My Take | Thucydides’ real moral is about democratic self-harm
- The ancient historian’s classic account of war was an indictment of democracy’s corruption into hegemony that ended up hastening the decline of Greek civilisation
Political guru Graham Allison says we are in an even more dangerous situation today than when he first published his book six years ago that made “Thucydides’ Trap” a popular phrase.
In an interview with the New Statesman last month, Allison warned that “American politics is driving towards a provocation that China could not avoid” and the two sides were sliding into a catastrophic new conflict, which would likely drag down the rest of the world with them.
Quite a few specialists on ancient Greece have questioned Allison’s highly idiosyncratic reading, driven as he was to extract an international relations theory about great power rivalry from Thucydides’ classic history. That’s actually quite similar to how whole schools of Chinese and Indian international relations scholars have tried to extract comparable theories from their own ancient histories.
But what would the Athenian general and historian really make of the dangerous world we live in today? I suspect he would not come up with “the trap” that has been named after him. Instead, he would have readily recognised the contemporary replication of the degeneracy and corruption of politics from a democracy into an empire; and that, at heart, was the underlying cause of the Peloponnesian war. Furthermore, he might also have recognised the same defensive nature of China’s military build-up as he did with Sparta’s own alliance-building.
Consider this line from Book 1 that Allison cites in his work as the basis of his notion of a trap. I use Thomas Hobbes’ elegant but often difficult translation: “And the truest quarrel [the underlying cause], though least in speech [rarely cited as an explanation], I conceive to be the growth of the Athenian power, which putting the Lacedaemonians into fear necessitated the war.”
This has to be read alongside the speech of Diodotus the Athenian who observed in Book 3 how people and states shared the same uncontrollable lust for power and that he identified that drive with the fear, honour and greed that were behind his city state’s quest for hegemony.