Love and Treaties

(or "Drawing Shitty Parallels Between States and Lovers")

"Moonlit Kremlin gardens, 1985. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev stroll hand-in-hand, their eyes locked.

Ronald: (softly) Misha, my dear, unions are like passionate lovers. They unite, stand strong and fight for their desires"

-ChatGPT, 2025¹

Part 1: "What on earth are you on about?"

Throughout history, there have been countless examples of federations, confederations and alliances. Throughout one's life, there are countless examples of friendships, relationships and situationships. And although we deal with interpersonal relationships in a completely different manner to international relationships, there are surprising parallels which can be drawn between them.

Why Love?

Let's put it this way - Alice and Bob are two lovers. Now, with regard specifically to sexual or romantic relationships, consider why people get together in the first place. There's the immediate aspect of attraction (Alice thinks Bob is hot), which in most cases needs to be mutual (Bob also finds Alice hot) for this kind of relationship to be successful. Love comes later, and although many a poet, philosopher or writer has tried to define love over the centuries with little general consensus on what it actually is, for our purposes we can simply use the dictionary definition of "a strong feeling of affection and concern toward another person" (Alice would do anything, within reason, for Bob).

However, we can also see a third aspect emerge - the mutual interests and agreements which benefit individuals in a relationship. It's a matter of human nature that most of us seek connection, a matter of biology that organisms seek to reproduce² and it's a fact of our society that people of a certain age are expected not to be single. Alice has needs and intentions - she wants companionship, she wants someone to talk to, she wants someone to hold her while she cries about her hopeless future; Bob needs much the same, and they can provide that for each other. There are also rules which control their relationship, whether unspoken or written, and govern their interactions. They expect a certain amount of attention and affection from each other, they expect that the other behaves towards them in a certain way, they may expect exclusivity.

We'll call this their treaty. An example from popular culture is Sheldon's "Relationship Agreement" ³in The Big Bang Theory. This may be unwritten rules which are simply understood by two individuals (e.g. Alice expects Bob to put his shoes on the shoe rack), rules ingrained by society (e.g. Bob expects Alice to look after her children) or written, legally-binding rules (e.g. if Alice and Bob are married and Bob cheats on Alice, she has legal grounds for a divorce).

Why Unite?

And now for something completely different, let's look at the European Union. Many a scholar or politician (yet few writers or poets) have tried to define the European Union over the decades, with little general consensus as to what it actually is. The generally accepted definition is that it is a "supranational political and economic union", but it also has some features of federations and confederations - although each member state retains its sovereignty and its right to make its own laws, Union law takes precedence over member state law (as ruled by the European Court of Justice in Flaminio Costa vs ENEL). This is a unique ("sui generis") entity, but we will be looking at some more conventional federations later. For our purposes, we can view the EU as the combined product of the relationships between its member states.

Let's try and apply the same framework of attraction, love and treaty that we used earlier to define romantic relationships to the relationships between member states of the EU. Mutual attraction is quite difficult to define between nations, but if we see attraction as the product of an organism's need to reproduce and pass on genes (effectively to preserve itself through its progeny), we could draw parallels to nations being drawn into alliances with each other through a mutual will for trade and exchange in order to improve their economies (and thereby self-preserve). In terms of love, we could look at the Scandinavian countries or the Baltic states - the countries which form each group are closely knit due to their shared history and culture, and generally support each other in a manner which could be described as affection. In the case of the Baltic states, this was also caused by human relationships - the friendships between some of the ministers of the Baltic states and the Nordic states led to the creation of the Council of the Baltic Sea States.

However, it is in terms of treaty where this metaphor really shines. The European Union is formed through two main treaties (Treaty on European Union and Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, TEU and TFEU respectively) which govern the relationships between EU member states and ensure co-ordination in fields such as border control, customs and currency. The TEU also sets out the common aims and interests of EU member states ("the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights") and how they should act towards each other, and the conditions in which states can join or leave the Union. States may wish join the EU because they want "companionship" in the form of access to the single market and the various other benefits of membership. Although this may be stretching the metaphor a bit, the parallels between this and the agreements on mutual interests, behaviour and manner of breakups⁴ between individuals in romantic relationships (particularly in marriages) are hopefully clear.

So, in essence, the European Union is sort of like a 27-member polycule.

If you've had enough of my rambling, feel free to stop reading here. If you'd like some more examples of how this metaphor tracks across to various federations, the next part is a comparison of various tropes of romantic relationships with various forms of federation.

Part 2: "Are you OK?"

Let's put Alice and Bob through some traumatic experiences.

