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Eurocommunkrn: Between East and West Iso-called “Eurocommunism ”-like its lively younger brother, “Eurosocia1ism”-is a vague, inaccurate , and misleading term which veils rather than describes complex realities. It is vague and misleading because it does not refer, as one might suppose, to a clear grouping of West European communist parties with common positions, an agreed body of doctrine, or organizational links, but rather to a process of change, to recognizabletransitional tendencies affecting certain communist parties. It is inaccurate because these tendencies are also found in some other communist parties outside Europe. But we need it: it is a word whose time has come, and the steadily increasing flow of articles, books, conferences, lectures and study courses on the subject in the past few years, on both sides of the Atlantic-though, of course, only on one side of the Iron Curtain-suggest that it is here to stay. But what do we mean by it? The Eurocommunist phenomenon should be examined against the background of a wider historical process: the process of sociopolitical adaptation to environmental realities that has been developing -gradually, unevenly and in greatly varying degrees-among communist parties operating in advanced capitalist democracies over the past two decades (although its origins can be traced even further back, in the case of the Italian CP). And the first and most fundamental characteristic of that gradual, uneven process was the abandonment by these Western communist parties, at first in practice and then increasingly also in theory, of revolutionary Leninism. With the onset of the cold war and the consequent division of Europe into adversary camps, Leninism-the doctrine of the vanguard revolutionary party of the working-class-had become for Western communist leaderships a geopolitical irrelevance, even if for ideological reasons they could not admit this. The only exception to this practical abandonment of the revolutionary option was the Greek Communist Party (KKE), which did attempt to seize power, first through a coup d’ttut in late 1944 and then through a bitter civil war from 1946to 1949. And one could perhaps describe as neo-Leninist the tactics of the Portuguese CP, in alliance with the ultraFrom 1976 through 1978, Harvards Center for Science and International Affairs sponsored a European Security Working Group, composed of faculty and fellows. This article is based on one of the chapters in their book, European Security: Prospects for the 2980s, Derek Leebaert, editor (D.C. Heath & Co., 1979). Kevin Devlin Kmin Devlin has been a political analyst for Radio Free Europe in Munich since 2961. He has published widely on European Communist parties. 81 lnternational Security I 82 leftist military, from 1974 to 1975-behavior, we may note, which brought it sharp criticism from the Italian and Spanish CPs and fraternal support from the French CP. The outbreak of the Sino-Soviet conflict-revealed to the scandalized leaders of the minor parties at the 81-party Moscow Conference of November, 1960-gave decisive impetus to the post-Stalinist transformation of the international communist movement in general, and to autonomous tendencies among the Western parties in particular. The challenge to Soviet authority posed by the only communist regime with comparable revolutionary prestige, and the ill-advised efforts of the CPSU to meet that challenge by rallying loyalist parties for a collective condemnation of the Chinese at a world conference, offered other parties, ruling and non-ruling, an increased freedom of maneuver which some of them began to exploit. The ouster of Khruschev in October, 1964, and the uncertain touch which his successors brought to inter-party and international affairs for a few years, considerably strengthened tendencies in many Western communist parties toward more independence, especially in domestic policies, and adaptation to national circumstances. With the Italian CP in the vanguard, these parties were becoming more aware of their own political interests and opportunities in economically advanced societies of pluralistic, constitutional democracy, and also more conscious of the need to seek political allies and to extend their electoral base by presenting a more acceptable public image. Both considerations led them to stress that their goal was a national path to an indigenous type of socialism. This in turn led them, on occasion, to dissociate themselves...

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