• defence policy
• Italy
• Mediterranean
• United States

Article 11 of the Italian Republican Constitution of 1948 declares that “Italy repudiates war […] as a means to resolve international disputes”. The country has consistently adhered to this principle for over thirty years after the end of WWII, somehow renouncing a proactive military policy – except for absolving its role into NATO collective defence framework and joining occasional peacekeeping commitments under UN aegis. However, in the last decade of the Cold War Era, Italy’s abstention from the use of force as a foreign policy tool abruptly disappeared. Throughout the 1980s, Italy entered into a phase of unprecedented military activism, radically changing national approach to security issues.
The dissertation aims to understand the reason behind such an unprecedented turn by focusing on three main keywords: “agency”, “consistency” and “bipolarity”. By investing the agency, it will be assessed whether internal or external factors were more relevant in overcoming Italy’s self-imposed abstention from using military power beyond national boundaries. Specifically, it will weigh the respective role of internal developments (such as the appearance new political leaders or the end of 1970s social turmoil) and external factors (like U.S. pressures or the 1980s “crisis of multilateralism”). The second analytical perspective will test the inner consistency of Italy’s military activism. In the wake of a long-standing historiographical debate, the dissertation enquires if there has been a coherent, proactive rationale or, on the opposite, Italy merely reacted to events beyond its control. Simply put, whether Italian security policy during the 1980s has been a consistent or erratic phenomenon. Finally, the third main research keyword explores the relationship between Italy’s national security and the politics of the Cold War. Scholars have argued that Italy (in particular) and the Mediterranean (in general) were already on their way towards a post-bipolar world as early as 1979. Nonetheless, the Reagan Presidency kept the Cold War somehow artificially alive in the Mediterranean and the Middle East throughout the 1980s, as a means to protect and advance U.S. national interests. The dissertation will therefore examine the impact of this capital incongruity on Italian security decision-makers, and how they modulate national military policy to correctly handle such divergent dynamics.
The research is built on a vast and solid bedrock of scholarly literature, covering a thirty-year-long debate among historians, political scientists and policy analysts. By and large, however, past scholars have primarily examined military policy as a mere variable of national foreign policy, focusing on how existing diplomatic courses determined national security decisions, and not vice versa. Seldom have the operative aspects– i.e., the actual employment in peace-, crisis-time and warfare of military power – been analysed, and how the unfolding of military missions abroad affected instead national foreign policy. Drawing from Colin Gray’s seminal work Strategic History – which he has defined as “the history of the influence of the use and threat of force upon the course of the events” – the research will apply this underused (at least, in Italian historiography) methodology. This approach has been made possible by taking into account an impressive extent of primary sources, selected from several Italian military and diplomatic records (both public and private) and foreign archives (Archives Diplomatique in Nantes, France; National Archives in Richmond, Great Britain; Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, United States). Thus far, none of the available research can claim such a variety in archival sources, which will decisively contribute to advancing the results achieved by past and present scholars. The expected result is therefore to provide a comprehensive and innovative account of a season of unprecedented military activism, which constitutes a unicum in the history of Italy during the Cold War Era.