by Aaron Lukas and Gary Dempsey

Aaron Lukas is a trade policy analyst and Gary Dempsey is a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

April 28, 1998

The world watched in horror recently as nearly 100 ethnic Albanians, many of them civilians, were killed by paramilitary police in the Serbian province of Kosovo. The Balkan Contact Group, which represents the United States and five European nations, has threatened to impose economic sanctions if Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosivic does not withdraw his internal security forces from Kosovo and accept international mediation of talks with separatist Albanian leaders.

But economic sanctions are not likely to work in Yugoslavia or anywhere else. In fact, in the last 30 years four out of five U.S.-backed economic sanction schemes have failed, according to the Institute for International Economics. Moreover, levying sanctions against Yugoslavia could embolden the leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army by sending them the message that the West will not allow Belgrade to resist secession with armed force.

If the Contact Group feels compelled to act, it should reconsider the Swedish foreign minister's proposal to exclude Yugoslavia from this summer's World Cup soccer tournament. Unfortunately, Contact Group representative Hubert Vedrine of France rejected the idea last month, saying, "It did not appear to be a satisfactory measure, nor one which was particularly sensible." When asked about his reasoning, Vedrine said that a sporting sanction is "the kind of sanction which, in a way, holds an entire people to ransom...that is not what we should be aiming for, that is not the main target -- it is not [the Yugoslav] people who are responsible for this or that action. It is a question of changing the policy of the leaders in Belgrade who have allowed the situation in Kosovo to fester for years...they have to be convinced, persuaded, forced to change this policy." Vedrine's counterparts from Britain and Germany concurred, with one diplomat arguing that it would "look like collective punishment rather than selective punishment."

But Vedrine and the others are deceiving themselves: Economic sanctions will not "selectively punish" the "leaders in Belgrade." Rather, innocent Yugoslavs will suffer while Milosivic and his inner circle continue to live a life of luxury.

What's more, economic sanctions might actually strengthen Milosovic's hold on power by providing an external excuse for his failed economic policies. That's precisely what's happened in Cuba. According to one leading Cuban dissident, Castro "wants to continue exaggerating the image of the external enemy which has been vital for the Cuban government during decades, an external enemy which can be blamed for the failure of the totalitarian model implemented here."

Threatening to expel Yugoslavia from the 1998 World Cup, however, will maximize the internal public pressure on the Milosivic regime while minimizing the economic hardship suffered by the Yugoslav people and foreign firms that provide jobs and investment. Ironically, it could also turn the very nationalist pride that Milosivic has exploited for years against his regime's policies in Kosovo.

As was demonstrated in South Africa, narrowly targeted sporting sanctions can be a powerful force for change without the senseless collateral damage of economic sanctions. In 1993 The Financial Times noted that sporting sanctions there "were the most effective of all -- not least because these measures had a clear and unambiguous impact, unlike economic sanctions whose effects are difficult to differentiate from normal market forces." Australian journalist Peter Mcfarline agrees, observing that "removing South Africa from the realm of competitive sport hurt the country more than any other weapon the so-called civilized world could have devised against apartheid."

Threatening to expel Yugoslavia from the 1998 World Cup would motivate the Yugoslav public far more than economic sanctions would. Indeed, Yugoslavs were stunned when their national soccer squad was suddenly banned from the 1992 European Championships because of their government's role in the conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia. This time the impact of expelling Yugoslavia from an international soccer tournament would be even greater because its neighbor to the north, Hungary, would participate instead.

Yugoslavs already are acutely concerned that their national team could be expelled from the World Cup competition. "We don't know if we will play in the World Cup," said one of the nation's top coaches, Raddy Antic. "I have heard that the International Community wants to exclude us because we now have a political problem in Kosovo. We hear voices to this effect but we can't believe it."

If the Contact Group feels that it must levy sanctions on Yugoslavia -- and it's not altogether clear that that's a good idea -- it should reconsider expelling Yugoslavia from the World Cup. There's no guarantee that exclusion will work, but the measure will allow the international community to take a high-profile stance against Belgrade without resorting to dubious economic sanctions.

This article originally appeared in the Journal of Commerce