The Economist has a sharp diagnosis for Italian foreign policy. The question is whether anyone in Rome is listening.
There is a cartoon chick at the heart of Italian political psychology. Calimero, born in a 1963 Italian television advertisement, is small, soot-covered, and convinced the entire world is conspiring against him. “Everyone has it in for me because I’m small and black,” he wails, in a line that has become so embedded in Italian cultural vocabulary that it gave its name to an entire political condition.The Economist has deployed Calimero to explain Italy in a recent piece titled “Why a big country like Italy acts as if it were small.” The argument is straightforward and not entirely comfortable to read from Rome: Italy is the EU’s third-largest member state, it has a larger economy than Russia, and it fields more active-duty soldiers than Britain. And yet, as Marco Del Panta, a former Italian diplomat and author of the book Il complesso di Calimero, argues, the country has evolved “a tradition of not taking a firm stance in foreign policy, but of trying to please everyone and be friends with everyone.”
The diagnosis is not new. Italy’s habit of strategic ambiguity, its preference for mediation over confrontation, its tendency to position itself as a bridge between opposing blocs rather than as a player with its own clearly stated interests, has been observed by foreign policy analysts for decades. What makes The Economist’s intervention timely is the context in which it arrives.
The same week that Italy’s national football team was eliminated from the World Cup by Bosnia-Herzegovina, a humiliation that produced the now-familiar Italian media cycle of self-flagellation and demands for structural reform that lead nowhere, the country was navigating some of the most consequential foreign policy decisions it has faced in years. Defence Minister Guido Crosetto turned back US bombers from Sigonella. Prime Minister Meloni suspended the military cooperation agreement with Israel. Pope Leo XIV, himself Roman by adoption if not by birth, was publicly defying the American president from a papal plane over the skies of the Mediterranean.
These are not small gestures. They suggest something is shifting, even if the underlying psychology The Economist diagnoses remains deeply embedded.
The Calimero complex, as Del Panta describes it, is not simply a matter of low national self-esteem. It is a structural condition produced by specific historical circumstances: the trauma of two world wars in which Italy changed sides; the Cold War geography that made the country a front line between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, requiring a careful maintenance of relations in every direction; and decades of domestic political instability that made long-term strategic commitments difficult to sustain regardless of who was in government.
The result is a country that has learned to use the language of principle while pursuing the interests of survival. Italy has been, simultaneously, a loyal NATO member and one of the alliance’s most accommodating voices toward Russia. It has been a founding EU member and one of the most persistent critics of EU fiscal rules. It has maintained close ties with Israel while being home to one of the most pro-Palestinian Catholic hierarchies in the Western world.
None of this is uniquely Italian. France does something similar, though with considerably more aggression and self-confidence. Germany has its own version, expressed through economic rather than military muscle. What distinguishes Italy is the apparent absence of the self-confidence that allows other large states to acknowledge their contradictions without apology.
The football elimination is an apt metaphor, though perhaps not in the way Italian commentators intended. The shock was not simply that Italy lost. It was that Italy lost to Bosnia-Herzegovina, a country of fewer than four million people. For a nation of 60 million with the infrastructure and resources Italy possesses, the result points not to a lack of talent but to a failure of organisation, investment, and long-term thinking: exactly the qualities that define the Calimero complex at its core.
The question The Economist implicitly raises, and does not fully answer, is whether the complex is changing. There are reasons to think it might be. The decisions Italy has taken in recent months, on Sigonella, on the Israeli defence memorandum, on the Pope’s diplomatic independence from Washington, suggest a government that is at least occasionally willing to say no to large and powerful partners. Whether that represents a genuine shift in strategic culture or simply a series of tactical decisions calibrated to domestic public opinion remains to be seen.
What is certain is that the world Italy is navigating has changed more rapidly than at any point since the end of the Cold War. The war in Iran, the fracture in the transatlantic relationship, the return of geopolitics as the dominant frame for international affairs, all of this demands precisely the kind of firm, consistent positioning that the Calimero complex has historically prevented.
Calimero, in the end, always found someone to wash the soot off and show him that he was not so small after all. Italy may be waiting for the same revelation. The difference is that in the cartoon, the intervention came from outside. In the real world, it will have to come from within.
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