When Democracy Turns Imperial

 I admit to never having finished Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. From what I did read, I see Athens as the aggressive imperial power, a tyrannical power overseas and democratic at home. This I took as a cautionary tale for America-as-Empire. War, Imperialism, and Democracy: Thucydides’ Ukrainian War reminds us Thucydides remains important.

Important as in reminding us why democracies are superior to authoritarian governments:

“Human nature being what it is,” Athenian democratic politics can appear wise or foolish, charitable or cruel. But they inevitably involve self-conscious, public reflection on citizens’ own courses of action, as well as the state’s, as fostered by deliberative institutions such as the Assembly or the Council of Five Hundred. Following Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, we can see that unlike the authoritarian regimes or bloody tyrannies which it sometimes must oppose, democracy can collectively question itself and raise questions of its own: the fate of entire human communities sometimes depends on such questioning.

Would a democratic Russia invaded Ukraine? If so, the goal would not be Putin's genocide, but I think it unlikely. I hear authoritarian government is becoming more attractive against democracy's messiness. Putin's invasion has ruined Russia's economy, shown the world the ineptness of the Russian military, and, generally, the weakness of the strongman. Yet, Trump thinks Putin a brilliant leader. Right there, you would think American voters would see the ineptitude of Trump himself.

Radical voices on the left and right of Western politics are asking, and will ask ever louder, whether the United States, by supporting Ukraine, is not just aggressively expanding its global sphere of influence. Granted, American and European leaders believe in their moral obligation to do so for the sake of democracy. But, in the world of international politics, do we even have the right to promote our ideas and our ideals to cultures and societies that were once or still are (like Russia, but also China or Iran) alien to democratic ideals? To put it in the most general and most banal terms: in the world of international politics, can anyone be absolutely correct on these matters? Right enough to justify actions that put us all in danger of a global, possibly nuclear, conflict? Let us recall Professor John Dillon’s warnings from the early months of the war in Ukraine.

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In line with the lessons of The Peloponnesian War, we must decide for ourselves whether the ideal of a balance between firm action and self-critical reflection has been achieved. Western criticism of Western actions on Ukraine is valuable in itself. As long, of course, as it “does not harm the deeds”. This is what perhaps allows us to transcend the “political realism” attributed to Thucydides, and perhaps to avoid, in our attitudes towards the current war, any extreme selfishness or indifference to the fate of the victims of imperial hubris, even if we hold the paralyzing and patently false conviction that, after all, no one is really right in this conflict. Yet one thing seems certain to me: on the other, authoritarian, side of the global clash over the fate of Ukraine, such a reading of Thucydides would not be possible.

In the end, Athens did win the war – after losing its empire – for none of us want to be Spartans. Our Western culture starts with Athens. NATO respects its members more than the Delian League did its recalcitrant members. Democracy learns from its mistakes. Dictators repeat themselves, ending with death and failure.

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