The breakup because the two of you don't see the same future together (Soviet Union)

Alice and Bob, in a relationship, are sitting on the sofa together, doing separate things. "I think it would be good if we spent a little less time together", Alice suddenly says. "You know, just because I think it would be nice for both of us to have some time to ourselves".

Bob doesn't like that. "What the fuck?", he says. "I don't want things to change." Everything falls apart.

In 1990, the Soviet Union was at the brink of collapse. Although the original Treaty on the the Formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had given some degree of autonomy to each of the 15 republics (representing the 15 largest nationalities) of the Soviet Union, control was still very much centralised in Moscow, and the Russian SFSR was very much the main power in terms of land, population and political power. Stalin's policies of Russification decades earlier and his replacement of local leaders with those from Moscow had not helped the image of Soviet Russia as a colonial power, with some even describing the Soviet Union as a "prison of nations" - the very same phrase used by Lenin and Engels to derogate the Russian Empire.

The New Union Treaty was Gorbachev's (Alice's) solution to this. This aimed to prevent a violent breakup by restructuring the USSR into a more loose confederation (which would then be named the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics)⁵, where each republic would have more autonomy and democracy than it did under the existing system and power would be decentralised, but they would be still represented on a global stage as one country. This would create a council of the leaders of each republic to take an executive role, and the Supreme Soviet would take a legislative role.

Unfortunately, this somewhat European Union-style restructuring of the Soviet Union would never come to fruition, as a day before the Russian SFSR's planned signing of the treaty in August 1991, Communist Party hardliners (Bob) launched a failed coup in an attempt to remove Gorbachev from power and conserve the existing Soviet system. The failure of the coup lead to the collapse of the Communist Party and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union just after Christmas.

The slow and painful breakup once the spark dies (Yugoslavia)

Alice and Bob (happily married) are sitting at the dinner table. They suddenly realise they don't love each other anymore; they never really did in the first place. The eventual divorce process is long and they fight for ages over who gets what.

In the words of my history teacher, Yugoslavia was the "Frank Sinatra of communism" - they did it their way. The ruling party (the League of Communists of Yugoslavia) were opposed to the Soviet Union's attempts to influence them, leading to Yugoslavia's expulsion from Cominform. Led by Josip Broz Tito, they adopted the ideology of Titoism - a "third way" which involved the policies of self-governing socialism (where companies were managed by their workers, as opposed to management by the bourgeoisie in capitalist countries or management by a central planning authority like Gosplan in the Soviet Union) and non-alignment with either side of the Cold War.

Yugoslavism - the belief that the South Slavic peoples all belong to one nation - had been around since nearly a hundred years before the creation of Yugoslavia. In fact the Young Bosnia movement, which carried out the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, consisted of Yugoslav nationalists who were opposed to Austro-Hungarian rule. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) was created in 1918, then was followed by the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after the abolition of the monarchy in 1945.

Tito himself was the key aspect of this. Having led the Yugoslav Partisans against the Nazis in the Second World War, he was a respected and beloved figure in Yugoslavia and was the glue (or the spark) holding an ethnically tense country together. Under the motto of bratstvo i jedinstvo (brotherhood and unity), Tito and his party just about managed to make Yugoslavism work.

His death in 1980, combined with the issues of rising ethnic tensions and a falling economy coming out of the woodwork started Yugoslavia on the path to war and its eventual brutally violent collapse in the 1990s.

The rebound (India)

Alice and Charlie have both gotten out of bad relationships with Bob. They bond over their common enemy, and quickly get together. Their common dislike of Bob is really all they have in common, though, and cracks start showing through in their relationship.

The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama reached India by sea in 1498, setting up several trading posts (most notably in Goa ⁶) to facilitate trade between India and Europe. Then came the Dutch, then the British. India had never been a single country - the closest it had ever been to being controlled by one entity was under the Mughal Empire, which alongside the Safavid and the Ottoman Empires was one of the three Islamic "gunpowder empires". It covered most of what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, although it notably lacked control over South India, which was mostly controlled by various Dravidian kingdoms. The Mughal Empire recognised that India was racially, linguistically and culturally very diverse and so chose to allow ethnic groups some degree of autonomy to increase stability.

The British East India Company, founded in 1600 (as the English East India Company, as this was pre-Treaty of Union) gradually expanded their influence over India over several decades, annexing several states from the Mughals and indirectly ruling others. After a failed rebellion by Indian soldiers employed by the East India Company in 1857, control over most of India was transferred to the Crown and the Mughal Empire was dissolved. Direct rule then began, with the colonial government of the British Raj being established and Queen Victoria declaring herself Empress of India in 1876.

