If we tackle the subject exclusively from the standpoint of political and institutional decision-making by the ruling classes in the second half of the 19^th century, there are two ways of grounding or boosting the nation building process, each based on an idealtype. They represent two different interpretations of the role of liberalism and the ruling class associated with it1. One where, within a shared constitutional setting, the political identity of the citizens is moulded (or re-moulded) by open competition, re-establishing the interests and policies of the differing members of the community. This may be called “horizontal” in that competition heightens the political links among citizens of the same nation; it ensures that belonging to a certain community has a directly political meaning. Opposite to this is the “administrative” mode which prioritises the role of administration in the nation-building process: its goal is to control, rationalise and augment the organization of the public arena so as to remove impediments making it difficult or impossible for citizens within the community to access or integrate in it. This mode we call “vertical” since it sets up a hierarchical relationship among political priorities and implementation thereof, with the state machinery and administration at the top and the citizenry at the bottom.

1Clearly historical reality is made up of a varying blend of these two “idealtypes”. In Italy, for example, what prevailed in the nation-building process was a determination not to politicise differences and divisions as a potential mechanism (albeit dangerous) for forging Italians and establishing them on a more solid identity basis. Though their arguments varied, most liberal politicians opted to dodge the issue of national identity building through allowing the system to politicise, entailing (as that would) open plural competition among the forces that had taken part in the process of state building. In practice, though also in theory, now that the battle with the ancien régime was at an end, most liberal politicians interpreted politics to mean leaving it to administrative mediation to shore up the fragile institutions. Conflict among forces that had won (actually fought for) mutual legitimacy in the war of independence was held to be senseless, not to say hazardous; and hence much of the liberal politicians’ energy went into making sure the system was proof against a return of the “political”, viz. conflict redressing the ratio of power within the community.

2Both policies – politicisation and top-down administration – left it to politics to find the solution, to choose a direction “artificially” in which the nation might form. In the former, however, – which more or less overtly sought to revive the spirit of political mobilisation that had only partly been stifled by the Risorgimento – the object was to “forge the Italian people” via participation and constitutional forms of liberty. By contrast, the second policy saw it as indispensable to secure the achievements of the Risorgimento by neutralising competition and direct participation, as being premature, still dangerous mechanisms. Given the historical background, such neutralisation could but enlist the massive support of the Catholic Church – that implacable enemy of unification2. It was the only political and moral body in a profoundly Catholic country like Italy that could ensure the masses made an “orderly” entry into the State, to which end it supported the rise of a conservative party to a dominant position. This was an illusion that liberal Catholics chose to espouse until the realisation dawned that the Pope was deaf to all compromise on the Roman question.

3The process of identity building that sets in with unification of the country must hence reckon with the rapid dissolving of cultures and viewpoints that had been strongly rooted until a few years beforehand. To anyone observing the events leading up to the birth of the Kingdom of Italy the most startling political transformation was the swift and radical disappearance of all realistic credence in the “moderate party”, the faction most closely bound up with class-ridden constitutionalism and the “religious and local-minded tradition3”. The final phase of the Risorgimento, in a climate of alarm and agitation, buried all realistic chance of founding the new State on such a moderate liberal basis4. What still seemed credible in 1859 – that a broadly “federative” nation might be created, uniting local claims and institutions on the hallowed British model around a non-invasive state and political centre – already sounded dated by 1861, if not dangerously “anti-system”. At Minghetti’s project for the creation of Regions, Nigra at once wrote to Cavour: “for heaven’s sake, oppose this regional system, or we are lost5”.

4Italy was patently incomplete and in “mortal danger” at the moment of her inception, and this heavily shaped the politics of her ruling class. Annexation of the South, as Garibaldi’s army swept northwards, might have to be put on hold until Rome was taken. The danger would be adroitly deflected by Cavour in a speech to Parliament on 2 October 1860 in which he announced to the world that Venice and Rome were bound to join the nation in the more or less imminent future6. The dramatic emergency of those months forced everyone, monarchists and democrats alike, to accept the central need for politics to play its role as a mechanism for accelerating processes, persuading people, stalling if necessary, and generally governing the interim – though after Cavour’s death the ruling class hastened to defuse that mechanism. What set in was a fear of the weakness of nation building, something to be checked and guided rather than fuelled. The proof of this is that in the first decades after unification the traditional vehicles for politicising a nation, school and the army, were muzzled in the name of discipline rather than identity building.

