Last of the commies

A PERK OFEUEU, being locked up by a fascist dictator is that it leaves you with a lot of time on your hands. Altiero Spinelli, an Italian communist, spent the bulk of his youth imprisoned by Benito Mussolini. During one stint of internment in 1941, Spinelli used his spare time to come up with the Ventotene Manifesto, named after the island off Naples to which he was banished. Pieced together on cigarette papers, it provided a socialist blueprint for a federal Europe, earning the communist thinker a legacy as one of the more obscure founding fathers of the .Aside from the European Parliament building in Brussels, which bears Spinelli’s name, communists left little mark on the club. Across western Europe, moderate Christian and Social Democrats ran the show. The Eurocommunists, who looked to Brussels rather than Moscow, were briefly in vogue in the 1970s and 1980s. Wily socialists, such as François Mitterrand, soon put them out of business. In Italy, where communists once won 34% of the vote, the party fell apart after communism collapsed in eastern Europe. And countries that had lived under communism were desperate to join the in part so the ideology could not return.