“Reporting on U.S. Military Basing in Italy: the Rule of Law and the Role Of Media in shaping civil-military relations”

Abstract

The presence of facilities owned and used by the United States armed forces around the world has been matter of debate over the years and for a wide variety of reasons. The purpose of this work is to examine the public perception of the presence and activity of United States’ armed forces on Italian soil, as shaped by a set of major agreements dating back to the aftermath of World War II, when our country needed support in order to reconstruct its economy and security, and found in the Marshall Plan and the partnership with the United States a powerful tool to recover from the conflict. But what is the current status of these treaties? How do our domestic laws apply towards U.S. personnel stationed in the Italian jurisdiction? Are the civilian communities on both sides informed about the status of bases within their country and overseas, and in any case, what kind of information is accessible to the public and how does it affect the collaboration and trust between these two economic and military partners? Given the premise that the major agreements between Italy and the United States, with an exception for the Shell Agreement of February 2nd 1995, still remain a secret, I tried to answer this question choosing the time-span that goes from 1998, year of the infamous “Cavalese Cable Car Disaster” to the present days, since it is only after this accident that the “Memorandum of Understanding between the Ministry of Defense of Italy and the Department of Defense of the United States of America” has been unveiled to the public. From an organizational point of view, the thesis is divided in two parts, made up of three chapters each, following two main fields of research: in the first part, which deals with the historical background of the military installations themselves, I examine the role of U.S. bases abroad, the legal framework regulating their presence in the Italian case, and how these have been used in procedures involving Italian and American military and intelligence personnel. The dissertation goes then further into defining the presence of American troops not only as a mere normative issue, but also focusing a on what the public perception of the subject is, and to what extent its media coverage defines Italian-North American relations and their bilateral security arrangements. In order to show the variety of opinions on this theme, I decided to concentrate my analysis on a selection of several newspapers articles, which provided an immense load of information on the matter (specifically, the The New York Times digital archives), websites of U.S. Navy and Air Force Network, Italian newspapers such as La Repubblica, l’Espresso, and many visual and graphic resources found online. In the last two chapters, I will briefly compare Italy’s situation with the experience of other countries working as hosts for the U.S. military system, showing what the hopes and concerns of citizens of different nationalities are, when facing the same question of national security and sovereignty. The conclusion will be an attempt to seek a common ground between the cases taken into exam, and considering the potentially positive and negative aspects of U.S. stationing abroad, and how differences in perception and understanding created by media can improve awareness and foster debate in an area that seems confined to an administrative and legal dispute, but unquestionably presents social and cultural implications as well.