The Introduction includes an explanation of the use of the word “secret” in the title. It is taken from Walter Bagehot’s 1867 book The English Constitution, in which the author famously argued that “the efficient secret of the English Constitution may be described as the close union, the nearly complete fusion," the “singular approximation” of the executive and legislative powers. This is a suitable description of what happens in trilogues, as these indeed realize a singular approximation of the different European legislative institutions. It could therefore be claimed that trilogues are the “efficient secret” of the European constitution – that is to say, something not expressly regulated in the Treaties but crucial to the existence and functioning of the European political system.

In chapter 3, preparing for crisis, the narrative begins. It is told mainly chronologically and this chapter deals with the period between May 11 and May 19, but only after a brief focus on January 1931 where Harry Siepmann on the basis of the socalled Bagehot model considers what to do in case of a major financial crisis in Europe. The Bagehot model for a lender of last resort and its inadequacy in the face of an international crisis, is a theme that goes through the book’s narrative. On May 11 the Credit Anstalt failure is made known and the central bankers get ready to make sense of the information they get from Austria and elsewhere. The BIS sends Francis Rodd to Vienna and the chapter follows him closely as he communicates his findings back to the BIS and Bank of England. In a world where debt is abundant and credit scarce, Rodd presents a plan to the upcoming BIS board meeting.

After a brief introduction to the outbreak of the Austrian Credit Anstalt crisis in May 1931 and the early response by central bankers from Bank of England, the BIS and the New York Federal Reserve Bank, this chapter proceeds to present the book’s overall issues and main concepts, which will be used as a heuristic framework throughout the narrative. The main concepts of the book are radical uncertainty, sensemaking, narrative emplotment, imagined futures and epistemic communities. In the chapter, I discuss how these concepts are helpful in understanding central bankers’, and other actors’, decision-making and practices in the five month from May through September. The chapter also discusses my analytical strategy and presents the empirical material, which comes from the Bank of England, Bank for International Settlements, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the J.P. Morgan Archive, the Rothschild Archive and a few others. At the end of the chapter, I present the structure of the book.

Classical economic liberalism was the first perspective on political economy to achieve worldwide influence. Its most famous advocate was Adam Smith whose 1776 book The Wealth of Nations became a foundational text for economic liberals that was known around the world by the early twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, some other European political economists consolidated the international dimension of the classical liberal economic perspective by building on Smith’s ideas, including David Ricardo, Richard Cobden, John Stuart Mill and Walter Bagehot. These and other European classical economic liberals were united in the belief that free trade and free markets would foster global prosperity, international peace, and individual freedom. At the same time, they did not always concur about the precise ways that free trade would generate these benefits or about which of them was most important. They also disagreed about the universal relevance of economic liberalism, their willingness to accept exemptions from free trade, their interest in international specialization and economic integration beyond free trade in goods as well as about the place of force, imperialism, civilizational discourse, and intergovernmental cooperation in the economic liberal project. In short, there were many distinct versions of classical economic liberalism.

This chapter examines theories of parliament and parliamentarism in Victorian Britain. The first part of the chapter offers a general survey of Victorian constitutional theory. I demonstrate that while Constant’s conception of parliamentarism was defeated in France, it triumphed in Britain, where Victoria was widely viewed as a monarch who reigned but did not govern, and a range of authors argued that ministers must hold power through persuasion rather than patronage. I then consider Walter Bagehot, the most famous Victorian theorist of parliamentarism, who developed the argument that parliamentarism was intrinsically superior to the American constitutional model. Finally, I turn to John Stuart Mill. I demonstrate that Mill shared the widespread Victorian belief in parliamentarism, and I argue that his true project in Considerations on Representative Government was to discover a way to harmonize Victorian parliamentarism and electoral democracy.