Comparative European Politics, 2004, 2, (302–319) r 2004 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1472-4790/04 $30.00 www.palgrave-journals.com/cep
Explaining Italian Preferences at the Constitutional Convention David Hine Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, George Street, Oxford OX1 2RL, UK. E-mail:
[email protected]
Italy’s position in the Convention represented a partial shift away from traditional national positions. This might have been expected given the apparent euroscepticism of some parties in the government elected in 2001, and from the growing challenges Italy faced from monetary union and the internal market process. But, while the traditional rhetorical commitment to integration was toned down, on the key institutional choices facing the Convention Italy’s representatives still favoured solutions generally supportive of the mainstream features of the Community method, and especially of further development of supra-national foreign and defence policy-making. The explanation lies in the interaction of the Convention process, evolving party interests and opportunities inside the Italian coalition, and the risks of Italian isolation in EU decision-making arenas arising from its close association with US policy in Iraq. A liberal intergovernmentalist explanation thus captures rather little of what happened. The explanation of Italian choices lies more plausibly in an institutionalist direction: the special nature of the Convention process, national decision-making processes and coalition relations, and the institutional logic, for Italy, of the EU itself. Comparative European Politics (2004) 2, 302–319. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110037 Keywords: Italy; preference-formation; EU; Convention; constitutional treaty; liberal-intergovernmentalism; EU treaty reform
Preferences and Explanations Italy’s long-standing European values Italy’s European policy — strongly supported by public opinion — was traditionally based on firm commitment to EU institutions and the community method, and a willingness to cede sovereignty through institutional reform. There was a high level of inter-party agreement on broad objectives, and a national reluctance to see the EU as working against Italy’s fundamental interests. Eurosceptics hardly existed. Even when it became possible in the mid1990 s that first-wave membership of the euro would have a distorting impact on the economy, few critics asked whether there was an alternative. European rules and policy restrictions were generally seen as benign, and the task of an elected government not only to defend Italian interests against Europe, or to
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reshape Europe in a mould more favourable to Italy, but also to ensure that government does what is required by Europe (Cotta, 1992; Hine, 1993; Romano, 1993; European Commission, 2002). Italy had few difficulties with further institutional development. It was a strong supporter of the SEA and the TEU. Its government would probably have gone further in both IGCs. The same was true of Amsterdam and Nice. Even in advance of the European Convention in 2001, the Italian Senate, in its resolution on the position to be taken at the Convention, could refer to the country’s historical role as a paese federatore (Senato della Repubblica, 2001, 89–98). Italy was a firm supporter of the community method, of the Commission’s right of legislative initiative, and of strengthening the role of the European Parliament. A theoretical explanation of this approach would have strong functionalist features. Italy rarely defended the prerogatives of the member states against shared sovereignty because the authorities believed Italy had much to gain from sharing it, and saw more efficient EU decision-making flowing from it. This view intensified as EU decision-making threatened to become more difficult with enlargement and declining popular support for integration elsewhere in Europe. Even if the driving force behind policy was Italian national interest, policy was driven by a well-developed vision of a future European political order. How Italy arrived at this view is a long story, going back to the highly favourable experience of the years of rapid economic growth, social transformation, and perceived collective economic security associated with EC membership from the 1950s to the 1980s. It became a national consensus, and because having a consensus on European and foreign policy issues is regarded as a virtue, it was hard to break. Admittedly Italy’s ability to identify and pursue its preferences always seemed less satisfactory in individual policy areas. There was a welldocumented view that the country’s preferences and negotiating positions were often poorly managed (Gallo and Hannay, 2003). But on matters of major institutional design that criticism was less evident. The Italian government had little difficulty deciding what it wanted, though its ability to achieve it was always constrained by what larger and more powerful partners would accept. In the Italian context, therefore, where parties dominate the policy process, and where the party system and coalition-building is complex, a materialist explanation of how Italian preferences were formed, certainly in the area of EU institutions, is not illuminating. To focus on social actors, rather than parties and institutions, would illustrate the existence of a consensus, which no doubt constrained parties and hence governments from departing from the traditional position outlined above. But to make this observation did not take the analysis very far. Comparative European Politics 2004 2
