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

THE EUROPEAN DIMENSION OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE IN ITALY.
international order, the second being devoted to the growth of a single region, and the third
being more persuaded of the necessity to “federate” the European entities. Before doing that,
anyway, we have to highlight a first descriptive element emerging from these data: the
marginal role of the European issues in the political formation of the Italian political
(parliamentary) class. A role that seems, anyway, to increase in the last two generations of
MPs: those born after 1940 and, even more, those born after 1960 are more committed to
the European issue (table 8). In other words, MPs elected during the eighties and the ones
arriving to the parliamentary scene after the crisis of 1992-1994 seem to have a more
pronounced receptiveness of the problems related to European integration 33 .
TABLE 8 ABOUT HERE
Until now we did not find anything really new, we just confirmed the mere “indirect”
involvement of domestic political elites in the debate on European integration (Katz 1999).
Under this point of view, the Italian case does not seem original. On the other hand, we
should talk about a rather deviant case, because the Italian MPs, in the whole, appear as a
strong pro-European group (looking at their political discourse), though with no real
European identity under the viewpoint of their political experience, practice and level of
information.
Controlling the distribution of the sub-group of Europhile MPs with some other social and
political variables, we can discover some interesting evidence that can be summarised as
follows:
1. during the “first phase” (parliamentary recruitment between 1972 and 1983) the
Europhiles were more diffuse among Christian Democrats and small government parties,
while among the MPs recruited after 1983 they are more numerous among the parties of the
left. The overall data about MPs from the last twenty years (table 9) show that the highest
degree of European support/activism is to be found within the left-wing, but also the centreright
and the right are more supportive than what the Christian democratic centre was able to
do until about fifteen years ago.
TABLE 9 ABOUT HERE
2. There is a strong correlation between pro-European attitude and non-political milieu
(academics, entrepreneurs, journalists…). On the contrary, the political background, namely
the pre-electoral party background, is much less pronounced in the group of the Europhiles
33 This is also consistent with the thesis of a (relatively) fruitful relationship, occurred in the midseventies,
between the national party elites and the pro-European and Federalist movements (Pistone
2000). In fact, it is not by chance that two leaders of the “federalists” like Altiero Spinelli and Giuseppe
Petrilli were elected in parliament, respectively in 1976 and 1979 (the first as independent candidate
by the Pci and the second by the Dc).
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