The essay aims to show how the analysis of the policy followed by the Partito d’Azione with respect to the origins and development of the “Trieste question” can enlighten more general aspects of its politics and reflection, concerning first of all the confrontation with fascism and communism and, through it, the definition of an alternative idea of a democratic homeland. The confrontation with the fascist past centred on the regime’s responses to the post-war crisis concerning the key problems of the management of multinational border territories, the organisation of state and European organisation, and Italy’s foreign policy in the Danubian-Balkan framework. The confrontation with communism was stimulated by the policy of Tito’s Yugoslavia towards the Upper Adriatic territories during the Resistance and in the aftermath of the Liberation, raising profound questions about the relationship of communism with anti-fascism and its role in the “democratic revolution” desired by the azionisti for the post-war period. The position of the Pd’A on these issues took shape through a constant and by no means linear dialectic between the central and peripheral structures of the party, arriving at a conception of the homeland with strong anti-nationalist and pro-Europeanist overtones.
