Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The new approach of the Italian Party, and rather less convincing efforts by the French Party to emulate its success if not its ideas, became known as ‘Eurocommunism’—a term first coined at a November 1975 meeting of Italian, French and Spanish Communists and given official currency by the secretary-general of the Spanish Communists, Santiago Carrillo, in his 1977 essay Eurocommunism and the State. The Spanish Party was only just emerging from decades of clandestinity and its leaders were keen to establish their democratic credentials. Like their Italian comrades, they understood that the best way to achieve this was by taking their distance, both from the contemporary Soviet Union but also, and more significantly, from their common Leninist past. ‘Eurocommunism’ proved briefly seductive, though less to electors than to intellectuals and academics who mistook for a political revival of Marxism what was in fact an expression of doctrinal exhaustion.