close as it could to its Russian ally (even at the risk
of being sucked into war by purely Russian Balkan
interests) and to the British entente partner. In
staff conversations the Russians in 1912 agreed to
resume their offensive military role and to start
their attack on East Prussia on the fifteenth day of
mobilisation. France had come through its years
of ‘risk’ giving up very little. The other side of the
coin is that imperial Germany had not exploited its
military superiority during the years from 1905 to
1911 by launching a so-called ‘preventive’ war.
The years from 1912 to 1914 marked a vital
change. Fatalism about the inevitability of war
was spreading among those who controlled
policy, and ever larger armies were being trained
for this eventuality on all sides of the continent.
With Poincaré as France’s president, Russia would
not again be left in the lurch by its ally whenever
Russia judged its vital interest to be at stake in
the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. But French
diplomacy conflicted increasingly with public sen-
timent. There was strong domestic opposition to
strengthening the army; foreign dangers, the left
believed, were being deliberately exaggerated by
the right. On the very eve of war in 1914, the
French elections gave the majority to the pacifist
groups of the left. But it was too late. Poincaré’s
support for Russia did not waver during the
critical final days before the outbreak of war and
was a crucial factor in the decision the tsar and
his ministers took to mobilise, which made war
inevitable in 1914.
ITALY: ASPIRATIONS TO POWER
What happens when a parliamentary constitution
is imposed on an underdeveloped society? The
answer is not without relevance to conditions in
the Third World in the twentieth century. Italy
provides an interesting early case history. In pop-
ulation size Italy, Austria-Hungary, France and
Britain belong to the same group of larger
European nations, but the differences between
their development and power are striking. The
greater part of Italy, especially the south, was in
the late nineteenth century among the poorest
and most backward regions of Europe. But its
rulers in the north imposed parliamentary consti-
tutional government on the whole of Italy, over
the more developed as well as the undeveloped
regions. Furthermore, a highly centralised admin-
istration was devised dividing the whole country
into sixty-nine provinces, each governed by a
prefect responsible to the minister of the interior.
Parliamentary institutions suited well enough
the north-western region of Italy, formerly the
kingdom of Piedmont, the most advanced region
of Italy, where parliamentary government had
taken root before unification. The problem arose
when the Piedmontese parliamentary system was
extended to the whole of Italy in 1861; it was now
intended to cover the very different traditions and
societies of the former city states, the papal
domains and the Neapolitan kingdom. It was a
unity imposed from above. For many decades
‘unity’ existed more on paper than in reality.
Italy had the appearance of a Western European
parliamentary state.
A closer look at the Italian parliament shows
how very different it was from Britain’s. To begin
with, only a very small proportion, 2 per cent, of
Italians were granted the vote. This was gradually
extended until in 1912 manhood suffrage was
introduced. But in the intervening half-century,
the small electorate had led to the management
of parliament by government; a few strongmen
dominated successive administrations. There
were no great political parties held together by
common principles and beliefs, just numerous
groups of deputies. The dominating national
leaders contrived parliamentary majorities by
striking bargains with political groups, by bribes
of office or by the promise of local benefits. When
a government fell, the same leaders would strike
new bargains and achieve power by a slight
shuffling of political groupings.
In such a set-up, parliamentary deputies came
to represent not so much parties as local interests;
their business was to secure benefits for their elec-
tors. Politicians skilled in political deals dominated
the oligarchic parliamentary system from 1860 to
- In the early twentieth century Giovanni
Giolitti became the leading politician. These lead-
ers can be condemned for their undeniable polit-
ical corruption as well as for undermining the
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