This introductory article discusses the circumstances under which Italy manages to forge ‘national preferences’ and push them through the European policy-making process. Drawing from the analysis of several policy areas, it concludes that Italy plays a major policy-making role, particularly when it acts as mediator between large countries and small- and medium-sized ones, and when it argues its case according to policy- and EU-appropriate logics. While Italy may not have it ‘its way’ all the time (as no member-state does), it still manages to influence the EU policy-making process more frequently and more significantly than the literature has so far conceded.

The role of Italy in the reform process of the regulations concerning EU regional policy has traditionally been weak. Since 1998, however, Italian actors in Brussels started to play an increasingly more central role. Looking at the 1998 Regulation, we analyse the internal and external factors that explain this improved performance and conclude that this change might lead to an even more active and creative role being adopted by Italian institutional actors in the current negotiations which will lead to the reform of the regulation of the Structural Funds for 2007–13.

The creation of both a Ministry and a Department for equal opportunities has been Italy's main institutional response to EU pressures in the field of equal opportunities policy. Nevertheless, the impact of Italian negotiators in the EU depends not only on the institutional resources available to them, but also on the political credibility acquired by presenting well-defined and clear preferences during the bargaining process in the Council. This article considers how the Italian position was presented, and how successful it was, in two recently approved Directives, one decided by qualified majority vote, the other on a basis of unanimity. The aim of the analysis is to assess Italy's capacity to influence EU social affairs. Information was gathered by conducting qualitative interviews with the main political actors involved in the decision-making process at the national and European levels.

This article analyses the role of Italian (institutional and non-institutional) actors in the area of state aid to labour and industry, two particularly sensitive European policies. The comparison between two decisions—the one concerning state incentives for youth employment and the other concerning the double recapitalization of Alitalia—allows the author to conclude that Italian policy preferences are best promoted when a viable compromise solution is first reached domestically and then pushed through the Union, and when Italian actors manage to argue their case in EU-compatible terms.

Although it is considered among the ‘environmental laggard’ states of the Union, Italy proved able to perform a crucial role in the promotion of one of the basic principles of EU environmental and consumer policy, namely the precautionary principle. The Italian government was influential in promoting this principle in EU food safety policy, in particular in a 2000 Directive on genetically modified organisms. This picture is certainly not one-sided, as the weakness of the Italian government in influencing EU decision-makers in the case of the 2001 Cocoa Directive shows. The main factors that explain when Italy matters in the EU environmental and consumer policy process are the way interests are aggregated, the way the problem is framed and the types of channels exploited to affect the policy process.

The article looks at the role of Italy in the decision-making arena of the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), analysing the initiatives it put in place to address and influence the construction of a common defence. The article aims to explain the ability or inability of Italy to build up a consensus around its proposals. By studying two initiatives in the field of European defence and security, it seeks to determine the factors which resulted in the differing outcomes of Italian actions at the European level.

The Italian representatives in the Brussels Constitutional Convention played a greater role than expected. The Italians, who many thought would be destined to a role as pigmies in the Convention because of ideological differences and the personal mistrust they carried from their domestic arena, acted mostly as giants in the contributions they provided to the final text. The representatives of both the government and the opposition identified a series of points upon which they agreed and which were introduced in the final document. These positions, although not federalist, were much more advanced than those described as ‘intergovernmental’ or ‘confederal’. There were many reasons for this. The deliberative method adopted in the Convention probably helped this convergence. Certainly, the Italians wanted to keep open the dialogue with the main EU member-states at a moment when the war with Iraq was undermining it, and the Italian representatives in the Convention shared a pro-European attitude, while this attitude was being called into question in the domestic arena by the Berlusconi government.

This article asks why, despite their doubtful utility, the categories used in accounts of contemporary Italian politics are almost universally negative in character. It is suggested that at least part of the explanation has to do with the ontological and epistemological assumptions informing the accounts, together with the social circumstances that have given rise to their production. More fruitful, less uncritically negative analyses require the adoption of approaches informed by alternative ontologies and epistemologies, that is, interpretive approaches. These seek to account for social phenomena by rendering intelligible the meaningful action in which the latter are rooted and, as the example of corruption shows, yield less negative accounts by allowing researchers to imagine themselves acting, given similar circumstances, in ways similar to those they study.

This article shows how the latest research into Sicily's social and economic history calls into question certain well-established interpretations of the history of the family and its structures, the paradigm of Mediterranean honour, and the theory of familism. This new appraisal also highlights the major significance of the history of women and gender identity.