Discipline and Punish

One of the notable history books of the year was Nicholas Mulder's The Economic Weapon, which traced the development of international sanctions from the First World War to the Second and the replacement of the League of Nations, as the chief instigator and overseer of concerted action, by the United Nations. The book was timely because of the return of sanctions to geopolitical prominence as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but it also highlighted a parallel in the vexed question of NATO's responsibility, namely that Germany and Japan's pre-emptive strikes during the 1930s were informed by the negative fear of sanctions as much as the positive attraction of lebensraum or the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. But my purpose here is not to revisit that narrow issue of NATO's advance in Eastern Europe but to look at the role of sanctions outside of Mulder's window. This is both a matter of time - before and after the interwar period - and of the role that sanctions have played within domestic politics.

Sanctions as a weapon of war did not spring into being in 1914. There are examples from antiquity (e.g. the Megarian Decree), though the systematic enforcement of commercial sanctions only really develops with the spread of global trade. Napoleon's Continental System - an embargo of the British Empire that was a response to a British naval blockade of the French coast - was significant for its insistence that allies and even neutrals should observe it. In other words, its coercive nature extended beyond the nominal target. Obviously the use of sanctions as a weapon of war didn't end in 1945. Consider variously the Berlin blockade, the seemingly eternal economic war against Cuba, and the sanctions against Iraq after the First Gulf War that would provide the notional grounds for invasion in 2003. As Mulder notes in his book, citing a UN report, one third of the world's population currently lives in countries under some form of international sanction. But this growth in their use has occured as their effectiveness has declined: "the history of sanctions is largely a history of disappointment", as he puts it.

This ineffectiveness is partly because many sanctions are trivial - annoying individuals (often rich individuals who can easily bear the cost) rather than threatening the mass of the population - and thus unlikely to change behaviour at state level. In other words, sanctions are often a low-risk way of being seen to take action. But there is something else at work here beyond virtue-signalling or satisfying domestic opinion (e.g. the absurd demand to boycott Tchaikovsky). It is also not the case that the spread of sanctions merely tracks the spread of trade: that globalisation has fuelled the use of sanctions as a routine tool of geopolitics. Global trade levels have been in decline for some years now but sanctionism remains in rude health. I think the missing factor is that greater use of sanctions in international affairs long ago led to their greater adoption within the context of domestic politics, and this in turn has encouraged their further use internationally. 

In the initial phase - the long nineteenth century from 1789 to 1914 - organised sanctions were resisted domestically precisely because they offended doux commerce and the rights of property. The UK's Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 were motivated by the desire to resist the sanctions of the organised working class (the withdrawal of labour) and so were a domestic analogue and precursor of resistance to the hostile combination of the Continental System of 1806. In contrast, the right to not buy certain goods was respected, e.g. during the American War of Independence and the campaign against the slave trade, though largely because of the limited effect and the absence of enforcement (outside the Boston Tea Party). This attitude persisted through the century, though the class and colonial bias was evident in the case of the Irish Land League boycotts of the 1880s (that gave the practice its name), which met with far greater hostility. 

The exception to this disdain for sanctions was the "pacific blockade", whose purpose was to coerce foreign (and typically non-Western) powers short of a formal declaration of war, such as the embargo of the Ottomon Empire in support of Greek Independence in the 1820s. Blockades were a product of empire but one that saw no legitimate parallel within domestic politics, and that attitude lasted into the first half of the twentieth century. As Mulder explains, this changed: "Interwar sanctions were focused narrowly on the external goal of doing inter-state war. Multilateral and unilateral sanctions since 1945 have usually had internal goals: to address human rights violations, convince dictatorships to give way to democracy, smother nuclear programs, punish criminals, press for the release of political prisoners, or obtain other concessions." But this focus on the internal has eroded the conceptual boundary between sanctions as a tool of international relations and domestic statecraft. One reason for their increasing use in the former sphere, despite the poor return, is that they are no longer a means of coercion so much as a form of punishment. Likewise, their utility domestically is as a form of discipline.

Just as the type of lies once encountered exclusively in the realm of international relations has seeped into domestic politics in recent decades, so the chief coercive method of the postwar era short of outright war has also started to appear. This is evident not only in the formal adoption of the term in areas such as welfare benefits (the "sanctions regime") but in the workplace. Employers threatening to dock the wages and holidays of striking employees until they fully make up "losses" is not a return to the Victorian practice in which trade unions were liable for civil damages but rather the adoption of sanctions as an economic weapon in labour relations. The aim is to coerce workers so that they in turn bring pressure to bear on the unions, much as the citizens of a sanctioned country are expected to pressure their government as the shelves empty and hospitals run out of medicines.

This sanctionist turn is also evident in political party management. The treatment of dissenting Labour Party members since Keir Starmer's election as leader has been notable for its method as much as it aims. This is not just a systematic purge of the left but the institutionalisation of a regime of sanctions in which political rights - to stand as a candidate, to attend conference, to be given a hearing - are denied purely on the grounds of affiliation, and that decided arbitrarily or on the basis of trivial evidence - i.e. no more thoughtful or humane than sanctions applied against a foreign population. Too many on the left are shocked by this behaviour, believing that it breaches norms and offends established mores, which seems neglectful of recent history. Starmer's behaviour is not just the usual deviousness and brutality of the party right dialled up to 11 but the product of a wider cultural shift towards sanctionism during the Blair years. Beyond the bromides of progress and technological liberation, what distinguished New Labour was its sanctionism: the belief that the market would provide carrots and government should provide the stick. Being a former DPP is precisely the background required for the job of party leader now.

The techniques of resistance to power have often been forms of sanction as well, such as strikes, boycotts and shunning (what used to be known as "sending to Coventry"). The contemporary issue is that these have even less chance of success than international sanctions, due to deunionisation, monopolisation and the demonisation of "cancelling" and "wokeness". But if we think of sanctions in the international arena as punishment, rather than coercion, then they are successful in their own terms. The problem is that popular sanctions in resistance to the state or capital are unlikely to succeed as coercion because of the asymmetry of power, and the one form in which a popular sanction can have a genuinely disciplinary effect - the democratic election of a government - is being systematically curtailed by the political cartel and its media auxiliaries. We have moved from the idea of government as the enabler of interests within society to that of a policeman who sanctions the refractory in defence of the established order: which is essentially how it was before democracy. Labour's refusal to commit to repealing anti-union laws is the spirit of 1799.