The History of Economic Warfare: International Law, Effectiveness, Strategies

Abstract

The article surveys the history of economic warfare from the Seven Years' War to the present. Three different aspects of economic warfare are studied: international law, effectiveness, and strategies. From the seventeenth century until World War I economic warfare scholarship was dominated by the perspective of international law. But as belligerents ignored jurists' rules of acceptable conduct in economic warfare, the international law approach receded into irrelevance. Practitioners and analysts alike have differed over the effectiveness of economic warfare. Its lack of success against Germany in World War II was a severe blow to the prestige of the blockade weapon. Economic warfare protagonists had underestimated the capability of a determined power elite, controlling the army, to retain power despite economic hardship. In general, economic warfare seems able to do little more than shorten conflicts. Strategies of economic warfare have two dimensions: the institution of blockades and other measures `at large', and the question of according to which principles one should draw up lists of prohibited items. Developments on the first dimension have gone full circle, from Napoleon's Continental self-blockade prohibiting imports from the United Kingdom while promoting exports, to the CoCom embargo of the USA and its allies restricting exports to the Warsaw Pact countries without attempting to prevent imports. On the second dimension, lists of contraband swelled until by World War II they became all-encompassing. In modern wars every good can have relevance to the war effort. Economists have even pointed out that the most strategic item is not the one having the greatest military use but the one relatively most expensive for the adversary to produce domestically and therefore bringing the greatest gains from trade.