Economic Weapon

This history identifies international economic sanctions as a central and understudied innovation of interwar internationalism. Sanctions were initially conceived by the victors of World War I—principally Britain, France, and the United States—as an ‘economic weapon’ inspired by new techniques of blockade and economic warfare developed in 1914-1919. Enshrined in Article 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, sanctions entailed the coercive economic isolation of countries that violated peace treaties. Sanctions were novel because they were a form of economic pressure imposed against civilian populations in peacetime and internationally legitimated as punishment for the crime of aggression—a break with preceding centuries in which such acts of economic isolation were only allowed in time of war. The study clarifies the differences between sanctions as they emerged in the early twentieth century and other forms of economic pressure—embargoes, (pacific) blockades, boycotts—and recovers the meaning and agendas behind sanctions as argues that the wartime origins and coercive nature of sanctions were widely recognized by their advocates and critics alike, and that this recognition persisted deep into the 1920s and 1930s, when the discourse of international blockade and economic weaponry was slowly displaced by the more neutral language of ‘sanctions’ and ‘collective security’.

It demonstrates that the most popular political and strategic theory of sanctions was one which conceptualized them as a deterrent: sanctions were thought to be capable of keeping the rulers and populations of other states peaceful by threatening them with quick and universal material devastation if they transgressed international rules. It emphasizes how the introduction of economic sanctionsentailed a revolution in international law, ending the centuries-old concept of neutrality: to effectively isolate aggressors, interactions with neutral countries had to cease, and impartiality was delegi