Eurocommunism

[yoor-uh-kom-yuh-niz-uhm, yur-]

noun

1. a form of Communism that developed in some western European nations independently of the Soviet Union.

Eurocommunism

/ ˌjʊərəʊˈkɒmjʊˌnɪzəm /

noun

1. the policies, doctrines, and practices of Communist Parties in Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, esp those rejecting democratic centralism and favouring nonalignment with the Soviet Union and China

Other Word Forms

• Eurocommunist noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of Eurocommunism¹

First recorded in 1970–75; Euro- + communism

Example Sentences

This type of wry evangelicalism was about as close to later English Puritanism as Italian eurocommunism would be to the clunking fist of Stalinism.

Read more on Washington Post

In the CPGB, Eurocommunism began to amass momentum and influence, and just before the party congress of 1977, Jacques was approached by the party’s general secretary, Gordon McLennan – a representative of what Jacques characterises as the Communist party’s “centre ground”, whose politics were dutiful and dull, rather than sharply ideological.

Read more on The Guardian

Gramsci’s devotees now looked not to the USSR, but Italy, where the national Communist party was blazing a trail for the open, nuanced and self-consciously “Gramscian” politics increasingly known as Eurocommunism.

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In the 1960s he engineered the expulsion and subsequent personal hounding of Fernando Claudín and Jorge Semprún, two Politbureau members whose “error” was to adopt what became Eurocommunism a decade before he chose it himself.

Read more on Economist

Out went a lifetime’s slavish subjection to Moscow in favour of moderate, social-democratic “Eurocommunism”.

Read more on Economist