5The historic events between 1859 and 1870 thus drove all the versions of Italian liberalism, bent on defending their status as victors in the Risorgimento epic, to rally round the system of administrative centralisation and extension of the role of the State based on suffrage and representation of the individual.

6The drama and emergency of the first phase after unification – public declaration of unification before it was complete, civil war in the south, armed occupation of Rome and eternal fear of international reaction – threw the expectations and schedules of the various brands of liberalism out of kilter, making them more prepared to countenance the German model which, after Sédan, began to be seen as a viable constitutional alternative to the classic British model.

7The Church’s hostility to the new Italian Sate and to political forces whose legitimacy was owed to the nation liberal “devolution” was another reason inclining those political forces to bury their cultural differences and use the lever of politics in building national identity, abstaining from all nostalgia for local representation7. The policy was to boost the governing executive and (from the 1880s on) the administration, with the explicit concrete intent of forestalling political conflict and bargaining by emerging social and economic interests: containment, in short, of “anti-system” tendencies. Politics seemed a dangerous game: if competition was to be the resource that gave rise to a proper vibrant political hegemony upon which to build a strong sense of national identity, it might also prove divisive of institutional unity and a source of social agitation. The ruling class found itself on the horns of a dilemma, wrote Brunialti: “Political education advanced slowly, almost unnoticed. What everybody noticed was the need”, as Ricasoli said in a circular on 26 June 1868, to remedy “this sickness that is so harmful to a country governing via public opinion”; but “those who governed the latter and the country preferred sleep therapy, which is cheaper and less troublesome, especially for those who wield power and do not want it to slip their grasp8”.

8After a short but intense season of uncertainty between the need to set the Italians upon the road to nationalisation via political mechanisms (i.e. accepting the virtues of competition) or build a sense of nation by administrative neutralisation of growing pains, the strategy issue was resolved by the line of prudence (in which the whole ruling class saw eye to eye), namely neutralising competition9. In terms of public order, that policy meant applying the philosophy of “preventing so as not to repress”, while in terms of political equilibrium the day of transformism drew appreciably closer. Such a result was not the inevitable upshot of historic destiny, but stemmed from internal jockeying among currents of liberal thinking – at some points in the first decades after unification it was by no means sure which way things would go. Historians have signally ignored that point, failing to grasp its significance as a profound constitutional conflict.

9The most explicit parting of the ways came in the years between the first Cairoli government and the start of the transformist period when the alternative political line was defeated once and for all. Cairoli and Zanardelli had expressly and consistently kept that line open, though of course they came from Ricasoli’s school of thought. On that view liberalism and its institutions were valid ways to build political and cultural modernism in the nation, picking up the challenge of legitimate political dialogue even with so-called anti-system associations, provided these continued to operate more or less legally within the system. When that political and cultural prospect was struck off the governing agenda in the early 1880s, “liberal politics” became little more than a technique for depoliticising the country. Education towards freedom and critical judgment - the basis of pluralism and deep in liberalism’s genetic endowment – might have opened the door to the “illegitimate” ambitions of the clerical movement and the socialists. From here stemmed the liberal leaders’ refusal to set in motion the “political system”10 – that powerful, if dangerous, resource in the tricky process of legitimising one’s role, and the equally complex parallel process of nation-alising a country. It was a strange but decisive “alienation from politics”: refusal to institutionalise the adoption of purely political resources in the process of nation building.

10The defeat of all direct attempts to politicise the country put paid to all praise of parliamentarianism (what Domenico Zanichelli called the “universal panacea” that the mid-19th century thought would cure all the woes of society): from now on government began to be seen as the technical solution of society’s growing problems.

