The Ukrainian peace process, if it deserves such a name, calls to mind the Melian Dialogues. Melos was a free state, an island in the Cyclades, that had remained neutral in the war between the Athenian empire and Sparta. In 416 BC the Athenian navy landed troops on the island and sent a delegation to demand that the Melians surrender and become tributary colonies of their empire. If they failed to surrender, they would be destroyed and enslaved. Thucydides, the Athenian general who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian wars, created a version of the dialogue between the Athenians and the Melians, derived from what eyewitnesses told him, or like the great Greek tragedians of his era, on what he imagined must have happened when justice met brute force.
The Melians protested that the military force arrayed against them left them a choice between dishonorable surrender or slavery and annihilation. They argued that since the Athenian empire might be in danger from superior force one day, the Athenians should respect the Melian’s ‘privilege of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right.’
In words that have been famous ever since, the Athenian general replied: ‘you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’
When the Melians refused to surrender, the Athenians crushed them. As Thucydides tersely records his side “put to death all the grown men whom they took and sold the women and children for slaves and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves.”
Ever since 416 BC, the Melian dialogue has defined how the West understands strength in its relation to justice in international relations. After two catastrophic wars in Europe in the 20th century, the victors crafted a UN Charter whose purpose was to equalize the power of the weak and strong states, by anchoring the sovereign equality of each and the inviolability of their borders in international law. The idea was to give what the Melians had called the principles of ‘fair and right’ a chance against the brute force of military power. The history of international relations since 1945 can be told as a story of the inconstant, uneven battle between the two principals at stake in those dialogues.
