Witching hour approaching over Italy's new attitude to Europe

EUROPEAN DIARY: On the night of December 5th each year, Italian children go to bed with a mixture of anxiety and anticipation.

They know that the witch, Befana, will visit during the night and depending on how they behaved during the past year, will leave them sweets or lumps of coal.

Befana may have arrived a month late to Mr Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing government, leaving behind her a reproachful heap of coals in the shape of Mr Renato Ruggiero's resignation as foreign minister.

Mr Berlusconi put a brave face on the resignation, taking on the post of foreign minister himself and declaring that Italy remained as committed as ever to European integration.

"Europe for us is an ideal, an ambition, a desire and a necessity because Europe has given us more than half a century of security, wealth, democracy and peace," he said.

Judging from the howls of anguish from Europe's capitals over the weekend, few of Mr Berlusconi's EU partners will be reassured by his words.

And Mr Ruggiero's resignation has revived doubts about Italy's approach to Europe that his appointment had served to assuage.Honoured by Queen Elizabeth for his part in bringing Britain into the EEC, Mr Ruggiero has spent much of his career shuttling between Rome and Brussels.

He was intimately involved in the creation of European Monetary Union and has been one of Italy's most passionate advocates of the euro.

This experience helps to explain his outrage at the sneering reception given to last week's launch of euro notes and coins by some of his cabinet colleagues.

Mr Umberto Bossi, leader of the far-right Northern League and Mr Berlusconi's reform minister, dismissed the launch with the words: "A me dell'euro non me ne frega niente" - politely translated as "I couldn't give a damn about the euro".

The defence minister, Mr Antonio Martino, a member of Mr Berlusconi's Forza Italia, hooted that the euro had not only lost value against the dollar but against "the potato from Macao".

Many European politicians hoped that Mr Ruggiero's influence would moderate the innate anti-Europeanism of many in Mr Berlusconi's cabinet.

The Northern League is a crudely populist, xenophobic party of the far-right that makes Austria's Freedom Party appear almost mainstream. Another coalition partner, the post-fascist Allianza Nazionale, which is part of Fianna Fáil's group in the European Parliament, is a conservative, nationalist party. And Mr Martino is not alone among Forza Italia ministers in regarding the EU with suspicion.

Despite Mr Ruggiero's presence for the past six months, the new Italian government has established a reputation in Brussels for being awkward, uncooperative and diplomatically maladroit.

Mr Berlusconi almost derailed a high-level EU mission to the Middle East last October by stating his view that western civilisation was superior to Islam. And his threat to block the European Arrest Warrant raised suspicions that he put his own personal interests above those of Europe as a whole.

EU diplomats were angered by Italy's failure to specify its objections to the arrest warrant until negotiations were almost complete.This contrasted with Ireland's successful strategy of identifying a few key difficulties at an early stage, which was rewarded with a guarantee that Irish authorities would only be obliged to extradite convicted criminals or suspects facing trial elsewhere in the EU.

When Mr Berlusconi finally agreed to the arrest warrant, he immediately created more ill-will by blocking an agreement on the siting of new EU agencies and withdrawing from a major European defence project.

The prospect of Mr Berlusconi as foreign minister, perhaps for as long as six months, fills EU diplomats with horror.

A successful EU foreign minister has all the qualities that the Italian prime minister lacks, including diplomatic subtlety and a complex view of national interests. Countries such as Spain and Britain, which have been regarded as awkward in the past, had specific concerns, usually relating to the budget and structural funds.

Like Ireland, Italy is a traditionally pro-European country that has turned cool on Europe without warning.

The difficulty for other EU member-states is that Italy's new antipathy to Brussels appears, like Ireland's, to be more rooted in psychology or emotion than in policy.

This makes it more unpredictable and more difficult to respond to successfully.

As the EU prepares for a great debate on its future, many in Brussels will be praying that Mr Ruggiero's resignation does not only herald the arrival of the witch, Befana, at Italy's bedside but at that of Europe as a whole.