Vassilis Fouskas - Italy, Europe, the Left: The Transformation of Italian Communism and the European Imperative

The transformation of Italian communism and the European imperative

Vassilis Fouskas

First published 1998 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge
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A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 98008636

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-32338-4 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-138-32341-4 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-429-45143-0 (ebk)

On 9 November 1989 the Berlin Wall collapsed. This unclenched a process which led to the demise of Communism throughout eastern and central Europe. In Italy, what was then the largest Communist party in western Europe, the PCI or Partito comunista italiano, transformed itself into the Democratic Party of the Left ( Partito Democratico della Sinistra PDS). The Italian Communists thus shared the fate of their 'comrades' in what was still called 'the Socialist camp'. Or so it would appear. Yet, just over a year after the transformation of the PCI, all the governing parties of what is now known as the First Italian Republic evaporated, punished by an indignant electorate, angry at the revelation of massive corruption unearthed by magistrates of great integrity. Fifty years of Italian Republican history were brought to a close. Thus, by the time the party of Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti had jettisoned its name and symbols, a succession of events had led to the elimination or transformation of all the parties which had dominated Italian politics since 1945 and which had so rigidly kept the Italian Communists out of power. It is the great merit of the author of this book that he resists the temptation of proceeding as if one event (the collapse of Communism) led to another (the transformation of the PCI) which led to another (the end of the First Republic). Simplistic causal chains are best left to the billiard table.

The agony preceding the rebirth of the PCI as the Democratic Party of the Left was perhaps unduly prolonged. The decision of the Twentieth and last congress of the PCI (February 1991) when a new name and symbol were adopted, led to its acceptance in the ranks of Socialist International, a symbolic gesture signalling the reintegration of the party into the political family it had abandoned in 1921, when revolution was expected to spread throughout the world on the back of triumphant Bolshevism. Strictly speaking, this was not the first time the party had changed its name. Following the disbanding of the Communist International in 1943, what was then the Communist Party of Italy became the Italian Communist Party, to symbolise the fact that the party was no longer a section of an international organisation which has ceased to exist at least in name.

Social anthropologists remind us, and rightly so, that names and symbols are important. The Communists themselves were aware of this. They came into existence when they accepted Lenin's 'Twenty-one Conditions' (July-August 1920) which included the obligation to call themselves Communists. If names were all that mattered, historians of the future would have their work cut out. The history of Italian communism could be encompassed within a measurable stretch of time: the seventy years from 1921 to 1991. Those who hold this position treat parties anthropomorphically, writing the history of a party as they would write a biography. Birth and death are relatively unproblematic historical facts.

It is the distinctive virtue of Vassilis Fouskas's inquiry to situate this metamorphosis in its proper historical context: the parallel disintegration of the Italian political system. This occurred essentially, though not exclusively, from endogenous causes: the corruption scandals, the long-term crisis of the DC, the rise of the Northern League. The PDS to the extent that it was still the PCI under a new name found itself as the sole survivor of the old party system. As recently as in 1994 it was still considered a Communist party by a sufficiently large number of Italians to enable the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi to launch a new political party under the banner of stopping the red menace.

The author convincingly argues that, though the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism were the immediate causes of the metamorphosis of the Italian Communist Party, historians and political scientists require a far more complex analysis. He thus reconstructs the strategy of the PCI from its inception to 1989 and provides a coherent investigation of the interconnection between the PCI itself and all the other Italian parties. This set of relations is then systematically examined from the point of view of the social and economic evolution of Italy evolution which is, in turn, mapped out in the wider European context. As he writes in the conclusion: 'the history of the PCI is inseparable from the history of the First Republic.' The context is a set of constraints which subjects all parties and limits their choices and freedom of action. Yet Fouskas eschews all forms of determinism: the recognition of constraints does not preclude that, at every historical conjuncture, real alternatives open up.