(This is an archived extract from the book Patterns of Power: Edition 2)
Governments try to use economic power to put pressure on other countries for political purposes. When they offer financial inducements in return for a desired behaviour, they risk unintended consequences:
· Aid can damage the country which receives it, as discussed later in this chapter (3.5.8.1).
· Aid given to a corrupt regime might be used to buy arms.[1]
Economic sanctions can be thought of as negative inducements, and seem to be popular with governments. They conflict with the regulations which protect free trade (3.5.4.5), so there is usually a need to obtain the agreement of other countries – without which they would be ineffective anyway. They can take various forms, including:
· Banning the sale of some goods and services to the target country;
· Refusing to buy from it;
· Denying it credit;
· Denying it economic aid.
Undeniably, these measures all place pressure on the country concerned and have an effect on its economy. They can all, therefore, be classified as economic sanctions: political pressure applied by economic means. They give their initiators a sense of ‘having done something’, which might be popular in their domestic political situations, but it is less clear whether the political outcome in the target country matches the published intention. Two contrasting examples illustrate the uncertainty of the effects of sanctions: South Africa and Iraq.
Economic sanctions on South Africa were widely regarded as having successfully contributed towards bringing about an end to apartheid, though this view has been challenged.[2] South Africa’s economy survived the pressure, by vigorously developing its own industry and by finding ways around the sanctions. There is no consensus on how the sanctions are supposed to have brought about political change.[3]
The economic sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s had unintended consequences: [4]
· They had a very adverse impact on the health and economic wellbeing of the population.
· They gave the regime a financial windfall in exploiting the shortages.
As observed in a subsequent Parliamentary report: [5]
“In the case of Iraq, the most important concessions were produced not by sanctions alone but by sanctions and force combined”.
“When economic sanctions are relatively weak in their economic effects, they can have the overall net effect of strengthening the target regime by legitimizing it, by strengthening its control command over resources, or both.”
The South African sanctions appear to have worked (or at least may have helped) because they put pressure on a group of people who were able to provide the desired response. In Iraq there was no mechanism by which the sanctions could have directly produced the desired result because the people were unable to put pressure on the regime.
It has been argued that there is no example of successful economic sanctions.[6] They strengthen the power of governments which have been targeted, by giving them someone to blame for their economic woes.
© PatternsofPower.org, 2014
[1] This allegation was made in relation to Ethiopians using Live Aid money to buy guns, in a BBC article entitled On the trail of Ethiopia aid and guns, dated 4 March 2010 and available in April 2014 at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8548412.stm.
[2] Philip I. Levy of Yale University wrote a paper in February 1999, entitled SANCTIONS ON SOUTH AFRICA: WHAT DID THEY DO? The abstract begins: “This paper considers the economic sanctions that were applied in the mid-1980s to pressure the South African government to end apartheid. It asks what role those sanctions played in the eventual demise of the apartheid regime and concludes that the role was probably very small.” This paper was available in April 2014 at http://www.econ.yale.edu/growth_pdf/cdp796.pdf. He went on to say: “their principal effect was probably psychological”.
[3] The New York Times published an article on 12 September 1993, entitled South Africa Sanctions May Have Worked, at a Price, which evinced uncertainty:
“In hindsight, few now question that the sanctions had powerful consequences, but there is no consensus that the results were quite what the sponsors intended.”
The article was available in April 2014 at http://www.nytimes.com/1993/09/12/weekinreview/the-world-south-africa-sanctions-may-have-worked-at-a-price.html?pagewanted=1.
[4] The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights produced a report, entitled The Human Rights Impact of Economic Sanctions on Iraq, for the meeting of the Executive Committee on Humanitarian Affairs on 5 September 2000. It drew attention to the adverse effects of sanctions on the population and the benefits to the regime:
“· economic sanctions almost always have a dramatic impact on the rights recognized in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. They often cause significant disruption in the distribution of food, pharmaceuticals and sanitation supplies, jeopardize the quality of food and the availability of clean drinking water, severely interfere with the functioning of basic health and education systems, and undermine the right to work;
· unintentionally, economic sanctions can lead to reinforcement of the power of oppressive élites, the emergence, almost invariably, of a black market and the generation of huge windfall profits for the privileged élites which manage it, enhancement of the control of the governing élites over the population at large, and restriction of opportunities to seek asylum or to manifest political opposition”.
This report was available in April 2014 at http://www.casi.org.uk/info/undocs/sanct31.pdf.
[5] The House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs produced a report on the impact of economic sanctions against Iraq, Burma, North Korea and Iran. The report was published on 24 April 2007 and was available in April 2014 at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200607/ldselect/ldeconaf/96/9602.htm. The sentence quoted appears at the end of the report.
[6] This was the position taken by Simon Jenkins, in an article in the Sunday Times on 13 July 2008. It was entitled Sanctions are a war waged by cowards and was available in April 2014 at http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/Features/Focus/article105530.ece.