Key Actors in Italy Concerning EU Sanctions against Russia 2014-2016: Interests, Positions, Outcomes. Is coalition possible?

Italy among the other European Union member states agreed to implement sanctions against Russia in 2014. Its consequences, as well as, consequences of the food embargo implemented by Russia took a form of the significant downsize of the Italian export in Russia and general losses of 1,25 billion euro for the economy only in the first year. Italy among few other countries tried to oppose the implementation of the new sanctions and extension of the existing ones that made it an interesting object for our research. In this thesis we aimed to answer on two research questions: What are the positions of Italian actors? and Can advocacy coalition between Italian actors for lifting the economic sanctions appear? By analyzing the timeline of the sanctions implementation and its consequences we succeeded to identify the position of Italian officials in the first chapter. In the second chapter by applying “Varieties of Capitalism” by Hall and Soskice to Italy, we managed to explain the main structure of Italian political economy system and identify the main actors. Furthermore, process tracing, the tool that allow to explain actors’ current interests and positions from the historical background perspective, was used in this chapter in order to put forward general assumptions that after checking through the discourse theory and critical discourse analysis method gave us foundations and evidences to answer the first question. Finally, advocacy coalition framework analysis was used in this thesis in order to analyze whether or not effect of the economic shock provided by sanctions and “anti-sanctions” was high enough for advocacy coalition on lifting the sanctions in Italy to appear.