roughly comparable system in Italy did little for environmentalists there: by 1987 the Italian ‘Greens’ had secured less than a million votes and just 13 seats out of 630. In Belgium the two ecological parties (one French-speaking, one Flemish) also improved steadily: from 4.8 percent of the vote at their first appearance in 1981 they rose steadily, passing 7.1 percent in 1987. In Britain, however, the voting system was designed to disadvantage small or fringe parties and did just that.
In Scandinavia, the prospects for single-issue parties like environmentalists (or pacifists, or feminists) were restricted by the ecumenical range of the existing political groupings—why ‘waste’ a vote on the Greens when Social Democrats, or Agrarian Parties, purported to share similar concerns? Environmentalism in Norway, for example, was at least as widely embraced as in Germany—as early as 1970 the Labour government’s plans to exploit Northern Europe’s largest waterfall, at Mardola in the Arctic Circle, for hydro-electric power provoked widespread national outrage and prompted the emergence of environmental politics in Norway. But neither the Mardola affair nor subsequent protests at the prospect of nuclear power stations ever translated into a separate political movement: protests—and compromises—were negotiated within the governing majority.
Greens did a little better in Sweden, where they finally entered Parliament in 1988; and in Finland, where individual environmentalists first won election in 1987 and only then formed the Green Association, an environmental party, the following year (not surprisingly, perhaps, the Finnish Greens did far better in the prosperous, urban, ‘yuppie’ south of the country than in the poorer, rural center and north). But Finland and Sweden were unusual: pacifists, feminists, environmentalists, the handicapped and other single-issue activists were so sure of a generally sympathetic cultural environment for their concerns that they could afford to split from the mainstream and risk dividing their own supporters without jeopardizing either the governing majority or the prospects for their own agenda.
Single-issue parties, as we have seen, often emerged in the wake of a crisis, a scandal or an unpopular proposal: thus Austria’s environmentalists, to the extent that they became a national force, owed their rise to bitter confrontation with the authorities over a 1984 proposal to build a hydro-electric plant in a wetland forest at Hainburg in eastern Austria. The Green cause received a strong boost from the ensuing confrontation between the Socialist-led coalition government and environmental activists: and even though the government subsequently backed down, the incident led to a sharp increase in support for the Greens from disillusioned Socialist voters, notably among intellectuals and liberal professionals.
The proliferation of single-issue parties and programs, and their steady absorption into mainstream public life, took its toll upon the traditional organizations of the Left in particular. Communist parties in Western Europe, undermined by the steady erosion of their proletarian constituency and discredited by the invasion of Czechoslovakia, were most vulnerable. The French Communist Party was led by semi-unreconstructed Stalinists who had never really taken their distance from the events of 1956, much less those of 1968. Inherently conservative and suspicious of any issue or person it could not subordinate and control, the Party saw its share of the vote fall steadily at every election: from a post-war peak of 28 percent in 1946 to 18.6 percent in 1977 and thence, in a vertiginous collapse, to under 10 percent in the elections of the 1980s.
The Italian Communists did rather better. Where the French Communist hierarchy was almost universally mediocre and unattractive—reflecting in this, as almost everything else, the PCF’s slavish imitation of the Soviet example—the PCI, from Palmiro Togliatti to Enrico Berlinguer (Party Secretary from 1972 until his early death, at the age of 62, in 1984), was blessed with intelligent and even appealing leaders. Both parties, like every other Communist organization, were deeply dependent on Soviet funding: between 1971 and 1990 Soviet agencies channeled $50 million to the French Communists, $47 million to the Italians. [214] But the Italians did at least express public disapproval for egregious Soviet actions—notably the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The (relative) autonomy of the Italian Communists was complemented by Berlinguer’s 1973 decision to commit his party to the defense of Italian democracy, even if it meant abandoning its outright opposition to the Christian Democrats: this was the so-called ‘historic compromise’. This shift was driven in part by the shock of the 1973 coup d’etat in Chile, which convinced Berlinguer and other Communist intellectuals that even if the Communists won a parliamentary majority they would never be allowed—by the Americans, or their allies in Italian military, business and Church circles—to form a government of their own. But it was also a reaction, as we saw in the previous chapter, to the very real threat to Italian democracy itself from Right and Left terrorists for whom the Communist Party was as much the enemy as the Italian state.
These changes brought temporary electoral dividends. The Communist electorate in Italy grew steadily— from 6.7 million votes at the elections of 1958 to 9 million in 1972 and reaching a peak four years later, in the elections of June 1976, when the PCI culled 12.6 million votes and 228 parliamentary seats. With 34.4 percent of the votes cast, it was just four percentage points and 34 seats short of the ruling Christian Democrats, an unprecedented score for a Western Communist party. The PCI was making a credible attempt to present itself as a ‘system’ party, perhaps even (as Henry Kissinger and many foreign observers feared) an alternative government- in-waiting.[215]
The new approach of the Italian Party, and rather less convincing efforts by the French Party to emulate its success if not its ideas, became known as ‘Eurocommunism’—a term first coined at a November 1975 meeting of Italian, French and Spanish Communists and given official currency by the secretary-general of the Spanish Communists, Santiago Carrillo, in his 1977 essay
‘Eurocommunism’ proved briefly seductive, though less to electors than to intellectuals and academics who mistook for a political revival of Marxism what was in fact an expression of doctrinal exhaustion. If Western Communists were to overcome the burden of their history and reprogram themselves as a—
Eurocommunism was thus a contradiction in terms, despite the best efforts of its spokesmen. Subordination to Moscow was, as Lenin had always intended, the primary identification tag of any Communist party. Until the disappearance of the Soviet Union itself the Communist parties of Western Europe were shackled to it—if not in their own eyes then most assuredly in the opinion of voters. In Italy, where the PCI had uniquely succeeded in establishing itself in certain regions as the natural party of (local) governance, the Communists held on to a sizeable vote, though never again scaling the heights of their 1976 successes. But elsewhere Eurocommunism’s steady decline continued almost uninterrupted. The Spanish Communists, who invented it, saw their share of the vote fall to just 4 percent by 1982.
Ironically, Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow actually gave his blessing to the Eurocommunists’ efforts to secure their local base by distancing themselves from him. The Soviet move, a by-product of the strategy of international detente then being pursued, did little for the would-be Communist reformers. But then, for all the support they continued to furnish in cash and kind, the Soviet leaders were losing interest in Western Communist parties, who had limited political impact and seemed unlikely to take power in the foreseeable future. Social Democrats, however, especially those in positions of influence, were another matter. And Social Democrats in Germany, still the crucible of a divided continent, were of very particular interest indeed.
In 1969, the West German Social Democratic Party (SPD), led by Willy Brandt, won a majority at the Federal elections and took office in a coalition with the Free Democratic Party, pushing the conservative Christian Democrats into opposition for the first time since the founding of the Federal Republic. Brandt had already served three years as foreign minister in Kiesinger’s Grand Coalition, and there, in close collaboration with the head of his policy-planning staff, Egon Bahr, he had begun to formulate a new departure for German foreign policy, a new approach to Germany’s relations with the Soviet bloc:
Hitherto, West German foreign policy had been dominated by Adenauer’s view that the new Republic, firmly tied to the West through the West European Union, the European Economic Community and NATO, must be unwavering in its refusal to recognize the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to its east. Claiming that the FRG
