1. See respectively A. Farkas, ‘Buttiglione e la Ue: Italia verso la rivolta come fecero i coloni americani a Boston’, Corriere della Sera, 18 February 2002; and ‘Analysis: Italy Commissioner Under Fire’, BBC News, 12 October 2004. (accessed 15 October 2004).
2. Foreign policy re-nationalization and internationalism in the Italian debate
3. For an overview of this theme and the different treatments it gets, see Brunello Vigezzi, L’Italia unita e le sfide della politica estera, Milan, Unicopli 1997; Carlo Maria Santoro, La politica estera di una media potenza: l’Italia dall’Unità ad oggi, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1991; and R. J. B. Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World, 1860–1960, London, Routledge, 1996.
4. In the 1930s, i.e. at the height of Italian nationalism, a journal called Anti-Europa became especially popular in Italy. As Giovanni Spadolini noted, these two developments were already at that time not unrelated; see his ‘Introduction’, in Giovanni Spadolini (ed.), Nazione e nazionalità in Italia, Bari-Rome, Laterza, 1994, p. 10.
5. Togliatti is quoted from ‘Per comprendere la politica estera del fascismo italiano’, in Palmiro Togliatti, Lo Stato operaio, Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1964, p. 270. Needless to say, history is not simply repeating itself: in the Italian debate, this is the unfortunate claim upon which many cling in order to normalize Berlusconi as ‘the next Mussolini’– it is a claim, one needs to add, that is as untenable as it is obscuring, as is often the case with the misuse of historical analogies for political purposes.