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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 (GouldDavies 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).
