In Search for Autonomy: The Bank of Italy Mediating between the State and the Market (1971-1994)

The period is a sort of ‘long’ ‘critical juncture’ characterized by a revolutionary reconfiguration of the central bank’s role and power vis-à-vis the state and the financial system. By moving beyond the ahistorical and ‘utopian’ paradigm of central bank independence, the thesis argues that the Bank of Italy’s own path towards a new form of institutional and operational autonomy must be understood through the study of much wider political and social processes, in which the central bank itself was highly ‘embedded’. The research aims to shed light on the historical causes and mechanisms behind the central bank’s gradual departure from a status of ‘hegemonic compliance’ towards the treasury within the Italian post-war ‘developmental’ model to a more ‘dis-embedded’ form of autonomy and power. However, as a case of autonomization ‘before’ the regional and global diffusion of CBI, which started only in the 1990s, the process of transformation of the Italian central bank is hardly explained by pointing only to supranational dynamics of institutional convergence or organisational ‘isomorphism’, so it needs also to be linked to the domestic politics of the country, to the ‘mediating’ role of national institutions and elites, and to more ‘indigenous’ within-state conflicts of power between different ‘local’ actors in a changing environment.