Utopian rejection of treaties and alliances

Utopian rejection of treaties and alliances is a political rule grounded in a claim about human obligation: peoples are connected by their common humanity before any treaty binds them. The Utopians distrust agreements that rulers can evade or exploit, but their refusal to form alliances does not amount to withdrawal from international affairs. They aid friends under specified conditions, oppose tyranny, and observe strict rules in war, presenting humane conduct—not diplomatic promises—as the firmer basis for relations between nations.

Neighbors, Friends, and Formal Alliances

The Utopians distinguish between nations that ask them for magistrates, whom they call Neighbors, and those they have helped more particularly, whom they call Friends. Some neighboring peoples have sought Utopian magistrates because they admire Utopian virtues and expect impartial government; those magistrates serve for a year or five years before returning home with honor, to be replaced by others. Yet such relationships do not lead the Utopians to make formal alliances. While other nations are continually forming or breaking leagues, the Utopians enter into no alliance with any state.

Their objection is not simply that every agreement is worthless under every circumstance. They believe that promises cannot secure trust when the ordinary ties of humanity have failed, and that an agreement’s written terms may be less powerful than the regard people owe one another. The policy thus places moral obligations prior to diplomatic ones: a treaty does not create the fundamental bond between peoples, and its existence does not guarantee that they will act justly.

Treaties and the Conduct of Princes

The account tests the Utopians’ skepticism against the treaty practices of surrounding nations, especially in Christian Europe. Treaties there are treated with great ceremony, yet their language is deliberately made ambiguous so that rulers can find loopholes and escape their promises. Those who devise such evasions for princes may condemn private people for comparable fraud in business. The contrast exposes a political double standard: conduct judged dishonest between individuals is excused when practiced by rulers in the name of state interest.

The Utopians see this double standard as dividing justice into two kinds. Ordinary people are expected to obey restrictive rules, while princes claim a freer measure in which what is lawful is decided by pleasure and advantage. In that order, a treaty’s sacred appearance can conceal the same self-interest that makes it unreliable. The critique therefore reaches beyond ineffective drafting. It challenges a political culture that treats justice as binding on subjects but negotiable for those who govern them.

Even if rulers observed their treaties more faithfully, the Utopians would still question the custom of relying on them. A mountain or river separating two nations does not, in their view, place those peoples in a natural state of hostility. Nor does the absence of a treaty authorize harm whenever written provisions fail to forbid it. They reject the premise that nations are enemies by default and that restraint depends on legal wording. Kindness and good nature, they hold, bind people more firmly than promises because they engage the heart as well as the words of an agreement.

Friendship Without an Alliance

The refusal of alliances coexists with a substantial willingness to act beyond Utopia. The Utopians consider war justified when they must defend themselves or their friends against unjust aggression, or when compassion leads them to help an oppressed nation throw off tyranny. They will support friends in offensive as well as defensive wars, but only after being consulted before hostilities begin, examining the grounds, and finding that demands for reparation have been refused and war has become unavoidable. Friendship here carries obligations, but those obligations depend on a judgment of justice rather than a standing treaty.

That judgment extends to commercial injuries. The Utopians treat oppression of another country’s merchants—whether imposed through unjust laws or through a perverse interpretation of good ones—as a particularly serious possible cause of war. They supported the Nephelogetes against the Aleopolitanes after judging that the former’s merchants had suffered great injustice. The conflict became a terrible war, drew in neighboring nations, and ended in the conquest and enslavement of the Aleopolitanes. The Utopians’ participation shows that rejecting alliances does not prevent forceful intervention; their stated standard is the injury and the failure of redress, not a treaty obligation to fight.

They apply a different threshold when their own people suffer commercial fraud. If no one has been physically harmed, they seek satisfaction and, if refused, stop trading with the offending nation rather than make war. Because Utopian commerce is conducted for the public, they reason that fraud causes less severe damage to them than it does to people who trade on their own account. But if a Utopian is wrongfully killed or wounded, they send ambassadors to demand the guilty parties. Refusal brings a declaration of war; compliance means the offenders face death or enslavement. The contrast makes their policy conditional rather than passive: the response depends on the kind of injury and the possibility of redress.

War Without Reliance on Treaties

The Utopians’ military conduct further distinguishes their rejection of alliances from indifference to rules. They train both men and women in military exercises, although they detest war and do not seek glory through it. Their preferred victory is achieved through judgment and skill without bloodshed. When they begin a war, they use sealed public notices to offer rewards for the capture or killing of enemy leaders and inducements to turn against their own side; if that fails, they encourage divisions among opponents or support neighboring rivals with money. These methods show a policy that seeks to end conflict without a decisive battle, even as it employs coercive and subversive means.

In the conduct of campaigns, however, they observe a truce faithfully, refuse to lay waste to enemy land or destroy its crops, and avoid harming an unarmed person unless that person is a spy. They protect a town that surrenders and do not plunder one taken by storm; their account also says they take no share of the spoil. These practices give concrete form to the principle behind their distrust of treaties. Restraint and obligation, in the Utopian account, should be maintained through conduct rather than left to the wording of a pact. Their refusal of alliances is therefore both a criticism of rulers who use agreements selectively and an assertion that justice between peoples ought to hold even where no agreement compels it.