simply, as an alternative to going to war against a state which is behaving against
the interests or moral preferences of other actor states. It is characteristic of
sanctions in practice that they involve international co-operation, while
straightforward war-making can be unilateral. Although countries have always
made threats to other countries, the actual application of a sanction is a
complicated matter and relatively recent as a concept in international poli-
tics.
Probably the first important appearance of the idea of sanctions was the
policy of theLeague of Nations, between the two world wars, to oppose
expansionist policies by aggressor states not by international or military action
but by international economic action. Sanctions typically take the form of a
trade embargo such that the offending nation is allowed neither to export or
import some or all goods, and it may be completely isolated financially and
economically. For most of the last decade of the 20th century, for example, Iraq
was subject toUnited Nations-legitimated trade sanctions which concen-
trated on preventing it earning any international currency through oil exports.
These were enforced because Iraq refused fully to co-operate with the UN
attempt to prevent them from developing weapons of mass destruction.
Two important points have to be made about sanctions. The first is that there
is little evidence of them ever having worked. Countries can endure great
hardship if they are politically united, and the external application of sanctions
is a very effective way of building internal cohesion and hatred of the sanction
imposing external world. Secondly, sanctions are seldom as ‘peaceful’ or non-
violent as they appear. Typically, great hardship is created in the poorest sectors
of a sanctioned society, while the intransigent political e ́lites remain relatively
immune.
In the end the direct application of force by those nations who feel entitled
to prevent another state from doing something is probably not only the more
efficient means, but the more humane policy. It is, of course, much harder to
get an alliance together to take military action than to carry out a trade boycott.
If this means that it is less easy to gain approval for direct force than for
sanctions, then that may indicate that there are relatively few examples of
genuinely justified international coercive actions.
Satire
Satire has been a vital political weapon at some time or other in most societies.
There are elements of intentional political satire in Aristophanes’ playThe
Wasps,Voltaire’s novelCandidelampoons political doctrines of his day and
English literature is full of satire in plays, poetry and novels, particularly during
the 18th and early 19th centuries—Gulliver’s Travelsby Jonathan Swift is
certainly one of the best known examples. In the 1960s television satire came
Satire