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Euroscepticism and Atlanticism on the centre-right A more serious explanatory challenge has emerged in recent years, however, and particularly over the 3 years since 2001, as Italian policy has shown signs of change. At the time of writing (2004), it is still unclear how significant this change is. The government that brought it about has been in office during exceptional times both for the EU and the wider international community. Part of the reason why there has been such extensive recent debate about alleged Italian euroscepticism lies less with Italy’s attitudes to the EU itself, than with the markedly more Atlanticist shift in Italian foreign policy under Berlusconi since 9/11 (Frattini, 2004). But the problem goes beyond the difficulty of squaring European integration and Atlanticism in a post-Cold War climate. Even before 9/11, the 2001 general election brought into government three parties all of which have at times been prepared to voice significant criticisms of how the EU functions. The tone of Italy’s European attitudes has therefore shifted, and this was also seen in the positions taken by the government’s representatives in the Convention, at least in the early stages of its proceedings. However, even at this stage, the change was expressed more through rhetorical flourishes than through strong and distinctive positions on questions of major institutional architecture. The ambiguities were compounded by Italy’s Council Presidency role immediately after the Convention draft was completed. Having developed some new and for Italy distinctive positions in the early stages of the Convention, the Italian government representatives in the Convention adopted an increasingly self-effacing position in preparation for the IGC. We are thus trying to explain changes from very weak signals making theoretical interpretation difficult. One line of explanation could be that the Italian authorities never intended to do anything more than make some verbal concessions (at a point at which they could afford to do so) to some minority interests that favoured a change, before falling back on the traditional set of Italian preferences driven by (perceptions of) Italy’s unchanging material interests. This explanation, linked to the notion of a broad socio-political consensus on the benefit of integration, would be a rather unenlightening form of liberal intergovernmentalism (Moravcsik, 1993). An alternative explanation could be that the peculiarities of the process (a Convention in which much of the decision-making escaped the traditional IGC approach of behind-closeddoors intergovernmental bargaining) forced the Italian authorities, whatever their real preferences, to focus on the constraints of the process particularly because, as holders of the presidency during the subsequent IGC, they bore responsibility for delivering a result. The real preferences might have been for more radical institutional revision than was on offer elsewhere (as had generally been the case in the past), or indeed they might have been for less Comparative European Politics 2004 2
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radical reform (though in reality there is little evidence of the latter). Such an explanation would veer more towards an institutionalist account (Pierson, 1996, 2000) and would certainly accord the authorities enough autonomy as an actor independent of Italian society to weaken a liberal intergovernmentalist account. The explanation here favours the latter account, though not in a simple version. The reality is not easily captured by schematic interpretations, because the political parties, and some social interests to which the parties were responding, brought something new to the Italian policy process, but little that affected institutional choices directly. Examined closely, Italy’s ‘new’ preferences amount to little more than marginal shifts on relatively secondary questions. Moreover, because the government itself was a new one, it took time to get its position clear, and several accidents in the early stages contributed to this. Because Italy held the presidency at the end stage, any strong positions it might have held were likewise muted. Finally, the international background against which the Convention process unfolded meant that the understanding of the Italian authorities themselves was evolving quite rapidly. The starting point to illustrate this account has to be the party system, for it was from the parties of the new coalition that shifts in Italian policy originated. As we shall see, these shifts, though partly a response to underlying socioeconomic pressures, (and in turn partly a response to Italy’s changing experience of EU membership) were also the result of autonomous shifts in the power relationships and alliances between coalition partners. These factors provide the context for Italian behaviour in the Convention, which was also affected by the nature of the Convention process, and the institutional agenda of the Convention itself. That agenda was only indirectly connected to the terms of the domestic Italian discussion taking place over European issues, leaving the Italian representatives fairly free to respond as they saw fit. Their response was in consequence, and notwithstanding the earlier eurosceptic expressions of some of the coalition parties, eventually a resort to traditional Italian institutional preferences, limited by the constraints of the preferences of other member states, by an international context in which an integrationist line on EU institutional building was needed to balance the appearance of Atlanticism, and by the need to act as honest broker. In such an account, as we shall see, the simple explanations of liberal intergovernmentalism capture relatively little of what was taking place.
