Ancient Neutrality

Preprint, August 2026
By Pascal Lottaz and Sumit Kumar Pathak

Neutrality is often treated as a creation of late-medieval Europe that matured into an institution of modern international law. This paper argues that the concept is far older and, in fact, naturally occurring. It compares the two oldest surviving bodies of strategic thought on the matter: Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra, which theorises neutrality as a set of calculated postures available to a ruler, and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, whose Melian Dialogue dramatises the fate of a neutral island that the belligerents refused to tolerate. Working out the differences between the two conceptions—prescription versus diagnosis, a policy of the strong versus a plea of the weak, unilateral calculation versus dependence on recognition—reveals a double character that neutrality has retained ever since.

Keywords: neutrality, Kautilya, Thucydides, Melian Dialogue, Arthaśāstra, ancient statecraft

When discussing the origins of neutrality, it is usually the modern era that provides the reference points. Peter Lyon, for instance, located the first appearance of the terms “neutral” and “neutrality” in the diplomatic correspondence and treaties of the fourteenth century, and the standard histories move from there to the maritime codes of the Mediterranean, to Grotius, and eventually to the Hague Conventions of 1907.^[1] In this reading, neutrality appears as an institution of European international law, an artefact of the sovereign states system. The reading is understandable—the word is indeed European and medieval—but it mistakes the history of a term for the history of a practice. Already in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the two oldest bodies of strategic thought available to us, the Greek and the Indian, treated the position of third parties in war as an ordinary and, indeed, unavoidable feature of power politics. Thucydides made the destruction of a neutral island one of the dramatic centerpieces of his History of the Peloponnesian War. Kautilya, writing roughly a century later and a continent away, listed neutrality among the six canonical instruments of foreign policy. While neither knew the other, the two unconnected traditions produced sophisticated treatments of the same phenomenon. That is itself strong evidence that neutrality belongs to no particular legal culture, but occurs naturally wherever more than two actors compete.

The Indian and Greek tradition demonstrates that the ancient understanding of neutrality was inherently pragmatic, adapting to shifting circumstances and contexts, thereby generating different meanings across situations. The two thinkers, however, did not understand neutrality in the same way, which is very instructive. In fact, this article argues that Kautilya and Thucydides approached the phenomenon from opposite ends: the Indian theorist wrote a manual for rulers contemplating neutrality as a policy, while the Greek historian recorded what happens to neutrals when the belligerents refuse to play along. In comparison to each other, they offer an interesting argument: a supply side and a demand side of the oldest third-party posture in international politics.

Kautilya outlines the strategic considerations a ruler must evaluate when deciding whether to engage in alliances, wage war, or remain neutral. For him, neutrality is not an idealistic or moral position but a calculated decision aligned with the long-term interests of the state. His framework conceptualises neutrality as a form of strategic vigilance—an acute awareness of one’s environment, including shifts in power balances, alliances, conflicts, and technological or economic transformations—without necessitating immediate intervention. Such vigilance implies constant readiness, situational awareness, and the maintenance of strategic ambiguity, allowing a state to pivot, mediate, or engage when it is advantageous. In this sense, neutrality is not indecision but a deliberate tactic of diplomacy and statecraft, preserving autonomy, managing risk, and optimising timing. This approach resonates strongly with realist and prudential traditions in contemporary international relations, where self-preservation, balance of power, and flexibility often take precedence over rigid ideological commitments.

The doctrines of Sadgunya and Rajmandala vividly illustrate the enduring relevance of Kautilya’s strategic vision by offering a nuanced and flexible framework for statecraft. Modern states, whether explicitly or implicitly, continue to employ variations of these strategies in their foreign policies, particularly in times of multipolar contestation. Kautilya’s sixfold policy presents a spectrum of responses to shifting power dynamics, within which neutrality occupies a critical position. By adopting a neutral stance, a state can position itself as a mediator, thereby enhancing its diplomatic leverage while minimising the risks associated with direct involvement in conflict—as can be observed in the cautious positioning of several middle powers in ongoing global crises.

