Description
Recent debates in IPE have highlighted the central role of European banks in the globalization of finance and the development of contemporary financialisation. Yet these debates have often paid limited attention to the diversity of European banking systems. Comparative Political Economy (CPE), by contrast, has traditionally emphasised institutional diversity and the uneven trajectories of national financial systems in Europe. However, this diversity has often been theorised through a limited set of ideal-typical models. In particular, German banking has frequently served as the archetype of a European model of “organised finance”, characterised by large universal banks, long-term bank–industry relations, patient capital, and the coordination of industrial investment.
This paper argues that the Italian case reveals important limitations in this approach. Because of its differences from the German model, Italian banking has often been characterised as dysfunctional, hybrid, or exceptional. Such labels have made it difficult to conceptualise Italian finance on its own terms and, in turn, to theorise both its transformation and its contribution to wider processes of European financialisation. More broadly, they tend to conceptualise institutional change as adaptation to external pressures rather than as a process shaped by the strategies and competitive struggles of financial actors themselves.
Building on recent work on extroverted financialisation and raiding finance, the paper examines how Italian banks and financiers engaged with offshore finance and leverage-based strategies from the post-war period onwards. In doing so, it shows how Italian banks were not merely shaped by European financialisation but actively participated in its construction. The paper, therefore, proposes an alternative way of theorising European financialisation, one that takes national diversity seriously while analysing how distinct banking systems actively contributed to broader transformations in European finance.