Pascal’s Message to Bogota Neutrality Congress (April 4-7, 2024)

Pascal’s message to the participants of the 2024 Neutrality Congress in Bogota. Pascal’s paper about the logic of neutrality: Being neutral means doing your own thing. It means being the third pole of a triangle and dealing with the accusations from the two other poles. It means being friends with those that are enemies with each other. From the above paper: “Beyond the confined area of IL, neutrality can also be studied as a phenomenon of international politics. Here definitions become more open. For instance, in one of the most important post–Second World War books on neutrality, Nils Ørvik (1953, p. 11) defined neutrality much more generally as “a nation’s status of non-participation in hostilities when other countries are at war.” Under this conceptualization, ancient forms of neutrality also become subjects of inquiry. Probably the most impactful account of this is chronicled in Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War. The Melian Dialogue—the chapter that has become one of the founding blocks of modern realism—describes the negotiations between the belligerent Athenians and the neutral Melians, who argued their case for maintaining neutrality in Athens’ war against Sparta. Inadvertently, Thucydides has thereby provided one of the most universal definitions of neutrality in international conflict when he wrote that the Melians told the Athenians that they wanted to be “friend to you, and foe to neither” (Thucydides, 431 BCE). The wars in ancient Greece and the records thereof provide already plenty of material to study historical neutralities. The best work to start investigating this period is Robert Bauslaugh’s (1991) The Concept of Neutrality in Classical Greece. Most realist definitions of neutrality conceptualize neutrality as a metarelational phenomenon denoting the attitude of states toward the relationship of two (or more) other states. Efraim Karsh (1988b, p. 198) put it well: “Neutrality is relevant not to a bilateral relationship but to a trilateral system of relations at the minimum” (compare also to Morgenthau, 1938b, p. 112). Therefore, neutrality as a political phenomenon describes instances when countries explicitly or implicitly claim an impartial stance outside of the conflict(s) of other states or promise to do so in the future (in the case of permanent neutrality). It is important to recognize, however, that neutral states do not stand outside the conflict logic itself. By the very definition of their position, they remain well within the conflict triangle (Lottaz, 2020). Although states can geographically and ideologically get caught “between” the belligerents—who usually both try to argue that the neutrals should support them and not their adversaries—the logical position of a neutral in a conflict dynamic is outside of the primary conflict, remaining at peace with both (or all) parties of a conflict. Figure 1 is a graphical representation of that logical position.“