ABSTRACT
In the post-war period, Italian foreign policy has been characterized by some constants connected both to its particular geographic location – a peninsula jutting down from the continental mainland and located at the centre of the Mediterranean sea – and to its particular domestic political conditions which favoured a low profile security policy in order to avoid defence matters becoming a contentious domestic policy issue.1 Italy’s geographic particularity pushed it into intervening in different areas at the same time (Santoro 1991). As Ambassador Ludovico Incisa di Camerana (pseudonym Ludovico Garruccio 1982) has written, Italian foreign policy unfolded during the post-war period in three concentric circles: the Atlantic, the European and the Mediterranean. The Atlantic circle is characterized by the adhesion to NATO and a passive position as regards the will of the American ally. The European circle, marked by an immediate adhesion to the European Community and by a strong integrationist attitude, took the form of rhetoric more often than concrete actions, owing to Italy’s economic and institutional backwardness (see also Coralluzzo 2000).2 Finally, in the Mediterranean circle, considered an area of great strategic importance derived from Italy’s dependence on energy imports from North Africa and the Middle East, Italy has exercised a high degree of international autonomy, putting forward a pro-Arab policy, often in opposition to the United States and the other European partners.
