- Position1 of 2›
- Yes, economic sanctions are effective
- Argument‹2 of 2
Economic sanctions are effective when there is strength in numbers
Economic sanctions that are enforced by a diverse group of countries are successful and effective.
The argument
This argument holds that sanctions work, but that their effectiveness depends on a condition often left out of the debate: how many countries impose them together. The reasoning is that economic sanctions are useful for sending a message to a country, and that the message carries most weight when it is spoken by a collection of countries. A single state withdrawing its trade can be absorbed. Its purchases are taken up by someone else, and the target can present the measure as the hostility of one government rather than a judgment on its conduct. When many states act at once, neither response is available: the lost trade cannot be replaced, and the isolation is visible. South Africa under apartheid is offered as the case. Sanctions were enforced by the United Nations as early as 1962. Britain imposed sanctions in 1985, and a year later the United States passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which imposed sanctions in an effort to move the country out of apartheid. The sequence matters: measures begun at the United Nations were joined over the following decades by individual states acting on their own account. The commercial effect followed. These countries stopped purchasing uranium and other products from South Africa, and the collective decision to do so devastated the South African economy. The word collective is load-bearing: it is the combination of these decisions that the argument credits with the effect. Beyond the economic damage, the sanctions helped to bring apartheid to an end, which is the test that matters for a policy intended to change a government's behaviour rather than merely to punish it. On this reading, sanctions enforced by a collection of diverse countries are highly effective, and economic sanctions work when there is strength in numbers.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Some economic sanctions simply are too political to be effective, even when enforced by a collection of countries. For example, during the Cold War, sanctions were mostly ineffective. This is because if the U.S. and anti-Communist countries refused to trade with a given country the USSR would take their place, and vice versa. When there are multiple "superpower" countries with different ideologies, sanctions become significantly less effective.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Not all countries are dependent on each other and/or economically intertwined.