It’s toastmaster’s time again and this evening instead of being an evaluator ( which went okay last time, my evaluatee wasn’t devastated by my comments, always a plus!) I get an easy job – speaker!
This time I have stayed away from my comfortable speeches where I teach a concept or tell a story because this project is called “Research Your Topic” and so I had to learn about something I didn’t know, I chose Economic Sanctions (something light and easy to digest).
This is what I plan to say:
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Do Sanctions Work?
Sanctions. In the news we hear a lot about imposing sanctions on countries like Iraq, Burma or Zimbabwe but we never hear what happens next. What effect does imposing sanctions have on a country or government?
In short, do sanctions work?
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What are economic sanctions?
An economic sanction is any restriction imposed by one or more countries on trade with another country in order to persuade the target country’s government to change a policy.
i.e. Limiting trade or investment into or out of the country
(we won’t buy your products and you can’t have ours)
But wait, if we don’t buy their products, what does that mean for their economy?
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This is the weapon.
By restricting trade, we’re effectively putting the country under siege. Companies in the target country will lose money or go out of business, reducing tax income, increasing unemployment and creating an unhappy population. The theory is that these pressures will force the government to change their policies.
How well does this work in practice?
Let’s look at some examples:
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Cuba:
The US has imposed sanctions on Cuba for over 40 years.
The purpose was to oust Castro.
He’s still there.
Kofi Annan has described sanctions as a blunt and even counter-productive weapon.
Cuba is a prime example of this. Imposing sanctions on Cuba gave Castro the ultimate weapon, he could blame all the countries problems on the US.
They made him stronger, they strengthened him by providing an external enemy to unite against.
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Burma
15 years of sanctions imposed by Western nations.
The aim, the freeing of political prisoners and democratic elections.
The result – no elections, no releases.
Here the effect of the sanctions was limited, Burma’s main trading partners were India, China and Thailand, so lack of trade with the West hardly affected it!
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Iraq
13 years of UN sanctions.
The result – nothing.
Well, when I say nothing, I mean the sanctions didn’t hurt those in power.
Instead they had an effect on everyone else – the poor and disadvantaged.
They suffered.
The estimates vary and it’s hard to get exact figures but it’s estimated that at least 100,000 children died from the poverty, malnutrition and disease caused by the imposition of the sanctions.
We, the international community, killed 100,000 Iraqi children.
Here again the sanctions were counter-productive, imposing sanctions hurt the very people we were trying to help.
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But sanctions can work too.
They worked in South Africa.
As a result of sanctions Apartheid was abolished.
They worked because they hurt the influential white middle class and they pressurised the government to change.
But it took 12 years for the sanctions to work. Economic sanctions are not a quick fix, I compared them to a siege and that’s the perfect analogy, you surround your enemy and wait for them to starve and surrender.
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I can quote examples of the successes and failures of sanctions all night but what are the hard facts?
The most common number thrown around is 33.
That is, when sanctions have been imposed, they were successful 33% of the time and even then they were mainly only partially successful.
That 33% covers the period from 1914-1990, if we look at the period from 1973 onwards the success rate drops to 24%
One more positive figure concerns the effect of threatening sanctions.
In the period 1975-1994 sanctions were threatened by the US 84 times, here the threats had a 56% success rate.
As you can see the threat of sanctions is still a very effective weapon
But if the threat is ignored then imposing the sanctions will probably be a waste of time….
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The idea for this speech came from a trip to Burma two years ago where I saw first-hand the effects sanctions were having on the country.
I wanted to see how successful sanctions really were.
I wanted to know – do sanctions work?
Not really, they can work in some cases but in general they cause nothing but hardship and suffering and in answering this question it prompts another question:
Should we impose economic sanctions?
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