ABSTRACT
A complete understanding of a country’s politics is impossible without an understanding of its position within the international community. International pressures have profound implications for what goes on internally. Inter-governmental and supranational organisations permeate the political and economic structures of their member states, so that the time when ‘foreign policy’ concerned only foreign ministries has gone for good. In the aftermath of 1989, the international system changed in at least four fundamental ways, each with profound implications for Italy’s foreign, security and domestic policy agendas. The end of the Cold War increased Italy’s ‘room for manoeuvre’ in pursuit of its foreign and security policy ambitions and meant that from having been a ‘security consumer’ it had to become a ‘security producer’. Globalisation gathered pace, bringing with it issues of migration and growing inequality and thus new tensions internally. Italy had to manage such tensions against the background of enhanced European integration, locking her into sets of norms and rules which created formidable constraints on state action. Finally, the rise of China and other new centres of economic power have had significant implications for the capacity of the country’s producers to compete in world markets.
