The accommodationist state: Strategic culture and Italy’s military behaviour

Abstract

This article aims to highlight the impact of strategic culture on Italian attitude to war and peace. The first section shows how both structural interpretations based on the influence of international variables and domestic models that neglect the cultural dimension offer no adequate explanations of Italy’s military behaviour. The second section reviews the literature on strategic culture and its usefulness to explain the Italian case. The third section examines the characteristics of Italy’s strategic culture through the period of the Republic, and the fourth examines the influence of ideational factors on its military behaviour abroad. In this section, a series of hypotheses derived from structural and cultural models are tested using data from the Correlates of War dataset. The conclusion provides a summary of the research findings that emerged from the empirical analysis.