Italy's Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

ii Since the end of the Cold War, Italy has sought to frame its relations with different southern Mediterranean countries inside various European multilateral initiatives. The Italian foreign policy objective to achieve stability and dependability in such relations has largely been met through the launch of different European Union (EU) framework policies, such as the 1995 Barcelona Process and more recently the 2008 Union for the Mediterranean (Aliboni 1999, Carbone 2008. The Italian diplomacy's preferred approach, one can thus infer, has been to Europeanise its foreign policy in the Mediterranean area, whenever possible (Balfour 2005) iii . However, there is one particular southern Mediterranean country which so far has proved itself impervious to the Italian preference for embedding bilateral relations in European structures and that is Libya. Tripoli has consistently reneged on the Union's invitations to join the different EU However, in spite of that the 2008 Treaty of Benghazi has been hailed as the remedy to settle most, if not all, outstanding bilateral grievances, a number of incidents since testify to that the, for Rome, much vaunted stability in its relations with Libya is still elusive. While the erstwhile strong tension derived from the colonial episode appears to have dissipated somewhat among the two countries, there is an underlying pattern of unpredictability about dealings with Colonel Qaddafi which has not changed since he seized power in Libya in 1969. What is more, the failure to achieve stability in Italian-Libyan relations has also had an unwanted side-effect. The considerable political capital invested by the Berlusconi government in the rapprochement with Libya also seems to create certain turbulence with its EU partners, and hence contributing to lesser stability in EU-Italian relations when it comes to determined issues. This chapter will explore the Italian efforts to achieve stability and predictability in relations with Libya over time, but with special attention to the post-cold war period. The first section will outline the conceptual framework used to analyse Italian-Libyan relations. The second section will provide an overview of the historical evolution of relations. The third section will look at the remarkable continuity which has characterised Italian domestic politics and debates in terms of Italy's Libya policy. The final section will ponder the outcome of the Italian pursuit for stability in its relations with Libya and how this aim for stability is affecting EU-Italian relations. Conceptual frameworkItaly's drive to secure stable relations with Libya arguably holds many elements in common with the thinking of Liberal institutionalism. The Liberal institutionalists, much like Realists, view the international system as characterised by anarchy. Neoliberal thinking holds that in the absence of a world government -or a regional hegemon -to impose order in relations among states, states must