Friendship among nations

History of a concept

Evgeny Roshchin

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781526116468
  9781526116444
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526116475
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is the first book-length study of the role that friendship plays in diplomacy and international politics. Through an examination of a vast amount of sources ranging from diplomatic letters and bilateral treaties, to poems and philosophical treatises, it analyses how friendship has been talked about and practised in pre-modern political orders and modern systems of international relations.

The study highlights how instrumental friendship was for describing and legitimising a range of political and legal engagements with foreign countries and nations. It emphasises contractual and political aspects in diplomatic friendship based on the idea of utility. It is these functions of the concept that help the world stick together when collective institutions are either embryonic or no more.

1

The ambivalence of ancient friendship

In this chapter I set out to highlight common ways in which classical literature uses the concept of friendship in the context of relations with foreign powers. I do not aim to analyse the whole corpus of ancient Greek and Roman literature. The task of this chapter is much more modest. It will deal with a small number of classical authors who were invoked, often in an eclectic manner, in early modern literature on the law of nations, and later in international relations, as intellectual authorities or sources of information in attempts to describe historical norms or patterns of political conduct. The task of this selection is to postulate the existence of conceptual instruments used to describe the common practice of making and breaking political friendships. However, given the specific aim of this chapter, it will not account for all nuances of conceptual application in classical works that sometimes are centuries away from each other.

Making these instruments more visible in classical literature and later debates will help us to identify an alternative perspective on international friendship that, for reasons that will be set out below, failed to become part of today’s scholarship in IR and politics. However, this failure is no reason to believe that this perspective is irrelevant to today’s theory. The historical circumstances and political rationality that contributed to its failure do not have the power of universal law, and what was discarded by one generation of scholars can be reactivated by another if found expedient. I do not mean to argue that the alternative perspective could have existed independently of the familiar ethical and normative accounts of friendship. In fact, as a number of classical texts demonstrate, different perspectives on friendship could have been intertwined or separated when political circumstances and the creative powers of a particular author demanded. For this reason, in the following discussion of the overlooked contractual concept of friendship, I shall also pay attention to the links between this concept and the ethics of personal and public relations.

One of the first tasks of the conceptual historian is to select a term or terms that express the concept in question. The history of international friendship is no exception. In fact, in the case of friendship this task might be more complex than it seems. This is due first of all to our focus on sources originally written in Greek and Latin. In both languages, several related terms were used to designate the phenomenon of what we could call a political friendship. Thus, a few words on terminological clarification are required before we can start our conceptual inquiry. In ancient Greek sources, the various forms of political friendship were designated by hetaireia, xenia and philia. The term ‘summakhia’ is also often mentioned with philia, but in contemporary language it is commonly translated as alliance. As David Konstan maintains, from at least the sixth century BC, ‘philia, along with summakhia, was a normal word for a treaty or alliance between states’. According to him, philia could designate peaceful relations, whereas summakhia means active confederation or alliance (Konstan 1997: 83). This is the conceptual pair with which I shall be mainly concernedbelow, as it refers to public political friendships made by individual entities, city-states or peoples, rather than by individuals belonging to different tribes or cities.

The survey of conceptual use in Greek sources will not include the term ‘xenia’, which referred to friendly relations with people from foreign countries, despite numerous attempts to associate the origins of diplomacy with the practices of making xenia. This is due to the nature of the relations described by the term. A typical example would involve a travelling stranger requesting that the noble owner of a house receive him as a guest and become friends with him. Plutarch describes this situation in Solon, when Anacharsis as a stranger knocked at Solon’s door and said that he ‘had come to make ties of friendship [philian] and hospitality [xenian] with him’ and, when Solon remarked that friendships should be made at home, offered to make himself a ‘friend and guest’ (philian kai xenian) at Solon’s home (Plutarch, Solon V, 2).¹ In Konstan’s interpretation, this term was mainly used to refer to personal friendship (predominantly of kings and aristocrats) (Konstan 1997: 83), which is essentially different from the subject of this book, which is friendship between aggregate entities.² Further confusion might arise over the use of philia and hetaireia in the context of the inner political life of the polis. By the fifth century BC, the philoi constituted a powerful resource in the political life of Greek city-states. Relations within such groups were often described with the term ‘hetaireia’. However, according to Konstan, this term was mainly used to ‘designate the aristocratic clubs that were politically active in Athens’ (ibid.: 60–61). Thus, the limited application to the specific circumstances of city life makes an analysis of hetaireia largely irrelevant for the purposes of this book. In Latin sources, the use of the term ‘amicitia’ is more homogeneous and stable as far as friendly relations between peoples are concerned. However, the following exposition will also identify its links to terms such as ‘amor’, ‘concordia’, ‘societas’ and ‘foedus’.

