Italian foreign politics is facing tough challenges in the near future. For more than 60 years, the Italian foreign policy compass was set on two poles, the European Union and the United States. Sometimes alternatively, much more often conjointly, these two polar stars oriented each and every Italian government’s choice since the end of Second World War. All this has been changing over the last few years. In this context, the article intends to introduce the special issue on Italian foreign policy drawing a stylized map of theoretical approaches that knits together the dispersed theoretical and empirical studies of Italian foreign policy, using a couple of theoretical perspectives as light posts in orienting the articles in this special issue. This introduction is organized in four sections. First, it discusses the approaches that explicitly combine together domestic and international factors in explaining foreign policy. Next, it maps studies on the Italian foreign policy within these frameworks. Then the main characteristics of Italian foreign policy, using these theoretical perspectives, are discussed. The article concludes summarizing how the contributions in this special issue fits into these theoretical frameworks and help shed light on present Italian foreign policy.

In a rapidly changing world, middle powers with no obvious role to play on the global stage have the difficult task to read the international environment in order to formulate and implement a coherent and possibly effective foreign policy. In order to do so, decision makers either reproduce old ideas or develop new ones. Considering the ideas put forward in their inaugural speeches by Prime Ministers and Foreign Affairs Ministers in office after 2001, we suggest that Italy’s institutional actors appear to be aware of the changes occurred in the international system after 1989, and in particular after 9/11. The national role conceptions sustaining Italy’s present foreign policy goals reflect such awareness, being quite different with respect to the picture offered by Holsti in his seminal work published in 1970. Ideas expressing foreign policy goals are also reasonably well grounded in ideas on how the world works or linked to operational ideas, yet the country’s foreign policy appears feebly focused, even though focus is explicitly very much sought for. Some explanations for such a lack of focus which makes Italy’s foreign policy design rather ineffective are offered.

The article compares the way Italian (governmental and political) elites and (organized and general) publics perceive the international system and conceive of the role of Italy in it by using an ad hoc survey conducted specifically for this study. In order to establish whether a horizontal (left-right) and vertical (top-down) consensus exists on foreign policy, special attention has been paid to divergence and convergence patterns in terms of threat perception, feelings towards the (American and European) allies, support for the main institutional mechanisms of coordination and cooperation, and willingness to use military power to defend the constituted order and the national interest, while controlling for the position and level of action of each actor within the foreign policy-making process as well as her or his ideological orientation. While tracing elites’ and publics’ attitudes towards a wide range of foreign policy and security issues, the article reveals the effect of ideological and situational factors on the strategic preferences of national policy-makers and public opinion. In doing this, it contributes to define both the substance and boundaries of the alleged consensus, based on shared norms and historical legacies, supposedly overcoming socio-economic and political cleavages in matters of foreign policy.

The international context seems to be increasingly exposed to multidimensional and transnational challenges, ranging from irregular migration and piracy to the violation of basic human rights. Rather than excluding a potential role for the military, many European states rely on it to face a complex security scenario. What are the reasons behind this activism? Taking Italy as a case study, this article works out two main arguments (ideational factors and interests relating to the so-called military–industrial complex) and tries to intercept their weight in the national debate leading to the decision to intervene militarily (or not) in Sri Lanka (2004–05), Haiti (2010), and in the Central Mediterranean (2015–). Ultimately, this effort contributes to understanding the role of the military instrument in Italy, a state particularly exposed to the new challenges ahead, and offers tools for research to be potentially applied in other countries that make similar use of armed forces to deal with non-conventional security threats.

The paper investigates the factors that led the Italian government to accede to the Fiscal Compact in spite of its demanding requirements for the country’s budgetary policy. Specifically, the paper assesses the extent to which Italian government’s support for the Fiscal Compact was driven by the logic of the ‘vincolo esterno’ in a replication of the pattern that led Italy to sign the Maastricht Treaty. The paper finds only limited support to the ‘vincolo esterno’ argument. Rather than being motivated by domestic dysfunctions or socialization to the fiscal discipline doctrine, the Italian government acted mainly out of market punishment fears. Interestingly, however, three factors filtered such external pressures and contributed shaping government’s support for the new Treaty. First, the Economic and Monetary Union unfinished architecture, and in particular the lack of a European financial firewall, weakened opposition to the new Treaty. That is to say, the institutional context constrained the choices that Italian policymakers could pursue. Second, the pro-European orientations of government members contributed to elevating the new Treaty to a symbol of European integration. Finally, the Italian government confronted a quite large domestic win-set during the negotiations, as the parties supporting the Monti government also supported Italy’s participation to the new Treaty.

The aim of this article is to assess Italy’s behaviour in the framework of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the United Nations Human Rights Council, both as a recommending state and as a state under review. The UPR is a peer review mechanism launched in 2008, through which all UN member states can make recommendations to each other regarding human rights practices. Drawing on role theory, liberal and constructivist institutionalism, and the two-level game approach, the analysis reveals that Italian decision-makers played parallel games at the domestic and international tables of the UPR, and managed to adapt country’s human rights foreign policy goals according to the different social contexts where they operated. Indeed, while in the review phase in Geneva, Italy sought legitimacy for both its policies and its status as an international ‘human rights friendly’ actor, at domestic level a policy of inactivity was chosen, in order to minimize the impact of the most costly UPR recommendations, and protect the dynamics of domestic politics. The time-span of the analysis covers the first 19 UPR sessions (2008–14), broadly coinciding with Italy’s first two membership terms at the Human Rights Council.