The role of Italy in the European Union: between continuity and change

The intersection of watershed events in international politics (first and foremost the end of the cold war), and in domestic politics (namely, the transition from the First to the Second Republic), induced a redefinition of Italy’s relationship with Europe in the 1990s. On the one hand, the Italian political and economic systems were profoundly transformed in that decade. However, the European Union (EU) was also transformed by both ‘deepening’, mainly through the establishment of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999, and ‘widening’, through embarking on enlargement, a process completed in 2004. Several different perspectives could be adopted in order to analyse the relationship between Italy and the EU. For a long time, the traditional ‘foreign policy’ approach prevailed, considering Italy’s EU policy as a component of Italy’s foreign policy tout court. Subsequently, the literature on Europeanization explored the domestic impact of the EU in Italy, making distinctions between the attitudes of the elites and masses, the effects on national institutions and policies and politics (see the burgeoning literature on Euroscepticism). Some of these works have focused on the impacts major EU policies, such as EMU, have had on the Italian state. More recently, a public policy approach has been adopted by those considering Italy’s European