Vassilis Fouskas, Italy, Europe, the Left (Ashgate, 1998)
Gramsci remarked that to write the history of a political party is to write the history of a country from a monographic point of view. This book aims not only to prove the truth of this maxim but also to extend its remit to cover continental affairs. For in this useful study Vassilis Fouskas insists that we we will best understand the transformation of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) into its successor party, the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), in 1989-1991 when we analyse this period as a coherent political response to the decade-long crisis of European Keynesianism in the 1980s. Fouskas thus sets himself against the more common interpretations of Italian politics that focus narrowly on the politics of 1989 and stress the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War as the chief unblocking agent for Italian politics. Fouskas doesn't deny the importance of these events, but he is wary of the simplistic claims that they led mechanistically to the political legitimation of the PDS, the destruction of the old party system, and the protracted political crisis of 1992-96.
In comparison with the wealth of material that appeared in English in the late 1970s during the excitement over Enrico Berlinguer's Eurocommunism (another failed attempt to articulate a terza via!), there has been much less on the Italian Left in recent years. This is surprising, for this is the period which has seen the formation of cabinets dominated by the Left parties for the first time in Italy's history. There are various articles and chapter-length studies in edited collections, together with David Kertzer's short volume on Politics and Symbols, and the introductory The Transformation of Italian Communism by Leonard Weinberg, but that seems to be about it. Fouskas's book is therefore extremely welcome. It is also of interest as a part of the research project on the modern European Left given structure and impetus by Donald Sassoon's magnificent One Hundred Years of Socialism. Sassoon supplied a Foreword for the book, and his discussion of "neo-revisionism" has also provided the central concept that Fouskas uses to organise the analysis of the PCI's transformation.
The book's central argument is that the PCI pursued a double-headed strategy (doppiezza) under Palmiro Togliatti's postwar leadership that lasted intact through the 1960s and 1970s, a strategy whose ambivalences can be traced back to the Prison Notebooks. On the one hand, the party remained loyal to the Soviet bloc and continued to proclaim its revolutionary mission, promising the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by a socialist economy and society. On the other hand, the party pursued reformist methods, offering to deal with the other parties, participating in local government, and seeking to advance the material interests of its working class constituency through the trade union movement. Fouskas's major claim, made concrete through the careful elucidation of the factional politics of the PCI, is that after the political failure of the Eurocommunist strategy, developments in the Italian political economy made the continuation of this dual approach (or "walking on two legs") increasingly hard to maintain.
The crisis of Keynesianism in the 1980s that accompanied the globalisation of international capital cast doubt on the efficacy of any attempt to manage, let alone transform, a major national economy through statist measures. The accelerating pace of European integration under the Delors Commission made elements within the PCI interested in a "European" approach to economic management, and to seek membership of the Socialist International alongside the major Western Socialist, Social Democratic and Labour parties. Simultaneously, the party's revolutionary aspiration was being compromised from the East, when the Gorbachev regime embarked on the twin policies of glasnost and perestroika. By the later 1980s, therefore, the party had to choose between a decisive commitment to either of its "legs", facing, in Fouskas's language, a choice between "neo-revisionism" (and transition to a mainstream social democratic identity) and "communist refoundation" (or reaffirmation of a revolutionary identity in a post-glasnost era). While the Party in the end split on exactly this issue, Fouskas insists that the majority decision to follow Party Secretary Achille Occhetto into the new PDS should not be construed as a radical break with the past, still less as a betrayal of the Party's heritage.
The book is well-argued, well-researched and copiously footnoted. It would have been handy to have more discussion of the post-1992 period: we're left with a sense of the failures of the PDS in 1990-2, but we don't hear much about its slow ascent to government from the fall of the Berlusconi government in 1994, which for a book published in 1998 is a shame. Better editorial preparation would also have helped: good proofreading would have cut out a bit of repetition and some jargony English, and the volume could do with a much better index.
