Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The (relative) autonomy of the Italian Communists was complemented by Berlinguer’s 1973 decision to commit his party to the defense of Italian democracy, even if it meant abandoning its outright opposition to the Christian Democrats: this was the so-called ‘historic compromise’. This shift was driven in part by the shock of the 1973 coup d’état in Chile, which convinced Berlinguer and other Communist intellectuals that even if the Communists won a parliamentary majority they would never be allowed—by the Americans, or their allies in Italian military, business and Church circles—to form a government of their own. But it was also a reaction, as we saw in the previous chapter, to the very real threat to Italian democracy itself from Right and Left terrorists for whom the Communist Party was as much the enemy as the Italian state.