Sphinx

Events of the present and future will tend to resemble those of the past – or however else you want to paraphrase Thucydides’ key assumption about the usefulness of his work – or at any rate will remind us of them. This week has been very much a case in point, as commentators have looked back to previous disastrous budgets and currency crises in search of a bit of historical context and/or a yardstick for evaluating disastrousness for the present Kwartastrophic Trussterfuck. I’ve been thinking a bit about my early childhood in the early 1970s (and how much this may have influenced my current instincts to preserve vegetables and hoard firewood), but even more my thoughts have turned to the Greek economic crisis, prompted by the wonderfully Thucydidean phrase used by someone from Nomura finance in the early stage of the pound’s collapse, “hope is not a strategy”. Yes, it’s the Melian Dialogue redividus, once again pitting the Batshit Brexit Party against another inexorable facet of reality.

“Hope is not a strategy” is not actually an echt Thucydides quote, not least because of the anachronism of ‘strategy’ (the word may derive from the Greek strategeia, matters pertaining to the activities of the strategos, but they didn’t develop anything like our modern concept). It is, however, a pretty well perfect epitome, in modern terms, of what Thucydides does write: Hope is a fine comfort in danger, but in the absence of military strength or resources or friends a belief that things might turn out okay is scarcely adequate, and if you rely solely on it you will quickly face disaster.

This was the first time I’d actually come across the phrase, at least as far as I recall, but I quickly realised that it’s not new; there are several books that use it for their title, it regularly features in discussions of business practice, and Rudy Giuliani used it in a speech to disparage Barack Obama’s optimistic vision for the United States. One website suggested that it’s substantially older than that, a phrase that regularly appears in mid-C20 discussions of military strategy – which then raises the possibility that it actually originated as a paraphrase of Thucydides in some professional military context! Something else for the ‘must get round to researching this properly at some point’ list…

It’s always worth stressing that, in the original Melian Dialogue, we’re presented with competing claims about reality: the Athenians seek to present themselves as an inexorable force of nature, so to speak, against which it is pointless to struggle; the Melians refuse to accept this, and their only hope of a positive outcome is to persuade the Athenians to drop the idea as well (or, admit that they never really believed it). The dynamic of the dialogue, from the reader’s perspective, is surely affected by whether you think there is legitimate doubt as to whether the Athenians are bluffing or over-confident, or whether you see the stronger power as genuinely unbeatable, either because you accept the Athenian assertion (hello there, crude IR Realism!) or because you substitute a genuinely unbeatable force, e.g. climate change as in my Do What You Must project.

Insofar as the Greek financial crisis was focused on negotiations between the government and the ‘Troika’ of IMF, ECB and European Commission, with the latter group unable simply to impose their will without compelling the consent of the former, that was a ‘legitimate doubt’ situation; the ‘Melians’ might hope, not completely unreasonably, to extract concessions because of the ‘Athenians’’ concern about the consequences if agreement was not reached. The UK government is at present trying to challenge the markets, which, at a global level, are really not going to suffer whatever happens (worrying about global contagion is someone else’s problem). You don’t negotiate with markets; you offer sacrifices to them.

There’s also the lack of a clear end point to the situation; since this is not a negotiation about clear demands, even ‘surrendering’ doesn’t necessarily solve the problem – it’s a matter of how many concessions have to be made before the markets decide to feel reassured, or turn their attention to another victim. Insofar as we see the Melian Dialogue as a study in negotiation, it’s pretty well irrelevant here; if we read it as a study of possible responses to a situation of pronounced inferiority, it’s hugely to the point…

Final thing to note. The Greek government could plausibly claim to be representing the Greek people, and clearly deployed this as part of their negotiating tactics. The British government clearly is the Melians, a small group of unrepresentative oligarchs not answerable to anyone else, selling their country down the river because of their own ideological obsessions…