TRANSNATIONAL IMAGINATIONS OF SOCIALISM : town twinning and local government in "red" italy... and the gdr, 1960s-1970s

Town twinning refers to the postwar phenomenon of administrative exchange between analogous municipalities. Cold War-related research has mostly interpreted it as an instrument to pursue European integration, or to solidify détente "from below". However, municipalities were not only administrative, neutral actors, but also bearers of political content. This is particularly visible in the case of Italian towns located in the Western bloc, guided by socialist-oriented administrations, and their "twin" counterparts in the German Democratic Republic. This volume explores the connections initiated by such towns in the 1960s-1970s, focusing on socialist-specific conceptions which fueled the policies implemented by "red" municipalities, in managing local economies and social policies, but also in maintaining a lively and interconnected transnational microsociability among grassroots activists. Despite the increasing ideological divergences between Eastern and Western communists, and between Italian democratic communists and the more dogmatic and repressive, strictly pro-Soviet ones in the GDR, communication continued to flourish on the local level. The book explores what still linked the two worlds together, the "bright side of socialism": in this case, a common symbolism related to the past, practical exchanges in the present dimension, and a shared future imagination and conception of the town on the basis of a socialist horizon, built around welfare and services for citizens and workers. Contents 5 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 13 Chapter 1 Conceptual Foundations and Historiographical Debates 41 Chapter 2 Cold War Entanglements 71 Chapter 3 Strategies of National Bilateral Exchange 95 Chapter 4 “Red” Areas and Towns: Developments, Similarities, Asymmetries 156 Chapter 5 Protagonists and Practices of Socialist Twinning 201 Chapter 6 Looking at the “Other” 315 Epilogue 376 List of Archives 386 List of Abbreviations 388 List of Interviews 389 Biographies of Interviewees 390 Bibliography 392 Index 421 The peer-reviewed series offers books that illuminate the multifaceted history of the Cold War in both its European and Global dimensions, across and beyond the Iron Curtain. It focuses on the interactions, interdependencies and co-operation of Eastern state socialist countries (and their citizens) with Western capitalist, Latin American, African and non-aligned states (and their citizens), as well as with China