European Voice: Smart sanctions prove not so clever
Written on October 18, 2007
As an alliance of states built on ‘soft power’, it is perhaps not surprising that the European Union has had ambivalent feelings about sanctions from the very first time it imposed them – against the Soviet Union in response to the suppression of democratic stirrings in Poland in December 1981.The trade embargo against the Soviet Union was partial and half-hearted: Germany was opposed, Greece was exempt and Denmark’s participation was limited to refusing to allow goods to be shipped through its territory to or from states that were implementing the sanctions.
But the sanctions on the agenda of the EU foreign ministers’ meeting this week (15-16 October) were quite different. The ‘dumb sanctions’ of the 1980s and 1990s – blanket trade embargoes against rogue regimes in South Africa, Yugoslavia and Iraq – have been replaced by ‘smart sanctions’ that minimise the effects on the general population by targeting individuals who are directly implicated in the events that triggered the measures in the first place.
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