經濟制裁成敗關鍵為何? 以歐洲聯盟委員會抵制亞洲七國之漁產品為例

Abstract

In 2008, the European Commission developed the so-called “carding system” to fight against the issue of illegal fishing. Through this system, the EC has continuously encouraged major coastal states to take more part in the international fight against the issue of illegal fishing by threatening to boycott fish imports from targeted countries whose vessels conducted illegal fishing activities. Since the carding system was developed, seven countries in Asia have received official sanction warnings from the EC. Out of the seven, four chose to comply with demands from the EC during the threat stage of their sanction episodes (South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand and Taiwan), two chose not to comply (Cambodia and Sri Lanka), and one is still on the EC’s list of warned countries (Vietnam). This is a puzzle worthy of further investigation since the important factors that were mentioned by the sanction literature do not provide a satisfying explanation to explain this variation. The goal of this thesis is to find the factors that contributed to the countries’ different responses to the EC’s sanctions threats. By exploring the cases of the seven countries, I argue that if states are democracies, they are more likely to comply with senders’ demands during the threat stage of the sanctions episode because democracies generally have more political incentives to concede to demands from democratic senders and they also tend to be more well-prepared to address the issue in dispute. Instead, if the targets are autocracies, dependency on the senders’ market is not a sufficient factor for them to comply. In this situation, an involvement of a second superpower like the US is another important reason for them to comply because the interference will put more economic pressure on the targets. My findings supplement the sanction literature by pointing out new causal mechanisms of the political and economic factors.