ABSTRACT
The period that stretched from 1890 until the outbreak of the First World War was one in which strike activity reached unprecedented heights and the trade union movement came to embrace ever larger numbers of industrial workers. In some countries, as in Britain, Italy and Germany, there were close contacts between working-class politics and the major trade union organisations; whilst in France and Spain socialist parties found themselves in competition and at odds with trade union movements which espoused the doctrine of revolutionary anarcho-syndicalism. Not all unions were politically conservative or quiescent, however: as the people have already seen, close contacts existed between trade union organisation and socialist politics in Italy and Germany before 1914. However, even in the Second Reich the right to exist as a legal political organisation and to participate in elections to the Reichstag had a not dissimilar effect to the existence of parliamentary institutions in France and Britain.