The Centre-Right Government and Europe The four-party government elected in 2001 — Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, Fini’s Alleanza Nazionale, Bossi’s Lega Nord, and the so-called Biancofiore group, essentially an assemblage of former Christian Democrats — contained three Comparative European Politics 2004 2
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parties that had all at some point shown some doubts about Italy’s proEuropean orthodoxy.1 Forza Italia’s reputation for euroscepticism went back to the period in 1994 when its foreign minister, Antonio Martino, having been a member of the Bruges Group, had expressed doubts about the terms of the EMU convergence criteria (Martino, 1995).2 Berlusconi himself talked of a ‘renegotiation’ of the Maastricht Treaty to dilute the criteria, though he did not seriously question the principle, and this, together with the promise of a more assertive defence of Italian interests in EU fora, and close support for the US, generated some basis for claims that Forza Italia was becoming an avowedly eurosceptic party. Neither in opposition, nor in government since 2001, has the party advocated withdrawal from EMU, let alone from the EU itself, but it has, for better or worse, taken an assertive line on certain issues (the common European arrest warrant, the siting of EU agencies etc), though for reasons linked more to these issues themselves than to an underlying ideological hostility to the EU. Alleanza Nazionale, like Forza Italia has only existed since 1993, but has a pedigree which comes from the old neo-fascist MSI. It was generally deemed circumspect towards issues of European integration, simply because neo-fascist parties tend to have this identity and are strongly nationalist. From its formation AN has been seeking cautiously to rebrand itself as a post-fascist or democratic conservative party, however. So the claim that it was against European integration was based more on the ultra-nationalism imputed by critics from fairly minor incidents than on clear and direct public positions. It would be fair to describe AN’s early position as ‘Gaullist’, in favour of a Europe des patries in the party’s own words. It was far from an advocate of withdrawal, or non-participation in EMU, and in some areas (an expanded EU budget for cohesion policies) it actually favoured deeper integration. If AN started out in the early 1990s with an aura of euroscepticism and moved towards accommodation and even enthusiasm, the Northern League took the opposite path. Having been like some other European localist/ separatist parties a fervent supporter of integration as a complement to regional autonomy or independence, and having in 1996 advocated ‘Padania’s’ separate admission to the euro-area, it swung only a couple of years later to a position of verbally violent criticism of the Union, and in particular the Commission. To some degree this was the result of the tactical manoeuvrings of the unpredictable Umberto Bossi, but, as we shall see, it has been echoed in softer tones by Giulio Tremonti, Finance Minister until 2004, who, though strictly a non-party technocrat within the Council of Ministers, is generally seen as close to the League. During the last eight years the position of AN and the League has thus been subtly reversed. Such a switch is not unique. Something similar happened to the relative positions of the two major UK parties in the early 1990 s. It can be Comparative European Politics 2004 2
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explained by the changing opportunity structure opening up in front of both the League and AN. The former became aware of frustration at the impact of EU milk quotas among northern Italian milk producers, at Italy’s failure to win concessions from Brussels on this, and more generally at Italy’s inability, within the EU’s external tariff regime, to take a more vigorously protective line against imported goods from China and central and eastern Europe. AN, for its part, was concerned more with domestic and subsequently international acceptability, and its slow switch towards a much more supportive attitude to the EU coincided with a closer working alliance inside the national coalition with the former Christian Democrats. It is easier to see this switch three years on from the government’s formation than it was in 2001, however, and herein lay the difficulty for the coalition as a whole in forming a clear set of institutional preferences in relation to the Convention. None of the three parties was exactly sure where it wanted to position itself, and none had given great attention to the subject in drafting the coalition’s electoral programme. The former Christian Democrats were anyway firmly committed to the pro-integration line the old DC had always taken, so it was clearly better to finesse the issue than generate a clash ahead of the election. And given the strong support most Italians continued to show for Italy’s EU membership it is unlikely that party strategists believed there were many votes to be gained by stressing this issue. Moreover, as was clear from the coalition’s choice of its first Foreign Minister, there was a concern to reassure other EU member states that Italy’s external policies were not about to change dramatically. Anxious to avoid a repeat of the Schuessel experience, Berlusconi gave the post to a non-party technocrat Renato Ruggiero. His credentials as a convinced European, closely linked to the integrationist outlook of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, were impeccable.3 The early months of the new government, therefore — effectively the period leading up to the Laeken summit — did not indicate that, on the institutional issues of the Convention, there would be a dramatic departure from traditional Italian positions. In late November, immediately before the summit, a major parliamentary debate was held to prepare for the Convention (Senato della Repubblica, 2001). The parliamentary resolutions that came forth were bland enough to attract almost unanimous parliamentary support. Nothing was said about institutional architecture or the big decisions which would divide the Convention: the respective roles of Council and Commission, voting procedures, the size of the Commission, the relationship between big states and small ones. Beneath the surface, however, there was less harmony. It quickly became clear to Ruggiero that the Northern League and Forza Italia were ill-disposed from the outset towards someone they perceived as imposed by forces of the old Italian establishment. Ruggiero’s style and personal preferences stood not Comparative European Politics 2004 2
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only for continuity, but also for policies that, on issues of vital national interest, spanned the government/opposition divide. His early months in office were a painful series of confrontations with his colleagues and unhappy rebuffs from Berlusconi. Within six months he had been forced into resigning. The final straw was the Italian government’s reaction to the introduction of euro notes and coins at the start of 2002: a theological dispute about the relative level of enthusiasm with which ministers should greet the occasion. Finance Minister Tremonti said he saw nothing particular to celebrate, and Berlusconi’s clear rebuke to the disappointed Ruggiero — describing him as nothing more than a ‘minister/technocrat’, then reasserting his own claim to have overall charge of Italian foreign policy — raised the stakes to a ‘who governs foreign policy?’ issue that left Ruggiero with little choice but to go.4 Berlusconi held the MAE portfolio himself for six months before appointing the able, but junior former minister for the Public Service, Franco Frattini: a technocrat from the Consiglio di Stato, turned Forza Italia MP, whose career and political base were entirely dependent on Berlusconi. The outcome, though messy, was not entirely negative for Berlusconi, leaving him a good deal freer to make policy without excessive pressure from Italy’s traditional foreign policy establishment.
