The Political Legacies of Resistance

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

In the framework of the EUI Political Behaviour Colloquium, this seminar features a paper presentation by EUI alumnus Simone Cremaschi (Bocconi University), co-authored by Juan Masallo (Leiden University).

Do wartime experiences other than violence leave long-lasting political legacies? How are these legacies kept and sustained across generations and beyond those who directly experienced war? We explore these questions in Italy, a country whose democratic institutions were forged in the aftermath of a civil war fought between 1943 and 1945 by an armed resistance movement against Nazi-Fascist forces. We argue that the local presence and activity of resistance bands left antifascist legacies that shape political attitudes and behaviors today.

Furthermore, we propose that memory entrepreneurs keep alive these legacies via a process of intergenerational, community-based transmission consisting of three core activities: (1) memorialisa-tion recomposes the resistance experience into a coherent narrative that legitimizes winners and condemns losers, (2) localization strengthen the narrative’s local reso-nance and self-identification, and (3) mobilisation activates the narrative to counter threats. We empirically explore this argument by exploiting novel data from a recent nationwide, grassroots mobilization campaign – the "Anti-Fascist Law" – aimed at banning neofascist propaganda. We use an integrative multi-method research design that combines a statistical analysis of geo-referenced data to make sense of the campaign's spatial patterns, with a within-case analysis of a purposively selected locality to trace the process by which legacies are kept and transmitted across generations. Our study emphasizes armed resistance as a critical source of war’s long-term political legacies and improves our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the collective transmission of political memories.