Читать книгу Collateral Damage Autocracy? - Tobias Lechner - Страница 15
Оглавление2 The collateral damage of sanctions
Part I of this book reviews the literature and develops hypotheses. This chapter reviews the literature on economic sanctions and autocracies. It starts with a brief overview over the historical development of sanctions, looks at the impact of economic sanctions on the state and its political system, summarizes the determinants of sanctions success, and finally looks at the so-called autocratic reversal and variables mentioned in the autocratization debate.
2.1 Economic sanctions in an age of interdependence
Economic statecraft existed a long time before our modern Westphalian state system came into existence, and was already advised by Sunzi, Thucydides, and Machiavelli to policymakers.100 An early example of classical economic sanctions was applied in 432 BCE in Ancient Greece, the Megarian decree.101 Some authors see the ancient and medieval siege of cities – such as the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 72 CE and the Mongolian siege of Baghdad in 1257102 – as the forerunner of modern sanctions: The close-off of a walled city starves the whole population into submission.103 The attackers seek a policy change through pressuring the whole society and thereby harming non-combatants.104 Furthermore, medieval states and state-like entities used multilateral coercion – during the crusades, the papacy banned the sale of war material to the Saracens, and the Hanseatic League regularly employed collective trade boycotts against its enemies.105
The modern Westphalian territorial state led to a centralization of power in favor of the “sovereign” ruler and enabled thereby a new dynamic between the political and the economic sphere. The American colonies boycotted British goods in the 1760s; during the Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), France and Britain engaged in economic warfare; and in the American Civil War (1861–1865), the Northern states cut off the Southern Confederates from foreign imports. Since ←45 | 46→then, there was no decade without economic sanctions.106 However, most of these cases included the use or threat of military force, which influences the political effect. Economic sanctions were mostly used as a tool of warfare, not merely as a tool of foreign policy.
The industry-based economy of the new territorial states and the massive population growth since the 19th century in Europe led to growing international interdependence and a growing interest in economic statecraft. Scientific discovery and technological progress changed the character of both war and economic life.107 The peace movement around 1900 placed great hope in non-violent conflict resolution such as economic measures. Economic warfare in its modern form has been developed during World War I, with an effectiveness not known before; the Allied blockade was even described as a major factor for Germany’s defeat.108
In the aftermath of the horrors of World War I, U.S. President Wilson advocated the use of economic sanctions as a substitute for war.109 A new type of economic sanctions, multilateral sanctions, was then at the heart of the peace-enforcement process of the new-established League of Nations:110 A member of the league who resorted to war was to be subjected to immediate trade and financial sanctions.111 In total, the League of Nations is associated with eight sanction episodes. The sanctions targeting smaller states like Yugoslavia, Turkey and Bulgaria were successful; others failed when they targeted more powerful states. The League of Nations failed to sanction Japan for its invasion of China ←46 | 47→in 1931, which would have been a clear case of sanctions according to the legal framework of the League of Nations. The sanctions against fascist Italy after its invasion of Ethiopia failed so miserably – also because they were not supported by states like Germany and the U.S. – that they were removed, and the League of Nations was soon demised.112
The successor of the League of Nations, the United Nations, should have guaranteed peace and prosperity following the horrors of World War II. However, the Cold War soon disabled the new institutions. During the Cold War, the Security Council of the United Nations (UNSC) applied economic sanctions only one time (in 1965 against Southern Rhodesia). The sanctions against South Africa (starting in 1962) were imposed by the General Assembly and were, therefore, not binding.113 However, the UNSC applied non-economic measures such as arms embargoes114 and diplomatic sanctions115 several times. The end of the Cold War antagonism brought new attention to the UNSC which got the opportunity to shape inter-state relations on a global level actively. One of its favorite tools was the enforcement of economic sanctions, which led to nicknaming the 1990s as “the sanctions decade.”116 The comprehensive sanctions against Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Haiti were considered as failures and followed by military action. Another reason for the dramatic increase in the number of sanctions was the “ever increasing global economic, political, technological, communicative and social linkage.”117 The increasing economic interdependence also created new opportunities in trade strategies and therefore incentives for sanctions.118 The increasing globalization of crime and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was another reason for the desire of an effective UNSC which was capable of acting fast and thoroughly. Whereas the UNSC imposed ←47 | 48→sanctions against only one country between 1945 and 1990, it imposed sanctions against 14 countries between 1990 and 2000.119
2.1.4 Re-design: Targeted sanctions
A major trend shaped the use of sanctions in the last two decades: The combination of comprehensive economic sanctions with so-called targeted sanctions. Mainly thee arguments caused this re-design of economic sanctions: the first one was the question of success. The general optimism of the 1990s in International Relations theory and practice was quickly overshadowed by the genocides in the Western Balkans and Rwanda. Economic sanctions successfully contributed to the end of Apartheid in South Africa, but they apparently failed in many other cases, most notably in the case of Haiti and Iraq. Though Iraq lost half of its GNP in lost trade,120 Saddam refused to back down, and military force was necessary to restore the independence of Kuwait.
