› › Italy Europe The Left

Italy, Europe, The Left

Author : Vassilis Fouskas

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 249 pages

File Size : 44,95 MB

Release : 2018-12-20

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 0429836686

Get eBook

Book Description

Published in 1998. Was the Italian Communist Party (PCI) a typical Social Democratic party in tune with the programmatic principles of the Second International? What is the appropriate context within which the strategies of 'historic compromise' and Eurocommunism in the 1970s can be analyzed and understood? In what form and to what extent has the process of European integration and the crisis of Keynesianism contributed to the transformation of the party in 1989-91? What caused the collapse of the ruling political class of the First Italian Republic? Why did the transformed PCI, the PDS (Democratic Party of the Left), fail to lead the transition to the Second Italian Republic between 1992 and 1996? Is there any link between the party’s historical factions and the current divisions in the Italian Left? Is it possible to theorize and speculate upon these divisions? Italy, Europe, the Left seeks to answer these questions, debating conventional views and examining the extent to which the end of the Cold War has contributed to a redefinition of the Left’s identity in Italy and Europe. The exemplary methodological framework and the wider European perspective adopted throughout, make the book an indispensable reading in the field of Italian and European politics.



First They Took Rome

Author : David Broder

Publisher : Verso Books

Page : 225 pages

File Size : 13,12 MB

Release : 2020-07-14

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1786637618

Get eBook

Book Description

Italy’s political disaster under a microscope There is little that hasn’t gone wrong for Italy in the last three decades. Economic growth has flatlined, infrastructure has crumbled, and out-of-work youth find their futures stuck on hold. These woes have been reflected in the country’s politics, from Silvio Berlusconi’s scandals to the rise of the far right. Many commentators blame Italy’s malaise on cultural ills—pointing to the corruption of public life or a supposedly endemic backwardness. In this reading, Italy has failed to converge with the neoliberal reforms mounted by other European countries, leaving it to trail behind the rest of the world. First They Took Rome offers a different perspective: Italy isn’t failing to keep up with its international peers but farther along the same path of decline they are following. In the 1980s, Italy boasted the West’s strongest Communist Party; today, social solidarity is collapsing, working people feel ever more atomized, and democratic institutions grow increasingly hollow. Studying the rise of forces like Matteo Salvini’s Lega, this book shows how the populist right drew on a deep well of social despair, ignored by the liberal centre. Italy’s recent history is a warning from the future—the story of a collapse of public life that risks spreading across the West.



Mapping the West European Left

Author : Patrick Camiller

Publisher : Verso Books

Page : 265 pages

File Size : 18,11 MB

Release : 2020-05-05

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1789606934

Get eBook

Book Description

Organized as a series of tightly linked, comparative assessments, Mapping the West European Left provides a guide to the state of the left in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain. While all the essays are detailed historical compositions-setting recent crises and dilemmas in a longer perspective reaching back into the postwar settlement-they articulate original insights into the contemporary political conjuncture. Why did Swedish social democracy lose hegemony and direction while its Norwegian counterpart showed unexpected resilience? What was the background to the Danish rebellion against Maastricht? What are the prospects for the SPD and the Greens in post-unification Germany? Should the British Labour Party embrace electoral reform? What propelled the French Socialist Party from triumph to disaster? And why did the Italian left fail to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of the Christian Democrats? Behind the questions explored by the contributors to Mapping the West European Left lie deeper issues concerning the future of radical politics in Europe after the repudiation of Keynesianism and the end of communism. With the individual country analyses synthesized by the editors in a concise and comprehensive introductory essay, this book provides key pointers to the social forces and ideological platforms that offer lines of advance to the left today.



Europe and the Left

Author : James L. Newell

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan

Page : 275 pages

File Size : 26,7 MB

Release : 2020-10-13

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 9783030545406

Get eBook

Book Description

This edited volume revolves around two sets of questions. First, what do the 2019 European elections suggest about the extent to which the mainstream parties of the left are attempting to deal with their decline through an increased, common, emphasis on their project for a more integrated, 'social Europe' as opposed to an emphasis on the more 'traditional', domestically-focussed, issues? Given the heightened profile of Europe in domestic politics; given the polarisation around Europe; given the way in which (especially in the countries of the Eurozone) media discussion of the domestic implications of EU decision-making can influence the climate of opinion regardless of the actions of domestic party actors themselves, we would expect the social democrats among them to seek to reassert control over the conditions of opinion formation through a renewed emphasis on integration (as well as its benefits and its potential as a source of identities to rival national, exclusionary identities) in opposition to their populist and Eurosceptical adversaries. To what extent do the campaigns waged by these parties bear out this expectation? Second, how well are the parties coping with the internal and external, institutional and political obstacles in the way of pursuit of this agenda?



