Cold War Republic: The 'External Constraint' in Italy During the 1970s

This chapter examines the relationship between Italian politics and the Cold War in the 1970s. It assumes that the close connection between the international and domestic spheres in Italy makes it an extremely significant case-study of how, despite global changes, the shape of the Cold War lasted in Europe—and thus also helps us to appreciate Europe’s particular place in the Cold War. By bringing into the picture both sides of the national and international scenes, it argues that developments in this decade—significant and tumultuous as they were—did not fundamentally change the pattern of political relations between Italy and the Cold War order which had been established in the aftermath of the Second World War. While the ‘external constraint’ prolonged an already harmful division of the political nation, it was to provide a structure to domestic politics until the end of the Cold War itself. However, this solution was hardly a sustainable one, and it did not really establish a new legitimacy, a fact which later became obvious when the country’s political system collapsed in the early 1990s, soon after the end of the Cold War—a unique development in Western Europe.

This article examines the relationship between Italian politics and the Cold War in the 1970s. It assumes that the close interconnection between the international and domestic spheres in Italy makes it an extremely significant case study of how the shape of the Cold War lasted in Europe despite global changes – and thus also helps us to appreciate Europe’s particular place in the Cold War. By bringing into the picture both sides of the national and international scene, it argues that developments in this decade - significant and tumultuous as they were - did not fundamentally change the pattern of political relations between Italy and the Cold War order that had been established in the aftermath of the Second World War.