Italy in the Convention As we shall see, however, the impact of the apparent shift towards euroscepticism was ambivalent, as far as Convention politics were concerned. The first problem in generating a purposive Italian approach in the Convention was that, though there were several Italians, they were by no means all onmessage from the government’s point of view. The official government representative, Gianfranco Fini, certainly was as close to the message as it was possible to get, and was regarded by the Praesidium as among the group of authoritative senior government representatives who could say with some confidence whether something under discussion was likely to be acceptable in Rome (Norman, 2003, 159). However, the government had already agreed at Laeken that Giuliano Amato, a former Italian prime minister with a reputation for skilled negotiation and a powerful legal mind, would be one of two vice-presidents in assisting Giscard. This gave him a position of exceptional influence, both because of his own contacts in Italy, and because he became a de facto leader of socialist representatives in the Convention. Amato is widely credited with securing agreement on important issues covered by the working group he chaired on the EU’s legal personality (CONV 305/02, 22/10/2002;5 Norman, 2003, 102–105). In principle, this could have led to considerable tension between two authoritative Italians, one from the right and the other from the left, each working with different power bases, and with, at the outset, rather Comparative European Politics 2004 2
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different perspectives on the integration process. In fact, as is clear from Amato’s own testimony in Gianfranco Fini’s book on the Convention, this did not happen. The two worked extremely closely, and apparently effectively (Amato, 2003, 7–12). Amato was not the only former Italian prime minister in the Convention. Of Italy’s two parliamentary representatives one was Lamberto Dini, prime minister of a technocratic government in 1995–1996, foreign secretary in the Ulivo government from 1996–2001, fluent in English, and influential in the Liberal group. The other representative, Marco Follini, was a former Christian Democrat and committed integrationist. In a Convention of 105 members, numbers for any national delegation do not count for much, but even when Forza Italia MEP, Antonio Tajani, is included, the tendentially eurosceptic parties of the coalition were only properly represented by two out of six main delegates. There were therefore several strands to Italy’s participation in the Convention, and two distinct phases emerge even with regard to the contribution of the government itself. It was noticeable not only that the Italian government — to Ruggiero’s regret — generated no overall strategy document in advance of the Convention, but that, unlike Germany and the UK, it did not present one to the Convention either. However, in the early stages of the Convention, Fini did indeed present a range of some 60 amendments, mostly fairly short and in some cases simply clarificatory in the Italian context. They express diffidence towards values that look strongly ‘federalist’, seeking to underpin the autonomy and freedom of manoeuvre of national governments, seeking to place the emphasis in any area of shared power on the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality (cfr. amendments to arts. 8–10 where there is an explicit proposal to require that, ‘Every intervention of the Union must take account of the varying sizes, structures, and circumstances of member states’), and to provide national parliaments with a greater role in enforcing these principles. It was against (cfr. amendment to art. 5) incorporating the Charter of Fundamental Rights inside the formal draft constitution, rather than in a separate protocol. It sought (cfr. amendment to art. 14) to make framework legislation in the area of family law the subject of unanimity procedure rather than of ordinary (QMV) procedure. In an amendment linked to this it also sought (cfr. amendment to art. 11) to restrict free circulation only of EU citizens, that is, not all its residents, which would include immigrants, and in any case sought to keep open the possibility of some agreed restrictions on internal movement (cfr. amendment to art. 11) and to emphasize the role of emergency help for individual states facing special difficulties (cfr. amendment to art. 13). There are repeated invocations of the need to respect national, political and constitutional individuality (cfr. amendment to art. 9), and Italian amendments Comparative European Politics 2004 2
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sought wherever possible to replace the adjective ‘European’ (where this might signify something approaching a sovereign state) with what was intended as the more inter-governmental phrase ‘European Union’. In short, and with the striking exception of defence and security, across the rather modest range of modifications offered by the Italian government’s chief representative (the great majority of which appear to have been rejected by the Secretariat or in the Convention itself) there is little which can be said to advance any project to enhance the powers of the Union and in some areas there is an apparent desire to restrict power or repatriate it. It is difficult to imagine previous Italian governments taking such positions. Who Fini spoke for, and with what preparation, in advancing these amendments is however rather uncertain. In Italy, as elsewhere, issue-areas with a degree of domestic socio-economic salience that appeared to