The “Failed State” Is No Longer Somewhere Else
Why Britain—and the West—Are Letting Critical Infrastructure Rot
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!For decades, “failed states” were something Western governments diagnosed abroad. Today, the same logic of neglect, outsourcing, and market obsession is quietly hollowing out the infrastructure that keeps advanced societies safe.
For years, “failed states” were imagined as distant places—countries unable to guarantee safety, basic services, or functioning infrastructure. It was a term Western governments applied to others, often as a prelude to intervention. But in an uncomfortable historical reversal, the conditions once used to describe collapse abroad are now taking shape much closer to home.
From disrupted rail networks and overstretched air traffic systems to power grids strained by extreme weather, the warning signs are no longer hypothetical. They are the predictable outcome of a political model that treats the state not as a guarantor of safety, but as a platform for market activity.
When the “Failed State” Comes Home
In the 1990s, the term failed state was coined to describe countries in collapse—states unable to provide basic services or guarantee security. Often, it also functioned as a convenient pretext for military intervention.
Today, in a bitter historical irony, the same concept can be used to describe what is happening inside advanced economies when aggressive neoliberal policies treat the state primarily as a business venture rather than a guarantor of collective safety.
The recent breakdown of communication systems in the Athens Flight Information Region, which created serious safety risks and widespread disruption, is a case in point. Greece’s air transport sector is already deeply privatized: there has been no national carrier for years, and most airports are privately run. Yet the part of the system that remains unequivocally a state responsibility—air traffic safety infrastructure—was revealed to be dangerously neglected.
This comes against the backdrop of the Tempe rail disaster, which was clearly not the result of simple “human error.” It was the predictable outcome of an infrastructure treated as a funding pipeline for EU money rather than as a system that must actually prevent two trains from running blindly on the same track.
This is not a uniquely Greek problem. Across the world, governments are struggling with the safety of aging infrastructure—systems built in an earlier era that now require sustained maintenance, upgrades, and institutional competence.
The root cause is familiar. The long-standing demonization of the public sector in favor of the private—or worse, the purely market-driven—has reshaped the state into an “investment opportunity,” sometimes even a political trophy. Maintenance and upgrades came to be seen as costs that needed justification, preferably as profitable contracts. The result has been chronic postponement or, at best, patchwork solutions that merely defer the next failure.
The growing pressure of climate change only magnifies these vulnerabilities, pushing already fragile systems closer to collapse.
What is needed cannot be reduced to slogans about “efficiency” or faster implementation. It requires a genuine paradigm shift in how we understand the state—its purpose, its priorities, and its obligations. Treating the state as little more than an administrative shell around privatized functions—where even policing, prisons, education, or healthcare are seen as candidates for privatization—produces a state that guarantees less, not more.
It is a state that structurally increases risk instead of containing it. A state of permanent insecurity, where the citizen is ultimately told that safety is a matter of “individual responsibility.”
