States should persist with a policy of trying to destroy economies and destabilise governments by resorting to a tool that has never worked: a triumph of hope over experience indeed. The general public neither understands nor endorses the use of sanctions and there is growing scepticism in the scholarly and policy communities about their rationale and usefulness. At the start of the new century, there is widespread distrust of the effects and costs of sanctions.
Similarly, and remarkably for a tool of national and international statecraft that is so commonly used, there is not a single major comparative study that establishes the efficacy of sanctions. By contrast, there are many studies that point to their limited usefulness as diplomatic tools. But there remains a need for comparative studies of the utility of multilateral sanctions imposed by the United Nations; most major studies have examined the history and record of unilateral sanctions.
This suggests an immediate caveat. Sanctions are inextricably tied to the interests of major powers. The calculus of others—the vast majority of member states of the international community—should be different from that of the major powers. But Kim Nossal notes that the official and public discourse on sanctions in middle-power countries such as Canada and Australia is indistinguishable from that in a major power such as the United States. The former two countries have participated just as frequently as the United States in imposing sanctions against transgressor states. Yet the latter’s ability to shape external or foreign events is infinitely greater.4
Sanctions may be imposed to punish or deter foreign military adventurism, to punish regimes for providing safe havens for international criminals (e.g., drug runners and terrorists), to penalise such specific acts as nuclear testing and humanitarian atrocities, to destabilise and bring down target regimes by isolating and weakening them, to stigmatise or contain “rogue states” and to prevent and deter the imitation of undesirable behaviour by states or groups.
These may be termed the instrumental goals of sanctions. But countries that lack the power to bully or the wealth to bribe, Nossal argues, resort to sanctions not for instrumental, but largely for symbolic purposes, namely, to register disapproval of certain kinds of behaviour. The target of symbolic action can actually be the citizens of the country imposing sanctions, in order to make them feel good at the thought that “something” has been done. Besides symbolism, maintaining alliance solidarity is an important consideration underlying the imposition of sanctions by middle powers. The coalition often determines both the minimum level of the sanctions required and the outer limits of acceptable behaviour.
Sanctions have a bad reputation and a worse history. They inflict undeniable pain on ordinary citizens while imposing dubious costs on leaders. Indeed, the leaders are often enriched and strengthened on the backs of their impoverished and oppressed peoples. In this article I argue that sanctions are a poor excuse for, not a sound supplement to, a good foreign policy. They are ineffective, counter-productive, harmful to the economic interests of those who impose them, injurious to relations with allies and morally questionable. The general arguments are buttressed by appropriate historical and contemporary examples. A Record of FailureSanctions were discredited in the 1930s when imposed on Italy in punishment for its invasion of Ethiopia, and again when applied against the Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia in 1966. The League of Nations sanctions against Italy were at once a triumph and a failure. They were a triumph in that for the first time the international community had condemned aggression, identified Benito Mussolini as the aggressor and imposed punitive measures against him collectively. But they were a spectacular failure in that the aggressor nevertheless secured his ends (the conquest of Ethiopia) by means of force. Recriminations about the failure of the sanctions against Italy continue to this day: the sanctions were intentionally incomplete (strategic items such as oil were exempted and the United States, then as now a superpower, refused to participate). They were also poorly enforced (the participation of most major powers was half-hearted). In the event, the first collectively imposed economic sanctions proved to be fairly typical of the genre.
In the Rhodesian case, the goal was to compel a transition from white minority rule to a black majority government. Whether sanctions succeeded in the long run remains a matter of debate and contention. In the short and medium terms, at least, compliance with the UN-imposed sanctions was most uneven. The role of sanctions in forcing President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia to sign the Dayton Accords is equally contested. But sanctions did force Libya into releasing two of its nationals to stand trial for the Lockerbie bombing.
An influential study by the Washington, D.C.–based International Institute of Economics (IIE) concluded that sanctions achieved only “partial success” in changing the target regime’s behaviour in a mere 34 per cent of 115 cases between the First World War and 1990.5 The success rate declined even further after 1970 as the global economy became more open. Even so, the study was faulted as being too generous to the effectiveness of sanctions. According to Robert Pape, only 5 per cent of sanctions regimes in the IIE study were successful.6 One may ask whether sanctions that are known to be ineffective when applied by a superpower such as the United States, on whose trade, investment and markets many countries are dependent, will fare any better when imposed by the United Nations.