be affected by articles of the Convention document naturally became the subject of amendments reflecting the relevant national concern. There were several for Italy in the area of social policy, civil rights, criminal policy, and religion. The lines of domestic division were complex and it would be hard to draw firm conclusions about which were the key drivers because it seems doubtful that even the government itself had done so.6 The debates were sporadic, and in a few cases — like the prime minister’s concern about the implication of the common European arrest warrant — they were closely linked to esoteric aspects of the Berlsuconi government. Overall, however, their effect seems to have been to make the Italian government more sensitive to yielding sovereignty in these areas, and in turn more aware of the merits of arguments about subsidiarity and the division of powers than would have been the case a decade earlier. Defence is an exception. There was a clear Italian antipathy to the pacific, internationalist and civilian-power approach to defence and security implied by the tone of the Convention document. Here, Fini’s amendments run in quite the opposite direction. The Italian government was clearly not afraid to cede sovereignty in this area, and its amendments (cfr. Fini’s amendment to art. 30) and its public utterances all steered in this direction. Moreover, although there was an instinct to limit federal powers present in the series of minor amendments presented by Fini in the early stages of the Convention, there was a largely balanced approach to the big institutional questions that proved the most divisive in the later stages of the Convention: the issues of leadership inherent in the selection and roles of President of the European Council, ‘Foreign Minister’, and President of the Commission; the size of the Commission; and the allocation of voting weights under QMV. On these issues, where the Italian government played no role through the amendment process — though admittedly neither did most governments, since the issues were handled by Praesidium negotiations — Fini’s position was that there was Comparative European Politics 2004 2
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a self-evident need for greater decisional efficiency, and that the size of the Commission and the cumbersome procedures for the rotating presidency needed to be addressed, as did the long-term decrease in proportionality between population of voting weights. In the Convention, he displayed greater understanding of the fears of small states on these issues than some other large member states, and suggested an incremental approach to some changes, but in an area where the real cleavage is as much between big states and small states as between federalists and inter-governmentalists, this has not really cut across the generally more self-protective stance the Italian government has adopted.7 It appears to have concluded that it could live with, and in some areas might actually prefer, some extension of majority voting, and that this, and the greater decisional effectiveness inherent in tipping the balance in favour of smaller procedural-majority requirements, and the strengthening of the centre (albeit a Council-led centre) in the foreign and security areas, were in its interests. This is, however, where there is some degree of uncertainty in the process. On individual aspects of the institutional architecture, other Italians — Amato and Dini in particular — appear to have played an important and in some areas quite influential role. As Fabbrini (2004, forthcoming) shows, Amato’s work was clearly of significance in several areas: in securing the ‘single legal personality’ clause, in overcoming the three-pillar structure, and in the regulatory simplification leading to the distinction between general and framework laws, and delegated regulations. It is difficult to establish how far these achievements represented outcomes positively supported by the Italian government, but it is noticeable at the least that it did not oppose them or seek modifications through amendment, and Amato’s general acknowledgement of his debt to Fini appears to have been aimed largely at the former’s work on institutional affairs (Amato, 2003, 22). It was also clear that the moves made by Italians to leave open the possibility that the semi-permanent Council Presidency and the Presidency of the Commission could in principle be held by the same individual were strongly supported by Fini. Both Fini and Dini came together in pushing for the ‘EU Foreign Minister’ to be a member of both Council and Commission. These were strongly expressed preferences, in line with the Italian view that defence and security policy required strong personalised leadership (a view incidently also in line with Alleanza Nazionale’s traditional approach to political leadership). Fini was also supportive of Dini’s position on the so-called ‘early warning system’ by which national parliaments oversee the subsidiarity principle. Most of these decisions were taken in the last stages of the Convention, when Fini had taken a positive decision not to introduce official Italian government amendments. By this stage Fini appeared in any case to have lost his earlier expressivist tendencies, securing in return an enhanced reputation as an honest broker within the Convention, a hard worker (he was present more consistently than any other government representative) Comparative European Politics 2004 2
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and the representative of a government determined, if it could, to push a workable treaty through the ensuing IGC.
