Quaglia, Lucia

Dr. Lucia Quaglia is Lecturer at the University of Bristol. She earned her doctorate at Sussex University. She has been a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman for Advanced Studies, European University Institute.

Italy and the Economic and Monetary Union

2006 0-7734-5768-2
This book analyzes Italy’s policy toward European monetary integration from the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957 to the final stage of Economic and Monetary Union in 1999 and the first five years thereafter. It is argued that “ideas,” in the form of “policy paradigms,” are crucial in framing member states’ trajectories in the European Union (EU) and they are therefore core components of the process of Europeanization. Policy paradigms need to be contextualized by considering the evolution of domestic institutions.

According to the foreign policy paradigm that prevailed in Italy from the Second World War until the late 1990s, “Europe” has been of paramount priority, which has been associated with its political, economic and cultural modernization. The economic policy paradigm, instead, has shifted from Keynesian economics in the 1960s and 1970s to the monetarist-inspired, stability-oriented paradigm of the 1980s and 1990s. The pro-European foreign policy paradigm explains why Italian policymakers decided to join all the European monetary initiatives, whereas the economic paradigm, which, for most of the time, was far apart from the stability-oriented paradigm embedded in European monetary regimes, explains Italy’s difficult adaptation. The book concludes by pointing out that the foreign policy paradigm has begun to shift since the late 1990s.