The Case for the City-State
Ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy provide a model for economic dynamism that modern-day Europe could use.
The current discussion of how Greece and Italy can overcome their economic devastation will have little effect until these countries finally decide to stop faking their own existence. Neither country has functioned as a centralized state since their unification movements of the mid-19th century, the result of ideals more romantic than realistic. Since that time, Greece and Italy have been kept afloat by tourism, agriculture and—in Italy's case—a knack for turning out practical products of great design.
Contrast this situation with the wealth and influence the ancient Greeks and Renaissance Italians achieved. One characteristic shared by these older societies makes all the difference: their embrace of the city-state as a political-economic model.
In both ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy, democracy was not incompatible with aristocracy. Even their oligarchies were not necessarily illiberal. Yet the real strengths of the Greek and Italian city-states lay in their economic and social dynamism.
Ancient Greece's first great economic boom took place around 500 B.C., the result of political power shifting into the regional democratic clusters. The great poleis—Athens, Corinth, Thebes and the colonized areas of Hellenic Asia—fueled prosperity and expansion by specializing their industrial production within four areas: agriculture, food processing, mining and pottery.
It was a time of technological revolution too. The iron tools made in Greece beginning in the 6th century were so advanced that they were used later to equip Rome and Ptolemaic Egypt.
The strengthening of the independent polis also meant the beginning of investment in industry, an activity that had previously been frowned upon. The introduction of coinage followed, the result of the new emphasis on local economies that were then starting to expand and trade with each other. As wealth spread, aristocratic patronage declined and was replaced with economic-civic relationships. An explosion in interregional trade between city-states followed.
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