IkeBrogi and Italy Ike and Italy: The Eisenhower Administration and Italy’s “Neo-Atlanticist” Agenda ✣ ecent scholarship has conªrmed that the major West European countriesR played a vital role in shaping the international system after World War II. Even the diplomacy of the much berated French Fourth Republic has now been redeemed.1 This article examines the extent to which Italy sought to improve its international position during a crucial phase of the Cold War. It also considers how the United States exploited Italy’s international political ambitions. Conventional wisdom holds that Italian leaders after World War II sur- rendered almost all of their leeway in foreign policy to Italy’s European and Atlantic partners. Italy’s humiliating defeat in the war, the task of economic reconstruction, the country’s deep political divisions, and the long record of Italy’s subordination to the great powers in Europe all posed formidable ob- stacles to any dream of diplomatic prominence. Even after an economic re- covery took hold in the 1950s, Italy’s inºuence in world politics was less than its demographic and economic size would have implied. Italy’s faction-ridden political elites, the traditional argument goes, ensured that the country always subordinated its foreign policy to domestic concerns. As an American politi- cal analyst, Norman Kogan, put it in 1957, “the key objective of Italian For- eign Policy is to protect the domestic social structure from internal dangers.” This tendency allegedly induced Italian leaders to defer to the United States, which they regarded as the best guardian of their country’s internal stability and perhaps even of their own political ambitions. In short, traditional ac- counts portray Italy as the quintessential client state.2 1. See William I. Hitchcock, France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Eu- rope, 1944–1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 2. Norman Kogan, The Politics of Italian Foreign Policy (New York: Praeger, 1963), p. 136. The book originated from a study conducted in coordination with the State Department in 1957. See also Frederic Spotts and Theodore Wieser, Italy, A Difªcult Democracy: A Survey of Italian Politics (Cam- Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 4, No. 3, Summer 2002, pp. 5–35 © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 5 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152039702320201058 by guest on 27 September 2021 Brogi A historical lack of self-assertion or initiative does not mean, however, that the Italian people and their leaders have not cared about their country’s international position. As Frederic Spotts and Theodor Wieser have observed, “Italians have a keen sense of national pride and are extremely sensitive about the status accorded their country by others.” But the gap between this obses- sion with rank and the capacity or willingness to assume a commensurate role has been wider in Italy than in other West European countries. Rome’s pur- suit of prestige has thus appeared an end in itself, a hollow claim to be present at great-power summits, without having to make any relevant contributions to those summits. Former U.S. national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger has described this phenomenon with biting sarcasm in his memoirs. Each ofªcial visit to Italy, he wrote, left me with the impression that its primary purpose was fulªlled by our arrival at the airport. This symbolized that the United States took Italy seriously; it pro- duced photographic evidence that Italian leaders were being consulted. ...One sometimes could not avoid the impression that to discuss international affairs with their foreign minister was to risk boring him.3 This anecdote reºects only a half-truth. Despite the Italian government’s care for appearances, its preoccupation with domestic concerns, and its staunch loyalty to American leadership, Italy has not been as fatalistically sub- missive as often portrayed. At crucial times during the Cold War, Rome set its own agenda in international affairs, and its manipulation of American leader- ship sometimes bordered on dissent. Recent scholarship has indeed begun to restore Italy to the narrative of Cold War history. The country’s success in achieving—and, as some would say, in actively pursuing—strategic and eco- nomic interests through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European integration has been reevaluated. Yet most accounts continue to privilege the “hard power” dimension of that narrative, leaving the impression that Italy’s inºuence at the great-power level remained quite negligible.4 bridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986), ch. 13; Primo Vannicelli, Italy, NATO and the Euro- pean Community: The Interplay of Foreign and Domestic Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Center for International Affairs, 1974); and Robert V. Fisher, Foreign Policy as Function of Party Politics: Italy, the Atlantic Alliance and the Opening to the Left, 1953–1962 (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1995). 