Kasz216 said:
1) The Meditterianian countries more or less have had the exact same problems the Scandanavian countries have. Too much government spending they can't pay for. That's most of the 1st worlds problem actually.
and quite honestly, unless it's really a case of genocide or something, independence referrendums should require 2 votes. Just by the cedeing area. What would the 2nd vote be?
After all, Crimea left, and them immediatly was folded into Russia... however.
What about their percetnage of the Ukraine's national debt? Does it make sense that Crimea can just skip town debt free?
Does it make sense that they just get everything in crimea specifically at that time government wise, just because it's currently there? Anything the Ukranian government has stored there suddenly becomes Crimea's even when it might be for use elsewere and just stored there for convience? What about surrounding natural resources, what about exact borders?
These are things that are rarely talked about at first and certaintly gonna have some dispute. The only certain thing is the border, Crimea was a region before so it had a defined border. That is unlikely to change when the annexation occurred even though no one seems to recognise it yet
3) Discrimination is illegal.... unless you vote to cede and then get rid of all of those protections.
As for when economic sanctions have worked. They've worked fairly often under the right cricumstances
Basically to work they require one of two things
1) You have to have big alliance that prevents needed resources
This scenario is a good excuse to develop renewable energy properly. Western Europe lacks conventional forms of energy to meet it's full needs, while Russia has tons (probably 100's of years worth of gas). Russia uses it's energy especially what Gazprom does as a political weapon to get its will in Europe. This potentially makes Russia very powerful, but by Europe being self-sufficient in renweable energy, it can successfully make Russia back off. Shame it's only Germany that's really trying with renewable energy.
2) If they care about and rely on their people. Putin actually does.
It didnt' work on North Korea, because Kim Jong Il didn't give a shit about his people.
As for examples, well the most noticeable example is Japan via WW2. It was the US economic sanctions that forced them to attack the US.
The anti Apartheid sanctions against South Afirca were quite affective. Except we happily supported their regime for about 40 years before changing our mind! Leaders like Thatcher and Reagan actually supported them in the early 80's.
They have such a shitty record because they're often just small unilateral sanctions that mean nothing. Like Obama freezing the assets of 8 russian officials.
That said, sanctions skeptics own numbers have sanctions working at least 15% of the time.
Good mulilateral full measure sanctions can work pretty well.
It's just to often half and quarter measure unilateral sanctions are imposed by congress, the president, or other political leaders just to be an official record of disaporval.
My problem with sanctions is that they aren't followed by the rules. If a country is on our side (say Israel) but does some questionable and undesirable things (by perspective) they get away with it, but if by the wests standards we choose not to like them for some reason (sometimes for no real reason at all) we sanction them (Iran). The use of sanctions I though was to use them to uphold championed stuff like human rights and international law, I though this should be universal but for some reason it is not. We pick and choose who the rogue states at some point and ignore the rest. No wonder they rarely work. The other I have when we use sanctions is that we assume to be in the right. The question is what if we aren't? If they must be used, then they have to be effective. Not something petty like banning travel of government officials for example
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