Sua Emittenza

As I write this, the writing is on the wall for Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister of Italy and of the most contested politicians in the extremely fractuous political history of his country. An ignominious end is coming to a surprisingly long career: Most of us would have expected it to end a lot earlier.

In history, making parallels is dangerous. But it is nevertheless tempting to refer back to the fall of that other flamboyant, womanizing, rethorical Italian leader, Benito Mussolini. The Duce had ruled Italy for 21 years, four years more than the Cavaliere, and like him he had relied a lot on the power of the media. And in 1943 as in 2011, the end came when the leadership had lost any and all credibility. In 1943 the crisis was military, while in 2011 it is financial, but the same feeling persists that the country has come to a dead end and only a change of leadership offers some hope.

And here is the worrying bit. In 1943, Mussolini was voted down by the Fascist Grand Council and dismissed by the king: This was not a revolution, hardly even a coup d'etat, and those in power after the fall of the Duce were the same people who had been his followers before his fall. While they aimed to change policies, indeed to change sides in the war, they were fundamentally unable to change the course of events. Is 2011 really that different? If the long career if "Sua Emittenza" indicates anything, it is that he could not be removed by his enemies, not by the political opposition, and not by judges investigating his many dubious activities. Berlusconi's fall, like Mussolini's, is arranged by his (former) friends, to protect their own survival in the circles of power.

There are of course other, less controversial examples. Margaret Thatcher was similarly forced to resign as prime minister by the inner circle of her own party, and so was, in more recent memory, Tony Blair. What these examples have in common is the inability of the successors to break with the past. They could have said, with Mark Anthony, that they had come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. But they could not really lay the ghosts of their predecessors to rest, nor achieve intellectual freedom from the climate in which they made their own careers. The results have been lacklustre.

And lacklustre solutions are the plague of Europe. Everybody agrees that something must be done, but nobody has the courage to advocate a sufficiently radical solution. Perhaps no monetary and financial crisis has had such political impact since the last days of Louis XVI, not coincidentally a monarch who also faced large debts, large deficits, and an inability to borrow more. Louis XVI appointed and fired a series of prime ministers in his attempts to find a way out, but he was (fatally) unable to reconcile himself to a change in the system. And his problem, as historians have pointed out, was not the magnitude of France's debt, but the lack of trust in its ability to service it, because the French government was systemically weak. Contemporary Britain owed even more, but investors remained confident in its ability to pay interest.

Nobody should want another French revolution. But the lessons of 1798 still apply: Changing the officials won't help much, even if they are incompetent. To rescue the financial system, it must be given a wider and stronger basis. The Europe of 2011 is much like the France of 1798, a patchwork of regional entities with their own systems of privileges and taxation. The time for this is past. As the revolutionaries put it, "the republic is one and indivisible." Or as a British luminary formulated it, we must all hang together, because if not we will certainly hang separately.