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166 | Zsolt Nagy, Zoltán Simon, Viktor Szép, and Tamás Dezső Ziegler
INTERNATIONAL SANCTIONS
— Viktor Szép —
Coming back to the realm of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy
(CFSP), the Union has now become a major sanctions actor in the world,
while restrictive measures - which is its official term for sanctions — have
grown into one of the most important instruments in its foreign policy
toolbox to pursue its distinct foreign and security policy objectives.
In the past couple of years, the EU addressed a number of international
crises through sanctions, like in Syria, Nicaragua, or Myanmar, and also
established sanctions in reaction to non-traditional security threats, such as
cyber-attacks (Portela 2020a, 24). So far, the evolution ofits sanctions regime
peaked during the crisis in Ukraine, which was unprecedented in the sense
that no state of Russia's size and posture had ever been subject to major EU
sanctions with such economic and financial repercussions before (Gould¬
Davies 2018, 5; Portela 2016, 36-39; Szép 2021, 11).
Given the Union's growing willingness to apply restrictive measures, EU
external relations experts are now, more than ever, interested in how this
increased use of sanctions has changed the CFSP. As Paul James Cardwell
convincingly argues: “[t]he extent to which sanctions have been imposed, or
at the very least discussed in the Council, means that it is little exaggeration
to say that the CFSP has become oriented towards sanctions as an appropriate
response to global or regional problems” (Cardwell 2015, 288).
We can also approach the use of EU sanctions from a statistical viewpoint.
Ramses A. Wessel and others have found that 47 per cent of CFSP decisions ¬
except those that cover Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) actions
- are based on Article 29 TEU, the legal basis for establishing EU sanction
regimes. Interestingly, this is followed by so-called implementing decisions
based on Article 31(2) TEU (29.8%), which are mostly used to amend existing
sanctions. Based on these results, the authors conclude that “sanctions are
by far the most used instruments in the Unions foreign policy” (Wessel et
al. 2022; see also Wouters 2017, 78-80).
However, despite this increased use of sanctions, EU official documents
reveal little about how they fit into the Union's broader foreign and security
policy strategy. A relatively old but still key policy document on sanctions
is the two-page-long Basic Principles on the Use of Restrictive measures of
2004, according to which the EU “will impose autonomous ... sanctions
in support of efforts to fight terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of
mass destruction and ... to uphold respect for human rights, democracy, the
rule of law and good governance” (Council of the EU 2004, 2). The more
recent 2016 EU Global Strategy considers sanctions as “key tools to bring
about peaceful change’, which “can play a pivotal role in deterrence, conflict
prevention and resolution” (European Union 2016, 32).