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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
“Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged” 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012


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Derived Forms

  • ˌEuroˈcommunist, nounadjective
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Other Words From

  • Euro·commu·nist noun adjective
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Word History and Origins

Origin of Eurocommunism1

First recorded in 1970–75; Euro- + communism
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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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