11Such a decision took the guise of transformism à la Depretis, Crispi and Giolitti. It was also clearly a signal of nervousness at the looming “social question” which speeded up the process of stripping Parliament of political weight. What should have been the best institution for representing and interpreting social conflict turned into a forum of political mediation. Despite the obvious differences among the three versions of transformism (exchange via the lever of public finance and administration; an authoritarian show of force; patient manipulation of MPs), the basic picture was one and the same: it was Italy’s version of the new European issue of liberal constitutionalism, the need to boost the power of the cabinet in parliamentary systems so as to deal with the social question more effectively.

12Sensitivity to the relations between government and parliament began to reach collective awareness in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Not that the central role of government was a discovery: this had been felt since the 1850s when it became clear that the engine powering legislation must be the executive. What happened in the 1870/1880s (with the success of “Prussianism”, symbolically and materially, and its trappings of statism and bureaucratic efficiency) was a creeping intolerance of parliamentary interference and decision-making mechanisms: people felt that too much debating in Parliament slowed down or prevented all efficiency and speed of government decisions.

13In this respect, the end-of-century crisis was simply a traumatic epilogue to forty years of post-unificatory attempts by the Italian leaders to treat nationalisation exclusively in terms of administration and discipline11, a kind of modernisation based on stepping up the public sphere without laying the foundations for a political definition of national identity. The Giolitti era with its original open-mindedness and innovations (which included espousing the principle that to ensure the central role of the executive one needed to be able to control the House, not ride roughshod over it) would confine itself to establishing a kind of apparent mediation, in which return to parliament-centred government would not entail any real reappraisal of the potential of competitive liberalism. The liberal ruling class would no longer find it possible to pursue any other course than national identity building without political identity12 – a feature which still bulks large in the Italian nation.

14The famous aphorism attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio upon unification of the country: “Italy is made, now we need to make the Italians”, contains a misapprehension. What had actually arisen was an Italian state, not a Renan-style nation in the sense of a wish to live together, which was still entirely to be forged. The Risorgimento had certainly enabled Italy to achieve that close connection between the idea of nationhood and liberty, which underlay the birth of the modern-style nation in the nineteenth century. Whether through the moderate neo-Guelph faction, or Cattaneo’s federal democracy, or Mazzini’s unity of the people, the idea of Italy shaking free of Austria combined the ambitions of “nationhood and liberty”, that twin slogan which had fired the British and French models in differing ways. In 19^th-century Britain the connection between nation and liberty identified with representative parliamentary tradition and garantismo; in France it went with the model of the Great Revolution.

15And yet, if we look beyond the reasons inspiring it, Italian national identity building was a far more complex process. Unlike other European countries, the process of building “nationhood” in Italy was a complex jigsaw puzzle of political systems and phases of social development, which caused the liberal ruling class a thorny problem of legitimation. From a political and institutional standpoint, unification had proved far from easy. For one thing, behind the political and diplomatic process leading to birth of the Kingdom of Italy there lay no binding social bloc, not even the aristocracy who were weak absentee landlords with no links to their country background and hence afforded no ethical or political model to the lower classes. The institutional situation appeared no less problematic. To begin from the top, there was no ruling family of any prestige13. The liberal community’s admiration for the Savoys for having preserved the Albertine Statute even after the 1848 insurrection failed, turned to disappointment at the fumbling uncertainty they had shown in subsequent years, not to mention their low international prestige. Cavour’s premature death removed from the scene what all agreed was the only European-level political figure that might have piloted the country through the quicksands of unification. Overnight the Savoyard political and administrative institutions became national institutions but were not seen as especially modern or liberal by the states and communities of the “Piedmontised” centre-north, while the former Bourbon territories viewed them as blood-sucking and violent. The leaders’ patent nervousness about the “people under arms”, added to the increasingly manifest weakness of the royal army, ruled out all plausibility of an appeal to military virtues. Even the Senate failed to provide a hub of vitality, given the limitations of the aristocracy from which it drew most of its members.

