- 26 March 2012
- 0 Comments
- Nuclear file, Sanctions
Cross-posted from the Huffington Post
“My basic approach is that sanctions have a limited place in international diplomacy or pressure,” says F.W. de Klerk, the former president of South Africa who presided over the end of the apartheid regime and the dismantling of the country’s nuclear weapons. Discussing whether sanctions are a useful tool of statecraft, de Klerk observed, “In the case of South Africa, it kept us on our toes. It halted economic growth, but it hurt the black population much more than the white population. It didn’t help those who it was intended to help, it actually harmed them more than it harmed the intended victims of the sanctions.”
De Klerk’s comments, delivered earlier this month at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, may be useful in assessing the utility of broad sanctions against Iran. Proponents of Iran sanctions cite the case of South Africa as an example of a successful sanctions regime against a state that transitioned to a democracy and subsequently dismantled its nuclear weapons. But out of the 35 authoritarian states that have transitioned to democracies, South Africa is the only one that did so under the weight of broad economic sanctions.
However, according to de Clerk, “sanctions at times delayed reform. In our case the biggest change agent, which in many respects made nonsense of the apartheid, was economic growth and development. Economic growth and development created an impetus in black education. Because of economic growth and development, so many black universities were created. By the 1990s there were more black students in universities than white students. But economic sanctions twisted our economy.”
According to economist Mats Lundahl, many of the sanctions imposed on South Africa depressed the industrial sector and actually perpetuated the dominance of a skilled labor force led by whites. Lundahl argues that if industrial markets were allowed to flourish, the expansion of its labor market would naturally prompt a quicker end to the apartheid regime.