Nicolae Ceauşescu and the origins of Eurocommunism

After the Sino-Soviet dispute had considerably weakened Moscow's supremacy in world communism, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was keen on restoring control and unity. But he soon discovered that his meaning of unity did not exactly coincide with what others had in mind. West European communists were striving to accommodate social principles to domestic conditions so, as to be able to accede to government. They advocated for each party's right to make their own decisions independently and also for an enlargement of world communism beyond its initial sectarianism. Their cause was vulnerable though as internationalism was still an important part of their political identity, apart from the fact that Moscow did subsidize most of them. In the second half of the 1960s though, a new voice joined those asking for reform in world communism: Nicolae Ceauşescu, a leader of the Romanian Communist Party. Interested to promote his country's autonomy in the Soviet bloc, Ceauşescu had no reason to support Moscow's efforts to regain control. Instead, Ceauşescu developed close relations with West European Communist parties and assumed some of their ideological tenets, trying to fend off Soviet domination. This way, although he never was a Eurocommunist, Ceauşescu did play an important part in the ideological debates that were later to produce Eurocommunism, defending West European arguments in front of Moscow.