How to sanction international wrongdoing? The design of EU restrictive measures

Abstract

Sanctions are among the most widely used foreign policy tools of governments and international organizations in response to national or international wrongdoings. Beyond the dichotomous question of whether to adopt or not to adopt sanctions against a target, decision-makers develop different designs when they impose restrictions: targeted sanctions like asset freezes and travel bans, arms embargoes, or economic sanctions such as financial restrictions and commodity bans. What accounts for this variation in the design of sanctions regimes? This article investigates this question by developing a configurational explanation that combines domestic- and international-level factors for the choice of an economic versus a targeted sanctions design. I test these factors on original data mapping European Union (EU) autonomous sanctions against third countries in force in 2019 through set-theoretic methods. The analysis shows that a militarily strong target’s serious misbehavior through grave human rights violations triggers EU action in the form of economic sanctions, however, only in combination with two conditions: first, the EU reacts to a misbehavior through the adoption of an economic design when the United States imposes economic sanctions, too (path 1); second, the salience of a target’s conflict triggers an economic design of sanctions in case of grave human rights violations (path 2).

Caught up by Geopolitics: Sanctions and the EU’s Response to Russia’s War Against Ukraine

“…From a geopolitical perspective, sanctions can be understood as a tool to promote foreign policy and security goals through economic means – they are a form of economic statecraft. Scholarship finds in recent studies that even the EU increasingly makes use of sanctions as economic statecraft ( Meissner 2023 ; Meissner and Graziani 2023 ) as will also be shown in this article. Under the condition of geopolitical concerns, we would expect decision-makers to opt for large scale sanctions which impose high costs on the target state (e.g.…”

“…Increasing attention is paid to geostrategic considerations in analyzing EU external relations and the respective policy decisions (e.g. Meissner 2023 ; Meissner and Graziani 2023 ; Nitoiu and Sus 2019 ). This shift is also evident in the literature on sanctions and studies on how policy-makers adopt and design sanctions packages ( Hedberg 2018 ; Meissner 2023 ; Meissner and Graziani 2023 ).…”

“… Meissner 2023 ; Meissner and Graziani 2023 ; Nitoiu and Sus 2019 ). This shift is also evident in the literature on sanctions and studies on how policy-makers adopt and design sanctions packages ( Hedberg 2018 ; Meissner 2023 ; Meissner and Graziani 2023 ). Hedberg (2018) , for instance, proposes a perspective on the design of Russian countersanctions against Europe which she labels ‘differentiated retaliation’.…”

Court of Justice of the European Union, European Court of Human Rights, respect for human rights and restrictive sanctions

“…Compliance with the obligation to state reasons assumes greater importance in the Yanukovych case, where the judge of the EU acknowledged that, in the context of the adoption of restrictive measures, not only the obligation to provide reasons of a "hard" nature is binding (Pond, 2017;Fürrutter, 2019, Meissner, 2022, that is specific but it is also necessary for the Council to assess that the decision of the national authority, even of a third State (such as Ukraine in this case) respects the rights of the defense and the right to effective judicial protection of the interested party (Alì, 2019) 20 . , not yet published.…”

Новое Международное Разделение Труда, Санкции И Фактор Образования

“…С 2018 года развѐртывается волна санкций США против КНР, в 2022 году произошла интенсификация санкций против Российской Федерации. Напомним, что международные санкции следует разделить на два основных типа: 1) целевые санкции -замораживание активов, запреты на поездки, эмбарго на поставки оружия; 2) экономические санкциифинансовые ограничения, запреты на товары [5]. По отношению к нашей экономике США, страны ЕС применяют все виды санкций, что свидетельствует об их направленности не против отдельных людей или отдельных отраслей, а против всего российского народного хозяйства.…”