Secondly, the Iraqi case had devastating humanitarian consequences: During the comprehensive sanctions of the UNSC against Iraq, 500,000 children died, and the and the country’s child mortality rate almost doubled.121 Mueller et al. write: “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.”122 Media, scholars, and politicians blamed the sanctions for these dead, and a transnational network of activists, NGOs and IGOs campaigned against sanctions.123 The Economist wrote in 1999: “Economic sanctions are a blunt policy tool, liable to give anybody but their intended target a bloody nose.”124 Comprehensive economic sanctions, so this second argument, lead to suffering of the weak and innocent population, whereas the elite finds ways to circumvent the sanctions.
The third argument was that economic sanctions were not only ineffective and had a terrifying humanitarian impact, but they were even counterproductive ←48 | 49→and strengthened the regimes they should hurt. In Haiti, the military junta used the flourishing black market for accumulating wealth, in Iraq, Saddam stabilized his hard regime.125
Already in 1992, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Agata, stated that sanctions should operate “without making the disadvantaged even more disadvantaged.”126 In January 1995, UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali said that the imposition of sanctions raises “the ethical question of whether suffering inflicted on vulnerable groups in the target country is a legitimate means of exerting pressure on political leaders whose behavior is unlikely to be affected by the plight of their subjects.”127 He didn’t reject the use of sanctions in general but called for reforms in their design. In 2000, Secretary-General Kofi Annan called sanctions a “blunt instrument which hurt large numbers of people who are not their primary targets.”128
The intensive discussions in media, scholarship and on (inter)state-level led in the 1990s to a re-evaluation of traditional economic sanctions, and eventually to a process in which many states agreed on a re-design. Instead of simply cutting off a country from the international or bilateral market and hurting the country as a whole, “smart” sanctions should target the elite with travel restrictions, asset freezes and other measures: “their logic is to maximize the impact on the responsible individuals […], while minimizing humanitarian consequences for the innocent population.”129 The Swiss-sponsored Interlaken meetings (1998–1999) resulted in a handbook on the implementation of targeted financial measures; the German-sponsored Bonn-Berlin meetings (1999–2000) focused on travel bans and arms embargoes; and the Swedish-sponsored Stockholm meetings (2001) improved the sanctions machinery at the UNSC.130 The evaluation and re-design of sanctions is considered as a “rare success story of fruitful collaboration between scholars, policymakers, and diplomats.”131 However, even targeted ←49 | 50→sanctions with the UN as sender have unintended consequences in 91 percent of the cases.132
A second trend in the last decades which got not much academic attention is the regionalization of economic sanctions. Besides the UNSC, many regional organizations discovered economic sanctions as a handy tool against members and non-members: the EU, the British Commonwealth, and especially organizations in the Southern hemisphere such as the Organization of American States, the African Union (AU), OPEC, or the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).133 Unilateral or regional sanctions precede 78 percent of UNSC sanctions.134 The failed integration of states into a world economy (Doha process), and the further integration of states into regional economic blocs give latter more political power. Whereas the UNSC applies more targeted sanctions and less comprehensive sanctions, regional organization tend to use rather comprehensive economic sanctions.135
The main articles dealing with the impact of economic sanctions on the political system were published within the last decade. Some articles deal with the (game) theoretical mechanism, others analyze large-N evidence. Before looking at the theoretical approach underlying most academic contributions and at the mechanism in detail, the next pages introduce the reference articles with a similar research question.
