The Italian foreign policy: challenges and continuities

Abstract

Italian foreign politics is facing tough challenges in the near future. For more than 60 years, the Italian foreign policy compass was set on two poles, the European Union and the United States. Sometimes alternatively, much more often conjointly, these two polar stars oriented each and every Italian government’s choice since the end of Second World War. All this has been changing over the last few years. In this context, the article intends to introduce the special issue on Italian foreign policy drawing a stylized map of theoretical approaches that knits together the dispersed theoretical and empirical studies of Italian foreign policy, using a couple of theoretical perspectives as light posts in orienting the articles in this special issue. This introduction is organized in four sections. First, it discusses the approaches that explicitly combine together domestic and international factors in explaining foreign policy. Next, it maps studies on the Italian foreign policy within these frameworks. Then the main characteristics of Italian foreign policy, using these theoretical perspectives, are discussed. The article concludes summarizing how the contributions in this special issue fits into these theoretical frameworks and help shed light on present Italian foreign policy.