Enrico Berlinguer

Enrico Berlinguer (left) together with Santiago Carrillo

Enrico Berlinguer ( IPA [berliŋ'gwɛr] ) (born May 25, 1922 in Sassari , Sardinia , † June 11, 1984 in Padua ) was an Italian politician. From 1972 to 1984 he was general secretary of the Italian Communist Party ( Partito Comunista Italiano - PCI ) and a leading exponent of transnational communism , especially Eurocommunism .

Origin and promotion to general secretary

Berlinguer was born in Sassari, the son of Maria Loriga and Mario Berlinguer . His father came from a Catholic Sardinian aristocratic family and worked as a lawyer , initially a member of the Partito Repubblicano Italiano , later a socialist senator.

He was the cousin of Luigi Berlinguer , who was also active in the PCI , and of Francesco Cossiga , who later became President of the Italian Republic as the leading Italian Christian Democrat . Berlinguer's relatives also included Antonio Segni , another leading Christian Democrat and president. Enrico's grandfather Enrico Berlinguer sen. was the founder of La Nuova Sardegna , an important Sardinian newspaper, and a personal friend of Giuseppe Garibaldis and Giuseppe Mazzini , whom he helped with parliamentary work against poverty in Sardinia.

In 1937 Berlinguer made his first contacts with Sardinian anti-fascists . In 1941, after graduating from high school, he enrolled in law at the University of Sassari , but did not finish it due to the war. In 1943 he joined the PCI , quickly became secretary of the Sassari section and took part in the anti-fascist resistance struggle ( Resistenza ). In the following year a riot broke out in his hometown of Sassari, in which he was involved and was therefore imprisoned, but was released again after just 3 months.

Immediately after his release from prison, his father took him to Salerno , the city to which the Italian royal family and the government had fled from the clashes between Allies and Germans in Italy. In Salerno, Mario Berlinguer introduced him to his school friend Palmiro Togliatti , the most important representative of the Italian Communist Party.

Togliatti sent Enrico Berlinguer back to Sardinia, where he was supposed to prepare for his political future. At the end of 1944 Togliatti proposed him to the national secretary of the Italian Communist Youth Association FGCI . After moving to Milan in 1945, he was elected as the youngest member of his party's central committee. From 1949 to 1956 he was general secretary of the FGCI and from 1950 to 1953 he was also president of the World Federation of Democratic Youth , the international Marxist youth organization.

In 1946 Togliatti was promoted to general secretary of the PCI and called Berlinguer to his side in Rome , where he gradually grew into a national leadership role.

Enrico Berlinguer had been married to Letizia Laurenti, a practicing Catholic, since 1957, who gave birth to four children: Bianca Maria (* 1959), Maria Stella (* 1961), Marco (* 1963) and Laura (* 1970). Daughter Bianca Maria worked as a presenter of the news program TG 3 on the state television broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI).

In 1957 Berlinguer became director of the PCI Central University. He performed the compulsory stay in the Soviet Union , which had been necessary up to then for employment in a higher management position , including political training. In 1959 he rose to a full member of the party executive committee and was primarily responsible for the organization. From 1962 to 1966 he was a member of the Secretariat and was elected to the Politburo in 1963 . Since 1968 he was a member of the Italian Parliament. In 1969 he was elected deputy general secretary of his party at the party congress in Bologna (the general secretary was now Luigi Longo ), and at the 13th congress he was promoted to general secretary of the PCI in 1972.

Berlinguer died on June 11, 1984 as a result of a stroke suffered on June 7, 1984 .

Togliatti's "Turn of Salerno"

The PCI was re-established by Palmiro Togliatti in March 1944 after his return from Soviet exile as a “ new type of party ” - with the aim of developing from a cadre to a mass party. In Italy, his so-called “Wende von Salerno” - Togliatti's entry into the bourgeois government of Ivanoe Bonomi - enabled the Resistance to make a decisive contribution to the victory over fascism . From 1944 to 1945 he held the position of Deputy Prime Minister and from 1945 to 1946 that of Justice Minister under Alcide De Gasperi . He strove for a popular front with the Socialist Party (PSI) to revolutionize the state and society through parliamentary channels. In doing so, he also looked for cooperation with civil forces in order to be able to achieve social goals. In 1956 he developed the idea of polycentrism in communism, “unity in diversity” as a political practice.

The PCI began to practice the coexistence operated by the USSR vis-à-vis the USA itself. Ultimately, this coexistence was also implemented in Italian domestic politics : in the 1970s, Berlinguer opened the party to relations with industry and, generally speaking, with the conservative forces of society. He publicly stated that the PCI was watching with interest a new economic development model, a concept that was part of the agenda of industrialists and entrepreneurs. This concept included, above all, the settlement of large-scale industry in the Mezzogiorno , the economically underdeveloped and poor south of Italy. As the construction of a Italsider - steel mill in Bagnoli, a neighborhood of Naples , and the construction of car plant "Alfasud" of Alfa Romeo . Italsider also built a steel mill near Taranto , and Fiat planned a plant in Calabria .