Explaining the Italian Position The first difficulty in explaining the Italian government’s preferences in the Convention is that, as we have seen, they were not strongly defined. Italy took a cautious attitude at the beginning of the Convention process, as would be expected from a new government, built on a complex coalition, with attitudes that seemed to challenge some established positions on European policy but had not been worked out, and probably had only weak public support. For reasons already alluded to, it also took a self-effacing position towards the end of the process, unlike most major governments who were anxious to get their red-line issues dealt with in the July 2003 final draft. In the early part of the Convention Fini was activist, but relatively isolated, in setting out positions that reflected the mild Euroscepticism in the governing coalition. Later he appeared to drop this in favour of a more constructivist approach. Silvio Berlusconi himself, despite having for several months after Ruggiero’s resignation taken on the Foreign Ministry portfolio, made few significant statements about Convention issues. Through his prote´ge´e, Franco Frattini, to whom he passed the Foreign Ministry portfolio in the latter half of 2002, he continued to have full access to the decision-making process, and there was clearly some upgrading of the prime minister’s role in foreign policy generally, as a consequence of the international situation. But by and large there was a division of labour by which Fini dealt with the Convention, and Berlusconi dealt with Atlantic and defence and security matters. This appears to have suited Fini personally. It brought him closer to the exChristian Democrats in the coalition, with whom, during 2003, he was also increasingly making common cause on domestic issues, particularly against Umberto Bossi but also, in so far as Forza Italia proved surprisingly tolerant of Bossi’s more egregiously irresponsible utterances, against the prime minister himself. Independently of this tension, with the prime minister representing the strongly pro-American turn in Italian foreign policy, Fini could act as interlocutor to ‘Old Europe’, and secure some personal prestige in other European capitals at the same time, thereby raising his level of general acceptability in the longer term as a potential future Italian foreign minister, or even prime minister. It also explains the paradox of the Italian eurosceptic dog that, in the Convention, eventually failed to bark. Domestically, there were other issues on which individual parties could express anti-European sentiment, such as the impact of the SGP, milk quotas, free-trade, and the absence of protection against third-country dumping. These issues had more resonance for the parties’ voters than the issues at stake in the Convention. But Comparative European Politics 2004 2
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the Convention itself required a visible success in the shape of an outcome sellable to the IGC, with few voters knowing anything about the details of the drafting process, nor probably greatly caring about them as points of detail. Furthermore, the fact that the Convention unfolded during the drama of the allied attack on Iraq, had contradictory effects on the Italian government’s perceptions of the value to it of the European Union. On the one hand, the relationship with the US deepened with Berlusconi’s close alliance with Bush. On the other hand, it left the Italian government acutely aware of its potential isolation in Europe, partly because it was a government that was looked at rather circumspectly by other governments, but more importantly because the effect of the war was ambiguous. It drove an enormous wedge between the UK (and other alliance countries) and France and Germany, but it also led to greater efforts at bi-lateral coordination between capitals — first on Afghanistan, later on European defence cooperation, and on Iran — and most notably between the big three capitals. In such a context, Italy’s growing euroscepticism posed the risk of it being increasingly isolated from formal and long-standing EU circuits associated with the Franco-German alliance. But it would also risk being isolated from the newer bilateral channels between the big three because it lacked weight. Faced with this risk, it appears that the Italian government perceived, quite logically, that its interests lay in an EU driven by existing but strengthened institutions — particularly, but not exclusively in the area of common defence and external security issues, but also internal security, especially in relation to the vexed question of immigration. Hence the Italian government’s cautious acceptance of efforts to link the Council with the Commission, to push for more majority voting in the foreign and security arena, and generally to support the Praesidium in the Convention in those areas of institutional evolution where it sought to reconcile greater decisional effectiveness (a semi-permanent presidency, a ‘foreign minister’, a QMV decisional threshold easier to reach than Nice) with the essentials of the community process (a greater role for the Parliament, some strengthening of the Commission, more majority decisiontaking). As a large country, Italy was not going to allow its Atlanticism or its mild euroscepticism to get in the way of the perceived safety provided by the collectivism of existing EU institutions, nor of the need for more efficient and streamlined structures and procedures in the face of enlargement. In the end, therefore, it could be argued that the Italian government did arrive at a national strategy in the Convention. It coincided with the art of the possible in the Convention: mild, domestically oriented euroscepticism at the outset, but solid work in support of the Praesidium once the critical stages were reached. It did so both because domestic Italian opinion required this, but also because those most closely involved in the process could see its benefits. This account has both liberal intergovernmental and institutional elements to it, but as we shall see, the deeper we probe, the more the latter type of Comparative European Politics 2004 2
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explanation prevails. Certainly, the Italian government machine — taken in its entirety to include Prime Minister’s office, deputy prime minister, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the permanent representation in Brussels, parliament, and governing parties — eventually came to a low-key consensus on what Italy’s needs were in a rapidly evolving European and international situation, and the outcome was one which in the end was not as far from the traditional Italian approaches as might have been anticipated in 2001. It was a set of positions advanced as much by default as by design, and was also pushed by Italians in the Convention other than the government’s official representative. But that mattered less than that the government eventually found a position it could support — and that the opposition could also largely support — as the pursuit of Italy’s basic European interests. The government’s arrival at these positions was complicated by the complexity of the forces contributing to the policy, and here, especially in the detailed texture of unfolding positions, the institutionalist explanations of events provide a more satisfactory explanation, as we can see if we look at the impact of the factors — the party system, the national policy style, the experience of the EU and the operation of EU policy-making institutions, identified by the editors of this collection. The party system The complexities added by the Italy party system have already been described. The nature of the parties forming the new government left space, as Ruggiero’s initial