An end to the gioco d’amore?

Italy’s Prime Minister Romano Prodi has been behaving very strangely for a former president of the European Commission.

By targeting illegal Romanian immigrants for expulsion his government seemed to be defying an EU law he himself had introduced which banned deportations based solely on nationality.

This followed the unfamiliar sight of a traditional Italian integrationist threatening to veto the new Treaty of Lisbon for the sake of one measly seat in the European Parliament. Add to that a letter from the Italian government warning Peter Mandelson, the European trade commissioner, against weakening defences against dumped shoes and clothing, and a defiant refusal to accept biotech crops and you have the picture of an increasingly combative Italy.

Two of the most ardently pro-EU politicians on the European scene, Prodi and Italian Interior Minister Giuliano Amato, a vice-president of the convention which drafted the EU constitution, the precursor of the Lisbon treaty, are the main faces of this striking new approach.

Is the traditionally pro-EU Italian political elite finally joining the rest of Europe in a more assertive pursuit of national interests?

Antonio Missiroli, director of studies at the European Policy Centre, says that Prodi, as a committed federalist, found it very difficult personally to threaten to veto the revised treaty over the number of seats in the European Parliament. Under a formula for allocating seats in a reduced Parliament with 750 MEPs from 2009, Italy would have had 72 MEPs compared to 78 at present. But it would have had one MEP less than the UK and two less than France, although the three countries’ populations are similar in size.

The Italian government argued that its size should be based on the number of citizens rather than residents, not least because there are a large number of Italians living abroad. But this approach required abandoning the long established way of calculating population and could not be adopted in a hurry by other member states.

In the end a compromise was found by having 750 MEPs plus the president. But what was clearly at stake for the Prodi government was a reluctance to accept being downgraded to a lower rank among the larger member states. This struck at an Italian sensitivity about being a player which punches below its weight internationally.

Missiroli says that the Italian government was caught napping by the issue of seats in the Parliament as its representation in the assembly is fragmented, spread across several political groups. He says that the question of immigration from Romania also took the government by surprise, especially as the country had to deal with a sudden influx of around 200,000 Romanians.

The test of the Prodi government’s commitment to the rule of EU law will be whether the new legislation, designed to allow the swift deportation of criminals, leads to mass expulsions based on nationality, a move which would clash with the safeguards on the law Prodi proposed himself as president of the Commission back in 2004.

It is clear that on these and other issues Prodi’s government, with its unwieldy coalition of six political parties ranging from the reconstructed former Communists and radical libertarians to moderate Christian Democrats, is coming under pressure to take strong positions from the right-wing opposition led by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Amato even hinted that failure to act decisively could spark a wave of racist attacks. "If xenophobic hate starts setting the metropolitan jungle on fire and triggers do-it-yourself justice, it is the end," Amato told La Repubblica.

Given the intense public feeling on the immigration issue following the death of a woman mugged in Rome, the accusation of inaction hits particularly hard. Prodi has since sought to reassure the international community that there will be no mass expulsions of the sort that Gianfranco Fini, leader of the nationalistic Alleanza Nazionale, has demanded. Prodi has also made a belatedly pro-European gesture by calling, together with the Romanian prime minister, on the EU to do more to help deal with mass influxes of migrants.

The speed and strength of the government’s reaction to the immigrant crisis has surprised and shocked many and there are concerns about whether the clampdown respects EU law and human rights’ conventions. While Prodi and his team remain committed pro-Europeans, Italy is clearly becoming more confident about defending its interests rather than sticking to its traditional deference to the EU ideal.

On foreign affairs, in particular, the country wants to be taken seriously. In recent years, it has put itself in the forefront of debates about EU relations with Turkey, Serbia and countries of the Mediterranean region. Prodi and Foreign Minister Massimo d’Alema took a lead in efforts to restore peace in Lebanon in 2006 and push for a resolution in the United Nations condemning the death penalty. Some rewards for this new activism can be seen. The trend of Italian nationals failing to get into top international diplomatic posts seems to be changing, with the appointment of former leader of the Democrats of the Left, Piero Fassino, as EU special envoy to Burma. By comparison, Prodi failed to put his diplomatic adviser, Stefano Sannino, in top posts in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Italy still has a long way to go before it can be compared with countries like the UK, France or Poland for obstinately fighting for its cause within the EU. But the change of approach is clear. As Missiroli put it, "Italy does not want to be seen as a naive country when other countries are playing a game of national interest".

Italy’s Prime Minister Romano Prodi has been behaving very strangely for a former president of the European Commission.