In April 1911 Giovanni Giolitti declared that all his governments aimed merely to see an Italy which was ‘calm, prosperous and great’. Two years later, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his Futurists demanded that ‘the word ITALY dominate over the word LIBERTY’ and that national foreign policy become ‘cynical, crafty and aggressive’. To some analysts, it is the difference between these two remarks, the contrast of the peaceable, if perhaps corrupt, liberalism of Giolitti, and the strident, irrational nationalism of some intellectuals which is the best evidence that Liberal Italy was, by 1914, headed for collapse and the degradation of fascism.

However, a detailed study of Italian foreign policy in the last years before 1914 reveals more continuity and consensus about diplomatic ambitions than might have been expected from these contrasting words. For, in 1913, San Giuliano's foreign policy was ‘cynical, crafty and aggressive’, just as much as San Giuliano's and many of his colleagues' definition of domestic policies sprang from an ideal that ‘Italy’, national unanimity behind the existing ruling class, surpass ‘Liberty’, with its horrid prospect that, via socialism, the ‘terrible masses’ were entering history and could in no way be diverted. What made Liberal foreign policy distinguishable from fascism-to-come was not its intention, but rather a combination of accident, opportunity and professionalism.