L’Italia nell’Unione Europea. Il dibattito parlamentare sul Trattato di Maastricht

The Maastricht Treaty is unanimously regarded as a milestone in the process of European integration. Scholars of various disciplines wonder what it has meant for the European nations: whether the umpteenth victory of the functionalists or a partial revenge of the federalists, whether it is possible to have a single currency in the absence of a federal state, what changes have been introduced in the European governance, whether there is consistency between the letter and spirit of the Treaty and the quantitative public finance constraints introduced in special protocols. In these surveys, and in others, the Treaty is seen ‘from the outside’, as a taken choice, whose economic, political and cultural consequences are to be assessed. There are also historical studies that attempt to reconstruct, ‘from within’, the decision-making process, the genesis, which led to the final approval of the Treaty. The subject of this research is the debate in the Italian Parliament on the occasion of the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in September-October 1992. The aim is to understand not only the explicit reasons that led the vast majority of Italian parliamentarians to approve the agreement but also the implicit political and economic cultures that inspired that crucial decision.