When the pain of economic sanctions is borne chiefly by countries in the neighbourhood of the target regime, and little help is available from the international community to offset the pain, enthusiasm for monitoring and enforcing the sanctions wanes. Neighbouring countries either connive to make the sanctions regime porous, or tolerate the actions of sanctions busters.
Sanctions fail because the target country can choose from a range of sellers in the international market-place: it is virtually impossible to secure universal participation in embargoes. It is difficult to police the compliance even of countries that have agreed to participate. The incentive to make large profits by circumventing sanctions is usually more powerful than the motive for enforcing them, and a variety of means and routes exist to camouflage sanctions-busting contacts. As the recent example of Sierra Leone has shown, traders will find ways and means to evade sanctions and continue profitable commerce with regimes under international boycott. In the case of Rhodesia in the 1960s and 1970s, the most prominent and crucial third-party route was through South Africa. The South Asian Nuclear TestsThe UN Security Council is the normative core of the international law-enforcement system. While enforcement authority is vested in the Security Council, enforcement capacity rests with the major powers. Therefore, sanctions imposed against countries or leaders whose behaviour is a challenge to the interests of major powers have a much better prospect of attracting serious enforcement efforts than others.
In response to the May 1998 nuclear tests in India and Pakistan,7 the Security Council spoke with one voice: the tests had offended the normative consensus of the five declared nuclear powers and the more than 180 non-nuclear states party to the Non-proliferation Treaty. To accept India and Pakistan as nuclear weapons–states would reverse three decades of non-proliferation policy and be unfair to many countries that had signed the Non-proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty on the understanding that the number of nuclear weapons–states would be limited to five.
Regarding India, the dilemma faced by outsiders was that a moderate response would have vindicated India’s nuclear hawks, allowing them to claim that India was now being treated with respect because it had nuclear weapons. On the other hand, a harsh response would have allowed India’s hawks to argue that a friendless India that was the target of hostile international attention needed a nuclear arsenal to defend its interests.
As for Pakistan, after India’s tests the world tried to secure restraint through a mixture of carrots and sticks. It was made clear that if Pakistan proceeded with its own nuclear test, sanctions would be imposed on it as swiftly and thoroughly as on India. But if Pakistan refrained from testing, a considerably enhanced package of economic and military assistance would be forthcoming. Japan was even rumoured to have offered to divert all its aid from India to Pakistan. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, however, bowed to pressure from the public, opposition politicians and the military, and authorised nuclear tests.
The world could not allow India and Pakistan to defy the anti-nuclear norm with impunity. But what to do? The strongest initial reactions came from the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand. Under the Glenn–Symington Act, Washington had to apply sanctions on credits and credit guarantees, loans from US banks, and military assistance, and to oppose loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Japan, the subcontinent’s biggest donor, also suspended all aid. Australia, Canada and New Zealand terminated aid and curtailed other programmes of co-operation, particularly with the military forces of the two countries. Other Western countries followed suit to varying but lesser degrees.