Āsana, in Kautilya’s schema, represents a strategic posture that operates at the intersection of war and peace. It denotes both a temporary withdrawal from active hostility and a calculated pause—a waiting strategy that allows a state to strengthen itself or await favourable conditions. As noted by Kangle, Āsana “is the policy of waiting in the expectation that the enemy would grow weak or find himself in difficulties or get involved in some war… while one becomes more powerful.”^[2] In the present international environment, such a strategy is visible in states that refrain from overt alignment while closely monitoring conflicts like Russia–Ukraine, preserving flexibility for future engagement.

Similarly, the principle of Sthāna underscores neutrality as an assertion of autonomy rather than mere abstention. It reflects strategic patience and restraint, allowing time for opportunities to emerge for future intervention or alignment. As Rangarajan notes, “Sthāna—settled with the nuance of not actively pursuing preparations for war or peace”—captures this calibrated stillness.^[3] This is particularly relevant in the current geopolitical climate, where states often avoid premature commitments in volatile theatres such as West Asia.

Upekṣaṇā further refines this framework by representing deliberate inaction grounded in rational assessment. It is not passivity born of weakness but a conscious decision to refrain from action despite possessing the capacity to intervene. As Gautam observes, it reflects an udāsīna attitude—patience and endurance even in the face of provocation.^[4] In contemporary terms, such strategic restraint can be seen in states that avoid escalation despite pressures, thereby maintaining stability while preserving long-term interests.

The sixfold policy does not exhaust Kautilya’s treatment of the subject. His map of the interstate world, the rajamandala or “circle of states,” contains two actors whose very position in the system is defined by their detachment from the central rivalry between the would-be conqueror (vijigīṣu) and his enemy. The madhyama, the middle king, borders both rivals and can aid or suppress either of them. Beyond him stands the udāsīna, the neutral king, whom the Arthaśāstra defines as “one outside the sphere of the conqueror, the enemy and the middle king, stronger than their constituents, capable of helping the enemy, the conqueror and the middle king … and of suppressing them when they are disunited.”^[5] Kautilya thus distinguished between neutrality as a posture—āsana, sthāna, upekṣaṇā, each a temporary policy any king might adopt—and the neutral as a position, a structural role in the political constellation. K. R. R. Sastry pointed out already in 1954 that the word udāsīna appears in the Rig Veda and the Atharva Veda, and that Western textbook writers such as T. J. Lawrence were simply mistaken to assert that the nations of classical antiquity “had no names to signify what we mean by ‘neutrality’.”^[6] In Sanskrit the names existed in abundance; as we shall see, it was the Greeks who lacked one.

Neutrality, in this Kautilyan sense, serves multiple strategic purposes, foremost among them the preservation and consolidation of power. In an international system characterized by constant competition, a neutral stance allows states to avoid entanglement in conflicts that do not serve their immediate or long-term interests. This strategic disengagement conserves resources, minimizes risks, and enhances future bargaining capacity. Importantly, Kautilya emphasizes that neutrality must remain dynamic and context-sensitive rather than a fixed or doctrinal position.

Thucydides offers nothing comparable to Kautilya’s doctrine. He was a historian, not a court counsellor, and his method was mostly that of narrative history. What he left, however, is, as Alfred Rubin put it, “the most famous dispute regarding neutrality in the ancient writings […], the Melian Dialogue of 416 B.C.”^[7]

It is worth noting how thin the conceptual apparatus was with which Thucydides had to work. Classical Greek, as Robert Bauslaugh demonstrated in the standard study of the subject, “had no single word for the diplomatic concept of neutrality.”^[8] Where Kautilya could draw on a differentiated technical vocabulary, Thucydides had to improvise descriptions from common speech: “those standing aloof from both sides” (ekpodōn histantes amphoterois), “those who were allies of neither side,” or, vaguest of all, “those remaining at peace.”^[9] The practice itself, however, was anything but marginal. Accounts of virtually every major conflict of the classical period mention states that remained, or sought to remain, friendly yet uncommitted toward the belligerents.^[10] The phenomenon was everywhere; only the name of the modern concept was missing. Hence, in modern translations, one finds the word “neutrality” which, however, was not present in the same way in the original Greek.

