Cultural kinship and commerce together defeated UN sanctions against Serbia

Evidence

Despite economic sanctions, Serbia was able to sustain itself reasonably well off as a result of massive smuggling of fuel and other goods from Timisoara organized by Romanian government officials, and from Albania organized by first Italian and then Greek companies with the connivance of the Greek government. Shipments of food, chemicals, computers, and other goods from Greece went into Serbia through Macedonia, and comparable amounts of Serbian exports came out. The combination of the lure of the dollar and sympathy for cultural kin made a mockery of U.N. economic sanctions against Serbia as they also did to the U.N. arms embargo against all the former Yugoslav republics. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 784

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the Champagne Fairs law-merchant material on how kinship and reputation ties reroute institutional control, and the diamond bourse work on extralegal commerce under official sanctions.