Silencing History in Foreign Policy Discourse: Forgetting Italy’s Past during the 2014ꟷ2018 Refugee Crisis

Scholarly analyses of the relationship between memory politics and foreign policy tend to investigate how historical events are remembered selectively in order to advocate or justify foreign policy choices. The focus is usually on the relevance or the distortion of events that are explicitly mentioned in official discourse. However, recent research has shown that ‘silencing the past’, notably the omission of relevant historical events, is also an important aspect of memory politics. This article examines how Italian foreign policy discourse silenced important and pertinent episodes in Italy’s history during the refugee and migrant crisis in 2014-8. It is argued that Italian foreign policy discourse was based on the long-standing ‘myth of the good Italian’, which negates the controversial aspects of Italy’s colonial experience and permeates the country’s self-perception as an international actor. Perhaps even more significantly, Italian foreign policy discourse silenced the highly relevant precedent of Italian migration abroad in the twentieth century. The focus is on the public speeches of Italy’s main institutional actors, including the President of the Republic, national ministers and the leaders of the largest parties in parliament.