L'Italia e la politica internazionale. Edizione 2007

This year’s edition of the IAI and ISPI yearbook, which has reached issue number eight, will cover the political and financial events of 2006. As with previous years, 2006 was characterised by continued instability in the Middle East in the form of the prolonged lack of a solution in Iraq, a resurgence of insurrection in Afghanistan, the political and diplomatic crisis over the nuclear issue in Iran and the endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The overall climate in the area was rendered even more serious by the fact that almost all of the situations mentioned above showed growing signs of deterioration over time, even to the point – as exemplified by the new war in the Lebanon and the successive international intervention – of conflicts spreading to neighbouring countries and regions. The first part of the volume covers the overall picture of this persistent crisis in the international political system, with particular reference to the political and juridical aspects of the Lebanese war, the new and worrying developments in nuclear proliferation and the increasingly politicised nature of religious issues in international relations. Particular attention has been devoted to Italian foreign policy with the transition from the government led by Mr Berlusconi to that of Mr Prodi. The second part of the volume deals with the stalemate in the political integration process and goes on to concentrate on the evolution of the European defence market, as well as on the role of the European Union in peacekeeping operations. The international economy is the subject of part three of the volume, which deals both with the main trends in the world economy and with its institutional aspects – with the hard task of adapting faced by the International Monetary Fund – as well as with the increasingly uncertain future of the current multilateral trade regime. A special focus has been devoted to the two themes that proved to be of central importance in 2006: energy and the progressively ageing population, with the consequent implications this clearly has on the sustainability of pension systems. The volume concludes with an analysis of some of last year’s main crisis areas: the Israeli-Palestinian question, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and Sudan.