Europe's Vulnerable Democracy | History TodayThere 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 The democratically elected governments of Greece and Italy have been replaced by ones made up of unelected ‘technocrats’.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.
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