Balance of Power and Democratic Peace vs Hegemonism: Demosthenes’s Grotian realism in the post-Cold War Perspective.

This paper adopts the thesis that the ancient Greek orator and statesman Demosthenes formulated for the first time so clearly in western political and strategic thought two of the most important principles of International Relations theory and Foreign Policy analysis, the principles of balance of power and democratic peace. The contribution of Demosthenes has a special character because he tried to found ancient Athens’s foreign policy in a way which has a lot in common with the concept of international society (common interests, common virtues etc) of the English School of International Relations. Demosthenes was a premature grotian realist long before Grotius expressed his political philosophy of international society. So, this paper tries to enlighten the farthest origins of a tradition of thought or paradigm which dominates the theory of International Relations today and gives peace and international ethics an exceptional meaning against offensive realism and hegemonism, as they are appear in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]