The Economic Weapon
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The first international history of the emergence of economic sanctions during the interwar period and the legacy of this development Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way of exploiting the flows of globalization to defend liberal internationalism, their appeal is that they function as an alternative to war. This view, however, ignores the dark paradox at their core: designed to prevent war, economic sanctions are modeled on devastating techniques of warfare. Tracing the use of economic sanctions from the blockades of World War I to the policing of colonial empires and the interwar confrontation with fascism, Nicholas Mulder uses extensive archival research in a political, economic, legal, and military history that reveals how a coercive wartime tool was adopted as an instrument of peacekeeping by the League of Nations. This timely study casts an overdue light on why sanctions are widely considered a form of war, and why their unintended consequences are so tremendous.
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Sanctions are a favorite instrument of the American Empire and as such it is valuable to investigate their history and scrutinize their efficacy. Mulder traces the history of economic sanctions (in their contemporary incarnation) to those directed against the Central Powers in the First World War, when the war time leaders conceived of sanctions as “the economic weapon”, a means to inflict damage against the enemy without shells or mortars. As Mulder demonstrates, it is fairly difficult to gauge the effectiveness of sanctions, though he demonstrates that it is very unlikely that sanctions have worked as intended more in more than two or three limited examples, confined to now forgotten international disputes in the interwar period. Mulder traces the intellectual history of sanctions, which were simultaneously understood as a weapon with which to coerce enemies into desired by outcomes, but also by the day's liberal internationalist thinkers as a potential ‘non-violent' tool in the arsenal of diplomacy. Mulder demonstrates that sanctions have largely remained ineffective and have in fact often induced ‘bad' behavior from authoritarian militarist states who are induced ultimately to double down on illegal foreign interventions and focus on autarkic internal industrialization, state behaviors which, to this day, sanctions are deployed to try to prevent.
