Do EU sanctions against the likes of Syria achieve anything?

Sanctions are often a dead-end if the targets do not comply, as military intervention - which was not on the cards – is then the only remaining option

In the past week, the Arab League and the European Union significantly sharpened their language on Syria. As the situation is now slowly brewing towards the boiling point, the EU has put a halt to all investments and added another 18 Syrian nationals to its list of sanctions. This follows a failure to introduce universal sanctions in the United Nations – these being vetoed by China and Russia.

The sanctions on Syria are inarguably morally and legally justified. This follows a trend of increasing use of economic pressure to promote democracy and for conflict management, even without UN support. The union has also withdrawn its trade concessions granted to all developing countries to Burma and Belarus over labour and human rights violations. We also know that the association agreement with Ukraine has been put in the freezer since the political trial of Yulia Tymoshenko – although, this has reoriented Ukraine towards a customs union with Russia instead.

So, are the EU sanctions really effective? The first modern sanctions were posed against South Africa and Rhodesia in the 1960s, which only led to polarising the white minority and rallying around the flag. The last apartheid President FW de Klerk has admitted that it was not three decades of sanctions, but the end of the Cold War and becoming obsolete as a bulwark against communism that convinced him to throw in the towel. Autarkies like North Korea, Zimbabwe and Syria are simply not responsive to sanctions as they are not convinced by soft powers or "European values". Sanctions are rarely successful except against smaller, co-dependent countries. But Fidel Castro lives to disprove even this theory. Ironically, sanctions are more efficient against friends and the like-minded – which is why condemnation by Turkey and the Arab League immediately unleashed a reaction in Syria, whereas years of EU or United States sanctions have failed.

But all of this highlights a new reality – the EU and the US no longer have exclusive access to the technology and capital that made sanctions work during the Cold War. For example, China is now a bigger lender than the World Bank in Africa. And Myanmar is more concerned about its trade with China than with the EU. The European Parliament recently approved a proposal to export controls to include software and telecom equipment, yet Chinese – and, possibly, less publicly accountable - firms have already replaced their European competitors in Iran and elsewhere.

So why do we pursue unilateral sanctions, even without UN support? Indeed, they are often pursued because we lack other options and sometimes against better wisdom. In the current climate of geopolitics, sanctions are policy failures in themselves for the EU. The situation is not supposed to escalate to that point, as mere threats from European leaders are expected to work. Sanctions also become a dead-end if the targets do not comply, as military intervention - which often is not in the cards – is then the only remaining option. This is why sanctions often result in loss of face or the emperor's clothes as the targets simply call the bluff.

Despite their ineffectiveness, economic statecraft is rapidly gaining ground, in Brussels, after the Arab spring. The EU is increasingly reversing its strategies of long-term engagement, which culminated in the end for the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. In fact, there is very little that dissuades European leaders out of using sanctions as panaceas – they are relatively easy and costless to impose, while the satisfaction of domestic constituencies at home is immediate. On the other hand - economic integration, coalition-building, cultural and public diplomacy demand mandates as well as priorities and patience. These are all, increasingly, rarities in a crisis-struck Europe.

Natalia Macyra and Hosuk Lee-Makiyama are trade policy adviser and director respectively at the European Centre for International Political Economy think-tank, in Brussels