'Italian Foreign Policy after the Cold War: Crisis and the Limits of a Post-Ideological Foreign Policy'. (original) (raw)

in 'Italy from Crisis to Crisis', ed. Matthew Evangelista (Routledge, 2017)

In steering its foreign policy in the uncertain waters of the post-Cold War international environment, Italy has been inevitably influenced not only by the changing regional and global balance of power but also by the ways in which the country's domestic political system has transformed, including its 'unfinished transition'. Italy's recent foreign policy approach has thus been affected by a multiple crisis – a crisis of world order, a crisis within Italy's domestic politics, a crisis within the party system, and not least a crisis of ideas. At the same time, Italy's current foreign policy can be seen as the increasingly skilled and deliberate attempt to move beyond crisis, towards a new post-ideological equilibrium. Rather than founded on entirely new premises, this new post-ideological consensus mixes old and new elements together – mercantilism with Atlanticism, multilateralism and conservatism, 'big tent' capitalism with realism – combining a set of values in apparent yet functional opposition. As cases from Europe and the Middle East show, the ultimate outcome of such an attempt may well be the embracing of a foreign policy understood as the mere management of national decline, on the one hand, and global neo-liberalism, on the other. There is no doubt that we live in 'interesting' times, a historical conjuncture that appears to be fraught with uncertainties and a widely-felt sense of disorder, if not outright crisis. In order to examine how Italy is navigating the world of today and whether the category of crisis is useful to understand how the country is steering its foreign policy in the uncertain waters of the post-Cold War international environment, a few preliminary remarks are in order. These relate to, on the one hand, developments that since the end of the Cold War have affected the global and regional scenario in which Italy is embedded and, on the other, a complex set of transformations that have involved the country's domestic political system, spilling over onto foreign policy. As will be detailed later, there seems to be a profound resonance between these two planes, suggesting that at the beginning of the XXI century Italy's crisis may be nested in, and compounded by, the wider unravelling of the international system; as such, its condition might be considered at the same time unique and common to many other countries (Hill 2011).