Melos was one such state. A small Cycladic island and, as Thucydides notes, a colony of Sparta, it was—together with Thera—one of only two island communities that stood outside the Athenian empire when the Peloponnesian War broke out in 431.^[11] In the summer of 416, an Athenian expedition of thirty-eight ships and some three thousand troops appeared off its coast. Thucydides introduces the episode with a compressed history of the island’s position (here in a modern translation): “The Melians are a colony of Lacedaemon that would not submit to the Athenians like the other islanders, and at first remained neutral and took no part in the struggle, but afterwards upon the Athenians using violence and plundering their territory, assumed an attitude of open hostility.”^[12]Even that last clause overstates the Melians’ belligerency. As Michael Seaman has shown, Melos was never a member of either alliance, maintained its neutrality through at least the first six years of the war, and even after Athens ravaged its land in 426 avoided any escalation that would have invalidated its neutral status—which is precisely why the Melians could still present themselves as impartial ten years later.^[13] Melos thus entered the year 416 as a functioning neutral of long standing, not as a subject in revolt. It was this status, and nothing else, that the Athenian envoys came to extinguish.

The negotiation that Thucydides reconstructs (how faithfully, we cannot know)^[14] opens with the Athenians dismissing every argument from justice before it can be made. Right, they declare, “as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”^[15] Within this frame the Melians formulate what is, for all practical purposes, a complete definition of wartime neutrality. “So that you would not consent,” they ask, “to our being neutral, friends instead of enemies, but allies of neither side.”^[16] The Athenian answer deserves to be quoted in full, because it contains the entire strategic logic of the refusal: “No; for your hostility cannot so much hurt us as your friendship will be an argument to our subjects of our weakness, and your enmity of our power.”^[17] The Melians have done Athens no harm, and the Athenians do not claim otherwise. The problem has to do with reputation and perception. An empire that tolerates a small island’s independence advertises the limits of its own power; the Melians are islanders, “and weaker than others,” and must therefore not be seen “baffling the masters of the sea.”^[18]

The Melians’ strongest rejoinder is, remarkably, not a moral argument as most realist scholarship would analyze the rest of the dialogue. How, they ask, can Athens “avoid making enemies of all existing neutrals who shall look at our case and conclude from it that one day or another you will attack them?”^[19] This is an appeal to Athenian self-interest, to the systemic costs of destroying a neutral, and it is the one argument the envoys never adequately answer. Instead, it was the Athenians who ascended to their famous law of nature: “Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.”^[20] The dialogue ends where it began. The Melians restate their position one final time—“we invite you to allow us to be friends to you and foes to neither party”^[21]—and refuse to surrender a freedom their city had enjoyed for seven hundred years. The siege followed, and, unfortunately for the Melians, the story took a rather grim turn. When Melos capitulated in the winter of 416/15, the Athenians “put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves.”^[22]