Protagonist of Eurocommunism

Berlinguer had already been known far beyond Italy since 1964 - especially since the Moscow Congress of Communist Parties in 1969 - as a representative of a movement within the PCI that sought an autonomous course for its party towards the CPSU . The Italian delegation in Moscow, led by Berlinguer, did not agree to the official line in 1969 and refused to take part in the final document. Berlinguer gave one of the most spectacular speeches ever made in the Soviet Union among the main Communist cadres. In it he refused to "excommunicate" the Chinese communists and made it clear to Leonid Brezhnev that the " tragedy of Prague " - the invasion of the Warsaw Pact in Czechoslovakia - the differences in concepts on fundamental issues such as national sovereignty and socialist democracy and clearly brought to light the freedom of culture in the international communist movement.

In the 1970s Berlinguer was best known as a protagonist of the so-called Eurocommunism propagated by some Western European CPs (those of Italy , France and Spain , the Left Party of Sweden and others) , which the Australian and Japanese CPs also took up. The central idea was to overcome the limited social and political influence of the communist parties as a social minority through participation in parliamentary democracy and the governments that emerged from it. This reformist ideology included government cooperation with bourgeois and social democratic parties. In return, the bourgeois parties demanded the abandonment of fundamental Marxist and Leninist positions, such as B. the concept of a “ dictatorship of the proletariat ”.

While Spain's PCE under Santiago Carrillo hardly got beyond declarations and the PCF soon distanced itself, Eurocommunism in Italy under Berlinguer became the dominant trend in the PCI for almost a decade.

On the threshold of the 1970s, Berlinguer was personally present at the “revolutionary mass unrest” - the strikes for higher wages and better working conditions among workers in the industrial metropolis of Turin , the headquarters of the FIAT group. The successes contributed to the growing mass influence of the PCI and established its high reputation among the grassroots.

Influences from Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia

The roots of Eurocommunism can be traced back to the end of the Second World War . In 1948, under the impression of Soviet tutelage and economic blackmail for Yugoslavia , Tito declared its own path to socialism, which was answered with an economic blockade, but which Tito continued to pursue. The policy of the CPSU , which since Khrushchev had propagated the possibility of the coexistence of communism and capitalism, led to a conflict with the Communist Party of China ( Mao called for much more radical positions and an immediate striving for the communist world revolution ) and to undesirable developments in the socialist states of Eastern Europe . Berlinguer, as the party secretariat's entrusted with international tasks, intervened in the disputes between the CPSU and the CCP. In 1968 Berlinguer condemned the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia . A process of division began within the international communist movement, which led to the isolation of the CPSU from its western counterparts. In the long term, this paved the way for Mikhail Gorbachev to power, as he pursued the goal of reopening the communist society of the Soviet Union to other countries and reorienting himself towards social democratic positions.

NATO - protective shield for socialism?

In 1974 Berlinguer traveled to Belgrade to meet Yugoslavia's President Tito and to establish contacts with other important Communist parties in Europe, Asia and Africa. In Moscow in 1976 Berlinguer reaffirmed the PCI's autonomous position vis-à-vis the CPSU. In front of 5,000 delegates he spoke of a pluralistic system (translated as multifarious by the translator) and described the intention of the PCI to build a socialism which we believe is only necessary and possible in Italy . When Berlinguer finally declared condemnation of any kind of intervention as the position of the PCI, the break with Moscow was perfect. The Soviet leadership took the view that Italy was already suffering from the "intervention" of NATO and that the only intervention that an Italian communist could not endure was the Soviet one. In an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera , Berlinguer said he felt safer under the umbrella of NATO. Another Moscow speech, with which Berlinguer a few months later aroused suspicion among the Soviets, was only published in a censored version in Pravda .

In addition to the justified criticism of socialist deformations within the USSR and of the leadership role of the CPSU , the PCI also participated in the criticism of Soviet foreign policy. The PCI party newspaper, L'Unità , criticized z. B. 1976 the shooting of an Italian communist truck driver by GDR border guards while processing at the inner-German border. In 1980 Berlinguer and Santiago Carrillo criticized the intervention of the USSR in Afghanistan . When the USSR refrained from an intervention in Poland based on the Prague model from 1981–1982 only because General Wojciech Jaruzelski seized power in a coup against the constitution of the People's Republic of Poland, this influence was also criticized by Berlinguer and Carrillo.

