The term “failed state” brings to mind benighted places such as Somalia and Haiti, where utter poverty joins with violence and lawlessness to create ongoing misery. Pakistan, whose government cannot provide basic service or impose its authority on territory it claims to control, offers a variation on the theme. Those countries show the failure of organized political communities, but institutional and political inadequacies make other problems worse. What about when politics fails without creating Hobbesian anarchy or grinding poverty? Can states fail within the developed world?

Italy suggests the answer is yes. Despite its many advantages, including world-class industries and an enviable standard of living, Italy has failed as an organized political community able to exercise authority by mobilizing the consent and allegiance of its citizens. The resignation of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi—and his long persistence in office despite cringe-worthy antics—highlights a pattern that merits recognition. Public institutions lack credibility in a world of tax evasion and lawless enterprises, and Europe’s growing fiscal crisis has brought into the open structural weaknesses glimpsed only occasionally before. The problem lays not so much with the Italian economy as in the Italian state’s inability to get the public behind a reform program to raise productivity, cut expenditures and levy taxes effectively. In short, the government cannot govern.

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