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

N. CONTI / L. VERZICHELLI
During the nineties, we registered important changes, that is to say, more diverse
preferences about the future of European integration, and more pronounced judgements
about costs and benefits of the process: the documents we have coded seem to indicate that
the distribution of the pro/anti-European points of view among the Italian parties is much
more scattered than what recent expert surveys report (see, for instance, Ray 1999).
Moreover, even those parties maintaining a broad pro-European attitude tend now to develop
a more multifaceted view of the European integration process, where the reflection on
specific policy aspects (from EMU to enlargement, from social cohesion to CAP) is often
controversial. An example of such attitude resides in Forza Italia’ discourse: one can easily
notice here the co-existence of general appeals to save the “heritage” of the “champions” of
Italian pro-Europeanism, but also the absence of concrete stances on the current problems
of the European integration process, and even some specific criticisms to a “Brusselscentred”
idea of Europe raised by important leaders of the largest Italian party in
contemporary times.
Nonetheless, we think that the idea of a “critical change” in the party elite visions of Europe,
after Mastricht and after the introduction of a mixed-majoritarian electoral system, should not
be overestimated. At the end, the metaphor of the train to be caught, quite diffuse within all
the elite appeals during the last decade, is something in the middle between two classical
modes of dealing with Europe: the idea of keeping a minor but continuous role in Europe, in
order to develop the political and economic capabilities of a problematic capitalist democracy
(somebody defines it a sort of Calimero syndrom), and the need to use supranational politics
to defend the national interest - another recurrent argument, strongly evoked during the
“socialist era” of Bettino Craxi.
The cross-road marked by the explosion of the party system occurred in the nineties,
simultaneously with the beginning of the “European acceleration”, created room for a
significant change within party positions. Nevertheless, this change is not the fruit of a
sudden turning point within the political discourse. On the contrary, it can be conceived as
another process of adaptation to some new constraints (or maybe a liberation from the old
ones). In the end, most politicians remain involved in a purely “domestic” discourse and the
formation discourse on European issues remains, anyway, a very difficult test for the Italian
parties.
Therefore, our modest conclusion here is the following: the cultural legacies have an impact
on Italian party elites, despite the widespread aspiration to be “European” and to have a
prominent role in the problem-solving processes at the European level. On the other hand,
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