Wars, Humanity, and Solidarity: A Critical Commentary on Lilliput

For political Realists, war is an eternal constant in human society, while peace remains but a rare interlude among wars.² From the massacres of World War I and World War II to the era of nuclear paranoia, humans increasingly find themselves living in a world of inflamed conflicts. Entering the second decade of the 21st century, two enduring conflicts on the Eurasian continent—between Russia and Ukraine war, Israel and Palestine—have once again awakened humanity’s longing for common values. Lilliput serves as a response to such sentiments. In this critical commentary, I reflect on the origins of war presented in this fiction, explore why war persists in human society, and contemplate the course humanity should take in its face.

The fiction is imbued with the protagonist’s trauma of war, yet it ultimately aspires to rediscover the future of society through human solidarity. The brief dialogues touch upon various themes concerning the origins of war: race, religion, the clash of civilizations… More significantly, these themes are expressed through a series of political-philosophical metaphors. The following analysis focuses on the key metaphors and their relationship to war and solidarity, though I hope readers may uncover more through their own interpretations.

Like Plato’s works, the dialogue form is one of the classic genres for expounding political philosophy. The protagonists of this dialogue are a female human and a male “Lilliputian”—a reference to Jonathan Swift’s satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels.³ Lilliput is a fictional island, inhabited by the Lilliputians, a race of tiny people approximately six inches tall. In contrast to Lilliput, Gulliver also visits Brobdingnag, the land of giants. The juxtaposition of the small and big metaphorically represents a fundamental dichotomy: sophistication versus simplicity. Yet, extreme sophistication leads to self-interest and the erosion of human nature, whereas simplicity frequently aspires toward a utopian ideal—a satire of early 18th-century British political institutions.

Lilliput begins with the Lilliputian reading the Bible. He comes across Job 41:34, which describes a sea serpent demon, Leviathan. In 1651, the English political writer Thomas Hobbes titled his seminal work Leviathan, where he proposed his famous theory of sovereignty and the state. Hobbes argued that the state of nature that human beings originally lived in is one of war. People live in mutual suspicion, thus the only reasonable action is to conquer the other: “that is, by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can, so long, till he see no other power great enough to endanger him.”⁴ In this state of war of all against all, the only way for humanity to ensure survival is to establish a social contract and form a state, thereby surrendering individual security rights to the sovereign power, that is, a colossus Leviathan.⁵

Hobbes’ doctrine established him as one of the most significant founders of Realism in International Relations (IR) Theory. For him, war culminates in hellish fear. Yet, European intellectual history is replete with classical texts that rationalise or glorify war. Thomas Aquinas formulated the renowned Just War Theory in Summa Theologiae,⁶ which was later expanded upon by other famous theorists such as the Dutch international lawyer Hugo Grotius.⁷ The Italian political writer Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) once mentioned that bellicosity was a sign of European vigour and refusal to the “sloth.”⁸ Even William Shakespeare penned the famous lines in the play Henry IV:

A peace is of the nature of a conquest;

for then both parties nobly are subdued,

and neither party loser.⁹

In contemporary international politics, we continue to witness the practice of a Hobbesian preemptive strike. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush introduced his “Bush Doctrine” of preemptive war, targeting “rogue states and terrorists” with “weapons of mass destruction against us, make today’s security environment more complex and dangerous.”¹⁰ This is not merely a military strategy, but also a Freudian neurotic complex: one that assumes the inborn scarcity of security, hence necessitating its acquisition at any cost. Nevertheless, who can guarantee that a global hegemony will faithfully fulfil its duty to combat terrorism rather than allow the flames of war to ravage civilian homes? It is indeed as the Latin satirical adage warns: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (Who watches the watchmen)?

When the protagonists discuss why human society is riddled with conflicts, they suggest that it stems from differing scales of observing the world. The material world is objective, yet human perception is subjective. As Hobbes argued, human judges, not only men, but all other things, based on their own measures.¹¹ Hobbes viewed war as arising from mutual misunderstandings among humans—much like the Tower of Babel metaphor in the Bible, where God punished humankind by confounding their languages, rendering them incapable of understanding one another and leading to division and strife.

