IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/stpchp/978-1-4614-1502-2_7.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Leading Governments and Unwilling Legislators: The European Union and the Italian Law Making (1987–2006)

In: The Europeanization of Domestic Legislatures

Author

Listed:
  • Enrico Borghetto

    (Universitá degli Studi di Milano)

  • Marco Giuliani

    (Universitá degli Studi di Milano)

  • Francesco Zucchini

    (Universitá degli Studi di Milano)

Abstract

If there is some truth in the old saying that “you don’t marry someone you can live with but rather the one that you cannot live without,” one should not be too surprised by the firm resolve of the Italians (both at the elite and mass levels) to tie their country’s destiny to a strong and stable European Union. For most of its early Republican history, Italy’s governing coalitions considered European membership a sort of “insurance against the threat of democratic breakdown” (Cotta 1992, p.210) posed by extremist parties. Italy’s participation in the European community as one of the founding members and the rising interdependence linking the major capitals in Western Europe represented a political buttress upon which the major pro-European political forces (Christian Democratic, Socialist and Liberal) consolidated their electoral support. The symbolic force of Europe did not lose its raison d’être even after the “normalization” of the Communist party and its gradual acceptance of the principles underpinning European integration.

Suggested Citation

  • Enrico Borghetto & Marco Giuliani & Francesco Zucchini, 2012. "Leading Governments and Unwilling Legislators: The European Union and the Italian Law Making (1987–2006)," Studies in Public Choice, in: Sylvain Brouard & Olivier Costa & Thomas König (ed.), The Europeanization of Domestic Legislatures, chapter 0, pages 109-130, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:stpchp:978-1-4614-1502-2_7
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-1502-2_7
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:stpchp:978-1-4614-1502-2_7. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.