The realist school of international relations has, for the longest time, used the Melian Dialogue as a pillar of its strategical thinking—a prudent waring about the pitfalls of idealism. Rupture follows where gods, virtues, or values replace realistic thinking about power differentials. Weak neutrals cannot persist in a world of powerful belligerents. Thucydides, however, appears to have intended nearly the opposite lesson. Bauslaugh observed that the historian passes over the many successful neutrals of the war—Argos before 420, the Achaean cities, Thera—in near silence, while devoting elaborate, dramatized set pieces to the neutrals that were challenged or destroyed: Plataea, Melos, Camarina.^[23] Hence, if one tallies the record of success vs failure, a different picture from the classic realist school emerges. In Book 8, after the annihilation of the Athenian expedition in Sicily, Thucydides notes that the states which had until then remained neutral (hoi mēdeterōn ontes symmachoi) now joined the war against Athens of their own accord, “for they believed, one and all, that the Athenians would have come against them, if they had succeeded in Sicily.”^[24] The Melians’ unanswered warning had, indeed, materialized. By refusing to respect a harmless neutral, Athens taught every uncommitted state in Hellas that its own restraint could not be trusted, and thereby converted the neutrals into enemies precisely as the Melian magistrates had predicted. Bauslaugh concluded that Thucydides treats the subjugation of Melos as a threshold, the moment Athenian imperialism passed beyond the traditional rules of interstate conduct, and neutrality itself as a double-edged sword: dangerous, even fatal, for the weak states that pursued it, yet useful and sometimes necessary for belligerents, whose interest lay in keeping uncommitted states uncommitted.^[25]

We should spend a moment to appreciate the differences in the two texts we just explored. The most fundamental difference between the two thinkers is, of course, one of vantage point. Kautilya writes from inside the chancellery of the (potential) neutral: his implied reader is a king weighing āsana against war, peace, and alliance, and his question is when neutrality serves the state’s interest. Thucydides writes from outside: neutrality enters his narrative at the moment it is challenged, and his question is what becomes of neutrals when recognition is withheld. One text is a manual, the other a case history; one prescribes, the other diagnoses. This is why the Arthaśāstra can discuss neutrality without ever mentioning the belligerents’ consent, and why the History can dramatize the belligerents’ consent without ever offering a theory of the neutral’s choice.

A second difference lies in language, and it cuts against a very old European prejudice. The Sanskrit tradition possessed a differentiated technical vocabulary—āsana, sthāna, upekṣaṇā for the postures, udāsīna and madhyama for the positions—fine enough that Sastry could distinguish “three kinds of neutrality” in the Arthaśāstra alone.^[26] Classical Greek possessed no noun for the concept at all. The asymmetry is quite worth dwelling on. Generations of international lawyers dated neutrality from the fourteenth century on the ground that antiquity lacked the word; Bauslaugh refuted the inference for Greece by showing the practice flourishing without the vocabulary, and the Arthaśāstra refutes it more radically still, since there the vocabulary itself existed some two thousand years before “neutralitas” entered European usage.^[27] On this point the comparison vindicates Kautilya’s tradition as the more theoretically developed one, and it lends historical depth to the broader effort of reading international relations through non-Western texts.

A third, and probably most substantive difference is that the two thinkers attach neutrality to opposite ends of the power spectrum. Kautilyan neutrality is a policy of adequate strength. The Arthaśāstra advises āsana for the king who judges that “no enemy can hurt me, nor am I strong enough to destroy my enemy”; the udāsīna is by definition stronger than the surrounding constellation of conqueror, enemy, and middle king; and for the genuinely weak, the sixfold policy prescribes not neutrality but samśraya—seeking shelter with a stronger power.^[28] Melos inverts every one of these premises. Its neutrality was the policy of a community that could neither hurt Athens nor defend itself, sustained by hope, seven centuries of tradition, and a miscalculated trust in Spartan kinship. Measured against the Arthaśāstra, the Melian commissioners committed a category error: they adopted the posture of the strong while possessing the resources of the weak. The Athenian envoys, in effect, made the same point: “your strongest arguments depend upon hope and the future, and your actual resources are too scanty, as compared with those arrayed against you, for you to come out victorious.”^[29] Kautilya, one suspects, would not have disagreed with their assessment, only with their subsequent conduct. His counsel to the Melians would probably have been samśraya or sandhi, submission dressed as agreement, rather than a heroic āsana that the island’s power position could not sustain.

