Rhetoric and war: a lesson from Thucydides
In the 1990s the end of history enjoyed its honeymoon, as Eastern Europe celebrated the marriage of capitalism and democracy. In the Noughties the end of history went through marital spats. Dotcom and financial bubbles shook confidence in the West in capitalism, and Gulf States glitz and Shenzhen skyscrapers in the East tempered enthusiasm for democracy. Over the last decade, capitalism and democracy have filed for divorce. The end of history is over.
Global cooperation is giving way to global conflict, sidelining idealists from Adam Smith to Francis Fukuyama, and foregrounding realists from Niccolo Macchiavelli to Carl Schmitt. Another writer who merits renewed attention is the Greek historian Thucydides, an analyst of conflicts between political systems.
Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War was a narrative of how two leading rivals of the Greece of his age, Athens and Sparta, slid into a war that both thought they could contain. But the conflict slipped out of their control and by the end enfeebled both.
The Peloponnesian War related many deliberations of political leaders who had to weigh the trade offs between two objectives, between doing what is right and doing what is expedient. But a particular oration that speaks to us at this moment is Thucydides’ narration of an address made by the Corinthians to their ally, Sparta. With this speech, the conflict between competing hegemons reached its tipping point.
Corinth was a polity situated on the northern rim of the Peloponnese, but in closer proximity to Athens than to Sparta. Given the location of Corinth on a fault line of Greek regional spheres of influence, one might have expected that control over the city might have been a flashpoint between Sparta and Athens. Indeed, Corinth triggered escalation, but for reasons of her own.
Following an incursion by Athenians into her colony, Kerkyra, Corinth appealed to Sparta. At the time, skirmishes and proxy wars were not unusual. On previous occasions they had been contained. But this time, Corinthians introduced a tool of warfare too insidious and devastating for Spartans to withstand, namely rhetoric.
The Corinthian speech was a masterclass of political propaganda.
The issue, Corinthians said, was not really over Korkyra. The antagonism between Athens and Sparta ran much deeper, it was in truth an antagonism between two ways of life:
“Besides, we consider that we have as good a right as any one to point out a neighbour’s faults, particularly when we contemplate the great contrast between the two national characters; a contrast of which, as far as we can see, you have little perception, having never yet considered what sort of antagonists you will encounter in the Athenians, how widely, how absolutely different from yourselves.
The Athenians are addicted to innovation, and their designs are characterised by swiftness alike in conception and execution; you have a genius for keeping what you have got, accompanied by a total want of invention, and when forced to act you never go far enough.
Again, they are adventurous beyond their power, and daring beyond their judgment, and in danger they are sanguine; your wont is to attempt less than is justified by your power, to mistrust even what is sanctioned by your judgment, and to fancy that from danger there is no release.
Further, there is promptitude on their side against procrastination on yours; they are never at home, you are never from it: for they hope by their absence to extend their acquisitions, you fear by your advance to endanger what you have left behind.
They are swift to follow up a success, and slow to recoil from a reverse. Their bodies they spend ungrudgingly in their country’s cause; their intellect they jealously husband to be employed in her service. A scheme unexecuted is with them a positive loss, a successful enterprise a comparative failure. The deficiency created by the miscarriage of an undertaking is soon filled up by fresh hopes; for they alone are enabled to call a thing hoped for a thing got, by the speed with which they act upon their resolutions.
Thus they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their life, with little opportunity for enjoying, being ever engaged in getting: their only idea of a holiday is to do what the occasion demands, and to them laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.” (Book 1: 70)
A judicious trade-off between justice and expediency might have led to a resolution of the clash over Kerkyra. But once Corinthians had scaled up the issues at stake in Kerkyra into a clash over two ways of life, that exit route from the conflict was closed off. Spartans might have compromised over a colony on the periphery of Hellenic zones of influence. But to back down if their very way of life was under threat, a threat that would never go away until Athenians were defeated, was impossible.
Psychologists tell us the way we frame a problem determines how we deal with it. With this speech Corinthians framed a dispute over regional control as one of existential antagonism. In the event, Corinth, a second-tier power, pitted two first-tier powers, Sparta and Athens, against each other. A regional spat became an existential fight to the death.
Thucydides speaks to our world where peaceful competition is yielding to hostile antagonism. The philosophers Plato and Aristotle thought that policy design should be overseen by analytical rigour. Thucydides, the historian, pointed out that in the real world, policy design can go astray when emotions and antagonistic perceptions take over. Logic may rule the politics of philosophers, but politics as it happens in history was and is swayed by rhetoric. We have Thucydides to thank for a case study of how manipulative rhetoric tipped two hegemons known for their astute diplomacy into a vortex of mutually assured destruction.
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