Recent anti-discrimination campaigns by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) activists in Italy have increased the visibility of these communities and individuals, but have not resulted in the desired improvements to legislation. In light of this situation, this article analyses modalities of ‘visibility’ as defined and desired by the active LGBT community in Turin, host city for National Pride 2006. The Pride committee scheduled an unprecedentedly ‘visible’ year-long programme of consciousness-raising and cultural events that went far beyond the more usual one-day march. Drawing on a series of interviews with members of the committee and of the lesbian community conducted in Turin in March and June 2006, the discussion explores social, cultural and political visibility in this LGBT community as it hosted National Pride.

Recent developments, especially the outcome of the 2008 election, appear to point to the definitive sidelining of centrism in Italian politics. In reality, it remains significant – not least because of the opportunities for influence all bipolar systems give to parties not of the left or right, and because of the possible consequences of reassessments of centrism's historical significance. The term itself has been used to denote a kind of political outlook or ideology and, consequently, a kind of political strategy. A number of party and elite-level strategies called centrist are identified; one of these – transformism – has roots that stretch back at least to the nineteenth century and is not specifically Italian. Transformism has been variously interpreted. Against this background, the articles in this special issue together evaluate the historical importance of centrism and its current significance for Italian politics. As a governing strategy, centrism is practiced differently now than in the past, but it continues to be practiced.

Following the end of the Cold War, Italy took on greater responsibilities in dealing with the increased challenges to international security, especially in its neighbourhood. The aim of this special issue of the journal Modern Italy is to understand to what extent Italy has been successful in developing a third circle in its foreign policy beyond the two traditional lodestars, Atlanticism and Europeanism; or whether Italy's competence in the Mediterranean has been strategically used to improve its relationship with the United States or its position within the European Union.

After outlining the trends of Italian Mediterranean politics, this article examines the relationship between Italy and the Maghreb region. As a result of its central geographic position, acting as a natural bridge between Europe and Africa, Italy is undoubtedly more exposed and vulnerable than other countries to any critical developments in the political and economic situation of this area, so it is understandable that it occupies an increasingly important position in Italian foreign policy. Italy has especially considered it in its national interest to make it a specific, high priority to contribute to stabilising this region through multilateral and bilateral initiatives aimed at reinforcing political dialogue and economic cooperation with the coastal countries on the southern shore of the Mediterranean. The aim has been to create a safety net around Italian maritime borders against the risks posed by an uncontrolled increase in migration (to which Italy is more exposed than other countries), the instability of North African energy resources and Islamist terrorists infiltrating Italian territory. Apart from examining the concerns regarding the Maghreb region that have become crucially important for Italian national interests (security, immigration, development, energy), the article analyses the salient elements of bilateral relations between Italy and the Maghreb countries, particularly Libya.

In 2003, a presidential decree enacted legislation guaranteeing Italian voters overseas the right to postal voting as well as parliamentary representation within their respective electoral constituency. The electoral weight of the overseas-based constituent had a remarkable effect on the 2006 election results. In the tightest vote in the Republic's history, the vote of overseas Italians, which was one of the decisive features of the election, helped provide the winning centre-left coalition with a slender majority in the Senate. Election results notwithstanding, the question of whether to grant the vote to Italians overseas has faced challenges of a procedural, normative and political nature. What may have been initially seen as a democratic right may well be cast aside as it poses challenges to overseas electoral relationships with the Italian national polity, Italian citizenship and multinational allegiances, diasporic identity, electoral participation and political representation in homeland political institutions. The overseas vote for Italians may be contested further in the near future, which could translate into a radical rethink of its validity and democratic global extension.

According to a strong and lasting prejudice, which has recently been expressed with renewed vigour, the optimum form of democracy is bipolar. The bipolar pattern, however, is not the only one possible. If the relevant conditions are in place, other patterns are possible, such as the formation of government majorities through a convergence of ‘centrist’ and intermediate parties. This pattern is not free from problems, and one of the main issues of debate in the Italian case, with its long tradition of centrist governments, is over the apparent poor functionality of the party system. The functioning of a party system, however, depends on its circumstances, and a centrist party system can function just as well as its bipolar counterpart. Indeed, it is questionable whether Italy has gained from its new bipolar structure and whether the new structure will endure.