appointment demonstrated, for other forces of the Italian establishment to retain an influence on decision-taking, and this probably restrained the government’s hand in the early stages. Thereafter, the shallow and imprecise line of cleavage between eurosceptics and traditional integrationists ran as much through the coalition as it did between government and opposition. The domestic divide between the AN and the Christian Democrats on the one hand, and the League and Forza Italia on the other also had its impact. It encouraged the AN to shift away from its earlier euroscepticism, and through this the individual in the Italian government best placed to influence the Convention, Gianfranco Fini, became the mouthpiece for an approach which more faithfully reflected past Italian attitudes towards integration. That the rhetoric of euroscepticism continued to sound in areas unconnected with the work of the Convention is not surprising, and can be explained by the next two variables under consideration. The national policy style The Italian style of decision-taking is in institutional terms less coordinated than that of the UK or France, and this has always been seen as leaving the Italian government less well-prepared to defend its interests in the policyComparative European Politics 2004 2
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formulation stage. On institutional matters, however, this is less applicable, since while judgements about institutions and procedures have to be looked at in each country in relation to vital national interests, and to what may happen if the rules are changed, it is not difficult for most countries to work out where their interests lie in this regard. This is certainly more complicated when taking decisions in decisional arenas where trade-offs between objectives need to be made in order to achieve any progress at all in decisional games where all players have a veto. But there is no evidence that for Italy this was a serious cognitive problem. The system was capable of handling this, and pursuing national interests, as long as those interests could be agreed on. There is no question, however, that the new government did affect the national policy style in that it became more difficult to decide where the tradeoffs should lie. Neither an old-style Christian Democrat government of the 1980s, nor the centre-left governments of the 1990s would have had this difficulty. The new government did, and it took time to solve the problem. In this sense ‘policy style’ did change, but partly because of changes in the wider party system, partly because of changes in the wider international environment, and partly because of objective changes in Italy’s economic relationships with the EU. So, policy on foreign and European issues became more partisan. There was a highly engaged prime-ministerial office (expressed thus to include the role of the deputy prime-minister), which attempted to lead from the front and not permit Italian preferences to be determined solely by a Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Bank of Italy establishment. But for all that the change was modest, the attitudes and values of the old establishment were still deeply rooted, and the margin for departing from them limited. A good part of the coalition remained unsure about the new departure, as did some powerful interest-group actors, and they became the dominant Italian voice as the IGC approached. Evolving Italian experience of the EU Overall, Italian perceptions of EU membership remain highly positive, but the last decade has been more difficult than any earlier one. Future decades look even more difficult, as several problems — the pensions and demographic overhangs, weak capital markets, geographical disparity, low investment in R&D and education — weigh heavily on Italian economic performance (Pedrini, 2003). The experience of monetary union has certainly been ambiguous. Low growth, and the rules of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), impede tax cuts and public investment projects of the sort with which Forza Italia appealed to voters in 2001. Hence the Finance Ministry’s regular attacks on the rules of the SGP. The governing parties are bearing the domestic costs of closer European integration: tighter constraints on domestic policy Comparative European Politics 2004 2
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choices, and curbs on the sorts of electoral linkages (high public expenditure, investment projects as patronage, public services as disguised welfare patronage) which previous governments were adept at forging. Their fear is that voters will not readily see that the European constraints on the Centre-Right today are a good deal tighter than those in the past on the Christian Democrats. Italian euroscepticism is thus a way of signalling to voters that Europe poses problems as well as solutions. It is a way of leading voters as well as following them and anticipating where the EU will cause domestic distributional problems, and trying to make clear to voters why the government cannot deliver what it would like to deliver. Current Italian government preferences are thus also a product of attempts by the governing class to rewrite the political agenda in anticipation of ever-tighter policy constraints. It should be no surprise that Italian governments struggling with the short-term domestic consequences of monetary union choose to blame economic difficulties on how their predecessors managed the convergence process. Nor is it surprising if Italy’s traditional placid compliance with EU policy has been replaced by a more assertive and sometimes acerbic defence of immediate interests. Institutions making Italian EU policy Italy had always had a coordination problem, but not one that generated serious domestic tensions on EU institutional matters. There was rarely a conflict between the two main actors involved, the Foreign Ministry (MAE) and the Prime Minister’s Office, even when a special unit headed by a junior minister (the Department for European Policy Coordination (DPCE)) was established in the latter. However, cooperation between Palazzo Chigi, its dependent unit the DPCE, and the Treasury did begin to change the balance of power during the 1990s. Reconstruction of central government under Prodi, D’Alema and Amato led to a series of measures to bolster direct action on EU matters by the Prime Minister’s office. This was not a full-scale power struggle, but under Public Service Minister Franco Bassanini’s reorganization of central departments, two new decrees were issued in 1999, giving substantial coordinating powers to the Prime Minister’s office. The MAE for its part was given specific coordination roles only in the area of second pillar issues (CFSP) and treaty revision. The stage was thus set, when Berlusconi came to power, and especially when he himself assumed control of the foreign ministry briefly in 2002, for a shift in the location of power. The MAE no doubt felt uncomfortable with this both institutionally, and because of doubts its senior figures had about both the style, and possibly the content, and Berlusconi’s international strategies. In the end, however, it is difficult to Comparative European Politics 2004 2
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see this tension as having greatly changed the outcome. Perceptions of Italy’s fundamental need to find a solution in 2003 that made a treaty possible, and that did not depart too far from Italy’s traditional attachment to EU methods and institutions, and in particular prevented a fragmentation of decisionmaking into inter-governmentalism in the enlarged EU, appear to have been widely shared across the government. So while the potential for intragovernmental conflict may have increased, it probably had little impact in 2003 itself.