The PCI accepted the “rules of the game of bourgeois democracy”, adopted the Western model of the state , for which it only called for a “democratic transformation”, recognized the market economy system and proclaimed its own “path to socialism”. At the party congress that elected Berlinguer General Secretary of the PCI in 1972, the party declared its support for “ pluralist democracy ” and for individual “civil liberties”.

Growing parliamentary and social influence

At the beginning of the 1970s, the PCI was the strongest and most politically influential Communist Party in what was then the EEC , with over two million members and over 30 percent of the vote . He has continuously increased the number of his seats in parliament since the 1960s and finally took second place in 1976 with just under 34 percent and only five percent behind the Democrazia Cristiana (DC), the leading ruling party. In the parliamentary elections in June 1976, the PCI achieved its historically best result. Berlinguer was also recognized as a key figure in Italian politics in the bourgeois media. The great importance and external impact of these parliamentary successes strengthened the social-democratic tendency of the party, which asserted itself as the spokesman for Eurocommunism .

While the reformists were already thinking of transforming the PCI into a social democratic or socialist party, Berlinguer, under Eurocommunist auspices, relied on the preservation of revolutionary potential and its use in government cooperation with the DC. The fact that the base of the party largely subordinated itself to the reformist course in the 1970s was based on their trust that Berlinguer would continue to rely on these militant positions.

Historic compromise

→ Main article : Historical compromise

In 1973, when Berlinguer was hospitalized after a car accident while visiting Bulgaria , he wrote three famous articles for the communist weekly magazine Rinascita :

• Riflessioni sull'Italia ( reflections on Italy ),
• Dopo i fatti del Cile ( According to the facts of Chile ),
• Dopo la golpe del Cile ( After the coup in Chile ).

In it he discussed the strategy of the so-called Compromesso storico ("Historical Compromise"), the hypothesis of a coalition between PCI and DC to secure political stability in Italy in a time of serious economic crisis and in view of the coup efforts of some forces.

The main goal of the PCI was government participation with the aim of restructuring the economy and society, which in fact also led to a compromesso storico in the form of negotiations with the DC. Berlinguer's goal was to tie in with Gramsci's definition of the “historical block”. In his view, the starting point was the need to form a broad alliance, including the DC , against the fascist threat that had grown after the fall of Allende .

Berlinguer took small steps that developed a consensus in the PCI about getting closer to the other social groups. After the surprising opening in 1970 to the conservative forces of society, he published an exchange of letters with the Bishop of Ivrea , Luigi Bettazzi . This was surprising in that every common platform since the excommunication of all communists by Pope Pius XII. seemed rather unlikely shortly after World War II . It was also done with the intention of countering popular accusations that the PCI was protecting leftist terrorists during the years of worst violence by the Red Brigades . In this context, the PCI opened up to Catholic members - a public debate arose about the contact options. Notably, Berlinguer's own Catholic family was not torn from their strictly respected privacy.

After the sensational victory in the parliamentary elections in June 1976 (the PCI received 34.4% of the vote), negotiations began to enter the government. The PCI was in a strong position for this, but it could not use it for government participation. As the second largest parliamentary group, it occupied 227 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and appointed the President there and the Vice- President in the Senate . Seven communists headed parliamentary committees. In the regions, the party participated in almost half of the governments. In all the major cities ( Milan , Bologna , Rome , Naples, etc.) it had a majority in the city parliaments and ruled together with the socialists. It provided the mayor of 1,362 of 8,068 cities. The representatives provided by the PCI and the Partito Socialista Italiano represented - from local to regional parliaments - 52.8% of the electorate. Participation in government by the communists was viewed extremely critically internationally: Helmut Schmidt , the then Social Democratic Chancellor , announced in this case that the loans granted to the Italian state would be demanded prematurely by the Federal Republic of Germany . During the world economic summit in Puerto Rico in 1976 this was also announced publicly by the participating states. Schmidt and American politicians also thought out loud about the extent to which Italy's position within NATO would also change if the PCI were involved in government .

The "parliamentary-programmatic majority"

After the 1976 elections, the PCI began putting its reformist aspirations into practice. As part of the so-called "government of national solidarity", the strongest opposition party tolerated the minority cabinet formed by the DC . Berlinguer said, however, that Italy needed a strong, powerful cabinet in the form of an "emergency government" to deal with the crisis. The PCI supported the DC, which ruled without a majority, by abstaining from voting in parliament. In 1978 he voted on the basis of an agreement that had now been officially agreed, but which provided for his entry into the government at a later, not fixed date, for the cabinet formed by the DC right wing and US representative Giulio Andreotti . In exchange for the prospect of government participation and the - never kept - promise to introduce social and economic reforms, he prevented the minority government from being voted out of office by abstaining. He also declared himself ready to support the government's rigorous austerity measures and to moderate the resistance of the trade unions in this regard .

