What Venice Still Has to Teach Us

I was standing inside St Mark’s Basilica on a recent trip to Venice, looking up at the mosaics while a wonderfully engaging guide walked us through the story of the Republic of Venice. She spoke not just about the art and architecture, but about something far more striking—how this small, lagoon-bound city managed to build a system that endured for around a thousand years.

It’s one thing to read that fact in a book. It’s another to stand there, in a place shaped by that continuity, and feel the weight of it. Venice wasn’t just beautiful—it was stable, deliberate, and, for much of its life, remarkably effective.

That experience stayed with me.

Venice as a lesson in getting things right

The success of the Republic of Venice wasn’t accidental. It built a system that balanced competing forces unusually well.

Power was shared and constrained. The Doge existed, but was tightly limited by councils and rules. No single individual could dominate for long, and decision-making was distributed across overlapping institutions designed explicitly to prevent concentration of power.

At the same time, Venice allowed a surprising degree of economic freedom. Merchants could operate, take risks, and build wealth, while the state focused on coordination—protecting trade routes, maintaining naval strength, and ensuring stability.

It wasn’t democratic in the modern sense, and it certainly wasn’t equal. But it worked because it prioritised the survival of the collective over the unchecked greed of the individual.

Venice managed something rare: it held together collective governance and individual initiative without letting either overwhelm the other. That balance created resilience, and that resilience sustained it for centuries.

There’s a simple but important lesson in that. Societies don’t tend to succeed at the extremes. They succeed when they manage tension well.

The Shadow of Others: Collectivism as Strategy

Venice wasn’t alone in this. History is littered with societies that thrived by placing the collective good above individual gain.

The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy operated on the “Seventh Generation” principle—the idea that every decision must be weighed against its impact on descendants seven generations into the future. It wasn’t just a spiritual idea; it was a constitutional mechanism that ensured collective stewardship of the land and resources, preventing the kind of short-term extraction that fuels modern inequality.

In Edo-period Japan, a rigid but highly stable social order created one of the world’s first truly “circular” economies. Faced with isolation and limited resources, Japanese society organised itself around collective restraint. It was a system that ensured survival through meticulous resource management and a social contract that, while hierarchical, prioritised the stability of the whole over the enrichment of the few.

Even Ancient Athens, in its prime, used “Liturgies”—a system where the wealthiest citizens were expected to fund public festivals, navies, and infrastructure as a matter of civic duty and honour. Public wealth wasn’t something to be hoarded; it was a tool for the collective flourishing of the polis.

These societies understood a truth we have forgotten: massive inequality is not a side effect of success; it is a precursor to failure.

Why Venice didn’t last forever

But Venice didn’t last indefinitely, and its decline is just as instructive as its success.

It didn’t collapse in a dramatic internal failure. Instead, it was gradually overtaken.

The world changed around it. The Age of Discovery shifted trade away from the Mediterranean. New ocean routes opened, and the commercial advantage Venice had carefully built over centuries began to erode. Trade moved outward, towards the Atlantic, and with it went influence and wealth.

Internally, the system that had once been its strength began to harden. Power became more closed, more hereditary, and more cautious. The mechanisms that had successfully prevented instability also made it harder to adapt. Innovation slowed. Risk-taking declined.

The balance shifted—not suddenly, but gradually—from dynamic stability to careful preservation.

By the time Napoleon arrived in 1797, the end came quickly. But the real story wasn’t the fall itself. It was the long period beforehand, where a successful system became just a little too rigid in the face of a changing world.

The American Drift: Power without Purpose

Viewed through that lens, parts of the modern world look less stable than we might prefer to believe.

The United States, in particular, feels increasingly unbalanced. It remains extraordinarily powerful, but power alone is not a reliable indicator of long-term health. The US has traded its social contract for a predatory form of hyper-individualism.

Trust in institutions hasn’t just eroded; it has been auctioned off. Social cohesion is not just strained; it is being actively dismantled by a system that prioritises short-term profit over the collective survival of its citizens. The ability to act collectively—to solve large, shared problems like climate change or failing infrastructure—is virtually non-existent.

Recent military actions in the Middle East reinforce that concern. They suggest a system still capable of projecting force, but less clearly able to align that force with coherent, broadly supported strategy. Historically, that combination—strength without alignment—is not a reassuring one.

It doesn’t look like collapse in the traditional sense. It looks like the terminal phase of a system that has forgotten how to care for its people.

The European Retreat: The Alternative that Faltered

The European Union presents a different, but related, challenge.

It remains one of the most ambitious collective governance projects in history. It was meant to be the alternative—a model of “programmable commons” where nation-states cooperated for a shared future. But it is showing signs of terminal inertia.

Instead of leaning into this radical vision, the EU is falling back into bureaucratic protectionism and internal fragmentation. Hungary and Poland have tested the boundaries of shared democratic norms with little consequence. Germany, long seen as a stabilising centre, is navigating a more uncertain position. Across the union, decision-making is slow, fragmented, and increasingly detached from the people it is meant to serve.

The EU is retreating from its frontier. It is becoming a system of rules without a soul, increasingly unable to respond to a world that demands speed, clarity, and a renewed commitment to the common good.

A reflection somewhere over the Indian Ocean

On the flight back to Australia, somewhere between Europe and home, I found myself listening to the 2025 BBC Reith Lectures by Rutger Bregman: “Moral Revolution” .

Bregman’s core thesis—that we are capable of profound moral shifts when we stop accepting the status quo as inevitable—echoed through the cabin. He drew a comparison that lingered: the idea that Venice didn’t so much collapse as slowly slide into irrelevance—a system that continued to function, but no longer shaped the world around it.

It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one.

Decline doesn’t always arrive as crisis. Sometimes it arrives as drift. As missed opportunities. As a gradual loss of influence while the system itself still appears intact.

From a European perspective, that comparison carries weight. The European Union is not Venice. The scale, context, and structure are entirely different. But the underlying risk—of institutional success turning into institutional inertia—feels familiar enough to warrant attention.

And from an Australian perspective, watching both the United States and Europe from a distance, the question becomes harder to ignore.

Are these systems still adapting as effectively as they once did?

Or are they, in quieter ways, becoming more cautious, more rigid, and less able to respond to a changing world?

What history teaches us

Standing in St Mark’s Basilica, the remarkable thing wasn’t just that Venice lasted so long. It was that its success made sense—it was built, carefully and deliberately, to manage the tensions that undo most societies.

And its decline makes sense too.

Not as a failure of one ideology over another, but as a reminder that no system remains optimal forever—and that stability, if held too tightly, can become its own kind of weakness.

History gives us the answers, provided we have the clarity to ask the right questions.

If we look closely, the blueprints for resilience are right there. They are found in the balance of the Doge’s councils, the long-term stewardship of the Haudenosaunee, and the collective restraint of Edo Japan. These aren’t just stories; they are proven alternatives to the extractive drift of the present.

The answers are clear. The challenge is whether we are asking the right questions of our own institutions:

• Are our institutions still balanced?
• Are they still trusted?
• Are they still capable of adapting when the world changes?

And perhaps most importantly—are we paying attention early enough to act on the answers we find?