Санкции – странный феномен

Abstract

The history of international economic sanctions is simultaneously old and relatively young. The first sanctions recorded in written history were applied in ancient times, but the newly introduced punitive economic measures received legal status only after the First World War. At first, sanctions were not given much political significance and there were not many of them. The situation changed radically after the Second World War and especially after the collapse of the USSR. The rapid increase in sanction activity over the past two decades is a manifestation of the desire of the United States and its satellites to protect their position as a world hegemon. The punitive economic apparatus, the most powerful in the United States, is set up for sanction activity and generates restrictions and prohibitions as the main products of its activity. To paraphrase the philosopher Rene Descartes, the western sanctions government officer use to say: “I authorize, therefore I exist”. International economic sanctions are losing their original function as a means of preventing military conflicts and are turning into an economic weapon. But, paradoxically, attempts to interpret them as an instrument of economic policy are not valid, if only due to the fact that working with the categories of “efficiency”, widely used in economic science, is impossible in the case of sanctions. Instead of “efficiency”, the term “effectiveness” should be used, but measuring the latter, unlike “efficiency”, is impossible; therefore, the phenomenon of sanctions, as such, largely goes beyond the scope of economic science. The nature of modern sanctions is perverse. Their use not only entails economic degradation and destruction of the institutional structure of society in the target countries, but also causes damage to the sending countries. Most modern sanctions are illegitimate and have no moral justification. Sanctions and their systematic application are nothing more than a geopolitical weapon used to undermine the sovereignty of independent states. This article shows the historical evolution of the sanctions mechanism, its degeneration and transformation into a stable institutional entity.