抄録
Italian European policy is often described as “federalistic”. Recent studies, however, have endeavored to explain the reason of the double language of Italian Europeanism; its federalist rhetoric and its pursuit of own national interest. These studies reveal how pragmatically the Italian government has used European Integration as an instrument of nation-building.
The priorities of Italian foreign policy after the Second World War were to regain an equal status among other western European states and to resolve its domestic socio-economic problems at the European level. Postwar Italy was, however, compelled to confront the Cold War with scarce diplomatic resources. Military involvement was severely limited by the socalled “punitive” peace treaty and by domestic tendencies towards neutralism.
The project of a comprehensive European political community by De Gasperi in the early years of the 1950s was an effort to incorporate the EDC into a more peaceful grand design rather than a military alliance. This coincided with another Italian insistence on the reinforcement of the OEEC with a hope for a resolution of its economic problems, such as unemployment and emigration. In both cases, Italy used the American support for European integration as a leverage to cover its unique and weak position.
The exceptional treatments for fragile Italian steel industry under the ECSC were guaranteed mainly by France. Generally, Member states were so reluctant to accept other Italian demands, such as the subsidies for the Italian steel and the improvement of the working conditions of Italian miners in Belgium, that Italy needed the intervention of the High Authority. Italy's preference for a supranational community can be well explained by the fact.
In the domestic process, the role of the technocrats of the Bank of Italy and the IRI and the influence of some leading figures of secular parties (PLI, PSDI, PRI) were decisive. This “centrist” era is highly marked as an age of technocrats, which has revived forty years later in the formation of “technocratic” governments of the 1990s.
