ABSTRACT
On 24 March 1999, US fighter aircraft set off from Aviano air base in Northeastern Italy to launch the first war in the fifty-year history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The war, carried out against the Republic of Yugoslavia in response to Serbian forces’ violent repression of the Albanian population of the province of Kosovo, was not the only NATO “first” during that period. Italy in 1999 was in many respects unrecognizable from the Italy of just ten years earlier and even more so from ten years before that. The present study is a kind of sequel, intended to assess the state of “the Italian crisis,” and perhaps understand why Italian and foreign observers so readily adopt that alarmist language to describe the country, and whether it is still appropriate. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
