In quest of a Euro-Mediterranean equilibrium. Italy, the European Political Cooperation, and the Middle East-North Africa (1970-1975)

This PhD thesis, situated at the intersection of the history of Italian foreign policy and the history of European integration, explores Italy’s role and contribution to the early Mediterranean initiatives undertaken by the European Political Cooperation (EPC) between 1970 and 1975, with a specific focus on the Middle East-North Africa region. Leveraging the EPC framework - i.e., an intergovernmental mechanism of foreign policy consultation and coordination among the Member States of the European Community (EC), established in 1970 - this study seeks to address a peculiar historiographical interpretative issue for the period under scrutiny, namely, the interaction between the Mediterranean and European “vocations” within the foreign policy of Republican Italy. As such, it delves into how these two dimensions intertwine, sometimes reconcile, and at other times clash - and, consequently, how this dialectic was influenced by the evolution of the European integration process, the international backdrop of the Cold War, and Italy’s dual capacity as both a European and Mediterranean actor. To this end, three initiatives are considered, which arguably came to represent an embryonic Mediterranean component of the EC’s external action: the EPC debates and declarative initiatives regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD), and the EPC preliminary negotiations on the Mediterranean Chapter of the Helsinki Final Act within the framework of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). On a broader level, the dissertation further seeks to assess Italy’s role in defining a cohesive European external actorness at a time when the Community was making its earliest attempt to define and project a distinctive identity in the international arena.