Economic interdependence and economic sanctions: a case study of European Union sanctions on Russia

Abstract

Economic sanctions impose costs on sender as well as target states, and those costs increase with the degree of interdependence between the states in question. We test the hypothesis that EU member states that are more economically interdependent with Russia would be the most opposed to the imposition of sanctions on Russia in response to its actions in Ukraine in 2013–2014. However, an analysis of the debate over the imposition of sanctions shows the opposite: a modest positive correlation between economic interdependence and support for the sanctions among EU member states. This finding further calls into question the fundamental linkage between economic self-interest and conflict avoidance among interdependent states.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 There are some limited video recordings of Council meetings from this period, but the only available recordings from this period are press conferences that discuss the result of the meeting, not the deliberations or the stances of the member states on the sanctions.

2 Governing coalition membership for 2008-2011 drawn from the dataset compiled by Amie Kreppel for the article, ‘Legislative implications of the Lisbon Treaty: the (potential) role of ideology’ West European Politics, Vol. 36, No.6, 2013. We thank the author for allowing the use of the data for this project.

3 To control for coder bias and ensure internal validity, approximately 10% of the speeches were coded by an individual not involved in the project. The codes closely matched and the small variance was in the judgement of intensity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul M. Silva

Paul M. Silva II is a student at the University of Florida. He is the editor of the University of Florida International Review. This article is based on research he conducted as part of the University Scholars Program. Email: [email protected].

Zachary Selden is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. His work has appeared in various journals including Journal of Common Market Studies, Security Studies and Policy Review. His most recent book is Alignment, Alliance and American Grand Strategy (University of Michigan Press, 2016). Email: [email protected].