In a series of articles, Peksen & Drury argue that comprehensive economic sanctions have a negative impact on democracy. Sanctions “are more harmful than helpful in the promotion of democratic freedoms and human rights.” Economic sanctions, so their argument, reduce the level of political freedoms in the target state. They “enhance the regime’s coercive capacity and create incentives for the regime’s leadership to commit political repression.”136 Sanctions restrict the flow of goods to the targeted country; the remaining goods within the state are controlled by the leadership. Regime-supporting groups will be more dependent on the regime than before the imposition of sanctions. Analyzing cases between 1970 and 2000, they find a decrease in democracy of 30 percent and a decrease ←50 | 51→of human rights of 70 percent after ten years of sanctions. In an article published one year later and using data from 1972 to 2000, Peksen et al. argue that comprehensive and longer sanctions have a more significant negative impact on the level of democracy (political rights and civil liberties) than limited sanctions. The regime “can use the economic disruption […] as a strategic tool to manipulate access to and redistribute resources made scarce by sanctions to enhance its authority and subsequently to weaken opposition groups.”137 Analyzing cases between 1960 to 2005, Peksen finds that sanctions with high economic costs push the regime to “pursue predatory policies” and to “selective expropriation and politically motivated redistribution of private property.” This policy of predation compensates the regime and its coalition “for the decline in tax base, export earnings, and foreign assistance caused by the sanctions.”138
Soest & Wahman come to a less depressing conclusion: Using cases between 1990 and 2010, they observe a significant correlation between democratic sanctions and an increased level of democracy in targeted authoritarian countries.139 They criticize that most studies do not take the explicit goal of sanctions into account. The authors agree with Peksen that autocratic leaders “tend to survive with a mixed strategy of repression and co-optation.” However, “repression is generally a less efficient tool for regime survival in the long term than co-optation” which does not cause dissent.140 From this perspective, economic instability can indeed lead to regime accommodation or regime collapse, especially when a regime relies on a small winning coalition.141 The costs of democratic sanctions are particularly high for an autocratic regime because “means such as vote rigging, interfering with the media and repressing the opposition are regularly necessary to stay in office.”142 The results of their quantitative analysis support recent democratization research which emphasizes the importance of economic decline for short-term democratization. The authors suggest disaggregating different autocratic regime types in future analyses.143 The authors use mainly variables related to the democratization literature, but not related to the design of sanctions.
Analyzing cases between 1976 and 2001, Wood finds that comprehensive economic sanctions by the UN and U.S. increase the level of repression. This is the best ←51 | 52→way for the leader to stabilize the regime, protect supporters, decrease the threat posed by oppositional elite members, and decrease popular unrest.144 Grauvogel et al. find that sanctions can strengthen an authoritarian regime if it “manages to incorporate their existence into its legitimation strategy.”145 This occurs when the target regime has strong claims of legitimacy and only limited (social or economic) linkages to the sender which makes it easier to discredit sanctions. Strong claims to legitimacy enhance the cohesion of the ruling elite and allow regimes to delegitimize any criticism.
The mentioned articles present large-N evidence and give an impression of the main arguments in the debate. Before explaining the economic and psychological mechanisms in detail, it is necessary to briefly point to the theoretical fundament on which most articles are built. Wintrobe, Kaempfer & Lowenberg, and Kirshner apply a public choice approach to economic sanctions. They do not ask whether economic sanctions bring a policy change in the target country but look for the impact of economic sanctions on different interest groups in the target country. Not states, but individuals and groups are the units of analysis.
