It has been an eerie experience rereading Thucydides while watching governments totter across the Arab world. In some ways, nothing has changed in 2500 years; revolution was an important part of Thucydides’ world and changes in government in Greek city states would cause those cities to shift from a pro-Athens to a pro-Sparta orientation.
The revolutionary upheavals of the 21st century and ancient Greece should remind us that ‘realism’ is a dangerous doctrine that can confuse discussion as much as clarify it. Realism isn’t unique in this respect; political discourse is full of words that everybody uses and almost nobody understands. Partly as a result, many political arguments are quibbles about definitions or arise from what Aristotle called ‘equivocation’: when one word is used in two distinct senses.
Reading Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War this semester I’ve been reminded rather forcefully that ‘realist’ is one of those words in common discourse without any consistent or secure definition attached to it. Thucydides is often invoked as the father of realism in foreign policy, but his approach to the way the world works has little to do with the way this term is frequently used by political scientists today.
Realism in political science is often tied to the idea that the behavior of states is determined by the structure of the international system and the balance of forces within it. In a famous analogy, realist theory takes states as “billiard balls” knocked about the geopolitical pool table by impersonal and predictable forces. Another analogy calls them “black boxes”; the analyst of international relations doesn’t need to know what is going on inside the black box in its domestic politics in order to understand what the box is doing.
If we define realism this way, then Thucydides isn’t a realist. In fact, he’s the greatest possible enemy of this kind of theoretical realism. He mocks it, spits in its face, and gleefully dances on its grave.
For Thucydides, the internal politics of a state are crucial to understanding and anticipating the policies of that state. Sparta has a set of interests that are not dictated by the nature of the international system so much as by the structure of Spartan society. The need to keep the Spartan population on a constant military footing and the need to keep the armies close at home derive from the need to keep the Helots under control. Another kind of city standing where Sparta stood, and with exactly the same powers and great powers around it, might well have had a completely different set of interests and adopted a completely different set of policies.
Similarly, the factional disputes within so many of the Greek city states frequently led to struggles between pro-Athens and pro-Sparta parties. The pro-Athenian side was usually democratic; the pro-Spartan side was conservative and oligarchical. The city of Corcyra under oligarchs might have a pro-Spartan foreign policy; let the democrats take over and the city would shift into the pro-Athens column.
But it is not just that structural and ideological factors cause the “billiard balls” to start moving around in unpredictable directions. In the world of Thucydides, the concept of the state is weaker than it is in modern realism. In Thucydides’ experience, the best way to capture an enemy city is to find some internal allies who can be either bribed or cajoled into opening the gates of the city walls by night.
This is not just about the fragility and vulnerability of the small states of the day. The Persian superpower has an obvious interest-based policy toward the Peloponnesian War: let it drag on forever while Athens and Sparta bankrupt themselves and the rest of the Greeks. But “Persia” does not make Persian policy. Tissaphernes and Pharnazabus, two political rivals who are the satraps of two Persian provinces bordering the theater of hostilities, have their own personal interests which they put ahead of the abstract national interest of the empire they allegedly serve. The Greeks are frequently able to play one satrap off against another — and the situation becomes even more complex as the rivalry between the two potential heirs to the Persian imperial throne begins to intrude on the policy calculations of Persian officials in the far western fringes of the empire.
The states in Thucydides often look less like billiard balls than like ropes of sand: the pull of private and factional interest is often stronger than the relatively weak force that holds the state together. Alcibiades constantly formulates Athenian policy with an eye to his own difficult political position — and people often support or oppose him less because of their sober convictions about the likely consequences of his policies than because of their sympathy for him personally, and their estimation of how changes in Alcibiades’ fortunes in Athens will affect them or their families.
Theoretical realism would strike Thucydides as barking nonsense — the kind of idea that could only appeal to people with little experience of actual affairs. Thucydides was not a realist in this sense; he was something much smarter. He was realistic.
In the world Thucydides writes about, interests matter. State interests, personal ambition, family and clan interests, the perceived interests of piety and religion, party and factional interests, economic interests: they all matter. But Thucydides seems more agnostic about which of these matter most at any given time.
While people can be quite ruthless in pursuit of their interests, they do not all have the same priorities. For some, the good of the commonwealth is the highest good. These people are willing to sacrifice themselves and everything else for the good of the state. While they sometimes take harsh actions to protect the state, Thucydides looks on people like this with a certain amount of moral admiration. He does not see them as coldblooded, cynical calculators: he sees them as honest patriots and even idealists in a world of lesser, more selfish actors. The modern realist is something of an idealist in the Thucydidean universe, and his innocent even naive goodwill is frequently exploited by the cynical schemers who would happily sell their whole city to the enemy in exchange for a big bag of gold.
More, Thucydides thinks that even if everyone agreed to seek the ‘best interest’ of the state as a whole, it is not always easy to figure out what that is. People may intend to follow the smartest foreign policy for their country, but international life is so complicated and the true national interest is so hard to determine (and so hedged about by unknowable future possibilities) that very few people ever figure out what it actually is. More, once somebody has figured it out, their chances of persuading the key decision makers in their country to follow this course of action — and do it in the right way — are extremely small. Worse, some unexpected event — the death or the overthrow of an ally, a sudden storm at sea that wipes out a fleet, a plague — can and frequently will undermine the foundations of what once seemed like the wisest of policies.
Unlike the smug and comfortable world of academic theoreticians, the real world of policy making is one of uncertainty, random events, upheavals and betrayals. Thucydides would proudly describe himself as realistic in the sense that he did his best to strip himself of the flattering illusions within which most of us try to cocoon ourselves against the uncertainties and moral conundrums of life. But at least as I read him, he would have considered ‘realist theory’ as just one more of those comfortable illusions with which frightened humans try to shield themselves from the radical uncertainty in which we all live.
[This entry is cross posted at Stratblog, the forum of the Hudson River School of Grand Strategy, where readers can follow the course Walter Russell Mead is currently teaching at Bard College based on the Yale Grand Strategy curriculum developed by John Gaddis, Charles Hill and Paul Kennedy.]