By Paul Lay | Posted 10th January 2012, 8:25
Greek philosophers and thinkers assemble at Plato's Academy in the Renaissance fresco by Raphael, 1510, known as the 'School of Athens'
There are two fewer democracies in Europe than there were this time last year. The democratically elected governments of Greece and Italy have been replaced by ones made up of unelected ‘technocrats’. The reaction, within those countries and without, has been relatively muted. Though the political systems of both have become bywords for corruption, incompetence and, in the case of Italy, buffoonery, it is still worrying that true democracy can be shelved so easily to be replaced by a ‘managed democracy’, a euphemism employed chillingly by the authorities in China, whose lack of popular accountability combined with rising prosperity threatens to become some kind of model.
It is ironic that Greece and Italy should be the victims of the Eurozone’s economic and political crisis. Demokratia, meaning ‘rule of the people’, is a Greek word to describe the system of governance that emerged in Athens and other city states in the sixth century BC. The political ideas that originated there and spread to the wider Classical world were rekindled and developed in Italy during the Renaissance by the likes of the Florentine Niccolò Machiavelli and Paolo Sarpi, who defended Italian liberty during the Venetian Interdict of 1605-07.
That episode demonstrates that there is nothing new about struggles between the centre and the periphery in Europe. The conflict that led to Pope Paul V excommunicating the Venetian Republic arose when Venice sought to expand its control of church appointments beyond the city proper to its mainland possessions. Sarpi believed the papacy was in league with Spain and the Jesuits to destroy liberty in Italy and assert central control. His promotion of the ‘Myth of Venice’ as the best governed state in the world, a guarantee of the city’s extraordinary prosperity and providence, gained influence in another country suspicious of Spanish motivations and the ways of the papacy: England. Sarpi’s was a vision that inspired many English Republicans, most notably James Harrington, who in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) modelled his proposal for a perfect state on that of Venice, an oligarchy with an elected monarch and complex procedures of checks and balances.
Though not a democracy, the Venetian Republic inspired ideas of accountable governance. Democracies as we know them are recent, rare and are not, as some imagine, a natural state of affairs, being slowly attained and fragile. During the 20th century in Continental Europe dictatorship was the norm rather than the exception. Even in Britain, which regards itself as some kind of paragon of stability, universal suffrage at 18 and over began only with the General Election of 1970. After decades of advance, democracy, which should never be taken for granted, has begun to look curiously vulnerable.
