International Relations and Supranational Institutions

DONATELLO ARAMINI

The course aims to provide students with the analytical tools necessary to understand the key issues in the history of contemporary Italy: the legacies of Fascist Italy, the central role of the Resistance, the building of a democratic regime and mass society, the emergence of the party-based republic, and its crisis. It seeks to place these aspects of Italian history within the European and global context, using Italy as a point of observation for a series of general transformations that characterized the international context of the second half of the 20th century.
The expected outcome is that students will not only be familiar with Italian history but will also be able to place it within the context of global history and engage in a critical discussion of Italy’s historical development and the expansion of civil, social, and political rights that characterized the second half of the 20th century.

Students must be able to understand Italian history and place it within the context of global history, highlighting how the political, institutional, economic, cultural, and social transformations that characterized it in the second half of the 20th century were the result of international processes in which Italy played an active role.
Students must also be able to engage in a critical discussion of Italy’s historical development and the global expansion of civil, social, and political rights that characterized the second half of the 20th century.

The students must have successfully passed the Contemporary History exam (minimum 6 cfu) in a three-year degree program.
The students must have a general knowledge of 20th-century history

The twentieth century has been defined in many ways, such as the century of extremes, of ideologies, of totalitarianisms, of genocides and violence. However, especially when looking at European history, it is also the century of liberal democracies. With the beginning of the third millennium, however, they appear increasingly in crisis, weakened and subject to profound transformations in the face of the challenges that globalization continually poses and which, in some cases, seem to call into question their fundamental principles, especially following the spread of nationalist, fundamentalist, and illiberal political positions.
Faced with this scenario, the course aims to provide historical depth to slow, complex, and unpredictable processes whose roots lie in the events of the second half of the 20th century. It will begin by illustrating and reflecting on the events, stages, characteristics, and transformations that have characterized the history of the birth and establishment of the democratic republic in Italy, placing this history, and its political, economic, cultural, and social issues, within the international and global context in which Italy operated in the second half of the 20th century.
Firstly, the course will focus on analyzing the construction of Italian democracy and how it was linked to a more general European process of building new institutional, political, economic, and cultural models. The characteristics, advantages, and limitations of a new model of democratic state-project that distinguished the Western world after World War II within the bipolar context of the Cold War will be illustrated, as well as how it took shape, how it imposed itself, and how it entered into crisis in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s.
With Italy as its focal point, the course will seek to answer questions about how Western democracies were built after World War II, how they were conceived, what debates they gave rise to, and how they were perceived by Italians and Europeans.
It will highlight how Italy contributed to and responded to broader transformations, not only in Europe, and how its political class dealt with the tensions of a world that has moved from bipolar to multipolar.
In this sense, the course will focus on analyzing how, starting in the 1970s, Italy has understood and interpreted the acceleration of globalization. It will concentrate on some key moments that revealed and marked the explosion of the global world (from technology to the reemergence of religions, from economic transformations to environmentalism, from the nuclear issue to the explosion of the Third World and Third Worldism, from attempts to shape Western international governance with the birth of the G6 and then G7 summits to terrorism, from the affirmation of civil rights to the impact of Reagan and Thatcher's policies), it will highlight how the global has entered the lives of Italians and the responses provided by politics.
The main events, decisions, choices, and protagonists of Italian politics will be retraced. The lines of development of Italy's most recent history will be shown, connecting political history with economic, social, and cultural history, and placing internal issues within a common European discourse and, from there, in an international context capable of focusing on global causes and influences. In this way, a history will be revealed that is less anomalous than is often believed and, on the contrary, a picture will emerge of a country which, with its own specific characteristics, is fully integrated into the dynamics of the contemporary world.

1) Martin Conway, L'età della democrazia. L'Europa occidentale dopo il 1945, Carocci, Roma, 2023
2) Guido Formigoni, Storia essenziale dell'Italia repubblicana, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2021

In alternativa, per studenti Erasmus o di non madrelingua italiana:
1) Martin Conway, Western Europe's Democratic Age, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2022
2) Guido Formigoni, Storia essenziale dell'Italia repubblicana, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2021

The course will take place through traditional "face to face lessons" with the support of original documents, images and videos.

Attendance is not mandatory but it is strongly recommended.

The exam will take place at the end of the course in oral form. The exam will focus on the textbooks indicated in the course syllabus. A sufficient number of questions will be asked to assess the student's level of preparation (approximately 3/4) and to ascertain the achievement of the learning objectives.
In addition to specific knowledge of the exam textbooks, active participation in classroom activities may also be taken into account in the final assessment.
In particular, based on the number of students attending the course and subject to agreement with the professor, students may be given the opportunity to present and discuss in class a written essay on some of the topics addressed in the third part of the course.

- The Italian Constitution and Western democratic constitutions
- The center-left and the new international political and cultural climate
- 1968 and rights in Italy and the West
- The historic compromise in the context of the international crisis
- The redefinition of the democratic state model in the 1980s
- The 1990s between national crisis and new international balances

• Firstly, the course will focus on analyzing the construction of Western democracies and how the Italian one was closed to a more general European process of building new institutional, political, economic, and cultural models. The characteristics, advantages, and limitations of a new model of democratic state-project that distinguished the Western world after World War II within the bipolar context of the Cold War will be illustrated, as well as how it took shape, how it imposed itself, and how it entered into crisis in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s.With Italy as its focal point, the course will seek to answer questions about how Western democracies were built after World War II, how they were conceived, what debates they gave rise to, and how they were perceived by Italians and Europeans. This part will cover the first third of lessons.
  • Books: Martin Conway, Western Europe's Democratic Age, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2022


• In the second part, the course will focus on the history of Italian democracy and its transformations. It will analyze the return to freedom, the formation of the Constitution, the years of centrism, the economic miracle and the cultural transformations, center-left governments, up until the protests against the Italian political system in the late 1960s and 1970s, and how it was rethought during the 1980s and 1990s. This part will highlight how Italy contributed to and responded to broader transformations, not only within Europe, and how its political class addressed the tensions of a world that was first bipolar and then multipolar. Special attention will be given in the final section to the events of the Republic over the last thirty years of its history. This section will cover two-thirds of the lessons.
  • Books: Guido Formigoni, Storia essenziale dell'Italia repubblicana,
    
    Il Mulino, Bologna, 2021