16After the events of 1859-1861, followed by ugly fighting in the South between the Savoyard army and bands of brigands in which the fledgling country went through the horrors of civil war, the great adventure short-circuited. Nascent Italy was patently incomplete and in “mortal danger”, and this bore decisively on the whole idea of nation building. It was out of the question to combine independence, unity and preservation of strong local traditions. Cavour’s death caused nation building to be viewed with alarm as a weak point, something to control rather than to fuel. After the taking of Rome, the sense of insecurity heightened; it was perceived that the season of solidarity among nations was on the wane. In 1871, Italy had 27 million inhabitants, ranking sixth nation in Europe. Going by size of territory and population, she might have been a power, but she was not.

17That weakness left her vulnerable on the international scene. The liberal and national principle informing her birth made her unwelcome to Austria; her position in the Mediterranean aroused French mistrust. After the early attempt to apply a liberal, even Gladstonian, principle of retrenchment in foreign policy under the Cairoli government, that very vulnerability and geo-political position caused Italy to go constantly in search of recognition within the European system. The birth of the German empire profoundly altered the parameters by which political modernity was assessed in Europe. Sédan planted the idea of a short-cut to achievement of national objectives in the minds of European nations. No longer might one need the long slow evolution of custom filtered through a parliamentary system; constitutionalism needed no longer to be the only vehicle from an old to a new regime. Bismarck showed that a quicker route was at hand: military, scientific and administrative power. The new model injected the principle of nationalism into the politics of power. From the 1870s on, Italy had to cope with two different visions of how to build her own national identity and how to integrate with the European state system. Yet foreign policy was not to be the path chosen for that process, despite developments after 1882 with the Triple Alliance. That was certainly the fastest way out of isolation, offering an international profile for the new home policy of transformism. But it entailed no credible prospects of identity building, first because Austria remained the historical enemy, and secondly because Italy insisted on a clause preventing the Triple Alliance from being construed as anti-British.

18The rapid rise of the German model caused a reaction in liberal political thought even in countries that were rooted in parliamentary tradition. In the space of a decade a new image of political modernity swept through Europe: that of national efficiency and the central role of the executive government. It was here that Europe actually underwent a process of cultural integration, involving sterilisation of the political implications of liberalism. Between the late 1870s and the first half of the 1880s, liberal political thinking in Europe stood before a parting of the ways. During those ten years, in differing ways European liberalism had to face the issues raised by acute dialectical tension running throughout its ranks, from the moderates to the most radical. The reasons for the tension lay in the different expectations nursed by the many social strata grouped beneath the broad liberal banner, and the increasingly clear awareness of the interests at stake14. But one should not, either, underestimate the contrast between the original ideal expectation and the prosaic recent governing responsibilities which liberalism was learning to come to terms with. The inevitable gap between theory and practice was producing an unattractive but effective realpolitik on the part of the liberal leaders.