A study by the US International Trade Commission concluded that in the year following the imposition of US sanctions, their cost to India’s economy had been a mere $320 million and to Pakistan’s $57 million.8 Russia refused to terminate long-established defence links with India. By September 1999, France had initiated a “strategic dialogue” with India. By the end of October 1999, Britain was edging towards re-establishing links with India. And in November 1999, Washington eased most sanctions against India. As for Pakistan, analyses by US intelligence sources in 2000 showed that China had accelerated the sale of missiles to its long-time ally after the 1998 tests.9
The sanctions imposed on India and Pakistan were egregious because both countries had already crossed the nuclear threshold and announced unilateral moratoriums on further testing. Any serious analysis of relative bargaining levers would have quickly concluded that the probability of coercing even Pakistan, let alone India, into restoring the status quo ante was close to zero. The point of sanctions, therefore, could only be symbolic expression: registering international disapprobation of the tests, communicating similar displeasure to any future would-be proliferators, and signalling resolve and leadership to domestic publics. Disapproval was indeed signalled, but no less would have been expected. However, not a single country has been added to the proliferation-sensitive list as a result of the South Asian nuclear tests. The states of concern remain exactly the same as before May 1998. Countries contemplating the nuclear route are more likely to be influenced by the continued possession of nuclear arms by the five declared powers, and by the public abandonment by some of them of the non-intervention norm (viz. NATO’s 1999 air bombardment of Yugoslavia), than by the crossing of the threshold on which India and Pakistan had stood indecisively for decades.10 A Counter-productive MeasureSanctions are counter-productive politically and economically. Politically, their goal is to reduce the support for sanctioned leaders of their own peoples. This may indeed happen in exceptional cases. But in fact the more general reaction is one of “rallying around the flag”, whereby resisting outside pressure is seen as a patriotic duty. “Far from imposing on the Italian people a desire to reverse their government’s policy, sanctions made the Ethiopian war popular,” observes George Baer.11
Economically, sanctions create shortages and raise prices in conditions of scarcity. The poor suffer; the middle class, essential to building the foundations of democracy, shrinks; the ruling class extracts fatter returns from monopoly controls over the illicit trade in banned goods. The more profitable the trade, the richer the leaders become and the greater their vested interest in perpetuating sanctions while using state-controlled media to scapegoat the West or the “Western-controlled” United Nations for the misery of the people. Scarcity increases the dependence of the population on the distribution of necessities by the regime, so that sanctions give authoritarian leaders yet another tool by which to exercise control and leverage over their people.
The motives for imposing and/or maintaining sanctions often have more to do with domestic politics than with trying to effect changes in the behaviour of target regimes. Once an offending leader has been successfully demonised, rivals for office in the sanctioning country seek to reap electoral advantage by depicting opponents as “soft” on the enemy. “The toast of Belgrade”, “standing shoulder to shoulder with the butcher of Baghdad”, etc., are among the choice insults of recent times used by Western politicians in domestic debates. For decades, no aspiring US presidential candidate has dared to offend the Cuban-American lobby by calling for the removal of sanctions on Fidel Castro, despite the clear demonstration of their failure on a scale that can only be described as spectacular. Similarly, the call for sanctions on Austria for having dared to elect right-wing Freedom Party members into government were led by France, Germany and Belgium. The governments in all three countries were not unmindful of the domestic political benefits to be reaped from showing a tough line against neo-Nazism. Some ExamplesIn the late 1950s, the Soviet Union tried a range of coercive economic measures to force Josef Tito’s Yugoslavia to toe Moscow’s line. Not only did these efforts prove ineffectual, despite Belgrade’s economic dependence on the communist bloc, they also proved counter-productive: Yugoslavia turned to the West for alternative supply and market sources and helped to establish the Non-aligned Movement as a more congenial political grouping.
Probably the best example of the counter-productiveness of sanctions is provided by the US embargo against Castro’s Cuba. A small neighbouring island that was almost completely dependent on the United States for its economic health was subjected to increasingly harsh and all-encompassing sanctions. Yet not only does Castro remain in power, but the embargo virtually obliged him to turn to the Soviet bloc for alternative suppliers and markets, thus helping to transform Cuba into communism’s forward base in the Western hemisphere. US sanctions therefore encouraged the very outcome they were supposed to avert.
Sanctions on Cuba are a historical legacy of the Cold War that ended over a decade ago. The Soviet Union has imploded, China has embraced market reforms, and communist movements have disappeared across Latin America. But sanctions on Cuba remain in place, not because they serve any purpose, not because they are achieving their original goals, but because of the power of a domestic electoral lobby, the Cuban exile community in Florida. The geographical concentration of the exiles in Miami gives them a crucial swing vote in determining the outcome of Florida’s ballot, which in turn is important in influencing the outcome of presidential elections.
Far from ousting Castro, the sanctions have helped him consolidate power by enabling him to delegitimise domestic critics and scapegoat Washington for the disastrous consequences of bankrupt economic policies, and by conferring on him the stature of a mythic hero throughout Latin America for repeatedly tweaking Uncle Sam’s nose. Conversely, any opening of Cuba to the outside world would expose its people to the infectious effects of freedom, democracy and prosperity.
