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56 Foreign Aff. 295 (1977-1978)
The Myths of Eurocommunism

handle is hein.journals/fora56 and id is 299 raw text is: Jean -Francois Revel T THE MYTHS OF EUROCOMMUNISM he paradox of the concept of Eurocommunism is undoubt- edly the combination of its extraordinary success in the United States and the skeptical treatment it has met since its birth in Europe in the countries concerned.' European political commen- tators, including this author, noted in 1975 how difficult it was to apply the same concept to situations so different as the Italian one, where a powerful Communist Party was allied to a powerful conservative party in order for the two of them to monopolize political life; the French one, where, in contrast, an important, though not dominant, Communist Party allied itself to the Social- ists and cut the political world into two irreconcilable halves; or the Spanish or Portuguese situations, where two minor Communist Parties (about 10 percent of the vote) had more coverage than their actual weight justified (the Spanish, because it presented the most liberal image in the Western world and risked nothing by doing so, and, on the other hand, the Portuguese, by trying with the help of the army to establish a dictatorship in the purest Leninist style). The point at which Europeans had little confidence in the solidity of Eurocommunism was evident from the moment that the first cracks appeared in the Union of the French Left, in September 1977. The explanation that immediately came to the minds of the Socialist analysts, when they perceived the incompre- hensible hardening of the French Communist Party, was the influence of Moscow. These are the same people who for five years had been maintaining that French communism had com- pletely detached itself from Russian communism, and then de- cided from one day to the next to perceive the hand of the Kremlin in the crisis of the French Left. The noted Paris daily, Le 1 One of the favorite amusements of political scientists is to search for the author of the term Eurocommunism, which was not devised by the communists. Some attribute it to Zbigniew Brzezinski, others to the director of Turin's La Stampa, Arrigo Levi. The latter, actually, used the word neo-communism (Newsweek, European edition, July 14, 1975). It took German erudition, in its own special way, to resolve the enigma. The word Eurocommunism was devised, during the summer of 1975, by the Yugoslav journalist, Frane Barbieri, former editor-in-chief of the most important Belgrade weekly, N.I.N., fired during the purges of 1972 and today a contributor to Il Giornale of Milan. (Ursprung und Konzept des Eurocommunismus, Deutschland-Archiv, April 1977.) Jean-Frangois Revel is a columnist for 1'Express and the author of Without Marx or Jesus, The Totalitarian Temptation and other works.

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