Wintrobe develops first models that explain how sanctions push autocrats to redistribute goods from the mass citizenry to supporters.146 His book “The Political Economy of Dictatorship” provides the basis for many analyses dealing with sanctions.147 Interest groups in the target state fight for political power and economic wealth. The actions of different influential groups within the state are crucial. Autocrats have two ways to survive, repressing opponents and rewarding the loyalty of supporters: “The dictator who wishes to remain in office therefore faces a trade-off between these two alternatives.”148 The size of the support coalition depends on rents and the opposition. Natural resources (in rentier states) lengthen the duration of authoritarian regimes.149
Kaempfer and Lowenberg anticipate and prepare with their research more targeted sanctions since the late 1990s: Sanctions can have the desired impact if they are “designed to selectively affect the appropriate interest groups.”150 The relevant task, therefore, is to identify the relevant pressure groups within the target country and to model the impact of economic hardship on these groups ←52 | 53→and the regime’s ability to reward supporters and suppress opposition.151 The ruling elite is the group which can most easily gain then rents accruing from sanctions-induced changes in terms of trade.152 The leader’s budget increases and his position is strengthened. Building on Wintrobe, Kaempfer et al. write that an autocrat builds his power on legitimation and repression.153 Repression means the elimination of opposition; loyalty means awarding rents to supporting groups. Therefore, the leader needs a re-allocation of resources. Autocrats can easily allocate scarce resources to their support groups to strengthen elite cohesion, and “redistribute resources to important socio-economic constituencies that will ensure popular, as well as elite, support for the regime.”154
In a similar approach, Kirshner writes that the pure effectiveness itself (“if they work”) is less relevant for policy makers than the question “how they function.”155 His microfoundations approach looks at how groups “within the target state are affected differentially.” This is the “key to maximizing the chances that sanctions will be successful.”156 Economic pressure on the central government and the supporting core groups can have different results: The government yields because of a cost-benefit-analysis, or the population or the core group overthrow the regime.
Wood summarizes that economic sanctions encourage the leader of the target state to increase repression of human rights. Economic sanctions deprive a leader of the resources to pay their supporting coalition. Whereas institutional constraints hinder democratic leaders to redistribute costs (and to repress human rights), autocrats can transfer the sanctions costs easier to opposition groups or the population.157 Costs are redistributed downward. If the leader succeeds in blaming external forces for the economic instability, he might profit from a rally around the flag; otherwise, he will face increasing dissent among the population and opposition groups and will see himself to be forced to increase repression.
Conventional wisdom is presented in the statement that sanctions “seemed not only to be ineffective in changing regimes, but even to entrench in power the ←53 | 54→groups they were intended to undermine.”158 Through an economic mechanism, economic sanctions influence the political system of the target state. Already Galtung criticizes the “naive theory” which claims that value-deprivation leads to political disintegration because it “disregards the simple principle of adaption.”159 The target economy will simply adapt to the new circumstances and loses its dependence on the sender.160
An unintended consequence is that sanctions may hurt the opposition groups they should help, by “strengthening the regime, triggering large-scale emigration, and retarding the emergence of a middle class and civil society.”161 In authoritarian states, comprehensive economic sanctions might redistribute the wealth to the elite and “cripple the middle class.” Sanctions have “the perverse effects of enriching the targeted elites, while simultaneously causing even greater impoverishment of civilian populations.”162 Economic sanctions increase the budget of the leader of an autocratic target state and strengthen his rule only if he can gain the profits made possible by the changes in the trade sector.163
Another consequence of economic sanctions is the deterioration of the economic security and private property rights of citizens in target countries. The regime “manipulate[s]; the domestic economic conditions through arbitrary confiscation and redistribution of private property and wealth.”164 This may include expropriation of private property, seizure of foreign exchange reserves from companies and banks, nationalization of industries, and heavy taxation. These predatory policies shall firstly compensate for the economic damage caused by sanctions and monopolize the economic resources of society, and secondly “weaken the material capabilities of the opposition to mobilize citizens against the regime.”165
The black market provides more opportunities: In Yugoslavia/Serbia, a powerful criminal class with ties to the Milosevic regime emerged in the 1990s which could benefit from the black market. While the middle class impoverished and half of the population slipped below the poverty level, 5 percent of the population have become enormously wealthy.166 Sanctions contributed to a symbiosis between ←54 | 55→political leaders, organized crime, and transnational smuggling networks, which could “persist beyond the lifting of sanctions, contributing to corruption and crime and undermining the rule of law.”167
Besides the presented economic mechanism, scholars mention psychological factors as triggers of autocratization during times of economic sanctions. Already in the 1960s, Galtung assumes “hidden forces” strengthening the target society after the application of economic sanctions.168 The result is not only a failure of the goals of sanctions but even the opposite. Not political disintegration, but even integration can be the effect of value-deprivation. This concept applies especially when the “attack from the outside is seen as an attack on the group as a whole,” and when the population of the target state cannot identify with the sender of sanctions. Galtung describes hereby a so-called rally around the flag. The regime portrays itself and the whole state as a victim of evil forces abroad. This may lead to increasing political cohesion: “The imposition of sanctions enables targeted leaders to pinpoint a clear external threat, which can be used as a focal point for a leader to unify the state.”
