Eurocommunism

Conditions of formation

Eurocommunism was the strategic position developed by West European communist parties in the 1970s. Three conditions formed it. First, the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 decisively damaged the legitimacy of the Soviet model. Second, in Western Europe, where parliamentary institutions and civil liberties functioned stably, the realism of a strategy of revolutionary seizure of power became questionable. Third, these parties in fact held considerable electoral weight and experience in local government.

The Italian Communist Party stood at the centre of the current. The historic compromise Berlinguer proposed in 1973 rested on the judgement that reform was possible only through cooperation with a broad range of political forces including the Christian Democrats, and the experience of the fall of the Allende government in Chile was offered as its ground.

Content

In March 1977 the leaders of the Italian, Spanish, and French communist parties issued a joint declaration in Madrid. It defined parliamentary democracy, political pluralism, and civil liberties as conditions of socialism and declared that the transition to socialism had to proceed by a peaceful and democratic road.

The largest theoretical change was the abandonment of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Italian party deleted the expression from its programme during the 1970s, and the Spanish party removed the designation Marxist-Leninist from its own in 1978. Gramsci's concept of hegemony served as the theoretical resource for the shift, placing at the centre of strategy the construction of consent in civil society prior to any capture of the state.

Outcome

Achievement and limitation appeared together. The Italian party reached its peak with 34 percent of the vote in the general election of 1976 without entering government, and the historic compromise foundered after the kidnapping and killing of Moro in 1978. The French party lost the initiative in its left alliance with the Socialists, and the Spanish party was overtaken by the Socialist Workers' Party during the transition to democracy.

The current weakened through the 1980s. The Italian party reorganized as the Democratic Party of the Left in 1991 and gave up the communist name. The question Eurocommunism raised, however, how parliamentary democracy and civil liberties are to be integrated into a socialist strategy, remained a basic condition of European left politics and continues to be referred to in the strategic debates of left parties in the twenty-first century.