Anticommunist and Anti-Fascist: Christian Democratic Conceptions of the Nation, 1948 – 1953

In the campaign against the Popular Democratic Front for the parliamentary elections of 1948, the Italian Christian Democratic Party (DC) was faced with the task of articulating a brand of internationalism that was anti-communist and a nationalism that was anti-Fascist. With this in mind, the paper addresses the DC’s process of conscious self-definition that attempted to build a new Italian national identity in contrast both to defeated Fascism and the internationalism of the powerful and popular Italian Communist Party (PCI). In the course of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the party of Alcide De Gasperi increasingly articulated itself as the defense against two enemies, one defeated in 1945 and one that remained at home and abroad in the form of PCI and the Soviet Union. It was against these twin enemies that the DC presented itself as the embodiment of the reconstituted Italian nation. The DC nationalism studiously avoided allusions to Italianita (Italianess) in the exclusionary and racially-defined ways promoted under Fascism and developed a form of Catholic and democratic internationalism and social solidarity that it contrasted to the reality of communism and the memory of fascism. This paper assesses the success and failures of Italian Christian Democracy’s poising of itself between the two enemies of Fascism and communism, as seen in official party publications, pamphlets, and speeches, from the electoral campaign of 1948 through the end of the De Gasperi government in 1953.