Per aspera ad astra: the thorny path of the Italian Communist Party to power in the “blocked democracy” of the First Republic

Since the Cuban Missile Crisis, analysts have turned to examine its impact on European politics at the turning point of the Cold War. As a large European state, Italy found itself at the epicenter of the Cold War – this conflict of interests reached planetary proportions and left a devastating mark on Italy. Even so, the scientific literature has not sufficiently reflected such global issues as the overcoming by the Italian Communist Party of the “Italian anomaly” and the “imperfect bipartisanship” which turned out to be a direct result of the Cold War.

The starting point of this research is to analyze the processes of overcoming the isolation of the PCI and its path to power in the context of the Caribbean Crisis influence on the transformations of the Italian political system. The author takes a closer look at the Center-Left experiment as the impact of the Cuban Crisis and the main result of the rethinking by the élites of the Center, including the communists, of the new formats of their interaction with the left political spectrum in order to overcome the situation assessed by analysts as a “political paralysis”. Carrying out research on the PCI drifting towards the so-called “room with buttons”, the author comes to the conclusion that in the conditions of the Cold War and the dictatorship of the Communist Party of the USSR in relation to the international communist movement, that goal could never have succeeded. Besides, the author draws a conclusion about a consistent contribution of the Center-Left to the reinforcement of liberal democracy and to the gradual overcoming of the Cold War binary logic in Italy and also in Europe.

Considerable attention is paid to the transformation of Italian communists. The Caribbean Crisis and the Center-Left experiment influenced greatly the communist’s transit to Eurocommunism as a revised design of social democracy. Finally, Vatican’s role in overcoming the Missile Crisis as well as its transition to positive neutrality at Vatican II at the very peak of the world conflict had a huge impact on the reduction of the ideological conflict severity in Catholic Italy.

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