This is third and final part of what we might call the Early Medieval International Relations trilogy if we were feeling grand or the most recent instance of me being grumpy on the internet if we were being accurate. In Part 1 and Part 2 I argued that we can meaningfully talk about international relations in the early medieval world. My reasons break down into two broad categories, the pragmatic and the idealistic. To give us some sense of the possibilities here we can turn to historians working on different periods who have attempted just this.
Explanations for the expansion of Rome across the Mediterranean have tended to go in two directions. The first is that Rome was a uniquely aggressive and military state, a society pathologically geared for warfare, which explains both why it attacked its neighbours and how it was so successful at it. The second argues instead that Rome accidentally stumbled into empire while defending itself and its allies against outside aggression.
Eckstein rejected these approaches, arguing instead that the Mediterranean in this period existed in a state of militarised anarchy, as discussed by the realist school of IR studies.
In such a system, states seek security by developing their military capacity and dominating their neighbours. In these conditions, even a state that builds a larger army for purely defensive reasons looks like a threat to the other actors, leading to rounds of warfare.
Eckstein uses this framing to show that the Romans were indeed aggressive with towards their neighbours, but not because they were culturally or psychologically unusual. Rather, all their peer competitors such as the Carthaginians or the Macedonian successor kingdoms were just as bellicose and organised for war as they were. The Romans were unusual for their victories, not for their wars.
