The crises of the decade 2011-2022 magnified the divergence between Italys and Germanys economic performance and created tensions in their relationship at EU level. After the economic crisis and the refugee crisis, the Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine added other major strains on both economies, causing increases in the price of energy and the need to revise well-established trade relations. This volume looks at the effects of these multiple crises on several aspects of the political and economic systems of Italy and Germany. It aims to interpret the changes in the internal dynamics of the two political systems as well as to measure similarities and dissimilarities in the magnitude and timing of these changes. Finally, it aims to understand if and how these changes have impacted the relationship between the two countries and their role as inspirers and catalysts of change within the EU context.

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1. Rossella Borri is research assistant at the Laps (Laboratory for Political and Social Analyses) at the University of Siena. She has extensively published on far-right parties and sovereignism in Europe and in a comparative perspective. 2. Lukas Brenner is a political scientist and lecturer at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. His research focuses on the study of populist phenomena, with a particular interest in explaining the rise of populism in the current century and the development of populist radical right parties in Europe. 3. Alice Cavalieri is a research fellow at the University of Trieste. Her main research interests concern public budgeting and policy changes in European countries. Her first book, Italian Budgeting Policy (Palgrave Macmillan) is forthcoming in 2023. 4. Riccardo Emilio Chesta is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the Carlo Azeglio Ciampi Institute for Advanced Studies in Florence. His research interests are in social theory, sociology of expertise, social movements and political sociology. He has published The Contentious Politics of Expertise (Routledge, 2020) and together with Donatella Della Porta and Lorenzo Cini Labour Conflicts in the Digital Age (BUP, 2022). 5. Nikolaus Freimuth is Student of History at Goethe-University Frankfurt and also studied at Paris Sorbonne IV and Alma Mater Studiorum Bologna. He currently writes his masters thesis on the history of free radio in the 1970s and 1980s in a transnational and intermedial perspective. 6. Johannes Karremans is Research Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI). His research interests are in the fields of budgetary politics and welfare re-calibration. His research has appeared in several international journals. 7. Linda Krzikalla is graduate student in Conflict Management and Humanitarian Action at the University of Siena, student assistant Intern at CIRCaP Lab on Sovereignist Parties. 8. Alexander Mathewes is a MA student of political science at the Goethe-University Frankfurt, where he also worked as a student assistant for the chair in qualitative empirical research methods. He previously studied and worked as a student assistant at the Philipps-University Marburg. His main interests are social scientific methodology and political theory with a comparative perspective. 9. Francesco Nicoli is assistant professor at the Politcnico Institute of Turin, and Gent University; he is also fellow at the department of economics of the University of Amsterdam and at the thinktank Bruegel. His research focuses on the role of fundamental socioeconomic crises in shaping processes of integration at European and international level. 10. Ton Notermans is Lecturer of Political Economy at the Tallinn University of Technology. He has taught at the Universities of Trento (Italy), Innsbruck (Austria), Pusan National University (Korea), and the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy. He has published with Cambridge University Press, Berghahn Books and in the Journal of European Integration, Politics &Society, West European Politics and German Politics. 11. Simona Piattoni is Professor of Political Science at the University of Trento, Italy, and Adjunct Researcher at the ARENA Centre for European Studies of the University of Oslo, Norway. Her main research interests and fields of publication are clientelism, regional development policy, multi-level governance, European democracy and comparative political economy. 12. AnnKathrin Reinl is a FWO postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University. Her research mainly focuses on transnational solidarity preferences within the EU. In addition to that, she is interested in studying support for EU membership, attitudes towards democracy, green issues and sovereignty claims both at the party and citizen level. 13. Mohamed Salhi is a doctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Political Science, Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. His main research interests include Right-Wing Populism and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). His ongoing PhD dissertation investigates the narratives of Far-Right populist parties in the time of (constructed) crises. 14. Nils Sartorius is a research fellow and lecturer at the Institute of Political Science at Goethe University Frankfurt. In his research he works on the (de-)construction of County Images, Italo-German Relations, and Radical Right Populists in Europe. 15. Michelangelo Vercesi is Researcher in Comparative Politics at the Portuguese Institute of International Relations of the NOVA University Lisbon and Privatdozent at the Center for the Study of Democracy of the Leuphana University Lüneburg. His main research interests are comparative government, political elites and leadership, and party politics. 16. Luca Verzichelli is Professor of Political Science and Global Comparative Politics at the University of Siena. His main research interests are in the fields of comparative political institutions and political élites in Europe. 17. Claudius Wagemann is Professor of Political Science Methods at Goethe-University Frankfurt and also collaborates with the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute (EUI) Florence. His main research interests are comparative methods, mainly Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and fuzzy-sets, the application of political science methods, and various forms of political organizations. 18. Tiziano Zgaga is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. He also serves as research manager for Luiss University within the Horizon 2020 project EU Differentiation, Dominance and Democracy (2019-2023). His main research interests include European Union fiscal policymaking and implementation as well as comparative fiscal federalism.

