The road ahead: philosopher king or money king
Last week’s column dealt with President Trump’s proposed Board of Peace and how it effectively formalised the split within the Western alliance. Cyprus has now found itself facing the difficult decision of whether to attend the board’s invitation to Washington on February 19 for its first meeting.
After the initial euphoria and self-congratulation of being invited to join the board, the Cyprus government’s tendency to place image and publicity above substance backfired spectacularly.
The rush to claim credit for putting Cyprus at the forefront of international policymaking and for being part of a “closed circle of invitees” was made a mockery once details emerged about what the Board of Peace actually stood for. Instead of acting prudently and waiting to understand the real purpose of the invitation, the government succumbed to its own hype and basked in an ephemeral sense of success.
This made the task of Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos, who attempted to spin the issue after the debacle, considerably harder. His claim that it is always better to be among the invited rather than among the sidelined was little more than a face-saving exercise.
Perhaps President Nikos Christodoulides should have paid closer attention to the now infamous quote from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The phrase originates from Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War, specifically the siege of Melos in 416 BC.
That episode is remembered for the negotiations between Athens and the small island of Melos, in which Athens demanded that the Melians join the Delian League – an ancient predecessor, of sorts, to today’s Board of Peace. It is taught as a classic case study in political realism, illustrating that the international system is anarchic and that states act primarily on the basis of power and advantage.
One would like to think that, even if Trump wishes to drag us back to such a state of international relations, the world has moved on. The entire European Union project stands as proof that cooperation, rather than coercion, has gradually become the preferred path. President Christodoulides has wisely sought refuge in a common EU approach to membership in the Board of Peace, abandoning earlier talk of “the special role Cyprus could play in the broader Middle East”.
Referring to the EU provides us here in Cyprus with a much-needed safety net which is not widely appreciated. The recent decision by the Cyprus Supreme Court to dismiss the case of Doria Varoshiotou is a case in point. The case, I remind you, was about the decision by the Cyprus Constitutional Court to terminate Varoshiotou from her post as a district judge. As is usual with lawyers, the case has degenerated into minute technical legal issues which I won’t bother you with. The essence of the matter behind all this is whether Varoshiotou’s verdict on the widely publicised Thanasis murder made her essentially a persona non-grata among the legal establishment. The fact that the decision of the Supreme Court was a narrow 5-3 majority with the president and vice-president in the minority may offer some hope about the future of justice in Cyprus. As it is, the case will now head to Strasbourg with Europe providing a check on the legal proceedings on our island.
The EU, of course, has problems of its own. As former EU trade commissioner Pascal Lamy recently observed: “The EU is predictable, slow and rules-based. Trump is the opposite. We’re playing a game with someone who doesn’t play by the same rules.”
This logic underpins the initiative launched by Germany and France to form the so-called “E6 group” among leading EU member states. Its stated aim is to strengthen Europe’s resilience and long-term competitiveness, bringing together Poland, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands alongside the two founders and try to improve the decision-making process. Although this effort inevitably treads on the toes of EU collective decision-making, Europeans – including us Cypriots – should recognise that desperate times call for desperate measures.
Some Cypriot commentators have already expressed hostility toward the E6, arguing that it undermines the veto power of smaller states. Yet they offer no credible alternative to a system in which narrow national interests routinely block action and the common good suffers. It is widely acknowledged that one of the central flaws of the United Nations is its ineffectiveness, which stems from the veto power of the five permanent members in the Security Council – ironically, a defect the Board of Peace claims it wishes to overcome.
Returning back to ancient Greece, Plato identified democracy’s weakness as the sacrifice of effectiveness in the name of legitimacy. In addition, in today’s democracies, competition between political factions, leads each side to sabotage the other, resulting in paralysis. Contemporary examples abound: France’s fiscal deadlock has left the country almost ungovernable while the UK’s political turbulence following the scandal surrounding Peter Mandelson’s links to Jeffrey Epstein has led to attempts to destabilise Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Plato’s solution was to offer the philosopher king, a ruler guided by wisdom and the common good. Instead, in Trump we seem to have found not a philosopher king but a money king. It may be a sign that our societies are drifting away from a love of wisdom towards the worship of material wealth. Cyprus now finds itself forced to choose between the two. Let us hope we choose wisely.