Double Standards in EU discourse on Sanctions - from Iraq to the ‘Arab Spring’

The existence of double standards in European Union (EU) foreign policy is well established and continuously deplored. However, few studies have so far paid serious interest to policymakers’ own concerns about double standards. This paper takes a decisive step towards filling this gap, by presenting a comprehensive empirical analysis of reasoning about double standards in EU discourse on sanctions. The study builds on a unique database containing all statements made on sanctions in European Parliament debates between 1999-2011; a central time span for the development of the CFSP. Sanctions are a classical foreign policy tool for reacting to certain violations of democracy and human rights. Thus, the data provides for an unusually rich empirical test of the Union’s handling of authoritarian regimes for both positive and negative sanctions cases. The results show a widespread fear that the EU’s image and credibility are hurt by inconsistency, especially when there is an underlying suspicion that ‘interests’ rather than ‘values’ have determined the choice to impose a sanction or not. Double standards in the use of sanctions are commonly understood to hinder the Union to reach its full potential as an international actor. Self-scrutiny about grave double standards is strongly present throughout the period and across context. However, double standards mean very different things to different politicians, and give rise to calls for different types of action. The framing of specific policies as inconsistent or hypocritical turns out to correlate with party affiliation and nationality of debate participants. Thus, the Union is curiously unified in its phobia about being inconsistent, while it is at the same time strikingly fragmented in its interpretations of what double standards are.