HAEU

Il volume licenziato da Achille Conti, storico contemporaneista presso il dipartimento di Scienze politiche e so-ciali dell'Università di Bologna, pone al centro della sua trattazione un tema che risulta, al contempo, classico e inattuale: classico, nella misura in cui si colloca all'interno di una tradizione di studi-quella della fenomenologia dei partiti politici novecenteschi-largamente fre-quentata sia dalla storiografia che dalla politologia; inattuale, perché la scelta di sondare i meccanismi di funzionamento e di riproduzione della classe dirigente locale (quella toscana) di uno dei cardini politici del secondo dopoguerra italia-no, vale a dire il Pci, offre al lettore un utile strumento per interpretare i codici dell'odierna disaffezione verso tutto ciò che evochi, anche solo indirettamente, la macro-categoria della «politica come professione».

Among all the Western European countries that joined the Organisation for European Economic Coop-eration (OEEC), Italy was one of the most active nations in the shaping of post-WWII European migra-tion policies. Unlike a number of its international partners (i.e. France and the UK), Italy’s Christian-Democratic Government put aside the goal of internal full employment and dealt with its high unem-ployment rates through the way-out strategy of promoting emigration flows. In doing so, the Govern-ment aimed at achieving not only the reduction of unemployed amounts and the inflow of remittances, but also the decrease of social conflict that massive jobless discontent was supposed to foment in the country. Consequently, Rome sought to open up, through bilateral agreements or multilateral measures promoted in the framework of the OEEC, new outlets suitable for Italian unemployed. This essay examines the actions that Italy promoted at both national (in terms of emigrants’ recruitment) and OEEC level. It also outlines in which terms Italy considered the issue of workers’ migration as a pivotal element of its national economic program as well as of its post-war foreign policy, and finally it explores the complex reasons why this strategy proved to be unsatisfactory for Rome’s emigration goals.

This article deals with the history of the OECD from 1961 to the mid-1990s. Even though there will be several references to the present-day activities of the organisation, this contribution aims to explore the manifold aspects of the OECD’s experience through a historiographical approach. It will take into account the context of the OECD’s creation and its original aims. Furthermore, it will examine the way in which the OECD enlarged and reframed its goals, paying specific attention to the rise of environmental concerns within the top-level structures of the organisation. Subsequent parts of the article will look at the geographic dimension of the OECD and at the way in which the organisation tried to promote its influence on member states’ national sovereignty. In doing so, we will reflect on the outcomes of the OECD’s peer-review processes, conceived as one of the core-elements through which the OECD elaborates its “hortatory” recommendations. Finally, the article will analyse the relationships that, over the past five decades, the OECD has developed with other international organisations or supranational institutions over the past five decades, namely the G7 and the European Economic Community (later European Union). This contribution aspires to draw a general overview of the historical experience of the OECD and, for this reason, it will ignore several aspects of the organisation that obviously deserve further investigations – for example its internal bureaucratic articulation, the policies promoted within single committees or working groups, and so on. However, our intention is to focus the article’s perspective on the turning points that led the OECD to dismiss its previous Keynesian macroeconomic approaches and to gradually espouse supply-side and neo-classical theoretical mind-sets between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s. The article will try to highlight the gradual and even contradictory paths that the organisation’s leading officials took - in primis Emile Van Lennep, OECD secretary Ggneral from 1969 to 1984 - in order to respond to the unprecedented challenges brought about by the 1970s’ and 1980s’ capitalist crises.

The paper overviews the main historiographical issues on which the research project titled A Flawed Germanization. Economic Cultures and Political Conflicts in Western Europe during the Great Recession (2010-2015) will be built. Starting from a short reconstruction of the main fac-tors behind the outbreak of the 2007-2008 Great Recession in Western Europe, this essay takes into account the main topics the research will deal with, such as the policies promoted by the European Union in order to face the economic and financial crisis in the time between 2010-2015 (i.e. the creation of the European Financial Stability Facility, the setting up of the so-called fiscal compact) and the role played by Germany in the conceptualization of such measures. According to this, the research aims at understanding whether and to what extent the policies promoted by the actors – conceived at both national and supranational levels – of post-20017 European governance were deeply intertwined with some of the most significant economic cultures that have been contributing to shape the very features of European integration history over the last decades, such as German ordo-liberalism and Anglo-Saxon neo-liberalism.