19Now, in the 1870s, those political leaders who had come to power in the name of a strong, generic, gradual and long-nursed need for freedom from feudal forms of restraint and impediment, began to realise that such a claim must of necessity entail a growth in democratic pressure. Out of the depths of the economic transformation that was in progress, accelerated by the agricultural revenue crisis all over the continent, there began to emerge a problem of most serious proportions which liberal jargon in its “neutralising” understatement had baptised the “social question”. (Incidentally, the urgency of this last was indirectly infected by the climate of vying among countries.) What had hitherto seemed cultural utopia (economic growth as a generator of social peace in a society of aware and responsible individuals) turned into a pressing political issue capable of seriously challenging the liberal ruling class and causing it to break ranks. After the “heroic” phase of “emancipation” from authoritarian power and class privilege, the inevitable worsening of state “corruption” caused them to lose all illusion as to the educational and moral virtues of liberal moderatism (traceable politically to a handful of proposals by a Louis Philippe or a Palmerston). Yet here was European liberalism of the 1870s and 1880s being forced to take a clear stand and show its political intentions on the burning issue of the 19^th century: how and how fast to integrate the masses into the State. The real position was worrying: broad swaths of the population had lagged behind in the process of moral and political education, which made it all the more alarming that class distinction had taken root in society and obstinately refused to melt away in the “sunshine” of civil equality as early 19^th-century liberalism had predicted. For the first time in the history of European liberalism, the moment for promising social integration thanks to ideals of liberty and national identity had passed. Back in 1848, their political and social implications might have seemed vague and distant; now, after the parenthesis of the Paris Commune, society teetered nervously on the brink of real democracy, with all the contradictions which that entailed. Now that the people were politically equal or potentially so, the question was how to reconcile both popular legitimation of the system and elitist revolution of a liberal kind. It was a conundrum fraught with weakness and divided interests such as to provoke outbursts of spleen on the part of anyone prone to authoritarianism. The by-play of European liberalism in this period thus illustrates one of the great crossroads in 19^th-century political history, even if the historians have tended to ignore it. In the space of a decade political liberalism in Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium and Germany (to take a few disparate national cases with all their different problems and backgrounds) came up with a series of hopelessly contrasting projects: though harking back to the grand tradition of liberalism, they advanced ideas to solve the legitimacy issue that could have been hardly more contradictory. It was not a mere clash between progressives and conservatives, but a full-blooded showdown between two ways of construing the development of free institutions during a phase when social policy was going the way of politicisation. Some sectors inclining to liberalism à la John Stuart Mill still felt it imperative to invoke the paradigms of liberty and rights that had recently characterised the inexorable advance of liberal culture. Others thought that the “constituent” phase was now over. It had ushered in a system of constitutional guarantees, beginning with parliamentary representation; some kind of pause for reflection was now needed to consolidate the administrative side and meet the domestic and international challenges, enhancing “national efficiency” – a phrase that was beginning to come in to British periodicals. Clearly after 1871 and the manifest success of German unification, “Prussianism” and its stock-intrade of statism and bureaucracy had begun to cast its fascination even on liberals of the old school, to whom Gladstone’s “peace, retrenchment and reform” were the essence of liberal governing practice. The major issues associated with Gladstonian politics since the 1860s (pluralism in Church-State relations, liberalism, minimal State and flexible use of administrative mechanisms)15 had long been the cement of all European brands of liberalism, even where it was doubtful whether the model could be reproduced, especially on the all-important question of self-government. Such liberalism, of course, was strongly inclined to see public life as service calling for individual commitment, the natural product of independence and education without which the civic virtues hymned by classical republicanism would not flourish16.

20Despite the shock of the Commune, and the different shock of Bismarck’s triumphant “white revolution”, in the 1870s proper liberalism might fairly be thought not to have shot its bolt – or at any rate the kind of self-consistent liberalism that was ready to face up to other emerging ideologies. In Italy the historic left wing took over from the Right in 1876, while in France the liberal supporters of Parliamentary centrality won the day in 1877 over those who favoured a presidential system steeped in monarchical overtones. In 1878 the government of Italy went to Benedetto Cairoli, the leading exponent of the European constitutional Left, while in Belgium that same year the liberals returned to power after a long stint in opposition. Even in Bismarckian Germany a strong liberal party still managed to defend the opening phase of what Weber called the “flowering of the Reichstag17”. To crown this season of successes, 1880 saw the champion of such politics, Gladstone, return to power in the United Kingdom after six years of conservative rule. But paradoxically 1880 symbolised the watershed in the brief heyday of the most open-minded and self-consistent liberalism. The political climate was changing. The Congress of Berlin in 1878 signalled an imminent intensification of inter-State rivalry, albeit outside the European continent. This would soon bear fruit as over-excited public opinion began to see economic competition in terms of nationalistic contest. If we were to pinpoint the exact moment when that season started seriously to wane, it would be July 1879 when the German Parliament launched the first phase of a customs clampdown policy which would start the protectionist landslide that soon knocked away the main pillar of liberal culture right across the continent of Europe, thus bolstering the wobbling fortress of some sectors of national economy (and associated investments in “social” integration), but also injecting rigidity into public balances and diplomatic relations. This would lay people open to the sirens of rearmament and militarisation of society and international relations. Anti-liberalism posed as the method for preventing social malaise. On all sides, it wore the trappings of paternalistic reformism in the name of social solidarity against what was branded as obsolete, abstract, egoistic individualism. The political effects of the new phase were not slow in coming. The liberals began to lose ground.

