When the Decline of Europe Turned Topical. From World War I to Peace

The First World War forms a cutoff point to which anyone retracing the origin of today’s public discourse on Europe is constantly driven back. This chapter looks closely into some notions of decline circulating at the time, taking them as “travelling concepts”: ideas that would travel in time and space, cross national frontiers and underpin the public debate over Europe down to our own day. The chapter focuses on a restricted group of scholars, academics, leading Italian entrepreneurs and politicians who made the ‘war-into-peace’ decline-of-Europe issue a veritable literary genre that appealed to European and western culture. Largely by their intense publicizing of the European crisis issue and their presence in the media of that age, figures such as Guglielmo Ferrero, Luigi Einaudi, Giovanni Agnelli, Attilio Cabiati and Francesco Saverio Nitti gained the cultural authority and personal popularity we associate with the “public intellectual”. It will be argued that their writings offer a broad picture of the semantic universe of the international and Italian debate on the Europe of those times, as well as the role of cultural mediation that such authors played through their works.