Types of sanctions: A further analysis looks at the types of sanctions. Arms embargoes correlate with a higher level of democracy. Arms embargoes hurt a ruler’s repressive capacity. This may force him to rely on other tools such as decentralizing political power and giving more civil rights. Aid sanctions – the cut of financial aid – also correlate with a higher level of democracy. Foreign aid is often aimed at state building and promoting rule of law and democracy but is also an external revenue source for the leader that helps him providing private goods to his supports, thus financing kleptocratic structures. Once these revenue streams disappear, the leader needs other means to keep the system stable such as providing more political rights. Improving the level of democracy is also the best way to make sure that foreign aid will re-appear in the future.
Implications
The findings have several implications at the metatheoretical and macrotheoretical level. The operationalization showed how difficult it is to operationalize sanctions and to measure their effects or even their “success.” In everyday life, the question of success is not that relevant. Policymakers are not so much concerned about the usefulness of sanctions per se; they need to choose the best possible tool in a specific situation under specific circumstances.
Furthermore, sanctions do not exist in a vacuum: In the toolkit of foreign policy, the economy is only one sphere besides diplomacy, military and information.10 When states apply sanctions against countries with which they have no pre-sanctions trade, sanctions are clearly signaling. The variable economic costs help to see whether sanctions are aimed as a signal. This book distinguishes between de jure and de facto goal: Whereas the de jure goal refers to the publicly stated goal, the de facto goal refers to Giumelli’s taxonomy of coercing, constraining and signaling sanctions.11 This categorization has the implication ←25 | 26→that signaling sanctions cannot be evaluated as non-successful just because they did not reach their ambitious goal.
There are more methodological implications of the findings. Democratic sanctions after 2000 have a much stronger positive effect on the level of democracy than those before. This may indicate that the sanctions re-design around 2000 made the sanctions tool much more sophisticated. However, the basic problem of all quantitative sanction research is the quantification of sanctions. It is extremely difficult if not impossible to compare them with each other and to describe their effects. Large-N analyses have only limited validity.
Policy recommendations
Policymakers need to be aware of different mechanisms of sanctions. Some sanctions are coercing, others constraining, others signaling. The goal does not need to be communicated publicly – information asymmetry is an important good in international relations. However, policymakers need to be aware of different mechanisms of sanctions.
Policymakers should recognize so-called secondary sanctions as normal sanctions against their state. Secondary sanctions are not some sort of collateral damage of ‘normal’ sanctions. Instead, they directly target a state and its economy.
Policymakers should develop sanctions and counter-sanctions capabilities. Sanctions need to be implemented properly. Numbers suggest that the EU is under-developed regarding its sanctions capabilities, especially in comparison with the U.S. Recent so-called secondary sanctions by the U.S. made clear that the EU is not only sender but also target of sanctions.
Lessons learned
1. Sanctions with high economic costs do not cause autocratization. The findings of this book debunk the argument that economic sanctions with high economic costs are responsible for an autocratization of the targeted state as a myth. The analysis conducted in this book finds a significant correlation between sanctions with high economic costs and the level of democracy. Cases that suggest otherwise are not prototypical sanctions cases but infamous anomalies, particularly known for their “failure”. In other cases, sanctions follow (not cause) autocratization, such as post-2014 sanctions against Russia. This book does not claim that economic sanctions with high economic costs cause democratization, but it claims that they do not cause ←26 | 27→autocratization – there is no correlation, so the claimed causality cannot be true.
2. Aid sanctions and arms embargoes correlate with a higher level of democracy. The type of sanction is crucial for its side-effects. Arms embargoes hurt the repressive capacity in the targeted state. Aid sanctions are particularly harmful to an autocrat because they directly hurt his revenue streams. Once they disappear, he needs to rely on other tools to keep the system stable – such as granting political rights. This will also guarantee the lifting of sanctions. This finding should be an incentive for further research.
3. Sanctions are not a binary variable and should, therefore, not be used as such in quantitative analyses. Though this seems to be self-evident, many articles use sanctions as a dummy variable. Similarly, many scholars assume that comprehensive economic sanctions equal high economic costs of sanctions. This is wrong. High economic costs result from the affected trade linkage and the implementation of sanctions. Sanctions consist of a complex net of legal regulation and laws, from different bodies, and their goal, design, and scope need to be included in a quantitative analysis of sanctions. Using sanctions as a binary variable is misleading and may suggest wrong findings.
4. Sanctions have a de jure goal and a de facto goal; an evaluation of sanctions that is only based on the de jure goal is misleading. Whereas the de jure goal refers to a publicly stated purpose of sanctions, the de facto goal refers to the inherent mechanism (coercing, constraining, signaling). Many sanctions function as a signal; they should not be evaluated as non-successful just because they did not reach their de jure goal. An evaluation of sanctions needs to include the de facto goal, though it may be very difficult to establish in most cases.
In conclusion, sanctions are not as bad – and probably not as useless – as academic and non-academic debates suggest. When policymakers want to employ them, they should not forget that the economy is only one sphere in foreign policy. The right combination of tools is necessary to achieve a goal.
←27 | 28→←28 | 29→
1 Peksen & Drury 2010.
2 Soest & Wahman 2015.
3 Soest & Wahman 2015, p. 957.
4 Geddes 1999, pp. 121–122.
5 Wright 2008, p. 323.
6 Grauvogel & Soest 2014, p. 635.
7 Lipset 1959, p. 80.
8 The model is based on Wintrobe’s view of a political system as marketplace; Wintrobe 1990.
9 Soest & Wahman 2015.
10 Baldwin 1985, pp. 13–14.