Reasserting (middle) power by looking southwards: Italy’s policy towards Africa

ABSTRACT

In 2015, the Prime Minister Matteo Renzi launched a new Italian agenda for Africa. Until then Italian involvement in African affairs had been almost exclusively restricted to multilateral initiatives. Through its new pro-active approach, Italy has engaged with the African countries through a dynamic and multi-layered partnership aimed at fostering peace, stability, economic growth and human development on the continent. Within this framework, Italy intended to go beyond the traditional ‘donor-beneficiary’ relationship to build a new partnership model centred around the concept of sharing. The article argues that the need to preserve or at least reinforce its international status as a middle-ranking power has been one of the factors that led Italy to relaunch its involvement in Africa. Nevertheless, statements of intent aside, Italian foreign policy is lagging behind other extra-regional players operating on the continent. Indeed, despite Italy’s natural geographical projection towards the South, its many structural weaknesses and lack of a coherent foreign policy make it a declining middle-ranking power in the international arena, able to operate in Africa, even now, only within the framework of multilateral initiatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Middle-ranking power
• Italy
• Africa
• cooperation
• security

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See for example, (Dietz et al. 2011; Panda 2011; Wade 2011; de Graaff, Ten Brink, and Parmar 2020; Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Hofmann 2020).

2. See, for example, Ravenhill (1998), Behringer (2005), Wang and French (2013), Carr (2014) and Holbraad (1984).

3. See, for example, Wight (2002), Farrell, Rynning, and Terriff (2013), Penttilä (2013), Wenger and Daniel (2010), Rhodes (2004) and Woods (2010).

4. See, for example, Santoro (1991), Andreatta (2001), Valigi (2010), De Leonardis (2011), Verbeek and Giacomello (2011), Romero (2016) and Siddi (2019).

5. Such parameters include Italy’s membership of the G7, its inclusion in the EU trio and the NATO Quint, and the size of its economy (8° GDP-2019). Concerning military capabilities, according to the Global Firepower Index (2020), Italy is ranked twelfth out of 138, and thirteenth in terms of military expenditure according to the SIPRI Index (2019).

6. (Massarenti 2015; Zanfagna 2016).

7. Italy has been involved in several missions including the NATO-led ‘Ocean Shield’ operation or the EU-led EUCAP ‘Nestor’, EUNAVFOR ‘Atalanta’ and EUTM-Somalia missions.

8. OECD data, DAC member profile: Italy. URL: https://www.oecd.org/dac/italy.htm

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giuseppe Dentice

Dr. Giuseppe Dentice is head of the MENA Desk at the Center for International Studies (CeSI), a teaching assistant in ‘History of Civilisations and Political Cultures’ and an Associate Research Fellow at the Middle East and North Africa Centre of the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI). His focus of analysis and research covers geopolitical and security issues in the MENA region with a focus on Egypt, Israel and the Gulf monarchies, and on socio-political transformations in the Greater Middle East. His latest work includes, ‘Israel and Quad Plus. A Pivot to Asia and through the Indian Ocean’, in The Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs (JIPA) and (with Federico Donelli) ‘Fluctuating Saudi and Emirati Alignment Behaviours in the Horn of Africa’, The International Spectator.

Federico Donelli

Dr. Federico Donelli is postdoctoral research fellow in International Relations at the University of Genoa, Department of Political Sciences, where he teaches the politics of the Middle East. His research fields have covered international politics and security studies of the Middle East and Eastern Africa, focusing on the foreign policy of the different players. Currently he is working on the process of militarization in the Red Sea and the growing engagement of the Middle Eastern states in the region. His latest work includes, ‘Crossing Roads: Middle East’s security engagement in the Horn of Africa’ in Global Change, Peace & Security, ‘Asymmetric alliances and high polarity: evaluating regional security complexes in the Middle East and Horn of Africa’ in Third World Quarterly, and Turkey in Africa: Turkey’s strategic involvement in sub-Saharan Africa (I.B. Tauris, 2021).