In June 1978 President Giovanni Leone was accused of minor bribery in a campaign supported by the PCI and brought to his resignation. The election of the socialist veteran Alessandro Pertini as head of state came about with Berlinguer's support, but did not show the effects he expected.

On the day a new cabinet was sworn in, Aldo Moro was kidnapped. Berlinguer called for determination and refused to negotiate with the Red Brigades. Moro wanted to exchange them for some prisoners and, as one of those involved later claimed, were ultimately satisfied with a few symbolic actions and public statements. The steadfastness of the PCI did not pay off, however. The Aldo Moro case brought the party back into social isolation.

Concrete measures to suppress the "fascist danger" such as B. an exchange of anti-democratic commanders in the police and army was not initiated. The PCI was still a long way from achieving its original intentions. Nevertheless, Berlinguer continued to work with the DC against violent protests not only from the PCI base, but also from parts of the party apparatus and beyond that of the rest of the left (Manifesto, Proletarian Democracy, Party of Proletarian Unity). Finally, the PCI chairman Luigi Longo declared that it was not a question of defending the “power system” ruled by the DC, but that it was important to preserve the legacy of the Resistancea .

Against the opposition of the reformists, who wanted to continue working with the government, Berlinguer declared parliamentary cooperation ended in January 1979. The historic compromise had failed - instead of pushing back the right-wing extremists, the PCI was faced with a turn to the right in politics. The party lost about a third of its membership and eight percent of the electorate in the years that followed. In a return to the ideas of its founder Antonio Gramsci , she was now striving for "cultural hegemony" in society. This initially successful strategy was thwarted by the privatization of the electronic media, especially by the private television station Silvio Berlusconi .

"Return to Social Democracy"

As the historian Giorgio Galli writes in his Storia del PCI (Milan 1993, p. 294 ff.), Berlinguer suffered badly from the defeat for which he felt personally responsible. This was also reflected in his deteriorating health. If in the end he did not follow through on the resignation he had repeatedly expressed, it was mainly because, in his view, there was no capable successor and he feared a deeper social democratization of his party. After his death on June 11, 1984, preceded by an intracerebral haemorrhage during his speech at a rally, the further development of the PCI confirmed his concern. The party had no successor to its format. The social-democratic current, which he was to a certain extent reined in, was given a free hand. As early as 1986, his successor Alessandro Natta initiated the “reformist turn”: The party's revolutionary orientation was abandoned - a step that the social democratic parties of Europe had taken decades earlier (e.g. the SPD with the Godesberg program in 1959). At the party congress in March 1989, in the shadow of Mikhail Gorbachev's reform course and the decline of real socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, the “return to social democracy ” was openly announced and in January 1991 the PCI was transformed into the Democratic Left Party ( Partito Democratico della Sinistra , later: Democratici di Sinistra ).

classification

Berlinguer's stance during the Eurocommunism phase was contradictory from the perspective of traditional communists. On the 15th anniversary of his death on June 11, 1999, the newspaper of the Party of the New Communist Party , Liberazione , wrote that he had sought a balance between the left and right wing, was a “man of mediation” and as such a “centrist” . One can assume that he would not have followed the path taken by Achille Occhetto (General Secretary since 1988) of transforming the PCI into a social democratic party: the new party has practically completely given up its communist traditions and thereby gained social influence; as the strongest force of the center-left governments that have been formed since then, it has also rallied with other social democrats ( Socialisti Democratici Italiani ), Christian democrats ( Democrazia è Libertà - La Margherita ), liberals ( Italia dei Valori ) and the Greens ( Federazione dei Verdi ) against the conservative Camp allied with Silvio Berlusconi . In 2008 it went on in the new center-left party Partito Democratico . Most observers today rate Berlinguer's work, his commitment to democracy and pluralism , positively. Even former opponents (such as Armando Cossutta ), who once branded this as “betraying the revolution”, are now praising his foresight. However, it is still controversial within the tradition- conscious Partito della Rifondazione Comunista .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Communist with new ideas , accessed December 19, 2015
2. ↑ http://www.lrb.co.uk/v06/n18/paul-ginsborg/berlinguers-legacy

Fonts

• Enrico Berlinguer: For a democratic change. Selected speeches and writings 1969–1974. Published by the Institute for Social Sciences at the Central Committee of the SED. Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1975
• Enrico Berlinguer: The international politics of the Italian communists: speeches and writings 1975/76. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1978. ISBN 3-12-910790-8

literature

• Harald Neubert : Gramsci - Togliatti - Longo - Berlinguer line: renewal or revisionism in the communist movement? . VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-89965-349-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Enrico Berlinguer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Enrico Berlinguer in the Members' database of the European Parliament