came from the politicians themselves, many of whom, on both theleftand
right, were in any case mortal enemies of the regimes. Thus such a political
system has come to be called ‘immobiliste’, referring above all to the absence of
democratically inspired political leadership. Most commentators would see
contemporary Italy in the same light, even after the fall of the ‘First Republic’,
and it is arguable that, though for different reasons, the enervation of the
Eisenhower presidency combined with a hostile Congress produced an ‘immo-
biliste’ government in the USA during the 1950s. Though with no precise
referent outside France, the term remains both vivid and useful.
Imperialism
Imperialism is the policy or goal of extending the power and rule of a
government beyond the boundaries of its original state, and taking into one
political unit other nations or lands. There are variations in the extent to which
the imperial power assumes administrative and political control for the states
that make up the empire; some retain degrees of independence and identity,
while others are subsumed entirely into the institutions of the imperial state.
Neither is it necessary that an empire has any specific form of central
government, though there must be one central and ultimately overwhelming
force, otherwise it is more likely to be an alliance, league or loose federation.
The British Empire at its height was a constitutional monarchy, but Queen
Victoria had lost most of the power of the previous English monarchs, and the
Empire was essentially a parliamentary one.
In fact, though there have been many empires in world history, few have
lasted as long as the modernnation statesof Europe, and most have collapsed
either because of political disunity at the centre, or because of the enormous
difficulty of exercising central rule over long distances and against the instincts
for local autonomy that always spring up. The motives for creating an empire
vary greatly, but imperialism in itself should not be confused withcolonial-
ism, which is a specific form and motive for holding political control beyond
national boundaries. A crucial aspect of imperialism, and one of the best aids to
categorization, is the way in which imperial citizenship is handled. If only
citizens or subjects of the original ‘homeland’ can be seen as citizens of the
empire, and the rest of the inhabitants are no more than subject peoples with
no hope of political power or legal protection, the empire is likely to veer
towards the principally exploitative version that is better thought of as
colonialism. On the other hand, and the later Roman Empire may be the
best example, citizenship, with its legal rights and duties, may be extended to
the entire population, or some part of the population, of the whole empire,
rather than just the descendants of the nation that built it. In this case the
empire is more in the nature of a supranational state which, given the
Imperialism