21In the name of realism and defence of national interest, many walks of public opinion began to accuse such political thinking of naive idealism, if not culpable ineptness and woolly radicalism. By the end of 1879, Bismarck’s offensive in Germany, backed by the Zentrum if only to sever the link between the government and the national-liberals, brought about scission and hence weakened the liberal party. In Italy, as we shall see, Cairoli’s experiment failed, giving a free hand to Depretis, leader of the moderate Left. In Belgium, the liberals returned to opposition in 1884 and would long remain there, while in 1885 the French Right began to reorganise, opening the doors to Boulangiste populism. But if we are talking of symbols, it was Gladstone’s defeat that marked the point of no return for that brand of liberal thinking. The strong identification between a certain kind of progressionism and Gladstone’s evangelical liberalism now struck the nervous late-Victorian bourgeoisie as demagogy, unsuited to solving the problem of national efficiency. Profiting by this cultural and political turn-around, which was given dramatic expression by the battle over Irish Home Rule, Salisbury’s Conservatism came to the fore as the most plausible political way out of the crisis. While saving the constitutional essence of Whig liberalism (balance), he sought to cancel its overtones of “moral reformism”. Thanks to skilful use of it by the moderates, the Home Rule crisis served as an opportunity to recompact the Conservatives and liberal apostates. These would force the Gladstonians into the corner of radicalism, now that the moderate Whig wing had abandoned them, and paved the way for a long period of Conservative rule. It was not so much political contingency as a deliberate strategy meeting the British upper and middle classes’ demand for a pause on reforms and integration of the lower orders, whilst not stopping the wheels of system modernization. By now the Tories were to all effects a branch of the liberal galaxy and as such took good care not to tamper with the last twenty years’ reforms; indeed, in the social area they rather thought they themselves had inspired them.

22The Conservative leader, Salisbury, though not fully convinced, ended by taking up the credo of his internal ‘adversaries’, the Tory democrats. The idea was that the driving force of “modernity” (construing the state as a power for intervention, and party organisation as the linchpin of political consensus) could be handled better by the Conservatives. They now saw themselves as the sole custodians of true liberalism, what the Gladstonians had abandoned to go chasing after the chimera of “radicalism” which the British moderates considered unpatriotic, undermining to the Empire. In the rest of Europe too, radicalism in its most varied forms was accused of stirring up class egoism, moral and social disorder. It incurred the wrath of the ruling class, such that the reaction to the liberal successes in the late 1870s justified itself as a response to excesses by radical democracy (which the most advanced liberals had gone along with, if not been puppets of). The goals of this last were nearly all contested: the time was not ripe, they were irresponsible, a danger to national interest. The French republican Jules Ferry attacked the radicals for their unruly impatience. By their demand for social reforms and administrative decentralisation they put pressure on the system. He insisted it was not incompatibility of programmes, but a question of timing and methods: “Progress is not a sequence of jerks and lunges, but a phenomenon of social growth and transformation which begins in ideas, then becomes a practice and eventually finds its way into law18”. Democratic radicalism might thus be opposed but not delegitimised. Though eccentric and visionary, it was part of theory and a value system (the role of individual responsibility, and the perhaps diluted but inalienable enlightenment principle of universalism, cosmopolitanism and contractualism), those powerful forces for pumping out the class-ridden swamp of the ancien régime, which the liberals could not disavow. Here the jeering ranks of clericalism had great sport reminding the timorous moderate liberals of their embarrassing bedfellows. The family album of these was completed by the nascent socialist movement, last link in a chain stretching back to 1789.

23But while the 1880s saw phenomenal changes in science and technology, many circles of the European intelligentsia were going through a gradual decline from the tradition of “critical” and experimental positivism, with its eye on individual participation in society, to “naturalistic” positivism with its organicistic view of public life. This kow-towed to the demand for systematic models from which to deduce “laws” of development and function, and thus quell the anxiety of a society that seemed to have thrown hierarchy to the winds and be marching into the dark towards an unknown destination19.

