Europe, the USA and the ‘policy of the pendulum’: the importance of foreign policy paradigms in the foreign policy of Italy (1989–2005)

At the turn of the 20th century, after a few decades of turbulence, Italian foreign policy oscillated between two poles. On the one hand was the alliance with the rising power of the time, Germany, which Italy signed in 1882 and which had been strongly advocated at home by conservatives to both counter French influence and contain democratic sentiments. On the other was the informal alignment with England and France, the soon-to-be Entente Powers, which materialized after the rapprochement of 1902–1903, and promised to be especially advantageous in colonial matters. Until the breakout of the First World War (and indeed a few months into the war), Italy entertained good relations with both alignments, despite the obvious, mounting tension between Germany and England. Curiously, Italy’s multiple diplomatic allegiances were simply considered ‘complementary’ at the time, with Italy supposedly gaining security on the continent (thanks to the Triple Alliance) and in the Mediterranean (thanks to the Entente). It took the crisis of July 1914 to bring Rome’s diplomatic oscillation to an end, and make many realize how contradictory and ill-advised this ambivalent policy had been. Writing in the 1980s, the former Italian Ambassador to Washington Rinaldo Petrignani compared the wavering, oscillatory behaviour of liberal Italy’s foreign policy to the trajectory of a pendulum, periodically swinging from proFrench/English to pro-German/Austrian policies. To explain this curious trajectory, Petrignani considers international and geopolitical factors, as well as domestic issues, but finally settles for a third explanation which echoes Federico Chabod’s own positions, arguing that it was the alternation of pro-French and proGerman ideas, more than anything else, which accounted for the swinging from one alignment to the other. Strategic and domestic factors were of course important, but ideas were just as much, if not more, to explain Italy’s oscillatory foreign policy.