Within the wider attempt to transform Italian communities abroad into Fascist colonies, the Italian Fasci Abroad sought to build nationalist propaganda in the Mediterranean. The irredentist activities and the propaganda of the Fasci in Malta alarmed the British governors on the island, the British government and MI5. This article analyses the cultural conflict organised in Maltese schools, bookshops and universities by the Italian nationalists against the British protectorate–a conflict the British suspected could be followed by military activity, in particular when Italy began building its empire in Ethiopia. The nationalist offensive was supported in the 1920s and, more vigorously, in the 1930s by the Fasci, the Italian consulate on the island and, ultimately, the Italian government. Not even the Second World War and the bombing of Malta by the Italian air force concluded the conflict between Italian and British imperialism on the island.

Focusing on Italy's Middle East policies under the second Berlusconi (2001–2006) and the second Prodi (2006–2008) governments, this article assesses the manner and extent to which the observed foreign policy shifts between the two governments can be explained in terms of the rebalancing between a ‘Europeanist’ and a transatlantic orientation. Arguing that Rome's policy towards the Middle East hinges less on Italy's specific interests and objectives in the region and more on whether the preference of the government in power is to foster closer ties to the United States or concentrate on the European Union, the analysis highlights how these swings of the pendulum along the EU–US axis are inextricably linked to a number of underlying structural weaknesses of Rome's foreign policy. In particular, the oscillations can be explained by the prevalence of short-term political (and domestic) considerations and the absence of long-term, substantive political strategies, or, in short, by the phenomenon of ‘politics without policy’ that often characterises Italy's foreign policy.

Now that the fifteenth legislature has come to an end, it is appropriate to assess the performance of the government whose fall was responsible for this event, as well as the coalition's significance for the trajectory of Italian politics generally. The four articles that follow this one together initiate the task, exploring performance from an institutional and policy-making point of view. This article suggests four criteria for evaluating the performance of any government and offers a brief initial ‘summary report’ in terms of them – paying special attention to implementation of the programme and to communications. Bearing in mind the structural conditions in which it had to work, the government had some notable achievements to its credit, but these same conditions undermined it by opening up an unbridgeable gap between performance and popular perceptions of performance.

It is widely accepted, among political scientists at least, that Italy's so-called ‘First Republic’ (c.1946–1994) had a tripolar party system while the ‘Second Republic’ has had, at least until 2008, a fragmented bipolar one. A superior conceptualisation of the party system of the ‘First Republic’ was provided by Paolo Farneti, and it remains relevant both for a better understanding of the current party system and for exploring party system dynamics, particularly the relationship between structure and agency in such dynamics. Farneti synthesised Sartori's 1976 analysis of tripolar mechanics with Galli's equally famous analysis of the party system (as one of ‘imperfect bipartism’) in terms of the coexistence of a subordinate bipolar dynamic and a dominant tripolar one. This article argues that the dynamics of the party system in the ‘Second Republic’, or at least the transition to it, can be conceptualised in terms of a dominant bipolar dynamic and a subordinate, tripolar one. This latter dynamic is significant, both empirically and theoretically, despite being subordinate.

This article reviews Italy's role in the various phases of the European Union's policy towards the Mediterranean: the ad hoc policy of the 1950s and 1960s, the Global Mediterranean Policy developed in the 1970s, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership agreed in Barcelona in 1995, the European Neighbourhood Policy signed in 2003, the proposal launched by French president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2006 for a Mediterranean Union. The overall argument is that the various Italian governments have carried out an ambivalent and often reactive policy: on the one hand, they have consistently tried to promote a Mediterranean dimension in the European Union, though without upsetting the United States; on the other hand, they have limited the extension of trade privileges to exports from North Africa. While the end of the Cold War provided a new opportunity for Italy to play a more assertive role in the international arena, the two coalitions that have alternated in power have substantially failed to move the Mediterranean to the centre of Italy's and the European Union's external policy. A partial change of attitude – yet a reactive policy – emerged under the second Prodi Government, when Italy and Spain became close allies in an attempt to counter-balance the new activist policy of Sarkozy.

This article analyses the competition strategies adopted by the Christian Democratic (DC) and post-Christian Democratic (post-DC) parties after the electoral reforms of 1993 and 2005. Four main aspects are considered: the significance of cultural (ideological and cognitive) factors in the DC's exit from the political stage; the need to adapt post-DC strategy to bipolarism and the nostalgia for an autonomous centre; the nature and geography of the post-DC vote; and the attitudes of the middle-level elites of the three principal post-DC parties (the DL, the UDEUR and the UDC) vis-à-vis the competitive and strategic decisions they had to make. The article reaches the following conclusions: the post-DC parties share the same cultural orientations and have similar politico-electoral characteristics (a confessional background, the relevance of patronage networks and personalistic vote mobilisation); all three parties adapted, in different ways and with different degrees of success, to the new structure of coalitional bipolarism in the decade 1996–2006; and both research data on the main post-DC parties’ national congress delegates and the evolution of their electoral strategies on the eve of the 2008 elections show that the post-Christian Democrats felt more at home in the centre-left alignment, together with the post-communist PDS-DS, than in the centre-right alignment led by Berlusconi.

