Eurocommunism
In April 1977, Deutschland Archiv decided that the word was first used in the summer of 1975 by Yugoslav journalist Frane Barbieri, former editor of Belgrade's NIN news magazine.
However, Eurocommunism did not go as far as the Anglosphere-centred New Left movement which had originally borrowed from the French nouvelle gauche, but in the course of the events went past their academic theorists, largely abandoning Marxist historical materialism, class struggle and its traditional institutions such as communist parties.
Romania's leader Nicolae Ceaușescu staunchly criticized the Soviet invasion in a speech, explicitly declaring his support for the Czechoslovakian leadership under Alexander Dubček.
[19][20] The Communist Party of Belgium flirted with Eurocommunism in the 1970s, but did not want to explicitly reject the Soviet model and engaged in a polemic with Carrillo for this reason.
[22] The Italian 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.
[23] The Historic Compromise (compromesso storico) with the Christian Democracy, stopped by the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro in 1978, was a consequence of this new policy.
For some, it was their direct experience of feminist and similar action, while for others it was a reaction to the political events of the Soviet Union at the apogee of what Mikhail Gorbachev later called the Era of Stagnation.
Eurocommunism became a force across Europe in 1977, when the PCI's Enrico Berlinguer, the PCE's Santiago Carrillo and the PCF's Georges Marchais met in Madrid and laid out the fundamental lines of the "new way".
The breakup of the Soviet Union and 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.
First, it is alleged by critics that Eurocommunists showed a lack of courage in sufficiently and definitively breaking off from the Soviet Union (for example, the Italian Communist Party took this step in 1981 after the repression of Solidarność in Poland).
[citation needed] From a Trotskyist point of view in From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of 'Socialism in One Country', Ernest Mandel views Eurocommunism as a subsequent development of the decision taken by the Soviet Union in 1924 to abandon the goal of world revolution and concentrate on social and economic development of the Soviet Union, the doctrine of socialism in one country.
According to this vision, the Eurocommunists of the Italian and French communist parties are considered to be nationalist movements, who together with the Soviet Union abandoned internationalism.
He also stated that the Soviet Union's refusal to reject Palmiro Togliatti's theory of polycentrism encouraged the various pro-Soviet communist parties to moderate their views in order to join cabinets which in turn forced them to abandon Marxism–Leninism as their leading ideology.
Henry Kissinger opposed the idea that communist parties in power in western Europe could be acceptable for the United States if they are independent from Moscow stating how "Tito is not under Moscow's control, yet his influence is felt all over the world" warning how a West European, communist ruled country, may potentially lead to "total redefinition" of the post-World War II order.
