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Friendship Between States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2009

P. E. Digeser
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Abstract

Although a substantial philosophical literature exists on the concept of ‘friendship’ and its connections to politics, the possibility that groups such as states could be friends has largely been ignored. This is puzzling since the description of political communities as friends is one that goes back to Thucydides. Moreover, contemporary international politics is replete with references to the concepts of ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’. This article argues that international friendships provide powerful reasons for minimally just states to engage in other-regarding conduct. Drawing on an Aristotelian account of self-interest for inspiration, it is suggested that the same reasons that justify a state’s self-regard also justify its regard for other states. These reasons rest on whether the basic institutions of a state – one’s own or another’s – are minimally just. States, solely because of their character, have reason to enter into different levels of friendship. Those different relationships in turn generate different expectations regarding consultation, security and respect for autonomy.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , April 2009 , pp. 323 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 The Greek word that is commonly translated as friendship (philia) appears in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars when the Mytileneans disparage their fear-based alliance with Athens by pleading to the Spartans: ‘How could we feel any genuine friendship or any confidence in our liberty when we were in a situation like this?’ See Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 3.12.1, for the Greek original, and the Penguin edition (1954) for the English translation. See also David Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 83, for a fuller discussion of ancient uses of friendship in interstate affairs.

2 If we take ‘amity’ as a cognate term for public character of friendship and friendliness between states, the online Oxford English Dictionary notes that it first makes its appearance in the late fifteenth century. Perhaps of more relevance is that both amity and friendship are deployed at the beginning of the modern European state system in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. The treaty not only repeatedly mentions amity between the parties, but also notes that they ‘shall endeavour to procure the Benefit, Honour and Advantage of the other; that thus on all sides they may see this Peace and Friendship in the Roman Empire, and the Kingdom of France flourish, by entertaining a good and faithful Neighbourhood’ (〈http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/westphal.htm〉). As with such terms as ‘peace’ and ‘co-operation’, ‘friendship’ repeatedly appears in treaties between a variety of different kinds of regimes. As examples of this diversity, one need only mention the 1763 Treaty of Paris (‘The definitive Treaty of Peace and Friendship between his Britannick Majesty, the Most Christian King, and the King of Spain’), the 1786 ‘Treaty of Peace and Friendship Between the United States and Morocco, 1786’, the 1939 German/Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, and the 1955 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance Between the People's Republic of Albania, the People's Republic of Bulgaria, the Hungarian People’s Republic, the German Democratic Republic, the Polish People’s Republic, the Rumanian People’s Republic, the Union of Soviet Union Socialist Republics and the Czechoslovak Republic’.

3 As in the case of treaties, the language of friendship plays a ubiquitous role in the rhetoric of international politics. Between 4 June 2007 and 4 July 2007, for example, a survey of European news sources shows that numerous nations officially noted or mentioned their friendship for one another: United States and the Czech Republic (Regulatory Intelligence Data, 5 June 2007), Albania and the United States (BBC Monitoring Europe, 6 June 2007), France towards the United States and Russia (Agence France Presse, English, 6 June 2007), China and India (Chinadaily.com.cn, 8 June 2007), China and Nigeria (BBC Monitoring International Reports, 8 June 2007), Iraq and Turkey (Associated Press, 9 June 2007), Sweden and China (Chinadaily.com.cn, 9 June 2007), United States, Estonia and Lithuania (Federal News Service, 14 June 2007), Russia and Macedonia (TASS, 24 June 2007), Russia and the Ukraine (SKRIN Market & Corporate News, 25 June 2007), Brunei and the United Kingdom (Borneo Bulletin, 28 June 2007), the United States and Serbia (BBC Worldwide Monitoring, 28 June 2007), Azerbaijan and the United Kingdom (BBC Monitoring International Reports, 29 June 2007), Kazakhstan and Spain (BBC Monitoring International Reports, 30 June 2007), Oman and the United Kingdom (InfoProd, 1 July 2007), Vietnam and Luxembourg (Thai Press Reports, 3 July 2007), Vietnam and the United Kingdom (Thai Press Reports, 3 July 2007), and China and North Korea (TASS, 3 July 2007).