24Deep down, it was another signal of weariness on the part of those descendants of Enlightenment rationalism20, that common bond linking the many souls of liberalism, including its radical limb. What caused that reaction against the most enlightened liberalism at grips with modernity was growing uncertainty on the cultural plane and more marked aggressiveness on the political and social plane. As with all the various political systems of liberalism, such fear and animosity increased the tendency to isolate the radical and democratic wing politically, by swelling the parliamentary majority that supported the government. This even took place in France. Although the strong secular tradition common to all republicanism – even in Clemenceau’s intransigent brand of it – used radicalism as an acknowledged fall-back resource against upsurges of anti-system mentality, the tendency of centres to band together showed that the system could afford fairly safely to marginalise radical pressure groups, relying on the prop of the centre-right.

25What seems certain everywhere in the 1880s is the widespread need for a “centre”, a governing fortress proof against extremist pressure. By differing routes, this managed to gather within the sphere of government some of the old radical or extreme elements like Chamberlain, Gambetta and Crispi, those who felt most keenly the fascination of progress as a product of “Jacobin” statism.

26Tension among the diverse currents of liberalism revealed the deeper nature of the conflict, which was how to define the role and functions of government in systems of parliamentary representation. By 1886, Joseph Chamberlain was by then on the side of the Conservatives, and had no hesitation in summing up the crux of the broader political issue with brutal frankness. “Democracy” and “radicalism” were by no means lost as definitions to the cause of authoritarian and imperialistic systems:

a Democratic Government should be the strongest Government, from a Military and Imperial point of view, in the world, for it has the people behind it. Our misfortune is that we live under a system of Government originally contrived to check the action of Kings and Ministers and which meddles therefore far too much with the Executive of the Country. The problem is to give the Democracy the whole power, but to induce it to do more in the way of using it than to decide on the general principles which it wishes to see carried out and the men by whom they are to be carried out. My radicalism at all events desires to see established strong Government and an Imperial Government21.

27To that end the prerogatives of Parliament needed curbing, beginning with

the practice of unlimited discussion [that] has become incompatible with the proper progress of business under modern conditions. The great underlying principles of representative government do not require it – democracy has shown no particular desire to preserve it. Its limitation […] is urgently and speedly demanded if we would preserve the potent instrument of popular government from ridicule and failure [… ]22.

28A fundamental shift, if the demands of strong executive government were to be met: it should rest on a stable majority but be shielded from the blandishments of radicalism and the wearisome round of that “perpetual wave of politics”. It is no accident that in Italy and Great Britain, for example, that need was voiced in most of the ruling classes just when approval was reached over what were seen as rash but inevitable electoral reforms. Nor is it chance that in both countries the power shift became practicable after the most go-ahead liberals in the political line-up had been defeated: Gladstone in Britain and Cairoli in Italy. In both cases defeat came to a head when their platform harked back to some of the cherished hobbyhorses of radical liberal tradition: in one instance, a plan for integrating the masses argued from the ethical angle of liberty, with no concession to the new role of public finance and the augmenting of “statism”; in the other case a less aggressive, and hence less expensive, foreign policy (Irish Home Rule presented as the prologue to relaxation of domestic tensions, and a “mani nette” (clean hands) policy pursued by Italy in 1878, a sign of awareness that power had its limits, but also a decision to give priority to domestic consolidation). For all the abyss between the two political and social settings, both government lines bore a marked similarity of basic design and were promptly rejected by their respective public opinions. This symbolised the new European preference, in domestic affairs, for a lull in reforms extending rights and citizenship, and in foreign policy for greater emphasis on nationalist and imperialist primacy.

29The decade we have examined thus reveals a full-scale historical hiatus starting from the intellectual world of political thinking and resonating quite explicitly on the political and institutional level. However, the situations were different: in France and Great Britain the reaction had no systemic overtones; radical democracy regained a permanent role, managing both to challenge and to blend with the other political parties even in government (in this it enriched those two parliamentary systems’ foreign policy strategy). But in Italy from that point on, aversion to radical-democrat ideas took the form of rigid political ostracism. Though Giolitti would partly regain ground in the early years of the 20^th century, that strategy of exclusion left an indelible mark on the political and institutional profile of the country.