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The implementation of European Union (EU) policies has been investigated for several policy areas, but Decisions made under the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) have rarely been considered. While many CFSP measures are applicable throughout the EU without the need for further action on the domestic level, some Decisions must be implemented by Council Regulations. These Council Regulations adopted with the intent to implement CFSP Decisions have qualities of Directives, which delegate implementing tasks to member states and require transposition. The aim of this article is to investigate whether restrictive measures imposed by the EU are uniformly implemented across the member states, and, if not, to what extent implementation performance varies. We observe significant differences in implementation performance across member states. The findings of this article are twofold. First, we claim that implementation and compliance studies should involve CFSP decisions more systematically. Second, empirical confirmation is provided of how uneven transposition and application occurs also in CFSP matters. This study is based on empirical work that consisted of desk research and semi-structured interviews with national competent authorities of 21 EU member states taking place between March 2020 and January 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decisions to impose sanctions on Russia and to lift them on Iran, in opposition to the wishes of the United States, contributed to the elevation of the profile of the European Union among the main global actors in international politics. However, the EU imposes sanctions since the spring of 1994, shortly after the entry into force of the Treaty of Maastricht. Even though the EU consequently has 26 years of experience herewith, EU sanctions have been mostly studied only on a case-by-case basis. The aim of this article is to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the experience of the EU with sanctions. Specifically, it presents the results of a newly constructed database of EU autonomous sanctions constituted by 48 cases of these restrictive measures, which have been subdivided in 85 episodes. The analysis revolves around four questions that we asked in each case: when sanctions were in force, what type(s) were used, where the targets were located and why restrictive measures were imposed. The analysis of the empirical database leads to observations about the EU as an international actor and, more generally, on the trends vis-à-vis the utilisation of sanctions as a foreign policy instrument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]