4 For example, since Winston Churchill’s ‘Sinews of Peace’ address of 5 March 1946 at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, politicians, analysts and journalists have considered the plausibility, nature and implications of the ‘special relationship’ between ‘the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States’. Commentators have also focused a great deal of attention on the nature of the friendship between Israel and the United States. Since the Johnson Administration, critics and defenders have sought to make sense of the origins and nature of this ‘special’ relationship. An example of a favourable account of the relationship can be found in Mitchell G. Bard and Daniel Pipe’s 1997 article, ‘How Special is the U.S.–Israel Relation?’ (〈http://www.danielpipes.org/article/282〉). An example of a sceptical view of the relationship is John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s 2006 article ‘The Israel Lobby’ (〈http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html〉). More generally, questions of international friendship can enter the public domain when democracies seek to strengthen their ties to autocratic regimes. Consider, for example, US congressional debates during the Clinton Administration over granting Most Favoured Nation status to the People’s Republic of China. Much of that debate centred on whether friendlier relations made sense given the human rights record of the regime. As Senator Paul Simon said in opposition to granting Most Favoured Nation status to China, ‘Here we are cozying up to a dictatorship, and we have a free multiparty system in Taiwan to which we are giving the cold shoulder. I think that does not make sense’ (Congressional Record – Senate, 19 May 1994, Legislative day of 16 May 1994, 103rd Congress 2nd Session, 140 Cong Rec S 6014 Reference: Vol. 140 No. 63).

5 Unlike the relationship between friendship and politics at the domestic level, which has been a source of reflection since Aristotle.

6 Bull wrote that ‘The disparagement of alliances, the international counterpart of Rousseau’s disparagement of factions as coming between the individual and the general will, is a feature of the solidarist ideology.’ See Hedley Bull, ‘The Grotian Conception of International Society’ in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight, eds, Diplomatic Investigations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 51–73, at p. 63. In contrast, Linklater and Suganami’s notion of ‘pockets of solidarism’ is closer to the position offered here, but solidarism and international friendship still differ over the possibilities for humanitarian or reform intervention. See Andrew Linklater and Hidemi Suganami, The English School of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 66.

7 See Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 22–3.

8 This assertion is not meant to deny that political associations can have feelings in a distributive sense, i.e., an angry mob is composed of angry individuals; a state acting with good will is a state whose diplomats are willing to negotiate in good faith. It does, however, deny that groups such as political associations could have feelings in a collective or non-distributive sense. To take seriously the idea of a state actually hating, loving, caring or feeling indifferent is to commit a kind of category mistake. For an alternative view, one can consider the work of such thinkers as Trudy Govier, Forgiveness and Revenge (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 91, and Margaret Gilbert, Sociality and Responsibility: New Essays in Plural Subject Theory (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), as well as On Social Facts (London: Routledge, 1989) and Living Together: Rationality, Sociality, and Obligation (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).

9 While interpersonal friendships would become unsustainable if the feelings of affection and trust were bracketed or found missing, those feelings need not accompany all uses of ‘friend’ at the interpersonal level. Ordinary language allows us to distinguish between ‘acting friendly’ and ‘being friends’ and between ‘befriending’ someone (that is, providing assistance and support) and ‘being a friend’. Similarly, it is possible to be a ‘friend to’ someone (say providing comfort and attention) without necessarily having the feelings of friendship. Using phrases such as ‘acting friendly’, ‘befriending someone’, ‘being a friend to’ do not require either mutuality or the feelings of friendship. Instead, these terms are purely or largely behavioural in that they can be successfully deployed with a variety or absence of feelings. Indeed, it is even possible to grudgingly befriend someone that you dislike (although, this may be a rare occurrence). In ordinary usage, this constellation of terms surrounding ‘friend’ presents a complexity in the connection between the sentiment and the relationship (see Elizabeth Telfer, ‘Friendship’, in Michael Pakaluk, ed., Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1991), pp. 250–67, at p. 250).

10 If international friendship is not based on sentiments of affection but rather on a set of reasons that are the same as the reasons supporting national self-interest, then the sharp distinction between ‘hard’, geo-strategic considerations of national interest and the ‘soft’, symbolic ties of ‘special relationships’ becomes untenable. For example, Abraham Ben-Zvi’s distinction between a ‘special relationship paradigm’ largely based on feelings of goodwill and a ‘national interest paradigm’ based on strategic considerations in considering America’s relationship to Israel, establishes a categorial distinction that is dissolved by the view of international friendship presented here. Neither paradigm need be based on sentiment (see Abraham Ben-Zvi, The United States and Israel: The Limits of the Special Relationship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 15–26). This dissolution of the distinction does not deny that feelings or sentiments are unimportant to international politics. It does deny that minimally just regimes can make a clean, clear distinction between the reason supporting national self-interest and the reasons supporting other minimally just regimes.

