The when, what, where and why of European Union sanctions

Abstract

The decisions to impose sanctions on Russia and to lift them on Iran, in opposition to the wishes of the United States, contributed to the elevation of the profile of the European Union among the main global actors in international politics. However, the EU imposes sanctions since the spring of 1994, shortly after the entry into force of the Treaty of Maastricht. Even though the EU consequently has 26 years of experience herewith, EU sanctions have been mostly studied only on a case-by-case basis. The aim of this article is to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the experience of the EU with sanctions. Specifically, it presents the results of a newly constructed database of EU autonomous sanctions constituted by 48 cases of these restrictive measures, which have been subdivided in 85 episodes. The analysis revolves around four questions that we asked in each case: when sanctions were in force, what type(s) were used, where the targets were located and why restrictive measures were imposed. The analysis of the empirical database leads to observations about the EU as an international actor and, more generally, on the trends vis-à-vis the utilisation of sanctions as a foreign policy instrument.

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

“…Asset freezes and travel bans have increased in absolute numbers as did the total amount of EU sanctions. Earlier studies and data gathering efforts find these types of sanctions the most frequent to occur at 75% and 62% respectively between 1989 and 2019 (Giumelli et al, 2020). These numbers are confirmed by the EU's current primary use of targeted sanctions on individuals through asset freezes (14 sanction cases) or travel bans (12 sanction cases) (Fig.…”

“…As the empirical data in this article shows, the EU's recent more frequent use of economic sanctions is not unique to Europe or the current time period. Rather, we observe similar economic sanctions, based on financial restrictions and commodity bans, in earlier sanctions regimes of the EU (Giumelli et al, 2020) and in programs designed by other actors like the United Nations (UN) (Biersteker et al, 2018;Targeted Sanctions Dataset (TSC)) and the United States (US) (Weber & Schneider, 2020).…”

“…Similarly, Drezner (2011: 96) urged the scholarly community to investigate the "conditions under which different kinds" of sanctions are deployed as did Bapat et al (2020: 451) in a recent review essay. The recently published EUSD dataset by Giumelli et al (2020) delivers the most comprehensive data on EU sanctions and their types to date. Far too few studies in the sanctions literature, however, compare and analyze different designs of sanctions (Giumelli et al, 2020;Hedberg, 2018;McLean & Whang, 2014;Kreutz, 2017;Portela, 2016).…”

“…The recently published EUSD dataset by Giumelli et al (2020) delivers the most comprehensive data on EU sanctions and their types to date. Far too few studies in the sanctions literature, however, compare and analyze different designs of sanctions (Giumelli et al, 2020;Hedberg, 2018;McLean & Whang, 2014;Kreutz, 2017;Portela, 2016).…”

“…The EU is a particularly interesting case to explore design choices of sanctions as it has lately opted for broad commercial and financial restrictive measures in addition to targeted restrictions such as asset freezes or travel bans (Giumelli et al, 2020 European Union Sanctions Database (EUSD)). This turn to economic sanctions is puzzling for two reasons.…”