Conclusion

This concluding essay argues that interwar liberal Europe should not be understood primarily as the history of a political failure or as a mere prelude to post-war European integration. Drawing together the contributions to this special issue, it reinterprets the interwar period as a moment of profound conceptual innovation in which liberal thinkers reformulated the meanings of freedom, Europe, pluralism, and international order. By examining the diverse intellectual trajectories of figures such as Croce, Weil, Madariaga, Fisher, and the Spanish constitutional debate, the essay shows how the crisis of liberalism generated new political languages rather than intellectual decline. It concludes that the enduring legacy of interwar liberalism lies less in its institutional achievements than in its capacity to redefine the conceptual vocabulary of modern European political thought.