Where to look for inspiration when Myanmar’s peace process shifts into the critical phase of political dialogue and options for a federal future are debated? There’s no obvious reason to turn to Italy – except that it has one very successful experience of accommodating ethnic diversity.

In 1919, during the fallout from the Great War, Italy annexed a parcel of land that for centuries had been part of the Germanic world, and latterly had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Though not in any organic sense Italian, the region’s new geopolitical status was endorsed by peace conferences at the end of both the First and Second World Wars. In Italian, it is currently known as Trentino-Alto Adige. (In German, Alto Adige is Südtirol. In English, it is South Tyrol.)

The early years were by no means easy. A population that was 92 percent German speaking in 1910 did not readily submit to the change of sovereignty, and tensions increased during a harsh Italianization campaign implemented by Benito Mussolini in the 1930s. From 1956 to 1988, ethnic German separatists unleashed terrorist attacks averaging more than 10 incidents per year. Today, by contrast, the region is broadly reconciled to its place in the world. How did this happen?

Celestine Bohlen’s article on South Tyrol in Monday’s New York Times notes that a 1972 autonomy deal granting extensive self-rule was the key move. Today the decentralized government, run by a German-speaking party, manages almost all of the public sector (though not the police force). It controls 90 percent of regional tax revenue. In a community with 62 percent German speakers and 23 percent Italian speakers, language policy is fully bilingual.

To explain how the 1972 deal was struck, Bohlen quotes local retailer Karl Bernardi. “Everyone had to renounce their own egoism. Above all, it required a will to compromise.”