Abstract: This article examines changes of Yugoslav perspectives of the reformist policies that were first adopted, and then abandoned by the French communists during the political crisis of the 1970s. In addition, it explores the development of relations between LCY and PCF, as well as numerous factors that could have influenced the process during which those relations evolved from the state of nearly constant conflict towards the state of cordial cooperation in less than a decade. The article is primarily based on the analysis of Yugoslav archival sources and thus far published scholarly literature form various fields of social sciences and humanities.

Keywords: LCY, PCF, welfare state crisis, détente, Eurocommunism, Josip Broz Tito, Georges Marchais

Summary: The renewal of cooperation between the LCY and PCF during the late 1950s was followed by a long and turbulent period in the development of relations between the two parties, which was marked by frequent conflicts over ideological differences and stances on the influence exerted by the Soviet party on communist parties of the Western Bloc. After the turbulent events of the late 1960s and with the beginning of political crisis of the 1970s, the French Communist Party started gradually accepting reformist policies and defining a new, Eurocommunist ideology. Although numerous contemporaries argued that the French party never truly became a Eurocommunist party, slow and limited reforms conducted by the French communists opened up a door for an unprecedented expansion of collaboration between the LCY and the PCF. Yugoslav communists created various forms of financial aid and invested their international influence in the effort to ease the burden of distancing from the Soviet party for their French counterparts, as well as to encourage further reforms of PCF policies. However, Yugoslav party refused to cease expanding those same policies and give up the practice of constantly improving cooperation with PCF even after General Secretary of the French party, Georges Marchais, openly abandoned the reformist course. At the end of the decade, attitudes of Yugoslav communists towards the reformist trends on the European far-left started gradually shifting. Facing new internal circumstances and the changing geopolitical situation, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia experienced major internal shifts which affected the development of the party’s ideology. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Yugoslav communists found themselves among the few far-left parties outside the Eastern Bloc that supported Georges Marchais and his associates in their bid to return the PCF to the pre-Eurocommunist practices they had previously criticized. In the end, old rivals from the times of great splits on the European far-left finally found common ground in the joint struggle against the same reformist ideas that they once supported.