For a long time, Italy struggled with a fundamental discrepancy between its ambition to be considered one of the great powers of Europe and its quite meager capabilities. Victory in World War I seemed for a brief time to give it status as a major player, but fascism proved to be the ultimate example of the tragic contradiction between goals and resources.
Having learned the hard way, post-1945 Italy has been a fundamentally peaceful, constructive actor in Europe and the world – a strong advocate of multilateralism, the UN system, NATO, and the European project. At the same time, it was …read more