Foreign Relations of Italy - Foreign Relations

Foreign Relations

Italy was one of the Founding members of the European Community — now the European Union (EU). The country was admitted to the United Nations in 1955 and is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization (GATT/WTO), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and the Council of Europe. It chaired the CSCE (the forerunner of the OSCE) in 1994, the EU in 1996, and the G8 in 2001, and held the EU presidency from July to December 2003.

Italy participated in and deployed troops in support of UN peacekeeping missions in Somalia, Mozambique, and East Timor and provides critical support for NATO and UN operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Albania. 1,000 Alpini troops were deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in February 2003. Italy also supported international efforts to reconstruct and stabilize Iraq through its military contingent of some 3,200 troops, as well as humanitarian workers and other officials. The troops remained in Iraq until December 2006 when they were retrieved by the Romano Prodi government.

In August 2006 Italy sent about 3,000 soldiers to Lebanon for the United Nations peacekeeping mission UNIFIL. Furthermore, since 2 February 2007 an Italian, Claudio Graziano is the commander of the UN force in the country.

The Italian government seeks to obtain consensus with other European countries on various defense and security issues within the EU as well as NATO. European integration and the development of common defense and security policies will continue to be of primary interest to Italy.

In February 2007, Italy, Britain, Canada, Norway and Russia announced their funding commitments to launch a $1.5 billion project to help develop vaccines they said could save millions of lives in poor nations, and called on others to join them.