When Do Sanctions Really Work?

“Are sanctions really “soft” weapons? Those who want economic war must know that they are willing to accept loss of prosperity, starvation and the death of many people.

Can wars be banished from world history once and for all? So far this has not been successful. Realists and utopians always face each other after major wars. The realists derided the pacifists as illusionists. The utopians berate the realists as cynics unwilling to learn from history and save humanity from suffering and destruction.

When we, children of the post-war period in West Germany, think of pacifists, we think of the peace movement, Easter marches and the fight in the 1980s against the NATO rearmament decision. But a hundred years ago there was a completely different world peace movement: Their utopia consisted in replacing military weapons with economic ones.

This movement was convinced that conflicts between states could never be completely avoided. And it knew that negotiated solutions would be ineffective without leverage. But it felt it was more humane to fight each other with economic weapons rather than tanks, missiles and cannons. In the words of a British bureaucrat in World War I: "Pencils are cleaner instruments than bayonets."

Sanctions are not that innocent

The product of this "peace movement" was the founding of the League of Nations on January 10, 1920. The founding states believed they had a new and powerful means of coercion at hand, even to prevent future wars. Like the strategy of nuclear deterrence (“balance of terror”) after the Second World War, the League of Nations harbored the expectation that the mere threat of economic sanctions would deter potential aggressors from invading other countries militarily.

The League of Nations introduced a means of pressure into international law called "sanctions". Last but not least, it was about raw materials, especially coal and oil, but also about the withdrawal of funds. US President Woodrow Wilson called sanctions in 1919 "something far more monstrous than war." Because the threat lies in the “absolute isolation” of the aggressors, which means that they will soon lack any military fighting power. An economic army (“l’armée économique”) could replace a military army. The cruel military war was to be humanized by turning it into a trade war.

Of course, the economic war was not as innocently peaceful as Wilson thought. This can be gleaned from Dutch historian Nicholas Mulder's recent study of the hopes and failures of economic sanctions in the 20th century. According to the researcher, who teaches at Cornell University in the United States, economic wars often result in even more deaths than military strikes, because many “innocent” people starve miserably or suffer for the rest of their lives from the consequences of malnutrition and wasting.

300,000 to 400,000 people would have lost their lives in Central Europe during World War I as a result of boycotts and sanctions (an additional 500,000 people died as a result of sanctions in the Ottoman Empire), a far greater number overall compared to the deaths caused by air raids or the gas war perished, historians estimate. The economic war is not a clean war either. The British economist John Maynard Keynes warned early on against punitive economic measures and instead advocated considering "positive" economic sanctions and aid to support the victims of aggression that violates international law.

A hundred years later we see that the hopes of the time that economic warfare could replace military warfare have not been fulfilled. Why is that? Mulder offers a bunch of reasons. The mere threat of economic sanctions has a deterrent effect on the one hand, but as a kind of “unintended effect” leads to aggressive dictators (Hitler or Mussolini) trying to become economically self-sufficient. "Resilience to the blockade", a kind of resilience against the economic war, was the declared goal of the National Socialists. It was precisely the resounding success of the British financial and trade blockade against Germany in World War I that enabled Hitler's Germany to prepare and react by establishing a self-sufficient economy.

It's about oil and gas

In addition, the sanctions were often not implemented comprehensively, harshly and consistently enough. The sanctions of the international community against Italy in the so-called Abyssinian War (1935 to 1941) - a particularly cruel war against Ethiopia that violated international law and actually one of the successes of the embargo policy - failed because the League of Nations did not want to bring itself to enforce an oil embargo. Does that sound familiar? "If the League of Nations had cut off his oil, it would have been a catastrophe," Mussolini is said to have said in an conversation with Hitler.

If anything, sanctions against small states have had an effect. After the Second World War there were more and more sanctions resolutions than before the war, albeit with less and less effect.

Can the history of economic warfare in the 20th century be used to boycott Russian gas and oil?  With all caution perhaps is this: a lot depends on the boycott of Russian gas and oil. The West should have gotten around to it sooner. As is well known, this failed not only, but largely because of Germany. 

A success of the energy boycott would be particularly effective if everyone, including India, China and Africa, took part. That's illusory, but it shouldn't be a reason for the West to cheat its way out or keep the discussion going for weeks.

Nobody should convince themselves that economic sanctions are “soft” weapons. Above all, they affect the civilian population in Russia. Economic sanctions also hit the people in the country of the boycotters. Those who want economic war must know that they are willing to accept loss of prosperity, starvation and the death of many people. Contrary to what Woodrow Wilson hoped, military war cannot be completely substituted by economic war. Russia is also showing the limits of sanctions.”