PhD thesis defence by Jan Lepeu
This thesis proposes a genealogy of the European Union sanctions policy by tracing the emergence of ‘unilateral sanctioning’, conceptualised as a foreign policy practice, through 4 episodes of European sanctions’ history. The dominant approaches investigating sanctions have mainly conceptualised sanctions as mere instruments of foreign policy, neither particularly surprising nor questionable. Actors of international politics have objectives, and sanctions are simply instruments to achieve those objectives. The sanctioners’ ‘objectives’—the belief that sanctions’ goals are worthy foreign policy objectives—and rationalities—the belief that sanctions are an adequate tool to pursue those objectives—has usually remained outside of the purview of the sanctions literature. This thesis, on the contrary, takes this ‘normalisation’ of international sanctions as a foreign policy tool as its central theme, focusing on the question of how some international actors become frequent users of international sanctions. To that aim, it studies the European Union's conversion from being reticent about the use of unilateral sanctions in the early 80s to being a ‘mass-sanctioner’ in the 21st century. Building on the Practice Turn, I argue that in order to understand this shift, one has to understand unilateral sanctioning as a social practice.
Theoretically, this thesis conceptualises sanctioning as a specific type of international practice, a foreign policy practice (FPP). The distinctive characteristic of foreign policy practices is that they are the practices of collective assemblages centred around states’ bureaucratic capabilities and legal sovereignty. Thus, FPPs emerge from an assemblage of discourses, objects, techniques, legal texts, and foreign policy-making practices. The conceptual innovation here is that foreign policy practices produce their assemblages as much as the assemblages produce the foreign policy practices. The practice (re-)makes the practitioners, while the practitioners (re-)make the practice. Therefore, investigating the emergence of sanctioning as a foreign policy practice requires tracing the practice of sanctioning at two distinct levels: as a state behaviour and as an emerging ‘sanctioning assemblage’ on which this foreign policy practice relies. Europe’s conversion to international sanctioning thus serves to illustrate how foreign policy practices emerge, evolve and get inscribed in the state’s foreign policy-making assemblages.
Empirically, building on original archival sources, interviews and secondary literature, the thesis offers a historical account of the conversion of European policy-makers to sanctioning through four episodes of Europe’s sanctions history. It first introduces how multilateral sanctioning emerged as an international practice at the end of World War I, in the wake of the re-modelling of international politics around the League of Nations and its sanctioning powers. The second empirical chapter investigates how the European Community reluctantly started to use unilateral sanctions in the 80s and how it contributed to remodelling the European integration model, most notably by mending the rift between the intra-European foreign policy coordination through the European Political Co-operation (EPC) and the economic and trade governance inside the European Community (EC) framework. The next chapter turns to the sanctions reforms movement of the 90s and early 2000s. In doing so, it investigates how the contestation of existing sanctions practices led to the crystallisation of a generative Community of Practice of sanctioners, which collaboratively redefined what counts as competent sanctioning and thus participated in a transformation of the foreign policy practices of both the United Nations and the European Union. Finally, the last empirical chapter, focusing on EU sanctions regimes against Russia from 2014 to 2024, studies how the EU moved away from its 2000s ‘European way of sanctioning’. In doing so, I show how the de-targetisation of EU sanctions contributed to reshaping the EU foreign policy-making assemblage, notably by putting the European Commission at its centre.
Jan Lepeu is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute (EUI) and a lecturer at Syracuse University - Florence. He specialises in the study of international sanctions and EU foreign policy. Before joining the EUI, Jan graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the College of Europe in Bruges. He has worked for various non-governmental and international organisations in the humanitarian and trade sectors.