By 1998, India was already paying the price of its rejection of the Non-proliferation Treaty through embargoes on the transfer of advanced or dual-use technology. Delhi seems to have concluded that the marginal costs of additional sanctions incurred by nuclear tests were outweighed by the substantial gains to be had in national security and pride. India’s nuclear self-restraints until the May 1998 test included no test since 1974, no declared nuclear-weapon status, no sharing of nuclear technology with others and no overt deployment of missiles. India has also refrained from exporting arms. Instead of appreciation for its unique nuclear continence, Delhi was repeatedly criticised for rejecting the Non-proliferation and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaties, even while the world turned a blind eye to the clandestine acquisition of nuclear capability by Pakistan through Chinese assistance. Washington has no satisfactory answer to the question why China, an authoritarian state with an unimpressive human rights record12 that has been the major proliferator of nuclear technology and expertise to South Asia, should be allowed to buy US satellites and other high technology, while these are denied to the world’s largest democracy, India, which has resolutely refused to leak nuclear technology abroad.
Pakistan was far more vulnerable to sanctions than India, lacking the latter’s size, resources, depth and resilience. Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves were a paltry $1 billion as against almost $30 billion for India. International sanctions severely dampened Pakistan’s economic activity and risked its default on debts of $30 billion. At a time when the world community was mounting emergency rescue efforts in Asian countries besieged by collapsing currencies and stockmarkets, it made little sense to try to push Pakistan towards the same precipice of economic, social and political meltdown: no one would benefit from its financial collapse into a country rattling a begging bowl with nukes in it.
India and China were the only two large Asian economies still to be growing significantly. The contrast between the policy of constructive engagement with China and destructive disengagement with South Asia was painfully obvious. The International Trade Commission study concluded that the cost of the sanctions to the US economy itself had been $161 million.13 American producers of wheat and other agricultural goods had suffered, losing out to alternative suppliers from Japan, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
In the case of Austria recently, the effect of diplomatic sanctions has been to entrench the very people whose removal was the ostensible goal of the sanctions. Castro has rallied Cubans against the old and historic enemy of “Yankee imperialism”. The Freedom Party has rallied Austrians against the common external enemy, the European Union. Many people in Central and Eastern Europe, too, have been antagonised by the EU decision, feeling that “having finally escaped the heavy hand of Moscow, they do not want to be told how to run their political affairs by Brussels—still less by diplomatic lynch mobs organised by the EU’s larger members”.14 Even inside the European Union, smaller countries such as Denmark have been anything but pleased at the union’s apparent willingness to serve as an instrument of the strong against the weak. “Danish indignation makes it more likely that Denmark will say no to the euro [the EU currency] in a referendum in September, with unfortunate repercussions for European integration”.15 In the meantime, of course, Austrian co-operation within the European Union, necessary for much business, has become more problematical.
The proposed China Non-proliferation Act, sponsored in the US Senate by Fred Thompson (Republican) and Robert Torricelli (Democrat), would trigger elaborate sanctions against the Chinese government and any person, company or group operating in China, if there was credible information that they were violating nuclear non-proliferation agreements or US export laws. The US president already has wide-ranging legal authority to impose sanctions to prevent the proliferation of biological, chemical, nuclear and advanced conventional weapons. The Thompson–Torricelli bill would impede non-proliferation efforts by unnecessarily politicising the process. Under the proposed bill, Congress would be required to second-guess the president every year on the basis of merely “credible” information.
Another difficulty with the resort to sanctions being rooted in domestic political motives is the termination trap. It becomes difficult to lift sanctions even when the target regime’s behaviour has changed appreciably because the domestic electoral cost may be too high. And the domestic political cost is much greater if the target actor has not changed behaviour, that is even if sanctions are clearly not working.
