L’Europe comme patrimoine commun : le processus d’intégration européenne et les identités politiques italiennes pendant les années 1980 et 1990

Abstract

The article aims at analysing the evolution of the Italian Communist Party’s stance on the International Communist Movement and on European integration during the Gorbachev era and the early 1990s. After the electoral failures of the previous decade and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the PCI’s élite had to reassess its own identity focusing on some specific issues. Those included the relationship with the Soviets and the PCI’s attitude toward Gorbachev’s European Common Home, the relaunching of the dialogue with former interlocutors such as the former protagonists of the Prague Spring, and the attitude toward the European integration process. The authors argue that the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and later of the Italian political system, made compulsory the choice of an alternative political identity: Europe became more and more the new point of reference for the PCI’s heirs, laying the groundwork for the future convergence with the Christian Democrats and the constitution of the contemporary Italian Left-Wing identity in the Nineties, embodied in L’Ulivo.