ABSTRACT
Filippo Andreatta and Christopher Hill Italian foreign policy has been little written about outside Italy. Even inside the country it has been the preserve of a narrow range of specialists, most of whom have preferred an historical method to the theoreticallybased approach of policy analysis. The same judgements apply a fortiori to the study of defence policy, where even Italian writing is fairly sparse. Work which discusses both defence issues and the European Union dimension has barely begun, so there is a natural gap in the literature which this chapter may help to fill. It seeks to do so by placing Rome’s view of European defence co-operation in the context of Italian defence policy trends since 1945; changing international pressures after 1985; and the domestic political environment. Only with this background analysis is it possible to understand the dilemmas which have confronted governments in Rome (although so far they have largely averted their eyes) arising out of their support in principle for European defence integration and their inability in practice to contribute much towards it.
