The international political economy of Berlusconism: emergence, consolidation and crisis of a neoliberalising project

In the existing accounts about Silvio Berlusconi, analyses of his political–economic project integrating the overarching context in which it emerged are conspicuous by their absence. The paper addresses this main gap by investigating Berluscon ism as a phenomenon reaching beyond Berlusconi’s figure, capturing the twists and turns of Italy’s neoliberal reconfiguration. Grounded in an International Political Economy (IPE) perspective and starting from the centrality of dialectics, the study proposes a periodisation of the prelude, emergence, consolidation and crisis of Berlusconism, zooming in on the interplay of three main analytical foci: (1) its insertion into specific geo-historical dynamics both favouring and constraining political agency, (2) its alliance building, which underpinned the creation – in the 1990s – of a political space for the Italian right (both moderate and radical), marking an unprecedented feat in the entire post-war period and (3) its specific array of enacted policies. Building on such empirical contribution, the article makes a methodological intervention, showing the heuristic added value of dialectically integrating these three foci into a novel double contextualisation of Berlusconism – as both (1) a product of and one of the answers to Italy’s organic crisis of the early 1990s and (2) an expression of and a political–economic project within the global trajectory of neoliberal restructuring. Berlusconism thus stands out as the ‘focal point’ around which the international neoliberal offensive in Italy could mobilise, with far-reaching implications for contemporary analyses of the far right in the international political economy.