Friendship in ethics

Friendship understood as an ethical phenomenon was a central theme in ancient discussions of life in the political community. In this context we can find many observations on what constitutes friendship among individuals, what is good and what is detrimental to friendship, what conditions feeble and lasting friendships, the circumstances in which they are formed and who can become friends. Since such discussions of friendship occasionally took the form of narratives on friendship between different cities and peoples, it is all the more important to start by reconstructing the main themes in the ethics of friendship. Given the scope of ancient contributions to this discussion, I shall mainly, but not solely, focus on Aristotle and Cicero, who were among the most popular sources for loci communes on friendship among early modern political theorists and moralists and who remain the key intellectual authorities on this subject in the modern debate.

The most elaborate discussion of friendship in the classical period can be found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In this work Aristotle classified friendship into three types: of virtue (sometimes translated as excellence), of pleasure and of utility.³ In philosophy friendship of virtue is considered as the best form of friendship and, thus, is taken as a moral ideal to which every friend should aspire. This attitude also seems to be shared by scholars of international relations, who see such friendship as a solution to the modern vices of inter-state politics driven by security concerns. This friendship is usually portrayed as durable and as preventing conflict, whereas the other two types – of pleasure and of utility – are considered to be of lower rank and often dismissed as having negative connotations for a good moral person.

In fact, disregarding friendships of pleasure and utility simply on the grounds of moral inferiority is not entirely fair to Aristotle’s account. He does introduce a qualitative scale of friendship by claiming that friendship of virtue is the most complete or perfect (NE VIII, 3/1156b5–15), which has prompted his interpreters to undervalue the other types. He also seems to treat all three types of friendship as essential social practices; even if friendship of virtue is worth praising, the other two are no less important social bonds in the life of the city. This is first of all due to the limited scope of ‘perfect’ friendship. Friendships of virtue, as Aristotle observes, are rare; they ‘require time and familiarity’ (ibid., 3/1156b25–30), and most importantly are uncommon, since it is impossible to have profound familiarity and shared experience with lots of people (ibid., 6/1158a10–20). This is a crucial limitation on extending this type of friendship to larger groups of friends, and even more so to relations between cities.

Despite these limitations, friendship of virtue has a strong moral appeal for those who see it as a way to a happy life in the form of lasting, joyful and peaceful social relations. Such relationships are conditioned by the friends having a degree of likeness and equality of virtue, and by their inclination to wish good to a friend for the friend’s own sake, rather than in expectation of some benefits (ibid., 3/1156b10–15; 5/1157b25–30). Therefore, in friendship based on virtue and mutual love there is no room for complaints and quarrels (ibid., 13/1163a20–25), making this the least political form of friendship, for politics is always about discontented parties challenging undesired outcomes.

In his most famous work on the subject, On Friendship, Cicero also connects virtuous friendship to love. He finds the origin of the former in the latter, and thereby opposes this understanding of friendship to the idea of friendship of utility:

The Latin word for friendship – amicitia – is derived from that for love – amor; and love is certainly the prime mover in contracting mutual affection. For as to material advantages, it often happens that those are obtained even by men who are courted by a mere show of friendship and treated with respect from interested motives. But friendship by its nature admits of no feigning, no pretence: as far as it goes it is both genuine and spontaneous. Therefore I gather that friendship springs from a natural impulse rather than a wish for help: from an inclination of the heart, combined with a certain instinctive feeling of love, rather than from a deliberate calculation of the material advantage it was likely to confer. (Cicero 2001, VIII: 26; emphasis added)

In this argument, friendship is conceived solely as genuine and true, as admitting only sincerity and benevolence while discarding all possibility of pretence for the purpose of gaining benefits. Cicero also points out another key property of friendship: genuine friendship is a product of nature, and as such is the opposite of advantage-seeking relations, which cannot cement friendship due to the shifting nature of utility (ibid., IX). In this sense, the moral goodness of friendship does not allow for friendship of degrees and thus for various types of friendship – what is not good is simply wicked and must be condemned. Stoic philosophers (see, for instance, Seneca’s Epistle IX) and their followers in Renaissance debates also cultivated the ideal of such virtuous, disinterested love/friendship for another, for whom one could even die. We can find similar arguments in accounts of what we would now call international politics. Dio Chrysostom’s (40–120 AD) classical maxim on ‘foreign’ policy, which suggests that a policy of friendship should be preferred to one of hatred, since it would be disgraceful to fail in actions inspired by the spirit of benevolence, is one example (Dio Chrysostom vol. IV: 40, 23). The virtuousness of friendship was then re-actualised as a powerful trope in early modern critiques of ‘corrupt’ conduct among princes (e.g. by Erasmus), particularly against the backdrop of religious wars and the declining authority of the Roman Church.