Conclusion Explanations of IGC outcomes tend to presuppose that what needs to be explained is the willingness of national governments to move from more decisional sovereignty to less. For governments with preferences for levels of integration substantially higher than those acceptable to the main players, however, this is less illuminating (except in the unlikely event that the more integrationist country decides that a small advance is worse than no advance at all). Italy was traditionally a case of such a government and was rarely subjected to close scrutiny concerning the factors which determined its choices. That has now changed. In 2003 there was rather more to explain, and many contradictory pressures. Some of this is explained by the Convention method itself. The method affected Italy in three other ways. Firstly, as with all member-states, it allowed some momentum to build towards a particular set of solutions in the period before national governments realized that the Convention itself would actually produce a single draft, and thus before they sought to re-establish national influence. So Italy, like every other country, found itself partially overtaken by the Praesidium in the first months, and faced with greater pressure to accept the broad outlines of the solutions the Praesidium was proposing. In fact, given the nature of Italian preferences, this did not matter as much for Italy as for some other large member states. But it did matter in a second sense: the momentum created by the Convention made it important that the ensuing IGC deliver, and hence in turn that the holder of the Presidency during the IGC was in the best possible position to achieve a positive outcome, which, as we have seen, generated constraints on the Italian government to act as honest broker. And finally, in a modest way, the Convention provided a stage on which a key national actor, Gianfranco Fini, could develop a new European role that would help in domestic electoral politics and coalition alliance-building, and this may have led him to downplay some preferences in pursuit of these wider goals. Comparative European Politics 2004 2
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This argument has its limits, however, because, as we have seen, the wider international context of the Convention pushed all Italian actors in the exercise, irrespective of their starting points on institutional reform and subsidiarity, towards common goals that tended towards traditional Italian preferences for greater integration. Despite this, however, tensions between competing objectives in foreign policy have increased. The effects of EU policies — especially monetary union — are having more divisive effects. And even though coalitions, under the bipolar coalition building conventions that have come with electoral reform, have in most respects become more cohesive, they may, on EU matters, as we have seen, have become potentially less cohesive. All of which would suggest that even if the overall vector of forces in 2003 produced an outcome in line with traditional Italian preferences, this outcome should not necessarily be expected in the future. Notes 1 For detailed analysis of the European positions of various Italian parties, see Quaglia, 2004. 2 See also ‘‘Euroscettico? No, voglio un’Europa leggera’’, Corriere della Sera, 9 January 2002. 3 For commentary on the appointment see: ‘Ruggiero, una feluca che piace a tutti’ and ‘Finisce l’era Dini, novita` in vista alla Farnesina’, Corriere della Sera, 11 June 2001. 4 For commentary on the resignation see: ‘L’Europa ha ricevuto ieri sera da Roma...’ and ‘Berlusconi si insedia alla Farnesina - ora si cambia’, Corriere della Sera, 6 January 2002 and 7 January 2002. 5 References here and elsewhere are to documents found of the website of the Convention: amendments can be accessed from links at http://european-convention.eu.int/amendemTrait.asp?lang=EN (accessed 10 July 2004). 6 For example, on immigration itself, there was a complex internal argument about voting rights for immigrants, which came to a head when the Alleanza Nazionale promoted legislation, which the League found distasteful, but which Berlusconi found it difficult to oppose since 60% of Italians supported it, giving immigrants voting rights in local elections. It was clearly important that the government retained as much leeway as possible for itself in this area. See ‘An rilancia gli stranieri potranno anche essere eletti’, Corriere della Sera, 15 October 2003, and other articles around this period. Also Hine (2000). 7 Note, however, that in the Convention’s endgame, where these important institutional issues were concluded, Fini held back from advancing a distinctive Italian government position, ostensibly to support the Praesidium, but also to enhance the Italian government’s position as honest broker in the approaching IGC (Fini, 2003).
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