Radio 4 broadcast a documentary last night on the use of economic and diplomatic sanctions in foreign policy. It had the usual Radio 4 foibles, of course - in the course of discussing the sanctions against Iraq they neglected to mention the fraud entirely.
They also repeated as fact the claim that half a million Iraqi children died from sanctions, quoting Unicef as the source, neglecting to mention that the source for Unicef's data was... guess who. Matt Welch's article in Reason remains the best short piece on the subject. (On a side issue, a major theme of the anti-war pundits in '91 was giving the sanctions time to work. Did any of the same pundits later came out against the sanctions? That's not an entirely rhetorical question. I'd be interested to hear of any such cases.)
This is not to minimise what sanctions do. They are the dumbest of dumb weapons, as Welch points out. In fact they're worse than that, since a dumb weapon has at least a reasonable chance of hitting its target. Sanctions don't. They don't work. Radio 4's report could only think of one case where substantial political change was brought about by economic sanctions, namely, South Africa. But R4 also entered a significant caveat, pointing out that the Afrikaner establishment tended to be made more stubborn by them. On the other hand, the Afrikaners aren't the whole story.
The key to modern South African history is the Apartheid Deal. This wasn't made explicitly, but put simply, after the Boer War the whites decided to divide the cake. The Afrikaners got the state, the English-speakers got the economy. The Africans would be whipped into line by the former and exploited by the latter. The sanctions hurt the English-speakers, the business class, more, and it was they who led the movement among the old elite against apartheid. Their actions can be explained by a mixture of pragmatism and bad conscience.
So sanctions probably worked there to a significant degree. There is one other case I can think of where economic pressure produced a political result, the Suez crisis of 1956. Eisenhower was furious with Eden and pulled the plug on the City: Eden and the senior Tories could see the economy going belly-up and executed a hasty retreat. That is an oversimplification by several orders of magnitude, but we can reckon Suez as a case where the economic sphere exercised critical influence over the political.
Put against those two partial successes the list of failures, of which the most obvious are Cuba, Iraq and Yugoslavia. In every case sanctions ensured that the economy fell more totally than ever under state control, i.e. sanctions were and are counterproductive.
This hypothesis is a bit far-fetched, maybe, but the two notable successes were both achieved against the English (in one way or another). Perhaps the English are exceptionally sensitive to their wallets? Put another, it may be that the English-speaking peoples have internalised the idea of economic rationality in the Smith-Ricardo-Mill tradition more thoroughly than anyone else, and are therefore particularly vulnerable to economic pressure. After all economic rationality in the modern sense is practically a British invention. Or is it that sanctions are useless against unaccountable regimes which don't have to defend their economic policies? Perhaps a bit of both. Neither Eden nor de Klerk could ignore public opinion in the way Milosevic or Saddam could, or the way Castro and Mugabe can.
A conclusion: the Radio 4 documentary had it about right in saying that sanctions are more about being seen to do something, a way of responding to political pressures, rather than about achieving anything. The old Yes Minister series had a character called Sir Humphrey Appleby, a civil servant who explained what Ministers did by means of the Politician's Syllogism:
1. We must do something.
2. This is something.
3. Therefore we must do this.
It would be best if the West lifted any and all economic sanctions against everyone, except those relating to military supplies and high-tech dual-use machinery, unless there are specific local conditions that make a given tyranny uniquely vulnerable. Instead, send in the Screaming Eagles and Desert Rats (assuming we've got any left after the latest cuts). They're more likely to achieve a result, and they're a lot more humane.