City Partnerships as Détente from Below? Twinning Bologna and Zagreb

Bologna was the only major Italian city which was uninterruptedly governed by a Communist party, i.e. the Italian Communist Party (PCI), from the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall (1945-1989). Accordingly, during the Cold War, Bologna positioned itself ideologically in the Eastern bloc, even if it was geographically located in the Western bloc. Hence, Bologna represented a major arena for ideological rivalry as well as continuous interaction between the West and the East: the city was the main stage of cultural and political cooperation between Italy and the Soviet bloc. It welcomed many official delegations and hosted festivals and other public events from the East. It also struck a complex and enigmatic relationship with Tito’s Yugoslavia, a non-aligned country ruled by a Communist Party. This contribution focuses on the evolution of that relationship from the Communist-led liberation of Bologna at the end of the Second World War, through the years of the Soviet-Yugoslav quarrel from 1948 to 1956, to the twinning of Bologna with the capital of the Socialist Republic of Croatia and Yugoslavia´s second city, Zagreb, in 1963. Using both Italian and Yugoslav sources, archival, press, and oral, the paper investigates the impact of Tito’s Yugoslavia on the municipal government’s struggle to ‘live Bolshevik’ in the West. The first part deals with the period when Tito’s Yugoslavia was in conflict with Moscow, when Aldo Magnani, Italy’s most famous ‘Titoist’, led a pro-Yugoslav split from the PCI in Bologna. The second part tracks the emerging political, economic, cultural and institutional connections with Yugoslavia that followed Soviet-Yugoslav reconciliation, and led ultimately to the decision to twin Bologna and Zagreb. The paper will thereby uncover the unique ability of a city to act as an ideological ambassador between a multiplicity of Cold War actors. It will interrogate to what extent the links set up between Bologna and Zagreb can be seen as an early form of détente as various actors responded to the logic of a bipolar world. The paper is a co-authorship between Eloisa Betti and Vladimir Unkovski-Korica.