The logic of the above analysis suggests that sanctions may be somewhat more effective against multiparty democracies than against authoritarian regimes. The former can take recourse neither to self-enrichment nor self-aggrandisement at the expense of a cowed populace and a jailed or liquidated opposition. Whether the United Nations ought to restrict sanctions as a policy instrument for use only against multiparty democracies and abandon them against dictators and autocrats is for the international community to decide. Self-inflicted WoundsEfforts by states to introduce political impediments to trade inevitably have some damaging effect on the traders of those states. The real question is not whether sanctions inflict costs on the countries imposing the sanctions, but rather how severe and prolonged those costs are. Exporters lose sales, their places taken by competitors from countries not observing the sanctions. In addition, if a country frequently resorts to sanctions, the long-term reliability of its suppliers becomes suspect, with the result that foreign purchasers may not switch back to its products even after sanctions are lifted. The sanctioned country itself can actually emerge stronger overall, or in strategic sectors like defence, by pursuing a determined policy of import-substitution.
Having imposed sanctions on India and Pakistan, Washington now finds itself imprisoned in the classic termination trap—how to lift sanctions without appearing to back down, on the one hand, or reward “bad” behaviour on the other. But the longer Washington vacillates, the more time other countries have to fill the commercial void.
Similarly, the proposed Thompson–Torricelli bill would put impediments in the way of trade with the United States’ eighth-biggest market, China. By restricting financing and credit guarantees from the US Export–Import Bank, it would throttle the very instruments designed to give US exporters a competitive edge in world markets. Rather than providing tough-minded US non-proliferation negotiators with a lever, the bill would give a boost to tough-minded Australian, Canadian, European and Japanese negotiators seeking to gain market share for their beef, wheat, aircraft and cars—not all of which are free of open or hidden subsidies. A Sanctions SuccessA logical implication of this is that countries are in a much stronger position to impose sanctions when target countries are heavily dependent on sanctions-imposing countries and the latter are relatively insulated from the effects of the sanctions and relatively invulnerable to retaliatory counter-measures. A good illustration of this was provided in the 1980s in a dispute involving France and New Zealand.
On 10 July 1985, the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior, on a mission to protest against French nuclear tests in the south Pacific, was sunk in Auckland harbour by a bomb blast that killed a Portuguese crew-member.16 Two French secret service agents, Captain Dominique Prieur and Major Alain Mafart, were arrested by New Zealand and put on trial for the bombing. On 22 November, having pleaded guilty to the charge of manslaughter, they were sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment each for their part in the attack on the Rainbow Warrior.
Unfortunately for New Zealand, France was more embarrassed by the capture of its agents than repentant at the moral and legal outrage it had perpetrated. France was able to exert the considerable leverage of a great power. On 7 July 1986, UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, who had been asked by the two countries to arbitrate in the dispute, announced his binding decision that the jailed agents should be released into French custody in return for an official apology and a modest reparation. Controversy and outrage in New Zealand were matched by relief and satisfaction in France. It was a rare case of the triumph of sanctions as an instrument of coercive policy.
The exceptional result is explained by the special circumstances of the case. The saga demonstrates the effectiveness of sanctions when applied judiciously to achieve clearly defined and limited objectives. France did not need to call upon the world community to apply collective pressure. Indeed, it did not even officially admit to its own individual application of sanctions. But the mere institution of concerted economic measures was sufficient to send the right message.17 French exports to New Zealand are small, as is French investment there, so France could afford to apply sanctions without fear of significant economic damage to itself. Conversely, the proportion of New Zealand trade that could be harmed by French action was very high (France’s membership of the European Economic Community gave it extensive leverage). So Wellington was singularly vulnerable to economic pressure from Paris.
In sum, the economic relationship between France and New Zealand was highly asymmetric. Wellington lacked readily available alternative markets for its products, or the ability to shift production from the agricultural goods being exported to Europe. The costs of sanctions were significantly less to France as the coercer than New Zealand as the coerced. Alienating AlliesTypically, countries have more dense economic and political transactions with neighbours than with distant countries. The imposition of sanctions therefore inflicts greater pain on the neighbours of targeted countries than on others. The record suggests that the readiness of the international community to impose sanctions is not matched by a willingness to defray the costs of the innocent parties who are hit the hardest. Very quickly, these countries conclude that their economic interests are better served by continuing economic exchanges with the targeted regime, if by other names and through alternative channels.
