L’Emilia-Romagna: un «laboratorio» dell’anticomunismo nel lungo dopoguerra?

This chapter examines Emilia-Romagna as a “laboratory” of anti-communism in post-war Italy, focusing on the period 1945–1956 while tracing longer-term continuities and subsequent developments. Drawing on archival sources, contemporary political publications, and existing scholarship, it investigates how the regional hegemony of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) generated heterogeneous forms of opposition. The analysis connects state repression, prefectural intervention, and the prosecution of former partisans with cultural representations of communism, Catholic mobilisation, and competing projects of local government. It situates these responses within the region’s diverse political traditions and social geographies, relating Cold War polarisation to older patterns of hostility towards social conflict and political subversion. Particular attention is devoted to the interaction between communist administrations and their opponents, notably Giuseppe Dossetti’s challenge to Giuseppe Dozza in Bologna’s 1956 municipal elections and the intellectual milieu of the journal il Mulino. The chapter argues that anti-communism functioned both as a means of political delegitimisation and as a stimulus to competition, mutual adaptation, and administrative innovation. The notion of a laboratory identifies a historically specific arena in which conflicting political cultures developed distinctive practices with national repercussions. Brief consideration of later socialist critiques and challenges to communist hegemony highlights the persistence and transformation of these tensions into the 1970s and 1980s. By examining these interactions, the chapter offers a perspective on the construction and contestation of the “Emilian model” and on the relationship between political conflict, local autonomy, and democratic legitimacy in republican Italy.