Patrick Comerford
When Xi Jinping and Donald Trump met in Beijing last week, the Chinese leader recalled another conflict between superpowers of the past, when he referred to the Peloponnesian War in ancient Greece, a decades long conflict that between Athens and Sparta that began in 431 BCE.
In a reference to classical rivalry, Xi asked: ‘Can China and the United States transcend the so-called “Thucydides Trap” and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations?’
I doubt that Trump had much of a classical education, and the reference must have gone over his head, presuming he was awake and listening at the time. If he was listening, I cannot imagine that he connected with the Peloponnesian War, still less that he ever heard of Thucydides or Pericles, just as I imagine that throughout the illegal war that has been waged continuously against Iran for weeks now, he has been incapable of knowing about the Persian Wars, still less that Persia was once one of the great classical civilisations.
Trump took a pack of ambitious business deal-makers with him on the jolly to Beijing, but few actual members of his administration, and probably no-one who was educated enough to understand the reference to the Thucydides Trap or anyone who was wise enough to grasp the significance of the citation.
The Thucydides Trap refers to the idea that when a rising power threatens to displace an established one, the result is often war. ‘It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable,’ Thucydides wrote in The History of the Peloponnesian War. Just as Athens was once at war with Sparta, the implication is that China’s rise provokes anxiety and potential conflict with the US.
But the term the ‘Thucydides Trap’ was not devised by Thucydides. Instead, the label was first used by the US political scientist Graham Allison of Harvard in a feature in the Financial Times in 2012 to describe an apparent tendency towards war when an emerging power, such as Athens, threatens to displace an existing great power, such as Sparta, as a regional or international dominant power. The term has been widely used since 2015, and it primarily applies to analyses of China-US relations.
Graham Allison led a study at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs which found that, among a sample of 16 historical instances of an emerging power rivalling a ruling power, 12 ended in war. Allison expanded his theory in 2017 in his book Destined for War, where he argues that ‘China and the US are currently on a collision course for war’.
However, Allison’s theory has come under considerable criticism, and scholars remain divided on the value of the ‘Thucydides Trap’, particularly as it relates to a potential military conflict between the US and China.
If anybody is brave enough to explain to Trump the meaning of the ‘Thucydides Trap’, they might also be well-advised to explain how the concept and values of democracy – so under threat in Trump’s America today – emerged and were consolidated around the same time as Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War.
The Greek word δημοκρατία (dēmokratía), a compound of δῆμος (demos, people) and κρατία (kratía, power or rule). The term first appeared in Greek political and philosophical thought in the city-state of Athens. The first attested use of the word democracy is found in prose works in the 430s BCE, such as Herodotus’ Histories. But its usage was older by several decades, and Aeschylus strongly alludes to the word in his play The Suppliants (ca 463 BCE), in which he mentions ‘the demos’s ruling hand.’
Athenian democracy took the form of a direct democracy, and it had two distinguishing features: the random selection of ordinary citizens to fill the few existing government administrative and judicial offices, and a legislative assembly consisting of all Athenian citizens.
All eligible citizens could speak and vote in the assembly, which set the laws of the city state. However, Athenian citizenship excluded women, slaves, foreigners, and youths below the age of military service. Effectively, only 1 in 4 residents in Athens qualified as citizens.
During the run-up to this week’s election, I have been re-reading one of the greatest Greek speeches about democracy and democratic values. For many years I had a T-shirt, bought in Athens, with quotes from that funeral oration by Pericles in the cemetery in Kerameikos in Athens at the height of the Peloponnesian War.
The funeral oration by Pericles has been handed down in history by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War. He tells us Pericles delivered his oration in the cemetery in Kerameikos – not only to bury the dead, but to praise democracy.
There are excerpts from the speech on the Monument of the Unknown Soldier on Parliament Square (Plateia Voulis) on Vasilissis Amalias avenue, facing onto Syntagma Square. The monument, designed by the architect Emmanuel Lazaridis in 1929-1930, includes a large bas-relief of a dying Greek soldier by Kostas Demetriadis (1881-1943) and the Greek text of the funeral oration delivered by Pericles in 431 or 430 BCE.
Pericles was a Greek leader and statesman and a supporter of democracy during the Peloponnesian War. He was so important for Athens that his name defines the age – the Periclean Age – during which Athens rebuilt what had been destroyed during the recent war with Persia.
The people of Athens, including those from the countryside whose land was being pillaged by their enemies, were kept in crowded conditions within the walls of Athens. Near the start of the Peloponnesian War, a plague swept through the city. Pericles succumbed to this plague and died.
Before he died, though, Pericles delivered his rousing speech about the virtues of democracy. Thucydides puts in Pericles’ mouth key democratic values that are worth remembering today when democracy is under threat:
• Democracy allows humanity to advance because of merit instead of wealth or inherited class.
• In a democracy, citizens behave lawfully while doing what they like without fear of prying eyes.
• In a democracy, there is equal justice for all in private disputes.
Pericles, in his ‘Funeral Oration’ in Athens, uses ‘the many,’ οἱ πολλοί (hoi polloi), in a positive way when praising the Athenian democracy. He contrasts them with ‘the few’ (οἱ ὀλίγοι, hoi oligoi), who abuse power and create an oligarchy, rule by the few. He advocates equal justice for ‘the many’, ‘the all’, before the law, against the selfish interests of the few.
And that’s what democracy should have at its heart despite all the threats it faces from the Trump autocracy in the US and from the far-right in Britain and across Europe: equal justice for ‘the many’ and ‘the all’, before the law, against the selfish interests of the few.
A grave in Kerameikós, Athens, where Pericles delivered his funeral oration (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