For example, US sanctions against the former Soviet Union over the construction of a gas pipeline between the Soviet Union and Western Europe often strained relations between Washington and other NATO capitals. US sanctions against Cuba have frequently brought Washington into conflict with its major allies, including Canada in the 1990s. And US technology-denying sanctions against China are presently souring relations between the United States and Israel.
The belief of US analysts and lawmakers that Washington’s allies are undermining US sanctions policy worsens relations with allies. US subsidiaries overseas, or US-based subsidiaries of foreign companies, would be required to comply with US sanctions under the proposed Thompson–Torricelli bill. This would provoke anti-US hostility in allied Asian and European countries, as has often happened in the past. Allies resent having their foreign political and economic relations dictated by Washington, and resent even more strongly attempts to expand the extraterritorial jurisdiction of US laws.
The humanitarian costs of the sanctions regime maintained indefinitely against Iraq have slowly but surely destroyed the fragile international consensus in the UN Security Council, which in turn spills over into other business conducted by the council as the organ with the primary responsibility for ensuring world peace.
Finally, sanctions can damage intra-alliance relations in that they are most effective against friends, allies and trading partners, as illustrated by the France–New Zealand dispute discussed above. Mass Murder in Slow Motion?Thus sanctions are generally ineffectual as a diplomatic tool. Their value as symbolic expressions of communal disapprobation might still leave them as an acceptable policy option if there were no other attendant costs. Public and hence political support for sanctions rests on their image as a humane alternative, and perhaps a necessary prelude, to war, which is increasingly regarded as a tool of last resort.
This is a dangerous distortion of reality. In contrast to wars, sanctions shift the burden of harm solely to civilians, and solely to one side in the dispute. (“Zero-casualty”, high-altitude warfare resembles this structural imbalance of risks.) Paradoxically, sanctions can be ineffectual in achieving stated goals even when effective economically, perhaps even devastatingly effective. Whether successful or not in attaining their goals, sanctions are not non-violent alternatives to armed force. The scale of death and suffering inflicted by the “structural violence” of sanctions—starvation, malnutrition and the spread of deadly diseases—exceeds that of the “cleaner” alternative of open warfare.
The moral premises of sanctions as the preferred instrument for punishing wayward regimes are thus open to serious question. Their primary victims are innocent civilians, mainly women and children, often the putative beneficiaries of international sanctions. If sanctions are imposed because of gross, pervasive and persistent human rights violations by the government, then the hapless citizens are doubly damned.
The ethics of sanctions can be assessed with reference to the just war doctrine, the Kantian emphasis on human beings as ends in themselves, and by weighing the probability of success in achieving instrumental or symbolic goals against that of inflicting pain on innocent victims. I will consider these approaches in turn. The Just War DoctrineJoy Gordon compares sanctions to siege warfare involving the infliction of systematic privation on a whole city.18 The just war doctrine imposes the ethical obligation to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. Sanctions do indeed discriminate between them, but spare the combatants and target non-combatants through methodical and comprehensive deprivation of food, water and fuel. Thus harm is done first and above all to the defenceless, blameless and most vulnerable. Regimes typically respond by shifting remaining resources to the political, bureaucratic and military elite. Because this is a typical response, it can be predicted. Because it is predictable, sanctioners cannot evade ethical responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Attempts to shift the burden of guilt to the recalcitrant target regime are simply not credible in the light of the overwhelming historical record of how despots behave when under siege.19 If the goal of sanctions is the enforcement of international humanitarian norms, then the policy is particularly pernicious and egregious. Kant’s ImperativeImmanuel Kant’s ethical theory imbues each human being with inalienable “dignity”. From this he derives the categorical imperative to treat every human being always as an end and never as a means. Sanctions, in treating masses of civilians as a means to the end of overthrowing a regime, necessarily violate this unconditional and binding moral mandate. Policy Success and Civilian SufferingIn a provocative essay, John Mueller and Karl Mueller argue that sanctions have caused more deaths in the twentieth century than all weapons of mass destruction throughout history.20 While media attention and public concern focus on biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, the real mass killers are sanctions. Consequently, sanctions should be re-labelled “economic warfare”, which would bring them within the purview of the laws of war.