In a traumatic flashback, the heroine recalls how different men and women in war “melt into one another,” evoking two images. One is the horrific destructiveness of nuclear weapons, which annihilate the human body in an unimaginably inhumane manner. The other is that human value is erased in war—an ultimate state of exception. Every individual with a vibrant personality is reduced to mere “bare life.”¹² They are atomised into faceless entities, assembled into a colossal “organism”—much like the Leviathan’s depiction on its famous cover image: “a crowned man whose body is made of numerous human bodies.”¹³

In 2021, a female historian Stella Ghervas published a study on the intellectual history of war in Europe, entitled Conquering Peace. She analyses the dialectic between war and the establishment of lasting peace: “In the engineering of peace, the first step to building any new and durable status quo has always been to raze the hostile empire threatening the preexisting political edifice”; yet “defensive wars were evidently necessary preliminary steps.”¹⁴ Given the relentless conflicts unfolding on our continent in recent years—not only wars in Ukraine and Palestine but also continued turbulence in Crimea, Azerbaijan, Syria and Kurdistan, Iraq and Iran¹⁵—Ghervas poses a question in the Conclusion: Quo vadis, Europe (Europe, where to go)?¹⁶

Jürgen Habermas attempts to answer this question in the latest Guest Article Für Europa (For Europe) published on March 21, 2025. He suggests that in this world of geopolitical turbulence and fragmentation, Europe must act politically as a unified entity to uphold its normative convictions and common interests.¹⁷ Yet, does this not return us to a Hobbesian logic? Hobbes claimed that an internal social contract could achieve security for all by conceding individual rights; and by doing so, he left the possibility of war external to the state, namely, the international society that contains “permanent tragedies to remain fragmented while longing for reconciliation and integration.”¹⁸ To what extent is the collective action of the Western world supposed to make the outside world feel secure?

At the end of the fiction, the stream of consciousness on conflict and human nature is abruptly interrupted, shifting instead to the most direct form of human contact—the touch of hands. The warmth transmitted through physical connection draws us away from abstract political-philosophical musings and back to the tangible reality of human existence. The real belief in the end of the war lies in the interconnectedness of human beings. Political greatness has repeatedly been found in the social bonds of togetherness that only lasting peace can afford; it would be a sign of weakness for anyone to place their faith in an offensive army, as the chief guarantor of national security.¹⁹ In the face of the current political landscape—crisis, suspense, and uncertainty—we ought to forsake the so-called ‘grand narratives’ and turn our attention to those who exist and live around us. That is the only way to rekindle a sense of solidarity within our hearts. It should be aware that “we”—we, as a species—can do better than to resign ourselves to reality as political Realism defines it.²⁰

Acknowledgement

For training in classical literacy, I specifically appreciate Dr. Yudan Chen and Prof. Tao Hong who guided me to the gate of intellectual history. Working on the undergraduate module “Classical Thinkers and Current Events” with Faiz Sheikh in 2024 inspired my thinking on Just War as well. I am also grateful to three brilliant writers whose books I have translated into Chinese: Stella Ghervas, Matthew Specter, and Perry Anderson. Finally, I always thank my friend and colleague Phil Xing, who is always willing to be my first audience.

Academic bio

Zizhu (Judy) Wang is a PhD candidate in International Relations at University of Sussex. Her research focuses on History of International Thought and translingual practice. Currently, she is exploring the conceptual history of the term ‘international’ as it evolved from Western Europe to East Asia, and the Jesuit translation of international law into the Sinosphere. She is also a freelance translator [Eng-Sino] and has translated works including Conquering Peace (2025), The Atlantic Realists (2025), Even Closer Union? (forthcoming), etc. She writes in English, simplified Chinese, and Japanese.