Brexit negotiations. Yes, we’re still replaying the Melian Dialogue, with the UK still stuck in the attitude of the Melians, offering the equivalent of “Surely there’s advantage to both of us in being friends rather than enemies?” and “Can’t you see that this will damage you as well as us?” as if these are knock-down arguments. My final-year Thucydides class has been having some really interesting discussions over the last couple of weeks about Pericles’ manipulative rhetoric and parallels to the Leave campaign – offered spontaneously by the students, before anyone puts me onto that government watch list – so I’m tempted to skip forward to the Melian Dialogue while these issues are still fresh. But, realistically, the negotiations aren’t likely to be going much better in February, when we’re scheduled to get to Book V, so the issues will still be fresh enough…
There’s now a decent case for focusing less on ‘Will the negotiations succeed?’ and more on ‘Was it inevitable that they’d be so shambolic, and why?’ Good thread on the Twitter from David Allen Green, arguing that all of this is just the inevitable consequence of decisions taken between the referendum result and May’s speech at the Tory party conference in October 2015. Reports of David Davis’ speech last night – addressed to serious people, heaven help us, not just to Parliament or British newspapers – raise questions about some deeper underlying factors, namely British politicians’ conception of inter-state relations.
I don’t just mean their apparent inability to grasp the way the EU actually works (the fond belief that Germany could overrule the other 26 even if it wanted to, the neglect of the role of the European Parliament etc.) but their utterly impoverished view of motivation. “Don’t put politics above prosperity” – as if these can ever be neatly separated (and leaving aside the fact that this is exactly what the UK government is doing – is this one of those ‘return of the repressed’, inadvertent revelation of the unconscious moments?). “Very unlikely there won’t be a deal because rational countries and institutions won’t let it happen” – what is this rationality of which you speak?
Answer: the crudest possible economistic means-end rationality, German car manufacturers want to sell to the UK so this will all get sorted out. Do they genuinely believe this, in the face of the evidence (e.g. looking in a mirror)? The basic realist version of Thucydides is pretty damn crude, but it runs to three different forms of motive, fear and honour as well as interest, and his narrative explores how these intersect and are negotiated in practice. The referendum result, let alone the attitudes of the extreme Brexiters, can’t really be explained in terms of ‘interest’ alone (even if such arguments are deployed) – but bring in conceptions of fear and honour, and things make rather more sense.
A fortiori the approach of the EU27, the Commission and the European Parliament; they clearly have a much broader and longer-term conception of ‘interest’ than the British government, but the roles of fear (for the European project as a whole, and of internal political dynamics) and of honour (belief in European ideal, assorted cultural factors) are equally obvious. The neglect of these sorts of issues by UK politicians and negotiators can be explained partly by the familiar fact that they almost always seem to be addressing domestic audiences, above all the head-banging Brexit cult, and ignoring the possibility that those dastardly foreigners might be capable of understanding English. But it does seem that they also genuinely fail to consider the possibility that things other than car exports might matter to anyone but themselves.
A recent article on the These Islands website makes the remarkable claim that liberty is an English, then a British, invention.* This really is how some people think. WE are proud Englishmen/Britons, so we’re all about the freedom from despotism and tyrannical packaging regulations, and never mind the possible consequences. THEY are not like us; they don’t really understand freedom, which is why they keep succumbing to authoritarianism and have to be rescued, but make all their decisions on a crude financial basis. No problem, that’s how we need to talk to them, and anticipate their responses.
The continued prominence of a simplified version of Thucydides in basic International Relations theory does become very silly and annoying at times – but if it works as a counter to such utterly reductionist thinking, we clearly need a lot more of it at the highest levels of government.
*To be precise, it claims that “it is natural to think of liberty” in these terms. But since it doesn’t immediately qualify this statement by pointing out that it’s nonsense, it’s difficult not to assume that the claim is being endorsed.
Sphinx 
Except in the historical example, the Athenians picked the fight with the Melians, while in this case Britain has picked the fight with the EU. It’s as if the Melians declared war on the Athenians and then when the Athenian fleet showed up with overwhelming power the Melians tried to talk their way out of it. Otherwise your analogy of human stubbornness in the face of reality makes a lot of sense. I’m pretty sure the main reason the EU is being tough on the UK is to discourage other countries from leaving (fear), which is ironic because I think the EU is over extended; having different currencies acts as an automatic and I think beneficial semi-barrier between developed and less developed countries. Germany and Greece had no business both using the euro as their home currency.
You’re right, of course. I tend to focus on the Melian Dialogue itself as a way of thinking about situations where power is very unevenly distributed – arguably a universal phenomenon – rather than on the way such a situation may arise, where the analogy is likely to be much more restricted in applicability. In context, I guess we are more inclined to sympathise with the Melians as the victims of aggression.