During the First World War, Mueller and Mueller report, about 750,000 German civilians may have died as a result of the Allied naval blockade, a figure which does not include deaths caused between the end of the war and the lifting of the blockade upon the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, nor the collateral embargo-related deaths in Austria, Turkey and Bulgaria. The number of those killed by all the aerial bombing in the twentieth century, by contrast, is fewer than two million.21
The starkest contemporary illustration of the destructive power of sanctions is provided by Iraq. Sanctions have contributed to the post–Gulf War death toll there in numerous ways. The spread of diseases is accelerated by the breakdown of sanitation, sewage and electrical systems partly attributable to sanctions-created shortages of components and spare parts. The capacity to mitigate the effects of disease is sharply diminished by restrictions on imports of food and medicines. Syringes have been blocked for fear of being used in the creation of anthrax spores; chlorine, a common water disinfectant, can also be used for making chlorine gas; fertilisers and insecticides are deemed to be dual-use products. Their banning has caused a proliferation of disease-carrying insects.
The number of Iraqi civilian deaths caused by sanctions is hotly contested. The Iraqi regime has a vested interest in exaggerating the toll, while the United States and the United Kingdom in particular have a corresponding interest in minimising it. Although casualty figures supplied by Iraq have been questioned, it is equally plausible that some deaths go unreported, especially in outlying parts of the country, either because parents know that the local hospital can no longer cope and so don’t bother to bring dying infants there, or because survivors wish to continue collecting the valuable food rations of deceased relatives. But what is not deniable are estimates by various UN agencies that sanctions have caused deaths of innocent Iraqis in the hundreds of thousands, far exceeding the numbers of soldiers killed during the Gulf War proper. Moreover, as Mueller and Mueller note, sanctions are reportedly causing a net increase per year of forty thousand deaths of children under five and of another fifty thousand older Iraqis. Mueller and Mueller ask how these Iraqi sanctions casualties compare with the human costs of weapons of mass destruction:
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki together killed more than 100,000 people, and a high estimate suggests that some 80,000 died from chemical weapons in World War I. If one adds the deaths from later uses of chemical weapons in war or warlike situations (excluding the deaths of non-combatants in the Nazi gas chambers), as well as deaths caused by the intentional or accidental use of biological weapons and ballistic missiles, the resulting total comes to well under 400,000. If the UN estimates of the human damage in Iraq are even roughly correct, therefore, it would appear that—in a so far futile attempt to remove Saddam from power and a somewhat more successful attempt to constrain him militarily—economic sanctions may well have been a necessary cause of the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history.22
While the primary responsibility for the tragedy in Iraq rests with the Iraqi leadership, the United Nations cannot evade some responsibility. In consequence, the international community has lost the appetite for imposing comprehensive open-ended sanctions again.
Moreover, the imposition of sanctions on India and Pakistan for their nuclear tests raises the issue of double standards. The five nuclear powers, which preach non-proliferation but practise deterrence, have no moral authority to impose sanctions. Their nuclear stockpiles are in defiance of the World Court’s opinion that there is a legal obligation to nuclear disarmament; India and Pakistan breached no international treaty, convention or law by testing. For the five nuclear powers to impose sanctions on the nuclear gatecrashers is akin to outlaws sitting in judgement, passing sentence and imposing punishment on the law abiding. This is not virtue exalted above commerce; it is power politics masquerading as virtue. The conflation of international norms into partisan privileges is a fatal flaw in the crime-and-punishment strategy of sanctions. Making Sanctions SmarterI have argued that because of the virtual inevitability of harm to the civilian population, and the low probability of success in changing the behaviour of targeted states, the sanctions equation just does not compute. The paradox of sanctions is fundamental, not merely apparent. Calling them instances of international governance rather than warfare makes a better soundbite, but does not alter the fact that sanctions systematically impoverish entire populations.
