AT THE WATER¿S EDGE? ITALIAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND MILITARY OPERATIONS ABROAD

For various decades, scholars in the fields of International Relations (IR) and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) have neglected the relevance of political parties as crucial actors in the study of states’ foreign and security policy. However, recently, academic debate on the connection between parties and foreign policy has significantly grown along three lines: party contestation across ideological cleavages, the impact of coalition politics and junior coalition partners, and the constraining power of legislatives, also considered as aggregations of parties. Contributing to this flourishing research agenda, this PhD dissertation explores how Italian parties positioned and interacted on Military Operations Abroad (MOA) during the so-called “Second Republic” (1994-2013). In other words, it fundamentally aims to scrutinize and explain party support for MOAs in Italy. The relevance of the Italian case lies in the country’s extraordinary commitment to military interventions after the end of the Cold War and the relatively high extent of fragmentation in its party system. Through the use of quantitative and qualitative data and methods, this PhD thesis highlights a series of findings with considerable implications for the study of party politics of troop deployments in Italy and in other Western democracies. Among them, three deserve particular attention. First, in line with existing studies, the presence of a centrist and bipartisan consensus on this issue based on a shared humanitarian narrative is confirmed. Secondly, party contestation across the left-right axis is decisively affected by a number of domestic and external factors, namely party affiliation to the cabinet, law-making procedures and the international legitimation of the specific operation. Thirdly, the salience attributed to opposition to MOAs among radical parties diverges according to their ideological leaning: extreme left parties rooted their scepticism on a deeply entrenched pacifist sentiment while the far right and autonomist Lega Nord had a more instrumental approach to the issue.