The Most Serene Republic

Lessons from La Serenissima

Imagine a country, wealthy beyond wildest imagination, filled with architectural splendour borne from a great trading empire and augmented by some of the highest human capital in all of Europe. Its constitution is admired in the known world, and all the great and the good see it as their duty to pay it a visit to see its wonders and learn from its governance. Yet, it has started spiralling into decline. Exogenous shocks abroad and an ossifying political structure at home render it incapable of responding to world events, leaving it decaying slowly but surely, until it becomes nothing more than a museum.

The Most Serene Republic of Venice was, at its zenith, one of the most admired nations in Europe. Its form of governance was wildly complicated, but afforded it a level of both stability and entrepreneurship that allowed it to become one of the richest cities the world has ever seen — the city became dominant in commerce, finance and banking. The citizens of the Republic thought themselves and their system, not without reason, as uniquely fair-minded and just. Her empire, acquired through maritime exploits, afforded dominance in the Mediterranean, and her fleets (manned by free citizens, and not galley slaves) were feared. She led the world in manufacturing — the Arsenale was an early form of a kind of mass industrial process, with galleys built in sections in parallel to allow for rapid ship production. For a while, it seemed like her power would never wane.

So what happened?

What is undeniable is that the world changed. Larger, once backwards, states simply caught up. A catastrophic war on the continent ended the Republic’s status as a premier power — in spite of the extraordinary pluck and resilience her people showed throughout in preserving their city. That spirit helped give rise to a new self-conception, in the ‘Myth of Venice’, that despite their near-total defeat, their unique sense of justice granted them divine favour and fortune.

Such moments do occur in history, as we know well ourselves — but the charge that indicts a state or its governance is the inability to respond to a changing world. We can point in this case to Venice’s constitution to demonstrate how she became incapable of responding to the myriad new challenges she faced in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The great fear of the Venetian aristocracy was that any one person or family would become too powerful and overrun the political system. As a merchant republic, they elected their leader, the Doge, to a lifetime tenure, but worried the position would effectively become hereditary. Therefore, they devised a kind of Parliament with complex voting systems and drawing of lots to ensure the great families were represented but to avoid the concentration of political power in one man. It was also expected that young men from such families would climb a cursus honorum of sorts, as in the Roman Republic, teaching them the various aspects of governance and economics that gave Venice her strength.

Fear of destabilisation, particularly after the attempted coup against the government in the Tiepolo Conspiracy of 1310, led to the fragmentation of political power and authority. The Council of Ten, initially a temporary measure to monitor the exiles in that failed attempt, became a permanent feature, taking much power for itself. Membership of the Great Council itself had been closed and made hereditary in 1297, making the structures of power increasingly both diffuse and ossified.

This isn’t to say that there weren’t some successes even in that period. Decline is seldom so linear. The great military success against the Ottomans at Lepanto, reminiscent of the Falklands for Britain, occurred long after Venice had reached her peak. Nevertheless, even then the golden age was over. Shifting trade patterns towards the Atlantic nations had eroded her economic power, while the Ottoman juggernaut ate away at the Stato da Mar, her maritime empire. Venice, which once had the most dynamic ruling classes and had responded to all manner of external and internal threats, had accumulated so many checks and balances in her constitution that any meaningful difference in direction became impossible to countenance. Most damningly, the unassailable Myth of Venice — which carried the city through the darkest days of the War of the League of Cambrai — began to make questioning the slow drift of the system into decay verboten.

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Whatever one might say about the value of historical parallels, I have seen far worse drawn than the Most Serene Republic and another larger, colder, and rainier archipelago that risks a similar fate.

Britain today stands at a constitutional crossroads — the accumulation of laws and state bodies, especially post-Blair, has left it sclerotic and motionless. There are occasional spasms: during the COVID years, the state could genuinely marshal huge resources under emergency powers and to great effect in locking up young people and the productive economy. But by and large, a judiciary with a much stronger litigating culture, armed with a fully-equipped arsenal of primary legislation and common-law principles, can thwart almost any meaningful policy commitment.

To list them all would run this article into the hundreds of pages, but we all know the legislative story in the Human Rights Act, Equality Act, and Climate Change Act, which forced the British state, once famed for its flexibility and ability for ministers to act with political will, into an iron cage. Our own mythologisation of vague ideas that once found root in worthwhile principles and historical experiences — the ‘Rule of Law’, sense of fair-play, ‘our reputation as an international leader’ — has become a fetish that saps institutional flexibility or action. No more can ministers, empowered by a democratic mandate and the national interest, pursue policy without considering statutory duties towards equality, vaguely defined concepts of ‘human rights,’ and climate targets. In an attempt to ape the Americans, the concept of ‘Separation of Powers’ was introduced by the backdoor — no such concept existed for our forebears. The Constitutional Reform Act of 2005 created a Supreme Court in a pale imitation of that American institution, and successful Blairite depoliticisation efforts have given it an aura of grandeur in the minds of twee Britpoppers.

Power, which used to be the responsibility of Cabinet, has now been diffused away to quangos, devolved governments, NGOs, and judges. Like La Serenissima before us, it seems impossible for the government of the day to do anything meaningful about the structural problems facing us. As the world changes around us still, Britain is currently powerless to act domestically or internationally. This was the tragedy of Venice. She had not forgotten how to be grand nor rich nor even how to administer — only how to act. Venice did not collapse overnight. She became a museum slowly, then all at once.

Britain need not follow the Serene Republic. But to do so, we must give up the pretence that politics as usual will get us out of this. Winning an election is not the same thing as possessing power. We must have politicians who are willing to understand how the existing system functions so they can begin to cut the Gordian knots of the restraints that bind us to managed decline. As this will necessarily involve wresting power back from the endless sea of quangos, NGOs, and other veto players which have enjoyed a comfortable existence under this new settlement, a plan for institutional resistance must be prepared. All the things that have been quietly removed from the political arena must be put back into play. Our own version of The Myth no longer serves us — and so it must be discarded. We are not favoured by the divine, nor do any of the quasi-religious mantras of the legalistic class provide us any fortune.

The lessons from La Serenissima are simple enough. A country can possess great wealth, prestige, and even an array of impressive military victories, but still lose the ability to shape its place in the world. The outward appearance may be of splendour, but the column can be rotting from the inside. Britain is not yet Venice, but if we continue on our present course we will end up in the same place: admired by tourists (in what is left to admire), studied by historians, and irrelevant to the future.

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This article was written by Charles Talbot, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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