Modern scholars seem to follow the tendency to idealise friendship of virtue and disinterested love as the ‘true’ form of friendship capable of delivering a happy life, while ignoring ‘instrumental’ or ‘defective’ forms (see, for instance, Berenskoetter 2007: 665; Smith Pangle 2003: 43). However, this is one of the major problems in modern interpretations of friendship in Aristotle, particularly those approaches concerned with politics, since it does injustice to the other forms of friendship that he discusses. In privileging the ‘best’ and the question of what friendship ‘ought’ to be, it is easy to overlook how things actually are and the purposes that the ignored practices might serve.

As mentioned above, Aristotle does not seem to condemn forms of friendship that could be qualified as incomplete compared with virtuous friendship. Friendships of pleasure and utility are not enduring and have other drawbacks, but nonetheless comprise significant parts of the social order and people’s personal worlds. They perform an important function of self-satisfaction, and in some cases of achieving a common good. Here I shall omit discussion of friendship of pleasure as pertinent to intimate relations between a small circle of individuals and thus irrelevant to the aim of the present chapter, and focus on the implications for politics of utility-based friendship.

The crucial role of friendship of utility is manifested in Aristotle’s observation that ‘friendship seems too to hold states [cities] together, and lawgivers to care more for it than for justice; for unanimity [homonoia – concord] seems to be something like friendship, and this they aim at most of all, and expel faction as their worst enemy’ (NE VIII, 1/1155a20–25).⁴ Friendship among fellow citizens is friendship in the political sense, that is, friendship of utility rather than of virtue. Community and friendship of utility seem to be mutually conditioning phenomena in Aristotle. As he further explains, ‘political community seems originally to have come together and to continue for the sake of what is useful, since it is this that legislators aim at, and it is said that what is useful, in common, is just’ (ibid., 9/1160a10–15). Aristotle complements this observation by arguing that there are forms of political friendship corresponding to three forms of polity (monarchy, aristocracy and property-based timocracy), based on the different models of equality/inequality and ideas of proportionality. With the exception of democracy, deviant types of polity (tyranny, oligarchy) contain little justice and do not allow for much friendship (ibid., 11/1161a10–30 – 1161b1–10).⁵

Thus, friendship of utility manifested in a political arrangement can be perfectly advantageous for all the parties involved, as it might facilitate provision for such common goods as security, public order and space to excel in virtues. The realisation of long-term advantages following from common public procedures might be the sole reason for the endurance of political community, and might not require the participants necessarily to become virtuous, as is sometimes suggested (Lu 2009: 53). As Aristotle noted, friendship of utility is even better illustrated by alliances between cities (poleis), which people also call ‘friendships’ even though the main reason of international alliances (summakhia) is expediency (NE VIII, 4/1157a25–30). The scope of such friendships is inevitably narrower than that of friendship between fellow citizens, but they clearly indicate the legitimacy of friendship in making short- and long-term advantage-seeking strategies within and between cities.

Of course, friendship as a concord between citizens that secures justice and the integrity of the city became a popular trope and normative ideal among those who saw the good of city or republic, and later the state, as the chief priority, rather than politics within and between political communities. In fact, friendship as concord might be one of the feasible alternatives to monarchical power that is ostensibly capable of containing competing political forces and keeping cities together. For instance, Cicero emphasises the value of friendship and concord for the city by contrasting them with their antipodes and at the same time by comparing, somewhat hyperbolically, family bonds to those of the city:

Nay, if you eliminate from nature the tie of affection, there will be an end of house and city, nor will so much as the cultivation of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The ambivalence of ancient friendship
• 2 Early modern friendship: politics and law
• 3 The ethics of friendship in early European diplomacy
• 4 Turning friendship into a moral prescription: conceptual change in modernity
• 5 The unknown friendship of the modern international order
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index