Italian foreign policy after the end of the cold war: the issue of continuity and change in Italian–US relations

Abstract

A number of academics have argued that the last two governments headed by Silvio Berlusconi have attempted to strengthen the relationship with the USA on a bilateral basis and, in so doing, have weakened Italy’s traditional support for the process of European integration. Thus, Roberto Aliboni has contended that Berlusconi has pursued a foreign policy ‘solidly linked to a priority and preferential relationship with the US’. Piero Ignazi has characterized what he has described as Berlusconi’s ‘progressive and growing alignment with the international choices of the Republican administration’ as ‘extreme Americaphilism’. Filippo Andreatta and Elisabetta Brighi have written that the Berlusconi government has embraced an ‘increasingly Americanophile position’ while exhibiting ‘a lack of enthusiasm in European affairs’. Even stronger claims have appeared in the daily and weekly press linked with, or sympathetic to, the centreleft. Thus, Ezio Mauro has written that Italy ended up in the Iraqi quagmire because of Berlusconi’s ‘fanciful ambition of turning himself into Bush’s privileged partner and Italy into a . . . support rider of the US’. Left-wing public intellectual Massimo Cacciari has charged that, under Berlusconi, Italian foreign policy ‘has simply been delegated to the US’. The new centre-left government headed by Romano Prodi, immediately upon taking office, announced that it would embark upon a new course in foreign policy. As the new Minister of Foreign Affairs Massimo D’Alema put it, the new government would revive Europeanism and reinvigorate multilateralism. As it was preparing to ask Parliament for its approval to extend the Italian mission in Afghanistan, President of the Council of Ministers Prodi affirmed that ‘in eight months, his government had led Italy to change pace in foreign policy’. At the same time,