ABSTRACT
In the post-Cold War era Italy has been one of the most active contributors to international security, constantly providing troops for military operations around the world. Italian decision-makers have justified the deployment of uniformed citizens abroad since the end of the bipolar era through the shared framework of the “peace missions” (Ignazi, Giacomelo, and Coticchia 2012). Italian public opinion has regularly supported the “peace operations” undertaken by the Italian armed forces: the greater the importance of the “humanitarian dimension” is to the aim of the mission, the more positive public attitudes are toward intervention (Battistelli et al. 2012). The military operation in Afghanistan is the most important Italian mission undertaken since the end of the Second World War. Italian public opinion widely supported the intervention until mid 2009, but then the percentage of people in favor of the mission dropped considerably. This chapter aims to understand the causes of the collapse in public approval focusing on the concept of strategic narratives (Freedman 2006). The questions this study seeks to answer are: how have politicians crafted strategic narratives during the course of the conflict to convince public opinion to support the mission in Afghanistan? How and to what extent have these storylines influenced the public? This research illustrates that the ineffective way in which a wellestablished strategic narrative (centered on peace and multilateralism, and shared by all the political actors) has been modified since 2008 onwards is crucial to understand the collapse of public opinion support for Italy’s military participation in Afghanistan. Indeed, the strategic narrative built by governmental actors, which was aimed at explaining the change of approach on the ground, has proved unsuccessful because of inconsistency and inability to prepare the public to such shift. This study extensively relies on empirical data such as polls, content, and discourse analysis. After a literature review, the study compares the trends in public support with the main events on the ground and the narratives developed by the three different governments in office from 2001 to 2011.2
Public opinion and international use of force
International public opinion firmly opposed the possibility of a military operation against the Syrian regime over the summer of 2013. The majority of Americans and French, who had previously agreed on the intervention in Libya, did not support another mission in the Middle East.3 Why do some operations elicit greater consensus than others? What are the elements that make the approval of the public more feasible? The literature is still divided over the answers to these questions. On the whole, two main paradigms have shaped the debate concerning the nexus between public opinion and foreign policy. According to the first perspective, public opinion, which is ill-informed on world politics, is extremely volatile, irrational, and it exerts no influence on the conduct of foreign policy. The so-called “Almond-Lippmann” consensus (Holsti 1992) was built mainly in the 1950s and 1960s upon the pessimist view of an incoherent and irrelevant public opinion (Lippman 1922; Almond 1953; Converse 1964). However, after the massive spread of polls during the Vietnam War, a second paradigm started to emerge. Several scholars portrayed a different picture of the public: rational, better informed, not so easy to manipulate, and more influential than expected (Verba et al. 1967; Holsti and Rosenau 1988; Russet 1990). The image of a rational public, whose attitudes remain stable and coherent across time, has been confirmed by a growing number of empirical studies (Caspary 1970; Page and Shapiro 1992; Isernia, Juhasaz, and Rattinger 2002). As recognized also by the Weinberger doctrine (1984), the support of the public is an indispensable condition for undertaking a military operation abroad. Zooming in the specific literature on public opinion and the international projection of military power, it is particularly interesting to have a glance at the works focused on public attitudes toward contemporary western military missions. Scholars have adopted alternative explanations to illustrate the key variables that guarantee a solid support for interventions. According to some authors, the public approves the involvement in a military operation when vital national interests are at stake (Ladd 1980) or when a specific multilateral framework defines the mission, providing international legitimacy and burden sharing (Richman 1994). Others have showed how the public, though not very familiar with the situation on the ground, is very concerned with the aim of the mission when taking a stand on the matter. According to Jentleson (1992), a “pretty prudent public” seems to be more willing to support military interventions in the case of a “foreign policy restraint” (e.g., a direct threat posed to the U.S.) than in the event of a “domestic political change” (e.g., civil wars).
