Eurocommunism

Eurocommunism was an attempt in the 1970s by various European communist parties to widen their appeal by embracing public sector middle-class workers, new social movements such as feminism and gay liberation, rejecting support of the Soviet Union, and expressing more clearly their fidelity to democratic institutions.

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It was those Communist parties most strongly entrenched in their respective societies — notably the Italian Communist Party and the French Communist Party — that adopted a Eurocommunist line, while smaller and more marginal parties remained correspondingly more dependent upon the patronage of Moscow.

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The Communist Party of Spain and its Catalan referent, the United Socialist Party of Catalonia, had already been committed to the liberal possibilist politics of the Popular Front during the Spanish Civil War, and it emerged from the dictatorship of Franco following an essentially Eurocommunist line. The Communist parties of Netherlands and Austria also showed distinct Eurocommunist tendencies.

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Western European communists came to Eurocommunism via a variety of routes. For some it was their direct experience of feminist and similar action. For others its was a reaction to the political events of the Soviet Union, at the apogee of what Gorbachev later called the Era of Stagnation. This process was accelerated after the events of 1968, particularly the crushing of the Prague Spring.

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The politics of d?tente also played a part. With war less likely, Western communists were under less pressure to follow Soviet orthodoxy yet also wanted to engage with a rise in western proletarian militancy such as Italy's hot autumn and Britain's shop stewards' movement.

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Eurocommunist ideas won at least partial acceptance outside of the continent. Prominent parties influenced by it outside of Europe were the Movement for Socialism (Venezuela), the Japanese Communist Party, the Mexican Communist Party and the Communist Party of Australia.

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But Eurocommunism was in many ways only a staging post. Some — principally the Italians — became social democrats, others, like the Dutch, toyed with green politics, while the French party during the 1980's reverted to a more pro-Soviet stance.

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Eurocommunism was officialized in 1977, when Enrico Berlinguer of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Santiago Carrillo of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) and Georges Marchais of the French Communist Party (PCF) met in Madrid and laid out the fundamental lines of the "new way". The PCI in particular had been developing an independent line from Moscow for many years prior, which had already been exhibited in 1968, when the party refused to support the Soviet invasion of Prague. In 1975 the PCI and the PCE had made a declaration regarding the "march toward socialism" to be done in "peace and freedom". In 1976 in Moscow, Berlinguer, in front of 5,000 Communist delegates, had spoken of a "pluralistic system" (translated by the interpreter as "multiform"), and described PCI's intentions to build "a socialism that we believe necessary and possible only in Italy".

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Before the end of the Cold War put practically all Leftist parties in Europe on the defensive and made neoliberal reforms the order of the day, many Eurocommunist parties split, with the Right (such as Democratici di Sinistra or Iniciativa per Catalunya) adopting social democracy more whole-heartedly, while the Left strove to preserve some identifiably Communist positions (Partito della Rifondazione Comunista or PSUC viu/Communist Party of Spain).

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1970s: This article provides extensive lists of events and significant personalities of the 1970s. For an in-depth article on the cultural and social trends of the decade, please see The Seventies...

Communist: REDIRECT Communism...

Public sector: The public sector is that part of economic and administrative life that deals with the delivery of goods and services by and for the government, whether national, regional or local/municipal....