Despite their different institutional setting, economic might and international role, Italy and Germany have shared a common fate since the end of World War II in that they inspired and led the process of European integration. To some extent, particularly if we think of their transition from dictatorship to democracy after the war, they also contributed to the consolidation of democratic rule in Europe. Political support from Germany and Italy, therefore, is critical for European democracy and for maintaining the momentum of European integration. All the more so during periods of economic crisis and political turbulence, when the risks of inward-looking and isolationist attitudes are high and threaten to reawaken a number of stereotypes and biases that could drive these countries apart (Piattoni et al. 2018). These events prompted us to assemble a group of scholars who would look at the variegated effects of this sequence of crises on the institutional, political and economic settings of both countries with a view to evaluate the nature and evolution of relations between Germany and Italy at a very volatile historical juncture after a decade and a half of crises. We met in October 2021 in Loveno di Menaggio, on Lake Como, Italy, thanks to generous DFG funding and to the hospitality of the Villa Vigoni foundation. Our main concern in organizing the colloquium was to select promising and inspiring pieces of empirical research on Italy and Germany, following the traditional Villa Vigoni policy of fostering a truly inter-disciplinary and inter-generational discussion. A number of pre-doc and post-doc researchers, focusing their research on Italy and Germany, were thus selected for participation. The participants of this workshop were free to develop different lines of inquiry and to apply different methodologies. However, all contributors were asked to provide an assessment of how two large European democracies like Germany and Italy - among the founders of the European Community and traditional supporters of European integration - managed such turbulent times and to what extent they collaborated within the EU context. This volume is the outcome of that reflection: it collects eleven pieces of original research that focus on the consequences that a decade of crises have had on Italy and Germany - their policy responses, their reciprocal relations and their interactions within the European Union. It exhibits a frank discussion among experts in at least three lines of research that too often tend to ignore each other: those engaged with international relations, those who study European Union politics and political economy, and those who focus - often with a comparative approach - on domestic institutions and public opinion. The EUs crisis-decade (2011-2022) started with the financial and Eurozone crises, continued with the refugee crisis and the Covid-19 crisis, and ended (for the moment) with the energy crisis and economic recession in part caused by the Russian invasion of the Ukraine (Caporaso 2018, Hutter & Kriesi 2019, Cotta & Isernia 2022). The asymmetric euro crisis magnified the divergence between Italys and Germanys economic performance and created tensions in their relationship at EU level. The refugee crisis was more symmetrical as both countries had to deal with massive migrations: a moderate but constant trickle from northern Africa (Italy) and a sudden and massive wave from the Middle East (Germany). Although both countries tried to react positively to these flows, they also experienced notable social and political tensions which fanned populist reactions and reverberated on the EU stage. Having an external border on what was to become the main refugee route, Libya and northern Africa in general, Italy often saw itself as having to shoulder a disproportionate burden and being left alone by the EU (Castelli Gattinara 2017, Ceccorulli 2021). Yet, the Balkan route proved as significant, as thousands of refugees fled from war-torn Syria. The war in Ukraine added yet another major (though temporary) migration flow towards Poland and central Europe. The Covid-19 pandemic was a different crisis yet again, as it was wholly symmetrical and virtually simultaneous; as such, it should not have created a rift between Italy and Germany, but rather solidarity and collaboration. And, also thanks to the surprisingly timely intervention of the European Council, in the form of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) investment programme, this is precisely what happened. An odd sequence of crises, indeed, which exerted differential pressures on the two countries and impressed both divergent and convergent dynamics on their politics and economy. Still, the cumulation of critical periods has strained the economies and societies of Germany and Italy adding to the difficulties that they had experienced in the previous decade. This volume looks at the effects of these multiple crises on several aspects of the political and economic systems of Italy and Germany. It aims to describe and interpret the changes in the internal dynamics of the two political systems, as well as to measure similarities and dissimilarities in the magnitude and timing of these changes. Finally, it aims to understand if and how these more or less symmetrical changes have impacted the relationship between the two countries and their role as inspirers and catalysts of change within the EU context. In collecting a set of empirical assessments, we are aware that we paint a somewhat impressionistic picture of the parallel transformation of the two political systems and the changing role of the Italo-German relationship in the European context. Without any pretence of producing a comprehensive picture of the challenges faced by Germany and Italy during this troubled decade, the volume includes a number of pieces of original research focusing on different aspects of German and Italian democratic politics and political economy, following different methodological strategies. The articles also address the state of the relationship between these two large European democracies during a particularly troubled juncture for European democracies. We decided to entitle the original Villa Vigoni event and this volume E la nave va (and the ship sails on), to express the risk of underestimating the threats to European integration, and in particular to the future of the German and Italian democracies, with the metaphor of the ship that sails on. The title refers to the dreamlike 1983 movie by Federico Fellini devoted to the story of a decadent group of Europeans socialites embarking on a luxurious cruise to commit the ashes of a celebrity to the sea in August of 1914 while Europe descends into the chaos of World War I. This provocation was mainly a critical reflection on our own research agenda: despite our best intentions, we had the gnawing feeling, and we still do, that something is missing in the way we and social scientists more generally, conceive the study of the politics and the economy in these two countries. Hyper-specialised research and the prevalence of micro-oriented explanations may have distracted us from selecting and testing good interpretations of similarities and dissimilarities between these two political and economic systems and have made it more difficult for us to assess the extent to which Italy and Germany are still capable of contributing to the process of European integration during this troubled period. Differently from other interdisciplinary attempts to focus on Italo-German relations (Goeschel 2016, DOttavio 2019), including a similar attempt made by us, the basic idea of this project was to provide a more systematic analysis of democracy and the economy in these two countries. Given the explorative nature of this initiative, we consider this volume a starting point rather than an ultimate reflection. Indeed, most of the papers represent segments of some extensive and ambitious resear...