Thucydides on superpowers, underdogs and ‘Realpolitik’
Sculpture of Thucydides (image created in Shutterstock)
Anyone trying to broker a Russian-Ukrainian armistice risks opprobrium. Viktor Orban is trying and is accused of knavery. Pope Francis tried earlier this year and was accused of naivety. However, before vilifying Orban and Francis for selling out the interests of Ukraine, one may first wish to consult an authority on military conflict management: the classical Greek historian Thucydides.
Thucydides (c. 460 – 400 BC) knew war first hand. He served as a general in the one between the two Hellenic superpowers of his time, Athens and Sparta. After defeat in battle, he retired to write the history of his turbulent times. His book, The Peloponnesian War, has survived.
Thucydides showed that wars develop a dynamic that sucks in innocent bystanders. One prime example was the fate of the polity of Melos.
Melos, a small island of no strategic consequence and with nothing to gain by taking sides, had adopted a policy of neutrality. However, the Athenians threatened it with an invasion, preceded by negotiations set out in the Melian Dialogue. Thucydides let both sides have their say.
The arguments put forth by the Melians were perfectly rational.
To begin with, they warned the Athenians of the reputational damage that came from invading a small, neutral polity. How would this play out with other neutral polities who had to fear the same fate? Other neutrals would swell the ranks of the enemies of Athens. And besides, did the Athenians not consider how an invasion would spur Spartans to come to their aid?
The Athenian counter was chilling.
Equity mattered, indeed, but politics was about power, not about equity. Melian neutrality sent a dangerous signal that Athenians could not ignore, namely of Athenian weakness. Precisely because Melos was so small, letting Melos defy Athens would make that weakness seem all the more glaring. It followed that Athenians had no choice but to invade Melos. If they did not, they would destabilise their existing empire. And as far as the contingency of Spartan backing for Melos was concerned, well, the Spartans would weigh up the risks and think twice before committing troops to a polity that was expendable.
The Melians and Athenians did not resolve their differences. Melians put up resistance to the ensuing invasion and, as the Athenians had predicted, the Spartans did not turn up to back them. The outcome was that the Melians were overwhelmed and either massacred or sold into slavery.
Readers surely do not leap to the conclusion that Thucydides exonerated his countrymen for the massacres they inflicted. Nor may anyone assume that Athenians were proud of what they did. In fact, a year after the fall of Melos, the Athenian playwright Euripides put on stage a tragedy, The Trojan Women, depicting the woeful fate of survivors after the fall of their city. The Athenians did not look away from the consequences of their actions.
Thucydides was an historian, and history relates unique events where analogies between past and present are tenuous. The dynamic between Athens and Melos might not map perfectly onto the dynamic between Russia and Ukraine. The Peloponnesian War, however, is not only a book that speaks to historians: it is also a foundational text of political science.
Thucydides was a theorist of what today is termed Realpolitik. It is a word freighted with connotations of cynicism and ruthlessness. However, the legacy of two unreconstructed practitioners of Realpolitik, Clemens von Metternich and Otto von Bismarck, was the framework of Europe’s political architecture that lasted from the Treaty of Vienna in 1815 until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. When seen against the relief of the twentieth century, the high tide of political ideology, the near-century 1815/1914 was a period of relative calm.
Detractors of Orban and Francis have every right, of course, to impugn the logic or the motives of their push for an armistice. Thucydides, however, was not a knave and certainly not naïve. The bottom line of his analysis was that there are times when Realpolitik saves lives.
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