11 ‘For people include among friends … those who are friends for utility, as cities are – since alliances between cities seem to aim at expediency’ (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1985), p. 215, line 1157a25).

12 A range of answers has emerged to this question. Very briefly, sceptics argue: ‘Ideological considerations may be articulated as the principle determinant of a specific alliance, but the evidence suggests that ideology is at best inadequate in explicating why or how an alliance came into existence’ (see Edwin Fedder, ‘The Concept of Alliance’, International Studies Quarterly, 1 (1968), 65–86, p. 86). A somewhat more moderate position is taken by Stephen Walt, who found that in his case study, there is a modest association between ideology and alignment and that, depending on its nature, common ideology could also divide (see Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 181). A stronger relationship is advanced by Suzanne Werner and Douglas W. Lemke, who argued that ‘similarities in the political and economic institutions of states are an important determinant of alignment behavior and that such similarities were important regardless of the aligning state’s regime type’ (see Suzanne Werner and Douglas W. Lemke, ‘Opposites Do Not Attract: The Impact of Domestic Institutions, Power, and Prior Commitments on Alignment Choices’, International Studies Quarterly, 41 (1997), 529–47, p. 530, and J. M. Owen, ‘The Foreign Imposition of Domestic Institutions’, International Organization, 56 (2002), 375–409, p. 399). A variation on this theme is that ideology only matters in alliance formation after 1945. See also Brain Lai and Dan Reiter, ‘Democracy, Political Similarity, and International Alliances, 1816–1992’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 44 (2000), 203–27, p. 204; Herbert Dinerstein, ‘The Transformation of Alliance Systems’, American Political Science Review, 59 (1965), 589–601, p. 592; Ole R. Holsti, P. Terrence Hopman and John D. Sullivan, Unity and Disintegration in International Alliances (New York: Wiley, 1973), p. 61; and Randolph M. Siverson and Juliann Emmons, ‘Birds of a Feather: Democratic Political Systems and Alliance Choices in the Twentieth Century’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 35 (1991) 285–306.

13 See, Jennifer E. Whiting, ‘Impersonal Friends’, The Monist, 74 (1991), 3–29. Whiting notes, ‘I am not, however, primarily concerned to defend Aristotle’s view as such, and will not attempt to defend my reading of him as required by or even consistent with everything he says. I am using him – or rather a certain reading of him – shamelessly in the service of my own end, which is to argue that there can be reasons to promote the ends of others the same in kind with reasons to promote one’s own ends’ (p. 4). Similarly, I am less interested in defending Whiting’s position and wish to use her account of interpersonal friendship to explore the possibility of interstate friendships. Whether Whiting herself would sanction using her theory in this manner is not clear. For an argument against Whiting’s account, see Diane Jeske, ‘Friendship, Virtue, and Impartiality’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 57 (1997), 51–72, p. 62. See also the discussion in Bennet Helm, ‘Friendship’, in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2005 Edition), 〈http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2005/entries/friendship/〉.

14 Whiting, ‘Impersonal Friends’, p. 4.

15 Whiting, ‘Impersonal Friends’, p. 5.

16 Whiting, ‘Impersonal Friends’, p. 6.

17 Whiting, ‘Impersonal Friends’, p. 21.

18 Whiting, ‘Impersonal Friends’, p. 22.

19 Whiting, ‘Impersonal Friends’, p. 7. Later, Whiting writes, ‘I may regard all of my impersonal friends (even those whom I will never encounter) as equally worthy of my concern, while coming as a matter of fact to display differential and apparently personal concern for only some (even among all those I have in fact encountered). Which some of these are will be largely a function of historical and psychological accident’ (p. 23).

20 Suppose Carol highly values musical abilities and, somehow, detects such capacities in Ted even though he never really had an opportunity to develop them and, moreover, is uninterested in developing them. My interpretation of Whiting’s argument is that Carol has no reason to promote those latent capacities in Ted as long as they remain latent and he is uninterested in developing them. But suppose Bob, who is a close friend of Carol and a great musician (and understands himself as such), now feels that music is no longer of interest. He cannot stand playing it. He cannot tolerate listening to it. As a friend, Carol may have standing to question Bob about his decision and feelings and perhaps wonder whether he should just take a breather, but further intervention (whatever that may entail) would not be justified. Depending on the centrality of music to their friendship, Bob’s loss of interest may lead to a diminution of the friendship itself, i.e., they no longer talk as frequently, attend weekly concerts together, discuss the latest releases, and so on.