The Left Case Against the EU

Author : Costas Lapavitsas

Publisher : John Wiley & Sons

Page : 160 pages

File Size : 12,20 MB

Release : 2018-12-05

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1509531084

Get eBook

Book Description

Many on the Left see the European Union as a fundamentally benign project with the potential to underpin ever greater cooperation and progress. If it has drifted rightward, the answer is to fight for reform from within. In this iconoclastic polemic, economist Costas Lapavitsas demolishes this view. He contends that the EU’s response to the Eurozone crisis represents the ultimate transformation of the union into a neoliberal citadel that institutionally embeds austerity, privatization, and wage cuts. Concurrently, the rise of German hegemony has divided the EU into an unstable core and dependent peripheries. These related developments make the EU impervious to meaningful reform. The solution is therefore a direct challenge to the EU project that stresses popular and national sovereignty as preconditions for true internationalist socialism. Lapavitsas’s powerful manifesto for a left opposition to the EU upends the wishful thinking that often characterizes the debate and will be a challenging read for all on the Left interested in the future of Europe.



What Has Left Since We Left

Author : Giulio Squillacciotti

Publisher :

Page : 0 pages

File Size : 21,11 MB

Release : 2021-01-12

Category : History

ISBN : 9789493148307

Get eBook

Book Description

What has left since we left? articulates the fictional end of Europe with the language of love and separation. Likening the political bonds that tie together European countries to the fluctuations of romance and desire, the book unpacks the complexities of the European relationship by touching on ideas of identity, collapse, migration, conflict and hope. The book features contributions by Ay'e Zarakol, Marwan Moujaes, Federico Lodoli, Marina Lalovic and Erica Petrillo. Together, these texts complement and expand on the script for the film "What has left since we left" - directed by Giulio Squillacciotti and written with Daan Milius and Huib Haye van der Werf - which fictionalises the current European dystopia by re-enacting and problematizing the rituals of kinship and relational struggles. Backstage images and film stills from this production, along with a European timeline from World War II up until Brexit compiled by Enrico De Gasperis, provide a specific overview to the entire project.



Migration Italy

Author : Graziella Parati

Publisher : University of Toronto Press

Page : 289 pages

File Size : 25,39 MB

Release : 2013-12-31

Category : History

ISBN : 1442620080

Get eBook

Book Description

In terms of migration, Italy is often thought of as a source country - a place from which people came rather than one to which people go. However, in the past few decades, Italy has indeed become a destination for many people from poor or war-torn countries seeking a better life in a stable environment. Graziella Parati's Migration Italy examines immigration to Italy in the past twenty years, and explores the processes of cultural hybridization that have occurred. Working from a cultural studies viewpoint, Parati constructs a theoretical framework for discussing Italy as a country of immigration. She gives special attention to immigrant literature, positing that it functions as an act of resistance, a means to talk back to the laws that regulate the lives of migrants. Parati also examines Italian cinema, demonstrating how native and non-native filmmakers alike create parallels between old and new migrations, complicating the definitions of sameness and difference. These definitions and the complexities inherent in the different cultural, legal, and political positions of Italy's people are at the heart of Migration Italy, a unique work of immense importance for understanding society in both modern-day Italy and, indeed, the entire European continent.



Italy's Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century

Author : Ludovica Marchi

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 265 pages

File Size : 13,24 MB

Release : 2014-10-17

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1317594754

Get eBook

Book Description

Italy’s foreign policy has often been dismissed as too idiosyncratic, inconsistent and lacking ambition. This book offers new insights into the position Italy has attained in the international community in the 21st century. It explores how the country has sought to take advantage of its passage from a bipolar to a multipolar system and assesses the ways in which it has engaged internationally, its new responsibilities, and the manner in which it conducts its policies in the pursuit of its interests, whether political or commercial. It argues that although Italy is engaged internationally, there is a gap between its actions and what it actually delivers, and as long as this gap continues Italy is likely to remain a partial and unreliable foreign policy actor. Divided into three parts, this book explores: the context and processes which characterise Italy’s external action its relations with crucial countries and regions such as the US, the EU, and the BRICs its security and defence policies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of European Politics, Foreign Policy analysis and Italian studies.



The New European Left

Author : K. Hudson

Publisher : Springer

Page : 273 pages

File Size : 41,7 MB

Release : 2012-06-19

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1137265116

Get eBook

Book Description

Hudson explores the development of communists and other left forces, charting their survival and renewal after 1989. She shows how an open and democratic form of socialism has emerged which embraces environmental, gender and anti-war politics.



The Radical Left Party Family in Western Europe, 1989-2015

Author : Paolo Chiocchetti

Publisher : Taylor & Francis

Page : 254 pages

File Size : 15,1 MB

Release : 2016-10-04

Category : History

ISBN : 1317221869

Get eBook

Book Description

This book provides an innovative analysis and interpretation of the overall trajectory of the Western European radical left from 1989 to 2015. After the collapse of really existing communism, this party family renewed itself and embarked on a recovery path, seeking to fill the vacuum of representation of disaffected working-class and welfarist constituencies created by the progressive neoliberalisation of European societies. The radical left thus emerged as a significant factor of contemporary political life but, despite some electoral gains and a few recent breakthroughs (SYRIZA in Greece, PODEMOS in Spain), it altogether failed to embody a credible alternative to neoliberalism and to pave the way for a turn to a different developmental model. This book investigates why this was the case, combining aggregate (17 countries), case study (Germany, Italy, and France), and comparative methods. It accurately charts the evolution of the nature, strength, cohesion, and influence of the Western European radical left, offering new insights in explaining its behaviour, success, and limits. It is essential reading for scholars, students, and activists interested in the radical left and in contemporary European politics.