Independence movements grew under British rule, with anti-British sentiment especially aroused by the several major famines caused by crop failures and worsened by colonial policies, which led to the deaths of tens of millions, making them some of the worst famines in history. There were both peaceful independence movements (such as the one led by Gandhi) and militant ones (such as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association). India became independent as a federal country in 1947. As with many multi-ethnic federations, racial and religious tensions were (and still are) very common.

India as a single country today only really exists because of opposition to British rule. In the absence of a common enemy, Indian leaders have tried to find new enemies to rally against (in many cases Pakistan; in some cases China), but cracks begin to show in their unity. The Indian Constitution forbids secession from the union, the Central Government has the authority to overrule state and regional governments as it wishes, and promoting secession is illegal, but this has not stopped several separatist movements from forming. The most notable ones include the (still-ongoing) Naxalite-Maoist insurgency in several states, the brutally suppressed Khalistan movement in Punjab and the decades-long Kashmir conflict.

The shotgun wedding (Kingdom of Great Britain)

Alice has made a bit of a poor decision in fooling around with Bob and she finds herself in a... situation. She knows she can't raise the child on her own, so she and Bob decide to get married.

The Darien Scheme is a lesser-known part of Scottish history. The Company of Scotland, created by an act of the Scottish Parliament (at this time, Scotland and England were separate kingdoms, with England also controlling Wales and Ireland), sought to establish a Scottish colony in now-Panama in 1698. With an investment totalling a quarter of Scotland's money, they set off to the Americas. Their chosen location was the Darien Gap - a place today known for its inhospitable environments and practically untraversable terrain ⁷. As you can probably imagine, this did not end too well. Many of the colonists died in epidemics of tropical diseases, a confrontation with the Spanish ended the colony in 1700, and the Scottish economy faced complete disaster.

97 years earlier, after the death of Elizabeth I, King James VI of Scotland had also become the king of England and Ireland, in a personal union (separate countries ruled by one monarch). He had wanted to unite Scotland and England into one kingdom, but faced considerable resistance in Parliament, with three separate acts to create a union failing. It is argued that the failure of the Darien Scheme made the Scottish ruling class less opposed to union with England, as it meant that Scotland could still be part of an international power.

The spectacular failure of the Darien Scheme, along with Queen Anne's fears that the Scottish Parliament would choose to reinstate the House of Stuart and potentially ally with France against England, was one of the causes of signing of the Treaty of Union in 1706 and the Acts of Union of 1707, which would establish the Kingdom of Great Britain.

Part 3: "How is this helpful in any way?"

As with any analogy, this comparison has obvious flaws. The main and most plainly obvious one is that states don't always act like people do, because states aren't individual people. The actions of a state aren't spontaneous, they have to be agreed upon by its government (or at least some part of it). This also works conversely, people don't always act like states do, because very few people think out their actions in every situation and many people act spontaneously, especially in matters regarding relationships.

However, as with any analogy, it's more important to focus on the general features than on the details. Consider the trolley problem - of course, you could go and untie the people from the track, you could try and cause a derailment, you could even try and jump in front of the trolley, but all that detracts from the actual point of the problem, which is to be a general analogy for a forced decision between two bad choices.

Of course, you shouldn't approach relationships in the exact same way you would approach federation or alliance, because relationships aren't federations or alliances. But, we can learn things from the failures of federations and alliances which might contribute to success in relationships.

First - it's important to have the same intentions or at least to come to an agreement on a fair compromise between different intentions. The alliance between the USA and the USSR collapsed immediately following the Second World War because although they had compromised in order to unite against Nazi Germany, the differences in ideology and Stalin's intentions in Eastern Europe were too great for any alliance to ever last.

Second - it's important that power is shared equally. Historically, asymmetric federations such as the Soviet Union have been far more unstable than symmetric ones such as the United States or the European Union, often ending in violent ethnic conflict. It's also important that agreements are made by all parties and are kept by all parties - for example, an alliance such as NATO could never work without the protections offered by Article 5.

And finally - it's important that there are methods of raising issues before they become major, and dealing with them fairly. The International Court of Justice, one of the six organs of the United Nations, deals with issues raised between one nation and another and aims to resolve them before they potentially lead to conflict. There should be some system of raising complaints, and some system of resolving them in which both parties get an equal say.

I hope that makes sense in some way. If all I've done is convince you that I've lost my sanity... well, I probably have.

~ chloe.v@tinyways.net / 2025-04-16

Footnotes

1. EUR-Lex, "Consolidated Version of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union" / https://eur-lex.europa.eu/resource.html?uri=cellar:2bf140bf-a3f8-4ab2-b506-fd71826e6da6.0023.02/DOC_2&format=PDF

2. Hannah Fry, TED, "The Mathematics of Love" / https://www.ted.com/talks/hannah_fry_the_mathematics_of_love