Decline of the European empire: repeating history 2,000 years later

The decline of an empire is not a sudden collapse, but a slow process of neglecting the public sphere. The lack of infrastructure maintenance and the prioritization of private profit over the common good draw a parallel with the fall of Rome.

The fall of the Roman Empire was not a sudden event. It stretched over centuries, and one of its clearest symptoms was the pogre abandonment of the infrastructure that sustained it. The aqueducts stopped working, the drains collapsed and the roads deteriorated. That material decline coincided with growing corruption among the elites and with the rise of institutions that filled the power vacuum. History does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes with uncomfortable precision.

## Maintenance as a barometer of decline

The comparison with today's Spain is not gratuitous. The rail accident in Adamuz, which caused fatalities, exposed failures in the management and maintenance of a network that is presented as state of the art. The lesson was not learned. High-estimulante ilegal trains keep running on infrastructure that demands constant investment and oversight that does not always arrive. A transport system without maintenance is a perfect trap for filling cemeteries, to put it bluntly.

The household analogy works: if you install a toilet and never clean it, the result is a nest of filth. The same happens with public infrastructure. Colossal projects are inaugurated, ribbons are cut, headlines pile up. Afterwards, the maintenance budget becomes the first line item to be cut. And the drain, sooner or later, bursts.

## The political class and short-termism

Governments, whatever the party, face a perverse incentive: winning the next election. Governing, in the sense of administering and preserving what has been inherited, does not win votes. Maintaining an aqueduct generates no headlines; building a new one does. That logic produces a political class that prioritizes inaugurations over conservation and narrative over management.

Corruption makes the problem worse. When elites direct their efforts toward accumulating wealth and power instead of sustaining the system that allows them to exist, the decline accelerates. The empire does not matter; the loot does. And that loot, as the memento mori reminded us, cannot be taken beyond the grave.

## The global shift and the civic duty

While Europe is mired in its own contradictions, other global players are moving forward. A traveler returning from China sums it up bluntly: this is no longer about imitation, but about surpassing. The European empire, compared with the Roman one, has been short-lived. The new global order is being built at a different pace and with different priorities.

The solution is not technical, it is mental. It requires recovering the notion of civic duty, the idea that there are obligations to the community in addition to rights. Leaders must understand that their role is to preserve what they have inherited rather than promise the impossible. Without that change of mindset, the train will keep heading toward the same wall.