The european dimension of political discourse in Italy. A ... - CIRCaP

N. CONTI / L. VERZICHELLI
almost totally dominated by internal questions and “negative” issues, like the problem of the
alternation between a socialist and a Christian democratic chief executive, and the hard
conflicts between the leaders of the two left parties. As a consequence of that, the
perspectives of European integration were almost totally neglected in the party congress
debates, as well as in the manifestos for the last two elections under proportional
representation (1987 and 1992). The reasons of this decrease of interest are numerous: in
general, parties supporting the cabinets were showing a more and more evident lack of
“policy inspiration“ which in a few years would open the crisis of the whole political system
(Cotta and Isernia 1996). But this is particularly true for the two most important government
actors, Psi and Dc, whose elites were at this point totally unable to manage the new
demands. In fact, while the increasing voices about the “costs of the integration” had
probably an important role in the escalation of the Northern League’s consensus, the
government leaders could not consider themselves as the sole “pro-European defenders”,
because the left opposition was now clearly divided between a small anti-European extreme
(then converged in the new communist party, Rc) and a fully pro-European left democratic
party (plus a number of new actors, all of them characterised by pro-European attitudes, like
the Radicals and the Greens).
Therefore, government parties, including PSI, limited themselves to appeal to the necessity
to “remain in Europe”, facing the vincolo esterno and following the stimuli coming from the
supranational arena 18 (Dyson and Featherstone 1996, Radaelli 2002), while the party
discourse of the late Pci/early Pds was mainly oriented to reposition its general guidelines,
with no discontinuous attention to the single dimensions of the European integration process.
3. The nineties: what is really new when they talk about Europe ?
The following pages will briefly analyse the same phenomenon discussed above, i.e. the
variation in the discourse on European integration developed by party elites, but focussing on
the decade following the political turmoil started by the general elections of April 1992 (Cotta
and Isernia 1996; Bufacchi and Burgess 2001). The data we have collected seem to indicate
that, after the ratification of the Maastricht treaty, the European Integration is discussed in a
more attentive way than in the past, and also a growing plurality of positions seems to
emerge. In fact, figure 6 shows that the decade 1992-2001 presents a reduction of the
identity Europeanism stances (balanced by a growing functional Europeanism), the
18 It is not a case that both a powerful interest organisation like the industrial association and a
traditionally loyal partner like the Republican party were hardly criticising the coalition, asking a more
courageous behaviour in Europe.
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