Many of the problems discussed in this article could be averted by the imposition of so-called “smart” sanctions that target members of the ruling elite while leaving ordinary citizens more or less untouched. One example of smart sanctions is restrictions on overseas travel, even for health reasons, by members of the regime. Another would be to freeze their foreign assets and restrict their overseas financial transactions. If brutal dictators know in advance that some day, perhaps when they might have to seek medical treatment in the West, they will be liable to arrest, trial, conviction and imprisonment overseas, then they just might refrain from perpetrating atrocities now.
A detailed examination of the feasibility and efficacy of smart sanctions is beyond the scope of this article. But their many advantages may be noted briefly thus:23 smart sanctions have a stronger moral foundation than conventional sanctions since they are directed at the perpetrators and transgressors themselves, not at innocent victims; their costs to third-party countries are negligible; they do not allow the ruling elite to enrich itself by black market manipulation while the general population suffers impoverishment; they avert long-term damage to the target country’s social and physical infrastructure; and, above all, they make clear to the civilian population that the international community does discriminate between the sins of the leaders and the innocence of the people.
Such attractions notwithstanding, the difficulties associated with the imposition, monitoring and enforcement of smart sanctions will only become known with experience. There remains a pressing need also for serious studies of the compliance and transaction costs to the international community of comprehensive, well thought-out sanctions regimes with built-in monitoring and enforcement mechanisms that are as effective as they are credible.
2. Kofi A. Annan, We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century (The Secretary-General’s Millennium Report) (New York: United Nations Department of Public Information, 2000), p. 49.
3. Thomas J. Donahue, “A China Sanctions Plan Needs to Be Headed Off”, International Herald Tribune, 11 July 2000.
4. Kim Richard Nossal, Rain Dancing: Sanctions in Canadian and Australian Foreign Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).
5. Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey J. Schott and Kimberley Ann Elliott, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, Volume II, Supplemental Case Histories, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1990).
6. Robert A. Pape, “Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work”, International Security 22 (fall 1997). For other methodological criticisms, see A. Cooper Drury, “Revisiting Economic Sanctions Reconsidered”, Journal of Peace Research 35 (1998).
7. My views on the tests are elaborated in Ramesh Thakur, “The South Asian Nuclear Challenge”, in Alternative Nuclear Futures: The Role of Nuclear Weapons in the Post–Cold War World, ed. John Baylis and Robert O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 101–24.
8. Adam Entous, “Sanctions Have Boomeranged, Says US Commission”, Times of India, 25 September 1999.
9. David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, “China Missile Aid to Pakistan Goes on, US Suspects”, International Herald Tribune, 3 July 2000.
10. See Ramesh Thakur, “Envisioning Nuclear Futures”, Security Dialogue 31, no. 1 (March 2000), pp. 25–40.
11. George W. Baer, “Sanctions and Security: The League of Nations and the Italian–Ethiopian War, 1935–1936”, International Organization 27 (spring 1973), p. 179.
12. This argument may be politically useful to India in employing the same vocabulary of human rights as Americans. If social and economic rights are brought into a wider definition of human rights, however, it is not so self-evident that China’s record compares unfavourably with India’s.
13. Entous, “Sanctions Have Boomeranged”.
14. Reginald Dale, “When Sanctions Policy Is off Target”, International Herald Tribune, 23 June 2000.
15. Ibid. My own discussions with Scandinavian interlocutors bear this out.
16. See Ramesh Thakur, “A Dispute of Many Colours: France, New Zealand and the ‘Rainbow Warrior’ Affair”, The World Today 42, no. 12 (December 1986), pp. 209–14.
17. France imposed stringent health, sanitary and other requirements on New Zealand imports and instructed its inspectors to adopt “go-slow” tactics in implementing the checks.
18. See Joy Gordon, “A Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy: The Ethics of Economic Sanctions”, Ethics & International Affairs 13 (1999), pp. 123–42.
19. Ibid., pp. 129–33.
20. John Mueller and Karl Mueller, “Sanctions of Mass Destruction”, Foreign Affairs 78, no. 3 (May/June 1999), pp. 43–53.
21. Ibid., p. 48.
22. Ibid., p. 51.
23. Some of these are discussed in Andrew Mack, “The Efficacy of UN Sanctions”, forthcoming in Security Dialogue. |