Eurocommunism

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GDR commemorative stamp on the occasion of the Conference of the Communist and Workers' Parties of Europe in 1976 in East Berlin . The conference is considered to be the last major conference in which the eurocommunist parties of Western Europe and the communist parties of Eastern Europe took part.

Eurocommunism is the name of a political movement within the communist parties of Europe. The term was coined in the 1970s and describes the politics of those communist parties in Western Europe that, beginning with the events of the Prague Spring in 1968, increasingly distanced themselves from Soviet- style communism and tried to achieve a symbiosis between Western ideas of democracy and the ideas of socialism ( Third Way ). At the latest since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the term Eurocommunism can be considered historical, as it was deliberately developed to differentiate it from the term socialism of the communist leading power ( actually existing socialism ). The political approaches associated with it were previously and are still widely referred to as reform communism .

Definition

Enrico Berlinguer (left) and Santiago Carrillo , two important representatives of Eurocommunism

Eurocommunism describes the politics of some communist parties in Western Europe and, in particular, their demarcation from socialism of Soviet character during the Cold War . The term originated around 1975 and was used in media and politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Initially, it was a foreign name and not a self-name, but was also accepted and used within the so-called parties.

The Eurocommunists denied the international leadership claim of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) over the other communist parties (CPs) and, renouncing the slogan of the “ dictatorship of the proletariat ”, proclaimed a democratic path to socialism within the pluralistic parliamentary systems of Western Europe.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the communist parties in Italy , Spain and France in particular represented eurocommunist views. An important representative and pioneer of Eurocommunism was Enrico Berlinguer , General Secretary of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI - Partito Comunista Italiano ) from 1972 to 1984 . Even before Berlinguer, the CP of Italy had taken a critical stance towards the CPSU. As early as 1968, it condemned the crackdown on the reform communist approach of the “ Prague Spring ” by Warsaw Pact troops under Soviet leadership. At that time, efforts were formulated in Czechoslovakia, under which market economy elements (see socialist market economy ) were to be reintroduced. In accordance with the reform communist nature of Eurocommunism, however, a complete private economy was not to be established, but rather the socialist economy was to be combined with a democratic structure - the slogan “socialism with a human face” was coined in the CSSR.

In Western Europe, the politically successful CPs with permanent mandates in parliaments, mayors or partial government participation have increasingly followed a Euro-Communist orientation since the 1970s; many CPs aligned with the CPSU, such as B. the West German German Communist Party (DKP) or the Socialist Unity Party of West Berlin (SEW), however, could not achieve any electoral success. In many cases this was attributed to their orthodoxy, which did not allow authentic politics. In fact, however, there were no successful new or counter-foundations of Euro-Communist parties in West Germany. Instead, a contrast between party democracy and New Social Movements was already emerging here, which did not appear until later in other Western European countries. Eurocommunist intellectuals organized themselves in the FRG in the working group for the Western European Workers' Movement, which existed from 1976 to 1980 .

The Titoism in Yugoslavia was also sometimes considered a form of Euro-Communism because Tito with as early as 1948 Stalin had broken Soviet Union and pursued its own path to communism. This referred to earlier council democratic models and dynamized the Yugoslav planned economy through the introduction of forms of workers' self-government . The "Yugoslav model" made up of planned economy and economic democratic elements had a great influence on the economic ideas of the eurocommunist parties, but was also discussed in the social democratic parties of Western Europe. Although not in Europe, the relatively influential Communist Party of Japan (CPJ) was also considered to be "eurocommunist" .

Political scientists rated Eurocommunism as the greatest political threat to the Eastern Bloc , as it appeared to be more successful than the imposed communism of the Soviet type. The decline of Eurocommunism did not begin with the disintegration of state socialism, but well before that. In particular, the failure of the “ Historical Compromise ”, a coalition government made up of Eurocommunists and Christian Democrats in Italy, was formative. It showed the limits of the eurocommunist approach of introducing a socialist transformation through elections and reform coalitions. The electoral successes of the Italian communists, who at times received over thirty percent of the vote, could no longer be achieved after this failed experiment, and in other countries the influence of Eurocommunism had already declined massively in the early 1980s.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ralf Hoffrogge: Fordism, Eurocommunism and New Left. Theses on continuities and discontinuities between the labor movement and the left-wing scene in the FRG, in: Yearbook for Historical Communism Research 2012, Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2012.
  2. ↑ On workers' self-management cf. Ernest Mandel (ed.): Workers' control - workers' councils - workers' self-administration, published in the trade union “Europäische Verlagsanstalt”, Frankfurt am Main 1971.
  3. ↑ Harald Neubert : Eurokommunismus, in: Wolfgang Fritz Haug u. a. (Ed.), Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism, Hamburg 1994.

literature

  • Detlev Albers u. a. (Ed.) Otto Bauer and the “third” way. The rediscovery of Austromarxism by left-wing socialists and Eurocommunists. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-593-32617-5
  • Francesco Di Palma: The SED, the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1968 to the 1980s - a critical insight into the triangular relationship In: Deutschland Archiv, 43 (2010), No. 1, Pp. 80-89 ( ISSN  0012-1428 ).
  • Nikolas Dörr: Change of communism in Western Europe: an analysis of the intra-party developments in the communist parties of France, Finland and Italy in the course of Eurocommunism. Berlin 2006 ( ISSN  0947-3599 ).
  • Nikolas Dörr: The Red Danger. Italian Eurocommunism as a Security Policy Challenge for the USA and West Germany 1969-1979 , Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 2017 (Contemporary History Studies, Volume 58), ISBN 978-3-412-50742-8 .
  • Ralf Hoffrogge : Fordism, Eurocommunism and the New Left. Theses on continuities and discontinuities between the labor movement and the left-wing scene in the FRG, in: Yearbook for Historical Communism Research 2012, Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2012.
  • Klaus Kellmann: Pluralist Communism? Change tendencies of Eurocommunist parties in Western Europe and their reaction to the renewal in Poland, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-608-91274-6 .
  • Adolf Kimmel : Eurocommunism. The communist parties of France, Italy, Spain and Portugal . Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 1977, ISBN 3-412-02977-7 .
  • Michael Mayer : "Creeping power on felt slippers". The Federal Republic, the GDR and the possible government participation of the Communist parties in France and Italy in the 1970s. In: Yearbook for Historical Research on Communism 2010, pp. 127–141.
  • Harald Neubert : Eurokommunismus , in: Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism , Vol. 3, Argument-Verlag, Hamburg, 1997, Sp. 979–994.
  • Karin Priester : Does Eurocommunism Have a Future? Perspectives and Limits of System Change in Western Europe, CH Beck, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-406-08706-X
  • Helmut Richter u. Günter Trautmann (Ed.): Eurokommunismus. A third way for Europe? , Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1979, ISBN 3-455-08876-7 .
  • Communism today. Part II: Eurocommunism - Challenge for East and West . In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 1977, pp. 170 ( Online - May 9, 1977 ).
  • Communism today. Part III: Eurocommunism - its ideology and its adversaries . In: Der Spiegel . No. 21 , 1977, pp. 150 ( online - May 16, 1977 ).
  • Eurocommunism - A collection of statements (with Franz Muhri, Erwin Scharf)

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