Les métamorphoses du communisme italien depuis 1989

Abstract

The Metamorphoses of Italian Communism since 1989, Lilly Marcou. In the world process of Communist party transformation following the collapse of the USSR, the Italian Communist Party occupies a special place. Its own history, especially since 1945, placed it at the forefront of a western communism that wanted to detach itself from the Soviet experience by forging its own path and its own model of society. The consequence of this long period from Togliatti to Berlinguer was the 1989 to 1991 transformation from a communist party into a respectable social-democratic party, member of the International Socialist and mainspring of the entry of Italy in the European unification process. Altough the majority of the old ICP took this turn, a minority created a new party, the PR. This party did not consider itself as a continuation of the old one but it stands for the birth of another communism, one that takes into account both the failure of the Leninist model and also of the reformist one. The future will tell which of these two parties, offspring of the International Communist matrix, took the right road.