3. Spotts and Wieser, Italy, A Difªcult Democracy, pp. 263–268. For the distinction between rank and role, see Carlo Maria Santoro, La politica estera di una media potenza: L’Italia dall’Unitá ad oggi (Bolo- gna: Il Mulino, 1991), pp. 73–95; and Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1979), pp. 101–102. 4. See esp. Ennio Di Nolfo, “Italia e Stati Uniti: Un’alleanza diseguale,” Storia delle relazioni internazionali, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1990), pp. 3–28; Pietro Pastorelli, La politica estera italiana del secondo dopoguerra (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987); Roberto Gaja, L’Italia nel mondo bipolare, 1943–91 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991); David W. Ellwood “Italy, Europe and the Cold War: The Politics and Economics of Limited Sovereignty,” in Christopher Duggan and Christopher Wagstaff, eds., Italy in the Cold War: 6 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152039702320201058 by guest on 27 September 2021 Ike and Italy It remains to be determined how much the elements of “soft power” helped improve Italy’s international position. A country’s “soft power,” as Jo- seph Nye characterizes it, is “the ability to achieve goals through attraction rather than coercion.” Soft power, Nye adds, “rests on the appeal of one’s ideas or culture or the ability to set the agenda through standards and institutions that shape the preferences of others.”5 Italian leaders sought to rely on those qualities by invoking Italy’s intellectual traditions and whatever diplomatic re- sources they could muster as substitutes for military and economic strength, or “hard power.” Even their craving for image, or bella ªgura, was not always casual and hollow. Appearances did matter and helped to increase Italy’s inter- national leverage. One is tempted to say that Rome achieved this result despite the tendency of its leaders to use their few diplomatic initiatives largely for domestic purposes. The same diplomacy that was motivated by petty political squabbles sometimes evolved into a signiªcant, if not always coherent, foreign policy. Italy conducted its most determined efforts in international affairs during the late 1950s. Rome’s foreign policy of that era, known as “Neo- Atlanticism,” revolved around a few clear objectives that remained at the heart of contemporary Italy’s international conduct: détente in the Mediterranean region, which could produce commercial opportunities for trade with the Near East and for a stronger position within the emerging European Eco- nomic Community (EEC); increased economic cooperation within NATO; and parity of status with the other major NATO European allies—Great Brit- ain, France, and Germany. The pursuit of rank was a prerequisite for the other goals. Gaining acceptance and respect from the other powers, Italian leaders believed, would allow Italy to advance its international agenda. In this regard the Italians’ idea of prestige resembled that of the French, especially af- Politics, Culture and Society 1948–58 (Oxford: Berg, 1995), pp. 25–46; Antonio Varsori, “Italy’s Policy towards European Integration, 1947–58,” in Duggan and Wagstaff, eds., Italy in the Cold War, 47–66; Timothy E. Smith, The United States, Italy and NATO, 1947–1952 (London: Macmillan, 1991); Mario Del Pero, L’alleato scomodo: Gli USA e la Dc negli anni del centrismo (1948–1955) (Rome: Carocci, 2001); Leopoldo Nuti, Gli Stati Uniti e l’apertura a sinistra: Importanza e limiti della presenza americana in Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1999); Alessandro Brogi, L’Italia e l’egemonia americana nel Mediterraneo (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996); several articles on Italy in Joseph Becker and Franz Knipping, eds., Power in Europe? Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy in a Postwar World, 1945–1950 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986); and Ennio Di Nolfo, ed., Power in Europe? Great Brit- ain, France, Germany and Italy, and the Origins of the EEC, 1952–1957 (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1992). See also Leopoldo Nuti, “Commitment to NATO and Domestic Politics: The Italian Case and Some Comparative Remarks,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 7, No. 3 (November 1998), pp. 361–377. 5. Quoted in Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Power and Interdependence in the Informa- tion Age,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 77, No. 5 (September–October 1998), p. 86. The best treatment of this thesis is in Joseph S. Nye Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 7 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152039702320201058 by guest on 27 September 2021 Brogi ter Charles de Gaulle’s return to leadership in 1958. The appearance of power was supposed to precede and even expedite the full accumulation of it. It is also important to verify how reciprocal the manipulation of status was between Italy and the United States.