Greece, the country that gave birth to democracy, has nearly destroyed Europe's economy. Italy, the world's seventh-largest economy and the birthplace of the Roman republic, would make the costly rescue of Greece pointless if it too collapsed. Both countries' crises are directly attributable to a sweeping malaise of Western societies: an affluence bought not by economic dynamism but by reckless borrowing. 

The response of both countries is to walk away from democracy. Temporary though it is, it is a precedent that should raise serious questions.

After all, the dizzying success of Italy's new prime minister, Mario Monti, is proof that difficult steps to fix the economy could only be taken by an unelected government. Monti is a well-respected international bureaucrat tasked with implementing structural reforms that European institutions, which are neither elected nor Italian, believe Italy must embrace if its economy is to avoid bankruptcy. They may well be right.

The ease with which Monti is tackling fiscal evasion in Italy is remarkable. The failure of his predecessors speaks volumes about the lack of courage and vision of democratically elected officials in the past. 

A similarly unelected Greek government led by Lucas Papademos, another former international bureaucrat, is trying to fix the wreckage left by elected politicians of both Left and Right, albeit with less chance of success. But the point is the same. The mechanisms devised to save Greece from default are being approved first by an unelected government and then by foreign parliaments from those EU countries that will have to pay for the plan. And the plan itself is not a Greek concoction, but a number of measures drafted elsewhere and forced upon Greece at gunpoint.