Enrico Berlinguer
Enrico Berlinguer was the General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party from 1972 until his death in 1984, the architect of Eurocommunism and the historic compromise with the Democrazia Cristiana, and the most successful communist party leader in Western Europe with the PCI achieving 34 percent of the Italian vote under his leadership.
Enrico Berlinguer was born on May 25, 1922, in Sassari, Sardinia. He served as General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI, Partito Comunista Italiano) from 1972 until his death on June 11, 1984, in Padua, where he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage during a campaign rally for European parliamentary elections. Under his leadership the PCI became the largest communist party in any Western democracy, achieving approximately 34 percent of the Italian national vote in the 1976 elections.1
Eurocommunism
Berlinguer was the principal theorist and political leader of Eurocommunism - the doctrine that Western communist parties should pursue socialism through parliamentary democracy rather than Soviet-style revolutionary means, and that they should operate independently of Moscow rather than as instruments of Soviet foreign policy. His intellectual development in this direction accelerated after the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, which demonstrated to him the irreconcilable contradiction between Soviet methods and the values communism claimed to embody.
By the early 1970s Berlinguer had explicitly distanced the PCI from Moscow's theoretical authority, supported Italian membership in NATO, and articulated a conception of democratic socialism compatible with Western political institutions. This repositioning - contested within the PCI by orthodox factions - opened the political space for the historic compromise.1
The Historic Compromise
Berlinguer proposed the "historic compromise" (compromesso storico) in a series of articles published in Rinascita in September-October 1973, following the September 11, 1973, coup in Chile that overthrew the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. Berlinguer's analysis drew an explicit lesson: a left government that held only plurality support was vulnerable to violent destabilization by the right and by external powers, as Chile had demonstrated. Italian stability required a broad national coalition.
The historic compromise envisioned collaboration between the PCI and the Democrazia Cristiana, bringing the communists - with their massive organizational base in the Italian working class and the unions - into effective partnership with the dominant Christian Democratic governing party. This arrangement, if realized, would have represented the first communist participation in government in a NATO Western European country since the early Cold War consolidation ended communist ministerial participation in France and Italy in 1947.2
The kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro in 1978 by the Brigate Rosse destroyed the political conditions for the compromise. Berlinguer himself, in the painful position of leading a party that had supported Giulio Andreotti's government's refusal to negotiate for Moro's release, subsequently moved the PCI away from the compromise strategy.
Relationship with Moro
Moro and Berlinguer represented the two poles of the compromise - Moro as the DC's most credible advocate for engagement with the PCI, Berlinguer as the communist leader willing to accept terms that required distancing from Moscow and accepting NATO membership. Their collaboration, which developed through indirect channels and explicit negotiations, was the most significant political realignment attempted in postwar Western Europe and the most significant political project ended by the strategy of tension.1
Death
Berlinguer collapsed on stage at a campaign rally in Padua on June 7, 1984, four days before he died. More than a million people attended the funeral procession in Rome on June 13. His death effectively ended the historic compromise era of Italian politics and the PCI's period of electoral ascendancy.1
Sources
- Hellman, Stephen. Italian Communism in Transition: The Rise and Fall of the Historic Compromise in Turin, 1975-1980. Oxford University Press, 1988. ↩
- Drake, Richard. The Aldo Moro Murder Case. Harvard University Press, 1995. Sassoon, Donald. One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century. New Press, 1996. ↩
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