The kingdom of Italy, legally created in 1861 and territorially united nine years later with the capture of Rome, carried into the early twentieth century legacies of unification which impacted upon the process of military planning in both general and specific ways. The wars of the Risorgimento left in their wake an enmity toward Austria that was matched by a fear of and distaste for France. Both periodically resurfaced according to the turns of international politics. The political architecture of Liberal Italy created a governmental system with no functioning cabinet structures to require, encourage, or facilitate much in the way of coordination between the two services or between them and the bearers of the civil portfolios. The military were regarded by civilian politicians as at most a functional elite – though to Giovanni Giolitti, whose premierships dominated the first years of the twentieth century, they were barely functional and certainly not an elite. Of questionable utility as a weapon in foreign policy, the army was commonly perceived by both the Left and the Right as primarily an instrument for domestic coercion in the face of growing social agitation. In the circumstances, it is scarcely surprising that military planning before 1914 was in most ways a highly circumscribed activity into which issues such as the balance between military service and civilian economic activity seem never to have entered.