Many scholars since Galtung mention and elaborate on this rally-effect. Olson writes that regime legitimacy and domestic coercive capability are the main factors that explain the positive or negative political effects of sanctions.169 Even Cortright & Lopez – they tend to be sanctions-optimists – lament that sanctions hit disaffected opposition groups, whereas they provide autocrats “with leverage to create a ‘rally around the flag effect’ as a means of suppressing domestic opposition.”170 Sanctions enable autocratic leaders to demonize them as an “external threat to sovereignty and economic well-being”171 and to blame them for the failure of their own economic policy.172 Current examples are the latest sanctions on Iran and Russia. In case of religious or quasi-religious ideologies, sanctions “increase the magnitude and the persistence of religious ideology” and strengthen the theocratic regime. The material loss caused by sanctions can be replaced with religion or ideology.173
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A crucial condition for the success of democratic sanctions is a potentially successful opposition group.174 However, if oppositional groups are being hurt, it will have “perverse” consequences because an “impoverished citizenry will have fewer resources with which to oppose the regime and would therefore be cheaper to police.”175 Sanctions cause higher poverty rates which lead to unemployment and violence. They worsen government respect for physical integrity rights (freedom from disappearances, extra-judicial killings, torture, political imprisonment).176 Other scholars even found that economic sanctions lead to a rise in the rate of domestic terrorism. Primary victims of comprehensive economic sanctions are not the elite and its supporters but the poorest segments of the population, which are more likely “to support or engage in terrorist activity” out of a sense of despair.177 Affected by sanctions are all those groups outside the support base of the regime. In states with cleavages along ethnic lines, this leads to discriminatory economic and political practices, which may lead to a rise in violence and instability.178 A “foreign aggression” such as sanctions also gives the regime an excuse for increasing the level of repression.179
Another explanation for the increase of repression is that the threat or application of sanctions has as a signal an encouraging effect on opposition groups and increases anti-government protests.180 Economic shocks cause an uproar and may force the regime to apply repressive measures.181 Sanctions lead to an increase in the prices of loyalty and repression because members of the support coalition may support a challenger, and opposition groups may be strengthened.182 Since loyalty is harder to buy in short-term, autocrats tend to rely on repression,183 especially when they lack legitimacy.184 Gershenson et al. argue that the optimal way for an autocratic elite to respond to foreign pressure is to increase both repression and co-optation.185 ←56 | 57→Escribà-Folch confirms that an autocratic ruler tends to increase spending in those sectors that benefit mainly his key constituencies when the budget is not severely affected by economic sanctions. Is the effect of sanctions on the budget higher, than the autocrat relies more on repression.186 But not all leaders are able to use repression effectively. Especially in mixed regimes, leaders lack the legitimacy and ability to repress the opposition.187 Sanctions might have an impact on third countries, too: Sanctions with the focus on human rights can improve the level of protection of human rights in countries that were not targeted.188 They trigger a proactive behavior in non-sanctioned neighboring states.189