21 The success in side-stepping these criticisms rests, of course, on settling the traditional problems associated with the nature of explanation and the realism of one’s assumptions. There is no need to take up these issues here.

22 One could, as John Rawls does, make a distinction between the reasonable and the rational. States could be understood as rational actors to the extent that they pursued power and influence in the international system. Alternatively, states could be understood as reasonable to the extent that they were willing to advance rules of co-operation and were willing to abide by those rules if others did the same. Consequently, the rational pursuit of self-interest may prove to be unreasonable. In contrast, the position offered here takes up the possibility that the ‘rational’ pursuit of power and influence by a state must itself be based on a compelling set of reasons in order to be rational. Absent those reasons, the application of the notion of rationality would imply a kind of reification of institutions (see John Rawls, Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 28–9.

23 The clearest formulation of this position is set out in Robert E. Osgood and Robert W. Tucker, Force, Order and Justice (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), pp. 282–3. Also, see Peter Digeser and Ross Miller, ‘Realism, Morality and Liberal Democracy’, Journal of Value Inquiry, 29 (1995), pp. 331–49.

24 State self-concern is reasonable if the state is minimally just vis-à-vis its own citizens. As a starting point, we can begin with the perspective of citizens and thereby derive the perspective of the state. Once the perspective of the state has been established the claim is that the reasonableness of state self-concern has implications for the reasonableness of concern for other states.

25 Jackson, ‘The Political Theory of International Society’, in Ken Booth and Steven Smith, eds, International Relations Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 110–28, at p. 122, cited in Linklater and Suganami, The English School of International Relations, p. 235.

26 One could argue that an unjust state has a good reason to protect itself from an even more unjust state, say, for example a genocidal regime. But even in this case, the argument rests on a judgement of the comparative justness (or unjustness) of the regimes in question and not solely on protection.

27 The fact that nationalist preferences can be cultivated through state policies does not evade the question of whether or why such policies should be enacted in the first place. Are they, for example, being used to further encourage the development of respectable, just institutions or are they in the service of discouraging such development?

28 Whiting, ‘Impersonal Friends’, p. 20.

29 Whiting, ‘Impersonal Friends’, p. 20.

30 These norms and expectations can compose a kind of practice of international friendship. As a practice, international friendships would be recognizable to both the participants and to other regimes. Subscribing to a particular friendship would require the exercise of judgement and statecraft and consequently could be done more or less skilfully. The norms of international friendship would not be algorithms that yielded necessary conclusions, rather they would be a bundle of expectations and rules that could be met and followed adroitly or clumsily.

31 This possibility was suggested to me by Albert Weale.

32 At the individual level, I had suggested that when one friend disavows a form of excellence that has drawn the friends together, the level of intervention may extend no further than questioning a friend’s decision. In the case of special relationships, the possibility of intervening into a regime that is slipping below the threshold of minimal justice is justified not only by the known wrongs that unjust regimes commit upon their own people, but by the shared sense of culture, history or tradition that may provide the friend some insight into the problem of how to restore minimally just institutions.

33 David L. Rousseau, ‘Motivations for Choice: The Salience of Relative Gains in International Politics’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 46 (2002), 394–426. See also Robert Powell, ‘Review: Anarchy in International Relations Theory: The Neorealist-Neoliberal Debate’, International Organization, 48 (1994), 334–8.

34 Joseph Grieco, ‘Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation: A Realist Critique of the Newest Liberal Institutionalism’, International Organization, 42 (1988), 485–507, p. 487. See also Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 105.

35 See Bull, ‘The Grotian Conception of International Society’, p. 52, and Linklater and Suganami, The English School of International Relations, p. 60.

36 Linklater and Suganimi, The English School of International Relations, pp. 71–2 and p. 261. This is interpretation of the pluralism/solidarism distinction is attributed to Wheeler, Saving Strangers.

37 Nicholas Wheeler and Timothy Dunne, ‘Hedley Bull’s Pluralism of the Intellect and Solidarism of the Will’, International Affairs, 72 (1996), 91–107, p. 95.

38 Bull, ‘The Grotian Conception of International Society’, p. 52.