A Glimpse Beyond Party Politics

Connecting the threads of the previous chapters, this chapter turns back toward semantics, thereby reaching beyond the sphere of party politics and established political languages. Examining the resonances of the changing party courses and adjoining debates among the politically engaged intellectuals that identified as liberals and linking the established usages of the liberal label to some of the meanings that manifested in contemporary intellectual debates, the chapter opens up further possible perspectives for studying liberalism beyond the narrow frame of party politics. While it may be argued that in the party politics of the three lands under scrutiny liberalism, if not gradually vanishing, was beyond doubt not developing further, it was however being revived and newly re-substantiated outside that sphere. Concepts of liberalism’s renewal were being developed among non-partisan or dissenting intelligentsia, being voiced also—but not solely—as critique of conservative stances, narrow interest politics and exclusivist nationalism of the national liberal heirs. Important to note thereby is also that these developments were not limited to one side of the political spectrum (“left” or “right”). In conclusion, the book thus shows that liberalism beyond doubt continued to have a marginal but nonetheless visible role in political life of the region in which other universalist ideologies had a powerful sway.