Arash Azizi in The Ideas Letter:
In March 1977, three communist leaders gathered in Madrid to insist on a simple yet profound proposition: Communism is not in contradiction with democracy. Enrico Berlinguer, Santiago Carrillo, and Georges Marchais led the communist parties of Italy, Spain, and France, between them commanding the loyalty of tens of millions of European voters. At Madrid, they formulated what they called the New Way, a communism committed to democracy. They demanded the full application of the Helsinki Accords of 1975, signed by the USSR, the US, Canada, and nearly all European countries, which included strong human rights provisions. Berlinguer made clear that while Italian communists respected the USSR’s “great conquests in social domain,” they also recognized its “authoritarian traits.”
They met at an auspicious moment: shortly after the fall of right-wing dictatorships in Spain and Portugal, just as the Iberian Peninsula was finding its way to democracy. This made the conference urgent since Spain’s judiciary was deciding whether to legalize the Communist Party of Spain (it eventually did, and the party emerged as a major force in democratic Spain). But the three communists had long shown a penchant for democracy. Already in November 1975, Berlinguer and Marchais had made a joint declaration that committed them to freedom of speech, a multi-party system, and the principle of “alternation” (voluntarily giving up power upon losing an election). By 1977, these democratic communists had found a ready epithet to describe their politics: Eurocommunism.
The term Eurocommunism, however, was a misnomer since the New Way (also called neocommunism at the time) had proponents around the world. The Japanese Communist Party had long supported a similar position, and the communist parties of Australia, Britain, Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, and Israel would also come to adopt similar orientations. I prefer to call this movement Democratic Communism.
The most prominent democratic communists belonged to the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the largest in Europe. It was the second-biggest party in every Italian parliament from 1946 until the party’s dissolution in 1991. At its eighth congress, held in 1956, it declared its ideology “the Italian road to socialism” (Via italiana al socialismo), and swore fealty to the Constitution of the Italian Republic—a document the party had helped write, and which called for a robust multi-party system.1 The “Italian road” implicitly rejected the Soviet road.
More here.
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