The History of Economic Sanctions as a Tool of War
"Russia Doesn’t Have the Demographics for War The 1990s collapse in birth rates still impacts Moscow’s ambitions."
February 24, 2022| Current Affairs, Economics, European History, History, Political Science
Today, economic sanctions are generally regarded as an alternative to war. But for most people in the interwar period, the economic weapon was the very essence of total war. The initial intention behind creating the economic weapon was not to use it–economic sanctions were intended to be a form of deterrence. In this excerpt from The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War, Nicholas Mulder looks at the history of the use of economic sanctions in wartime and elaborates on their effectiveness and consequences.
Nicholas Mulder—
Can war be banished from the earth? Throughout modern history, world peace has been a powerful ideal. It has also been one of the most elusive. Each major war produced its share of cynics as well as visionaries. Pessimists saw war as an inescapable part of the human condition. Optimists viewed growing wealth, expanding self-government, and advancing technology as drivers of slow but steady moral progress. This veering between hope and desolation took on a new urgency after the unprecedented destruction of World War I. The victors created a new international organization, the League of Nations, which promised to unite the world’s states and resolve disputes through negotiation. The collapse of the global political and economic order in the 1930s and the outbreak of a second world war have made it easy to dismiss the League as a utopian enterprise. Many at the time and since concluded that the peace treaties were fatally flawed and that the new international institution was too weak to preserve stability. Their view, still widespread today, is that the League lacked the means to bring disturbers of peace to heel. But this was not the view of its founders, who believed they had equipped the organization with a new and powerful kind of coercive instrument for the modern world.
That instrument was sanctions, described in 1919 by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson as “something more tremendous than war”: the threat was “an absolute isolation . . . that brings a nation to its senses 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.” [1] 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. During World War I, the Allied and Associated Powers, led by Britain and France, had launched an unprecedented economic war against the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. They erected national blockade ministries and international committees to control and interrupt flows of goods, energy, food, and information to their enemies. It was the severe impact on Central Europe and the Middle East, where hundreds of thousands died of hunger and disease and civilian society was gravely dislocated, that made the blockade seem such a potent weapon. Today, more than a century after the Great War, these measures have a different but more widely known name: economic sanctions.
How economic sanctions arose in the three decades after World War I and developed into their modern form is the subject of my book, The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War. Their emergence signaled the rise of a distinctively liberal approach to world conflict, one that is very much alive and well today. Sanctions shifted the boundary between war and peace, produced new ways to map and manipulate the fabric of the world economy, changed how liberalism conceived of coercion, and altered the course of international law. They caught on rapidly as an idea propounded by political elites, civic associations, and technical experts in Europe’s largest democracies, Britain and France, but also in Weimar Germany, in early Fascist Italy, and in the United States. But then as now, sanctions aroused opposition. From the outbreak of war in 1914 until the creation of the United Nations Organization in 1945, a diverse assortment of internationalists and their equally varied opponents engaged in a high-stakes struggle about whether the world could be made safe for economic sanctions.
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. In retrospect the economic weapon reveals itself as one of liberal internationalism’s most enduring innovations of the twentieth century and a key to understanding its paradoxical approach to war and peace. Based on archival and published materials in five languages across six countries, The Economic Weapon provides a history of the origins of this instrument.
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” (solidarisme). 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.
The significance of the birth of economic sanctions lies in this momentous shift in the meaning of war and peace. A coercive policy that used to be possible only in time of war—isolating human communities from exchange with the wider world—now became possible in a wider range of situations. Commercial and financial blockade, a policy developed as a form of economic war, was reconceived as a prophylactic against war. By carving out the space in which international economic sanctions have been used for the last century, the League thus had a much more profound impact on modern history than is usually assumed. Indeed, The Economic Weapon argues that the struggle to create and use the weapon of sanctions deeply shaped the interwar world and thereby the structure of the political and economic order that we inhabit today. For one thing, it marked the international emergence of a new form of liberalism, one that worked through a technical and administrative apparatus of lawyers, diplomats, military experts, and economists. These officials’ work, first in wartime and then after 1919, had far-reaching effects. In a period when European governments granted suffrage and extended welfare and social insurance, sanctions made them see other populations as suitable targets of coercive pressure. Long-standing traditions, such as the protection of neutrality, civilian noncombatants, private property, and food supplies, were eroded or circumscribed. Meanwhile, new practices, such as police action against aggressor states and logistical assistance to the victims of aggression, arose. All of this amounted to a major and complex transformation of the international system.
