Are there any leaders out there?

The cry goes up: this crisis is a moment for leadership. But if leadership is needed, then to where, and with whose consent? In the face of financial apocalypse those questions take us to more difficult places. They rub against the progressive expectation of democracy: that tomorrow can be better than today. Perhaps that isn't always true.

Despite their differences, capitalists, socialists, liberals and conservatives are united by a common idea. It is the assumption of linear progress for human civilisation: the belief, seldom stated because rarely challenged, that things can only get better or – if they seem not to be – can get better if we choose the right policies. To this way of thinking, a turn for the worse is seen as a setback: a reason to condemn one set of politicians for choosing the wrong policies, and elect another instead who offer different ones. Normal service will be resumed shortly. We'll sort the problem out, maybe try a new tack – and continue on an upward path.

For several centuries the west has been right – most of the time – to assume this rule applies. It may still be right to assume it now. Science and technology are leaping ahead. The world's rich can count on living longer than ever. Life, for most people, is pleasant.

But behind the sloth of a European elite on holiday as so much goes wrong lies a miserable possibility. Perhaps no G7 summit, no telephone call, no brilliant speech by Barack Obama, no amount of breezy calm from Cameron can break paralysis. The terror of the financial crisis is not that it requires a series of complex policy responses which, if followed, will set the world economy back on a path to growth. It is that no amount of fiddling may do anything other than delay the judgment: and the sentence is decline.

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Give us Clinton, Blair and Kohl!

"After the great recession of 2008-2009, one would expect two things from Western leaders,” writes Alberto Alesina in the Corriere della Sera: “First, that they grasp the seriousness of the situation and show that they want to and know how to tackle the problems, with urgency and without just putting them off. Second, that they prove able to put aside partisan interests and conflicts for the common good. On both those counts the Western political class has failed, and will go down in history as one of the worst since the Second World War.”

The liberal Italian economist criticises the European and American political class for their “flagrant lack of vision”:

In Europe, one year ago, we should have radically resolved the crisis in Greece," he writes, "either with debt repudiation or with a full bail-out. Instead, the (so-called) European leaders have been torn apart in discussions that have been for nothing, unless their purpose was to plunge the markets into chaos. The real fiscal crisis is the tsunami caused by an ageing population. Are the politicians talking about that? Of course not: it’s too expensive and seniors are a crucial source of votes.

Future generations, on the other hand, do not vote. And so they don’t matter to this mediocre leadership, which will go down in history as one that was not up to the serious and complex challenges facing us. In Europe the leaders of countries at risk have found nothing better to do to hide their weaknesses than to accuse the Germans. The French have ridden this hobbyhorse, but such is the French public debt that sooner or later the markets will take note of it. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has shown little understanding of the financial markets, and her erratic pronouncements haven’t helped.

In brief, Alesina concludes, “give us back De Gasperi, Thatcher, Reagan, Clinton, Blair and Kohl before it’s too late.”