The History of Contemporary Italy 1943-2019

A history of contemporary Italy from the collapse of dictator Mussolini to the present, placing this major Euro-Mediterranean country in a wider geo-political perspective. It looks at how Italian history and politics developed in relation to - and were shaped by - the international context, from the cold war and the NATO to the European integration process and the global challenges of 1989. It highlights all major events, structural limits, contradictions and conflicts influencing the Italian democracy and the political system up to today. This essentially shows a continuous tension between “stabilization” and “conflict”, between the possible innovative evolution of a representative and mass democracy and the constraints of a political system conditioned by structural limits and old contradictions. In many ways, the monograph encounters Italy’s identities, the fights for “inclusion” and “participation”, and its political parties and collective narratives – including the establishing of new democratic forces, the competition between the center right and the center left. This has in turn influenced the choices and existences of generations of Italians over seventy years