Yet, the Melian Dialogue also exposes the limit of any purely unilateral doctrine, Kautilya’s included. In the Arthaśāstra, the choice of āsana belongs to the ruler alone; nowhere does the text ask whether the belligerents will permit it. The transition from neutrality to war depends entirely upon the king’s evaluation of the enemy’s vulnerability. The enemy’s consent is irrelevant. Neutrality is therefore neither a contractual arrangement nor a mutually recognized legal condition; it is a strategic posture that may be discarded whenever it ceases to serve the ruler’s interests. Thucydides places exactly that question at the center. The Melians’ final formula is probably the most interesting one: they must “invite” the Athenians “to allow” them to be friends to both and foes to neither. Neutrality appears here not as a posture but as a relationship: a status that exists only where belligerents concede to it. What the dialogue stages, in Bauslaugh’s reading, is the collision between the customary rules of interstate conduct, which balanced rights and obligations to the benefit of weak and strong alike, and “the newly evolved ethos of hegemonial, imperial Greek states that refused to accept any restraints on the pursuit of self-interest.”^[30] Neutrality, in other words, has a demand side. However prudently a state calculates its posture, the policy survives only as long as the warring parties find it more useful, or less costly, to respect than to violate. This insight is entirely absent from Kautilya’s supply-side science, and it is Thucydides’ distinctive contribution to the theory of neutrality, delivered, characteristically, in the form of a tragedy rather than a proposition.

There is, finally, the question of morality. Kautilya is serenely amoral: āsana is neither honorable nor dishonorable, merely indicated or contraindicated, and the Arthaśāstra wastes no sympathy on those who choose it badly. But, Kautilya seems as a moral realist, not an amoral thinker, consequently, Āsana is justified on strategic grounds. This blend of ethics and prudence is one of the defining features of Kautilyan strategy. Thucydides, by contrast, stages a moral confrontation. His Melians defend “the privilege so useful to all of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right.” That is an argument that treats the respect for third parties as a common institution whose destruction impoverishes even the destroyer.^[31] Reading the Melian Dialogue in conjunction with the books that follow and the rupture that in the end visits Athens, one sees that among the outcomes of the choice to destroy Melos (together with other decisions) is the loss of power over a geographic space. It is a judgment delivered at the belligerents’ own will, based solemnly on its interest. The Greek account thus carries a normative undertone that the Indian one deliberately excludes; that neutrality is not only a stratagem but part of a fabric of restraint on which, in the long run, even hegemons depend.

These differences should not obscure how much the two traditions share. Both derive neutrality from interest rather than sentiment; both treat it as relative to a particular conflict, dynamic and revocable; and both embed it in the same (bleak) understanding of how humans work. The Athenians’ “necessary law of their nature” by which men “rule wherever they can” is the Greek cousin of matsyanyāya, the “law of the fishes” by which, in the Indian tradition, the big devour the small wherever order is absent—the very condition the Kautilyan mandala system presupposes and seeks to manage.^[32] And on the decisive point the two texts converge from opposite directions: the Melians’ warning that violated neutrality multiplies one’s enemies is an argument Kautilya could have written, an appeal to the belligerent’s own long-term interest rather than to fairness. Athens rejected the argument in 416; by 404 its empire no longer existed. Thucydides supplied the empirical demonstration of a theorem that Kautilya, a century later, would state in general form: the mismanagement of third parties is a strategic error, not a moral one—though the Greek historian, unlike the Indian theorist, lets us see that it may be both.

When situated within both ancient Indian and Greek political thought, neutrality shows to be not a passive or moral ideal, but an active, strategic, and context-driven instrument of statecraft. One that, by the way, even today continues to shape the conduct of states navigating an increasingly complex and contested world order.

