­I always found technocracy exciting. What a great idea to have a government filled not with politicians, but with people who actually know what they are doing! But is the reality of the technocratic governments as appealing as its theory?

The newly-formed governments of Mario Monti in Italy and Lucas Papademos in Greece have embarked on a journey to find an answer to this question. Both men are economists and were not elected by their people, but through a bureaucratic process on the basis of their specialized knowledge.

They don’t teach it to you in school, but technocracy is an exception to democracy. When democratically-elected leaders make a huge mess out of their countries, it is acceptable for them to be replaced with non-elected professionals for a year or two to get country back into order, so that future elected leaders can start messing it up again.

Both Italy and Greece are familiar with this arrangement very well. For Greece this is the second technocratic government in its history, while for Italy it’s the fourth (!) one in the last 20 years and the second to be brought by the Berlusconi’s reign.

Italy’s three previous technocratic governments lasted from 1992 till 1996, with a short seven-month break, when Berlusconi was first elected after a fierce and successful election campaign. He was forced to leave, but chose his successor personally from his own circle. 

During these four years of technocracy Italy managed to respond effectively to two devaluations of the Lira, the then-Italian currency, thus taking the first steps in the road that brought Italy to adopt the euro.

We constantly hear from various democratic (and not particularly democratic) governments around the world that their 4 to 5-year term was not enough to do what they wanted and therefore they need to be given another chance. These politicians are trying to convince their electorate that unemployment is rising, the healthcare standards are poor and pensions are low because one term in government was not enough to improve the situation. However, the historical examples show that the technocratic governments manage to deal with much bigger problems such as financial crises, devaluation of national currencies, etc in one year. 

The reality, unfortunately, is such that you are either a politician who concentrates all the efforts on getting elected or you are an expert who knows what to do when in government. We should create a new form of government that would be a mixture of democracy and technocracy. We’ll give the politicians a chance to fight elections on behalf of the technocrats who would be left to do the job. The United States would benefit the most from this arrangement, as at the moment politicians spend half of their terms in election campaigns.

­The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.