Today, economic sanctions are generally regarded as an alternative to war. But for most people in the interwar period, the economic weapon was the very essence of total war. Many sanctionists regretfully noted the devastating effects of pressure on civilians but nonetheless wholly accepted them. Woodrow Wilson held that if “thoughtful men have . . . thought, and thought truly, that war is barbarous, . . . the boycott is an infinitely more terrible instrument of war.”[2] William Arnold-Forster, a British blockade administrator and ardent internationalist, admitted that during the Great War “we tried, just as the Germans tried, to make our enemies unwilling that their children should be born; we tried to bring about such a state of destitution that those children, if born at all, should be born dead.”[3] Internationalists were exceedingly honest about this awful reality for a good reason. By deliberately spelling out the horror of enforced deprivation, they hoped to dissuade revisionist states from even thinking about challenging the Versailles order. A fear of being blockaded would keep the peace.
The initial intention behind creating the economic weapon was thus not to use it. To interwar internationalists, economic sanctions were a form of deterrence, prefiguring nuclear strategy during the Cold War. Of course, sanctions were not nearly as immediately destructive as nuclear weapons. But for anyone living in the pre-nuclear decades of the early twentieth century, they raised a frightening prospect. A nation put under comprehensive blockade was on the road to social collapse. The experience of material isolation left its mark on society for decades afterward, as the effects of poor health, hunger, and malnutrition were transmitted to unborn generations. Weakened mothers gave birth to underdeveloped and stunted children.[4] The economic weapon thereby cast a long-lasting socio-economic and biological shadow over targeted societies, not unlike radioactive fallout. Feminist politicians and scholars in particular recognized this during the Great War itself, and many pursued an energetic campaign against the economic weapon’s targeting of civilians. The women’s movement played an active role in the international history of sanctions, largely opposing and moderating their force—although also sometimes supporting them as preferable to war.
From The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War by Nicholas Mulder. Published by Yale University Press in 2022. Reproduced with permission.
Nicholas Mulder is an assistant professor of modern European history at Cornell University and regular contributor to Foreign Policy and The Nation.
Notes
1. Woodrow Wilson, Woodrow Wilson’s Case for the League of Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1923), pp. 67, 69, 71.
2. Ibid., pp. 71–72.
3. W. Arnold-Forster, “The Future of Blockades—Part II,” Foreign Affairs 2, no. 3 (September 1920): 38.
4. Mary Elisabeth Cox, “Hunger Games: Or How the Allied Blockade in the First World War Deprived German Children of Nutrition, and Allied Food Aid Subsequently Saved Them,” Economic History Review 68, no. 2 (2015): 600–631.
Sanctions Relief Won’t Be a $100 Billion Windfall for Iran’s Terrorist Friends [...] Since the U.N. intensified sanctions .. sanctions-united-nations-nuclear" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer ugc" target="_blank">http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/09/iran-sanctions-united-nations-nuclear .. against Iran in 2010, it has only grown more desperate. For example, the country’s oil sector now needs anywhere from $50 to $100 billion in investment to improve production, a point that Iranian officials, including Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh, have emphasized .. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304096104579240131109374914 .. repeatedly over the past two years. External investment was cut off by sanctions, and Iran has not had the spare capital to maintain, much less improve, its facilities. Nor has it enjoyed access to new technologies that could enhance oil field productivity. October, 2015 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=117731743
Russia planning to annex new areas of Ukraine, U.S. intelligence finds
Claiming Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson would be an attempt to control of much of the country’s east despite setbacks on battlefield
"Russia Doesn’t Have the Demographics for War "
By Missy Ryan, John Hudson, Louisa Loveluck and David Stern
May 2, 2022 | Updated May 3, 2022 at 11:17 a.m. EDT
Paraskevych Lubov Petrivna, 73, walks past damage from Russian shelling at her home in Novovorontsovka, a few miles from the front line in southern Ukraine. (John Moore/Getty Images)
Moscow is preparing to annex vast new swaths of Ukrainian territory in coming days, the United States said on Monday, potentially moving to cement control of much of the country’s east even as Russian forces struggle to capture key areas on the battlefield.
A move by the Kremlin to formally claim as part of Russia the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, along with the southern city of Kherson, amid an intense ongoing military battle could thrust the conflict into an unpredictable, even more explosive phase.
It is not clear how Ukrainian forces and their allies would respond to such an attempt, which would echo the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 but, in a crucial difference, occur as forces loyal to Ukraine fight to retain control of their territory.
A senior U.S. official said “highly credible” intelligence indicates that Russia will probably stage fraudulent referendums in mid-May in which citizens of Donetsk, Luhansk or Kherson appear to express support for leaving Ukraine and becoming part of Russia. After that, Russia would probably install leaders loyal to Moscow in those areas.
The votes would be an attempt to give the planned annexations a “veneer of democratic or electoral legitimacy,” Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told reporters at the State Department. He called the move “straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook” but declined to disclose the intelligence underlying the U.S. prediction.
Russia had no immediate response to the allegations.
Carpenter said the U.S. intelligence community’s track record on predicting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should give the public confidence in its current assessments. “Unfortunately, we have been more right than wrong in exposing what we believe may be coming next,” Carpenter said. He also noted that the Russian plan may not succeed.
Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland who is a fellow at the Atlantic Council, said Russian President Vladimir Putin might be hoping that Europeans would tolerate annexation as a way to end the bloody conflict. But he said apparent Russian atrocities — such as in the town of Bucha, where civilians appeared to have been tortured and beheaded — would make a peace offensive based on annexation more difficult for Ukraine’s Western backers to accept.
“This plan works if he’s won,” Fried said of Putin. “The trouble is that Putin may claim territory not on the basis of having beaten the Ukrainians but on the basis of an extravagant claim he can’t support.”
Western officials describe a Russian military under strain nine weeks into its offensive but still able to pound strategic areas of southern Ukraine, including the coastal city of Mariupol, where heavy bombardment has left many civilians unable to reach safety.
A U.S. defense official, speaking to reporters on the condition of anonymity under Biden administration rules, said Russian troops were making “minimal progress at best” in their attempt to seize the Donbas region.
“In some cases, quite frankly, the best way to describe it would be anemic,” the official said. Russian forces had withdrawn in many instances following their capture of a city or town, allowing Ukrainian forces to recapture the area, the official said, adding that Russian forces were now launching offensive operations around Izyum, a city in eastern Ukraine that Russian forces first captured in March.
Britain’s Defense Ministry said that more than a quarter of Russian units sent to Ukraine had been damaged to the point where they were probably “combat ineffective.” The ministry said it could take years for Russia to reconstitute elite units weakened in the war.
Taken together with an accelerating flow of Western weaponry for Ukrainian forces, the reports of logistics challenges and battlefield reversals suggest a taxing road ahead for Russia as it approaches its traditional May 9 Victory Day .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/12/what-victory-day-means-russian-identity/?itid=lk_inline_manual_27 .. celebration. Analysts have suggested the date may present Putin an opportunity to offer his view of Russia’s war achievements to the Russian public.
Russia’s Defense Ministry, in an update on Telegram .. https://t.me/mod_russia/15054 , meanwhile reported that Russian forces had wiped out a wide array of Ukrainian weaponry, including arms depots, drones, rocket launchers and anti-air systems.
Even as the fight for control of Donbas regions unfolds in slow motion, intense Russian attacks have continued on Mariupol, where civilians have been trapped by a punishing weeks-long siege. The strategic port city, if captured, would provide Moscow a land bridge from Russian territory to Crimea.
Vershynin said that he hoped civilians, those wounded and, possibly, fighters could be extracted from the plant if an agreement between Russia and Ukraine could be reached.
If not, he said, “Russia just levels completely from the face of the earth everything that’s left at the factory. This won’t be easy, because one way or another we’ll defend to the last fighter.”
“There will be losses for Russia. It will lose its shaky authority completely,” Vershynin said. “And we’ll be destroyed. ... It’s that kind of story.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said that Russia’s ambassador to Israel would be summoned over Lavrov’s comments, which he called “both unforgivable and outrageous.”
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said the Russian official’s words “are untrue and their intentions are wrong.”
As Ukrainian and Western officials call for greater organized evacuation of civilians from hard-hit areas of Ukraine, a steady stream of vehicles carrying civilians arrived Monday in the eastern town of Zaporizhzhia, a destination for those seeking safety from across the region’s front lines and Russian-occupied territories.
Most arrived in private cars with the word “children” scribbled on the windshield in Russian. The passengers inside were exhausted.
People from the front-line town of Orikhiv wait on a bus after arriving at an evacuation point in Zaporizhzhia on May 2. (Chris Mcgrath/Getty Images)
Once-simple journeys had taken hours, or even days, as Russian soldiers searched the families’ cellphones and personal belongings at each of the several dozen checkpoints. Some said they had spent nights in their cars, on the road, in fields or in churches.
After weeks of failed attempts to leave the town of Enerhodar, one young couple said that they awoke Monday to find their cellphones flush with messages. The road to Zaporizhzhia had opened up.
“We just jumped in the car,” said Yuri, who, like many civilians interviewed at the evacuation point, asked that his surname be withheld amid security concerns for family members still in Russian-held territory.
He said that he and his girlfriend, Victoria, had visited her parents days before the invasion, planning on a short stay. When war engulfed the city, they found themselves trapped. The occupation that followed felt like “terror,” he said.
The couple had tested the route Monday to convince Victoria’s family that it was safe. By the time they arrived Zaporizhzhia, Yuri was fighting back tears. On the phone to her mother, Victoria was crying, too. “We’re safe, Mama,” she told her. “We’re safe.”
Loveluck reported from Zaporizhzhia. Stern reported from Mukachevo, Ukraine. Loveday Morris in Berlin, Steve Hendrix in Jerusalem, Dan Lamothe in Washington and Hannah Allam in Lviv, Ukraine, contributed to this report.
correction Earlier versions of this article misstated part of the results of a Washington Post-ABC News poll. The poll found that most Americans support humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine, not Russia.
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