Italy’s Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century. A Contested Nature?

Italy’s foreign policy has often been dismissed as too idiosyncratic, inconsistent and lacking ambition.

This book offers new insights into the position Italy has attained in the international community in the 21st century. It explores how the country has sought to take advantage of its passage from a bipolar to a multipolar system and assesses the ways in which it has engaged internationally, its new responsibilities, and the manner in which it conducts its policies in the pursuit of its interests, whether political or commercial. It argues that although Italy is engaged internationally, there is a gap between its actions and what it actually delivers, and as long as this gap continues Italy is likely to remain a partial and unreliable foreign policy actor. Divided into three parts, this book explores:
+ the context and processes which characterise Italy’s external action
+ its relations with crucial countries and regions such as the US, the EU, and the BRICs
+ its security and defence policies.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of European Politics, Foreign Policy analysis and Italian studies.

Contents:
1. Introduction - Ludovica Marchi Balossi-Restelli, Richard Whitman and Geoffrey Edwards

Part I: Context and processes
2. Italy in a wide framework - Federico Eichberg
3. Processes of Italian foreign policy since 1989 – how black boxes can change - Paul Furlong
4. The EU post-Lisbon milieu: a context available to Italy? - Geoffrey Edwards

Part II: Italy in a new global order
5. All quiet on the western front: Italy and transatlantic relations - Osvaldo Croci
6. Italy in Europe: Between the first and second republic - Antonio Missiroli
7. Italy and the BRICs – The political economy of a complex relationship - Andrea Billi, Andrea Goldstein, Luigi Manzetti and Francesca Spigarelli

Part III: Perspectives on security and defence policies
8. What is defence now for Italy? The armed forces - Lucio Martino
9. Actors in defence decision-making in the light of contribution to European Defence - Claudio Catalano
10. Finmeccanica: evolving the role of enterprise in Italian foreign policy - Alberto DeBenedictis
11. Sant’Egidio’s diplomacy in crisis areas - Roberto Morozzo Della Rocca
12. Italy and the challenge of mass migration: risks and opportunities - Germano Dottori and Emanuela Paoletti
13. ‘Stable Unpredictability’? An assessment of the Italian-Libyan relations - Nicola Chelotti and Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués
14. Values promotion and security management in Euro-Mediterranean relations: The case of Italy - Fabrizio Tassinari and Ulla Holm
15. Conclusions - Ludovica Marchi Balossi-Restelli, Richard Whitman and Geoffrey Edwards