Far away from Megara

Whether you are a student in geopolitics, an expert in AML KYC or a fan of Greek antiquity, the name of a city less known than Athens, Sparta or Mycenae may have caught your eye, Megara ...

What could this city have done to deserve such attention across various disciplines, and to be so often cited in the introduction to training in sanctions regimes, or in the first chapters of international relations books?

We need to go back to the Peloponnesian War of 431-404 BC, a Greek tragedy that brought the Hellenic powers of Sparta and Athens into confrontation, and the latter's final defeat.

The League of the Peloponnese, of which Sparta was leader, allied among others the cities of Argos, Corinth, Thebes and Megara. This league was intended to counter the supremacy of Athens and his own league of Delos, that was turning into a hegemonic power in the Greek world.  As an example of its political and economic influence, around 449, Athens imposed on its allies the prohibition of issuing their own currency and forced them to use Athenian currency. 

The tension between the two leagues was growing for several years, and around 431 BC Athens decided to forbid access to Attica and its ports to the merchants of Megara, Athenians wanted to punish Megara for its support to her rival Corinth in a political dispute, and by economic and diplomatic pressure to fragment the Spartan alliance . Megara, like Corinth, then appealed to Sparta intervention who in support mobilized the League against Athens. This event was the trigger for the Peloponnesian war, which was to lead, a quarter of a century later, to the final victory of the aristocratic Sparta and the end of the dominance of the democratic Athens.

Athens inaugurated here a tradition of financial sanctions and commercial embargoes which would know a long posterity, these events reported by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War is thus considered as the first historical example of the exercise of geo-economic power and the first stone in the regime of sanctions that is now widely used by international organizations and regional powers.

It could also be said that was the example of economic sanctions failing, Athenian’s embargo didn’t cow Megara into submission and even worst Athens lost the war. But it is always easy to look with an educated view on past events, the winds of destiny had turned several times in favour of the Athenians along this long war, and it is difficult to determine whether the strategy of tension chosen did not at the time had the desired effect in pushing Sparta to war; a more wait-and-see strategy could have seen the Spartan league fragment and the sanctions would have been seen as a stroke of genius for Athenian diplomacy.

From a more cynical point of view, we could remember that we must consider the risks when we impose sanctions on a country that has powerful allies,  as the situation could degenerate and lead to some backfire and more losses than gain. Or that the imposition of sanctions is a mean among others in the great game and cannot completely replace a certain military power or powerful allies, a point that Europe, which has one of the most extensive sanctions regimes, should consider carefully.

Considering historical examples ( like the Megara case or the sanctions against Japan in the 1930’s ) and the current geopolitical situation , economic sanctions have seen various outcomes, despite being very popular in use across various periods of History and political regimes. If they have seen some success and be sometimes effective, they have also known failures, missed their targets by enforcing the regime sanctions push others to extreme reactions and war. The truth is that economic and diplomatic sanctions are not only linked to international order and a certain conduct of economic diplomacy and international relations but also to moral principles and non-rational behaviour of state, and often to a certain inertia in foreign affairs and unclear strategy , how to define the success of sanctions and how to end them. 

This lead us back to ethics and values, that should always be in our mind both in business and in politics; based on our values and view on history we could consider Athens was suffering from Hubris and that Megara incident was a political suicide or that they had a morale duty to intervene even at risk of war, or that they were non rational and not assessing the risk, or that they were very cynical and tried a stroke of poker.  

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