Italy from Crisis to Crisis

Matthew Evangelista is President White Professor of History and Political Science and former Chair of the Department of Government at Cornell University, New York, USA.

• Part I: Introduction1. Italy in Crisis: Eppur si muove [Matthew Evangelista]Part II: The Political-economic Nexus2. The Canary in the Coal Mine: Movements, Parties, and Populists in the Italian Crises [Sidney Tarrow]3. Disembedding the Italian Economy? Four Trajectories of Structural Reform [Jonathan Hopkin and Julia Lynch]4. The Trickle Down of Corruption: Italy, Mafia, and the Crisis of Legality [Fabio Armao]Part III: Foreign, Energy, and Security Policy5. Italian Foreign Policy after the Cold War: Enduring Crisis and the Limits of a Post-ideological Foreign Policy [Elisabetta Brighi]6. Running in Chains: The Transformation of Italian Defense Policy [Fabrizio Coticchia]7. Between Shocks and Crises: Changes in Italian Energy Policies from the Cold War to Today [Elisabetta Bini]Part IV: Societal Change and Adaptation8. Where Have All the Young People Gone? Generations, Family, and Work in Italy [Adele Lebano] 9. An Italian "Integration Crisis": The Role of the State and Political Actors in Excluding Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities [Teresa M. Cappiali]10. Va pensiero: The Evolution of Italy's Information Society [Giampiero Giacomello]11. Crisis and Improvisation?: A Historical Meditation on Italian Post-war Political Development [Mabel Berezin]12. The Italian Crisis in Comparative Perspective [Kenneth Roberts]

‘The great national sport for the Italians for a century and a half has been complaining about their condition. Foreign observers have often encouraged this sport with critical narratives on Italy and Italians. The value of the most qualified comparative analysis is to reject this sport and to look at Italy for what it is, comparing it with the experiences of other countries. After the extraordinary economic and democratic miracle of the post-war era, since the 1970s Italy has taken a long break, but it hasn’t stopped. This book brings together a team of authoritative scholars who conduct a wide-ranging, accurate, and intriguing exploration of the peninsula’s society, economy, and politics of the last quarter century. What the work shows is a country undergoing profound change: Italy has changed and is still changing. It changes, after all, as the world around it changes, in some respects for the better, in some for the worse. But it changes. Isn’t it time to file away the idea of a crisis without a break?’ - Alfio Mastropaolo, University of Torino, Italy.‘Other parts of the world, not least Italy, have often been viewed as "not normal" or idiosyncratic relative to an Anglo-American norm of socio-political stability and maturity. The model has recently suffered some obvious blows on home turf that thereby draw attention to its longstanding insufficiency. This welcome volume shows how useful and limited a crisis motif can be in understanding recent Italian history without recourse to dubious role models.’ - John Agnew, UCLA, USA.‘With a cross-disciplinary approach and within a comparative perspective, this important volume helps us to understand the effects of the neoliberal crisis as it interacts with long lasting and multifarious crises.’ - Donatella della Porta, European University Institute, Italy.