This article examines how Anglo-Italian relationships unfolded in the aftermath of the Second World War within the framework of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC). By analysing Italy's participation in the early stages of the European integration process through the lens of British diplomacy, this contribution aims to shed new light on the international dimension of Rome's post-1945 political and economic strategies. First, the article considers the main concerns that characterized Italy's involvement in the OEEC activities between the late 1940s and the early 1950s: the promotion of the circulation of the intra-and extra-European manpower and the liberalization of trade and payments. Second, rather than making a 'classic' comparison between the divergent policies-particularly the internal and international economic programmes-that Britain and Italy pursued within the OEEC, this article highlights the extent to which an 'asymmetry of power' impacted Italy's ability to realize its strategies. To conclude, the essay assesses how bilateral and multilateral relationships in the OEEC arena mutually contributed to the shaping of Italy and Britain's patterns of post-WWII economic reconstruction.

This article deals with the origins, the spread and the consolidation of the so called 'neoliberal school of thought' across the European Economic Community (EEC) area between the 1970s and the 1980s. In order to assess whether, how and to what extent neoliberal-oriented policies emerged and interwove with the making of the European economic and monetary integration processes, the case-study of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) will be analysed. Established in 1955 in London by the businessman Antony Fisher and explicitly endorsed by Friedrich von Hayek, the IEA rapidly became one of the most prominent international think-thanks committed to the strengthening of free-market values throughout the Western world. In this respect, by exploring the scientific and political 'outputs' (such as books, papers, newspaper articles, proceedings, as well as private correspondence of significant IEA's members) that the IEA issued on the subject of European integration , this contribution aims first and foremost at understanding how this think-tank looked at the setting up of the 1970s' and 1980s' EEC monetary and economic poli-cymaking. In doing so, this paper will investigate whether and how neoliberal intellectuals paid specific attention to the 'European project' as a whole and whether the neoliberal school of thought contributed, directly or indirectly, to influence the climate of economic and political opinion within which European integration took shape in the 1970s and the 1980s. Thus, this article will assess whether the IEA conceived the political and institutional framework of the EEC as one of its own areas of intellectual interest and intervention.

L'articolo prenderà in esame l'esperienza dell'Italia all'interno dell'Organizzazione per la co-operazione economica europea (Oece) negli anni della prima legislatura repubblicana. A par-tire da una riflessione sulle motivazioni tanto economiche quanto politico-diplomatiche che si posero alla base dell'adesione italiana all'Oece, questo contributo analizzerà le misure di li-beralizzazione commerciale perseguite dal paese all'interno degli organi decisionali dell'or-ganizzazione. Si darà risalto alla dimensione europea delle iniziative che l'Italia elaborò nell'ambito della progressiva riduzione di dazi, tariffe e contingentamenti alle importazio-ni di beni provenienti dai mercati internazionali. Si passeranno in rassegna le principali ini-ziative presentate in sede Oece dalla delegazione italiana e verranno presi in considerazione i provvedimenti promossi a livello europeo da parte dei maggiori partner della Penisola: i piani Stikker e Pella (1950); la nascita dell'Unione europea dei pagamenti (Uep, 1950); il pacchetto di liberalizzazioni introdotto da La Malfa (1951); la reintroduzione delle restrizioni quantitative da parte di Regno Unito e Francia (1951-1952). Questo contributo intende perciò sondare la natura, i presupposti e gli esiti della "filosofia liberalizzatrice" sviluppata dalle classi dirigen-ti dello stato italiano nel più ampio contesto del processo di integrazione economica del Vec-chio continente e della genesi di quello che sarebbe poi divenuto il mercato comune europeo.