This article examines whether Italian foreign policy has undergone significant and substantial changes under the second Prodi government. The first part identifies the variables affecting continuity and change in a country's foreign policy and addresses the question of the conditions under which one can expect changes as a result of a change in government, and the conditions under which continuity is instead more likely. The second part looks at the second Prodi government's foreign policy on a number of topical issues, most of which were also faced by the Berlusconi government, to see to what extent the Prodi government's approach to foreign policy indeed changed from that of its predecessor. The article concludes that the Prodi government did not change Italian foreign policy in any substantial manner; differences existed only in the way the new government occasionally chose to present and justify its policies publicly.

There are few issues that better illustrate the unresolved condition of the Italian right in the postwar period (neo-fascist in identity, democratic from necessity) than that of its stance on Israel, the Jews and Zionism. In the aftermath of the fall of fascism, the right had no difficulty in combining the defence of anti-Jewishness with domestic anti-anti-fascist policies and a foreign policy that was hostile towards the ‘allies’ of 1940–1945. Yet as soon as political competition became oriented around pro- and anti-communism, the right was, over time, driven to play down the recollections of fascism and specifically its antipathy towards Israel, not to mention its anti-Zionism. The exacerbation of the Middle East problem and the right's foreign policy response to it led to a further evolution in its stance, eventually culminating in a definitive end to any ambivalence on the issue with the birth of the ‘National Alliance’. From that point onwards, anti-Zionism found support only in the utterances of neo-Nazi skinheads and the banners of rowdy fans at the ‘northern end’ of football stadia.

Since the early 1990s Italy has been engaged in promoting peace and stability in the Balkans with a growing amount of political, economic and military resources. At the beginning of the process of Yugoslav dissolution, the Italian polity was torn apart by a set of political and financial scandals that prevented the development of an assertive foreign policy. Over time, however, Italy was able to play a more relevant and constructive role. This article traces Italy's policy towards the Balkans from its modest beginnings to the present day, focusing on four key political/economic events: the war in Bosnia, the Telekom Serbia affair, the war in Kosovo and the support given to the nascent Albanian democracy. Generally speaking, Italy has provided a positive, although modest, contribution to bringing peace and stability to the region.

This article seeks to explain the Iraq policy of Silvio Berlusconi's second government. Why did Berlusconi's Government declare ‘non-belligerency’ when the American-led war with Iraq began in March 2003? Why did the Government send a mission of 3,000 Italian troops to Iraq in April 2003? Why did Berlusconi announce the progressive withdrawal of that contingent in March 2005? This article recognises the Berlusconi Government's ideologically-rooted pro-American tendencies, but draws on liberal international relations theory to stress the importance of the electoral motive to explain the timing and nature of the Government's decisions. As the Italian public was highly critical of the Iraq war, the Berlusconi Government could not actively participate in the war; it had to frame the deployment as a peace mission and had to begin withdrawing Italian troops before Iraq was stable and secure.

Within a few months of the second Prodi government taking office in 2006, the Interior Minister, Giuliano Amato, reignited the ongoing debate on immigration, social integration, nationality and citizenship in Italy by launching the government's proposed reform of the law on citizenship. This article examines the implications of the reform and the debate it has provoked among the political parties in Italy in the context of the broader political discussion that has developed in Italy since the 1990s regarding immigration control, social integration and multiculturalism. The article sheds light on the way in which themes such as ‘multiculturalism’, ‘integration’ and ‘citizenship’ are conceptualised by political actors in Italy, and the way in which discussion of these themes relates to the broader political strategies and trajectories followed by these actors.

In the last decade, in spite of a large number of parties taking part in elections, the Italian party system has shown an increasing simplification in the programmatic supply, with two large coalitions showing a process of convergence of their policy platforms. This article shows that on the crucial themes characterising the confrontation between neo-liberalism versus regulated capitalism, the distance between the two coalitions has progressively reduced. The theory of the cartel party has predicted convergence in the policy positions of parties. Thus, the article will attempt to test the validity of this theory and of the predicted consequences on the Italian case. For this purpose, a longitudinal analysis will be presented grounded on party manifestos for the Italian general elections.