Neutrality, then, is much older than its name. The Greeks practiced it for centuries without a word for it; the Indians named it several times over and built it into the architecture of their strategic theory. Wherever political actors compete in constellations of more than two, third positions appear naturally, without legal instruction, and long before any Hague Convention undertook to regulate them. Kautilya and Thucydides agreed that such positions exist; they disagreed about what kind of thing they are. For the one, neutrality was a calculated posture chosen by a prudent ruler; for the other, an (unstable) status held at the sufferance of the strong. Both were right, and their disagreement prefigures the double character neutrality has retained ever since: at once a unilateral policy of interest, which is how neutrals themselves understand it, and a relationship dependent on recognition, which is how belligerents treat it. Modern neutrality law is, at bottom, an attempt to stabilize that second, fragile side of the concept. The Melians did not live to see it and the ancients had no such law. They had only power, prudence, and, occasionally, the wisdom to leave third parties alone. Looking at today’s perennial conflicts—foremost the one in Europe and in the Gulf—and the absence of strategic neutrality thinking or the acceptance of neutral solutions, one is tempted to conclude that our modern wisdom extends no further than that of the ancient Athenian envoys.

^[1] Peter Lyon, “Neutrality and the Emergence of the Concept of Neutralism,” The Review of Politics 22, no. 2 (1960): 256.

^[2] R. P. Kangle, The Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra, Part III: A Study (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1965), 253.

^[3] L. N. Rangarajan, Kautilya: The Arthashastra (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1992), 569.

^[4] Pradip Kumar Gautam, The Nitisara by Kamandaka: Continuity and Change from Kautilya’s Arthashastra, IDSA Monograph Series No. 63 (New Delhi: Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, 2019), 109.

^[5] Kautilya, Arthaśāstra 6.2.22, quoted in Medha Bisht, Kautilya’s Arthashastra: Philosophy of Strategy (London: Routledge, 2020), 108. The parallel definition of the madhyama (Arthaśāstra 6.2.21) is quoted ibid.

^[6] K. R. R. Sastry, “A Note on Udāsina: Neutrality in Ancient India,” Indian Yearbook of International Affairs 3 (1954): 131–33.

^[7] Alfred P. Rubin, “The Concept of Neutrality in International Law,” Denver Journal of International Law and Policy 16, no. 2–3 (1988): 355.

^[8] Robert A. Bauslaugh, The Concept of Neutrality in Classical Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), xx.

^[9] Bauslaugh, Concept of Neutrality, 10–11.

^[10] Bauslaugh, Concept of Neutrality, xix; see also Pascal Lottaz, “The Logic of Neutrality,” in Permanent Neutrality: A Model for Peace, Security, and Justice, ed. Herbert Reginbogin and Pascal Lottaz (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020), 60–61.

^[11] Thucydides 2.9.4; Bauslaugh, Concept of Neutrality, 143.

^[12] Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley (London: Longmans, Green, 1874), 396 (5.84).

^[13] Michael G. Seaman, “The Athenian Expedition to Melos in 416 B.C.,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 46, no. 4 (1997): 387–91.

^[14] Bauslaugh, Concept of Neutrality, 143.

^[15] Thucydides, History, 397 (5.89).

^[16] Thucydides, History, 398 (5.94).

^[17] Thucydides, History, 398 (5.95).

^[18] Thucydides, History, 399 (5.97).

^[19] Thucydides, History, 399 (5.98).

^[20] Thucydides, History, 400 (5.105).

^[21] Thucydides, History, 403 (5.112).

^[22] Thucydides, History, 404 (5.116).

^[23] Bauslaugh, Concept of Neutrality, 24–25.

^[24] Thucydides 8.2.1, quoted in Bauslaugh, Concept of Neutrality, 28.

^[25] Bauslaugh, Concept of Neutrality, 26–29, 142–46.

^[26] Sastry, “Note on Udāsina,” 133.

^[27] Bauslaugh, Concept of Neutrality, xx; Sastry, “Note on Udāsina,” 131.

^[28] Sastry, “Note on Udāsina,” 133; Bisht, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, 108.

^[29] Thucydides, History, 402 (5.111).

^[30] Bauslaugh, Concept of Neutrality, 145–46.

^[31] Thucydides, History, 398 (5.90).

^[32] Thucydides, History, 400 (5.105); Bisht, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, 160; Rashed Uz Zaman, “Kautilya: The Indian Strategic Thinker and Indian Strategic Culture,” Comparative Strategy 25, no. 3 (2006): 237.